Marcus McCann

2008-07-27T09:37:00.003-04:00

Yesterday's Globe and Mail books section rails against open relationships, courtesy of Elizabeth Nickson's review of Jenny Block's Open. Of polyamoury:

It would have sounded like excellent stuff to me in my 20s. Certainly, I was way into polyandry before I did something, what was it, oh yeah, grew up.

It's funny, because last time I checked "Oh, grow up" wasn't exactly the most rational, adult argument. I'm not even going to get into the infantalizing, paternalistic agism at that statement's heart.

Anyway, she goes on to say a number of really silly things, dismissing the book as having no value and, in places, using dripping sarcasm in place of analysis. She gives us flashes of her own ideological blinders, as in:

There isn't intimacy of any sort that I would recognize, either, because no one seems anything but busy, competent and shallow.

And...

I read recently that the most refined pleasure is found in performing our duty, and for that reason alone, I suspect traditional marriage will survive the assaults of Block and her polyamorous comrades. One holds pity for those who succumb.

In an other bit of the review -- a commonly held belief that always makes me chuckle -- Nickson argues that in the advent of gays ruining marriage, poly and open relationships are the wolfs at the door. In a way, I hope that's true. Folks who have utilized their newfound sexual freedoms should be fighting for the decriminalization of polygamy (and sex work, bathhouses, rough sex, BDSM porn...) as analogous.

I also never really understood the sentiment about marriages as the "millennia-old institution upon which human civilization is built."

A) Our concept of marriage is quite new -- probably less than three hundred years, and by some metrics (equality within the marriage; the right for a woman to withhold consent to sex; property rights at dissolution) is only a generation old.

B) What about the other institutions by which our civilization was built: autocracy, serfdom, misogyny, racism, slaves, wars, genocide, ecological ravaging. Are they worth keeping around just because they're old?

Anyway, this kind of drive-by smear of sexually open relationships drives me nuts.

2008-07-06T11:29:00.006-04:00

Old Barns
Tim Bowling

Starlight especially seems to love them;
its fractured brilliance angles in
the broken loft
with so much ease and warmth
it's as though the long, golden needles
of a distant harvest
had fallen through the galaxies
in search of home, as though
somewhere in the immensity of darkness
a wagonload of hay had overturned
and centuries later settled in beside
the swallows' nests and spiderwebs
like a living thing that knows
where it belongs.

This is the power these structures have,
the sense of sanctuary they possess;
animals sheltered from the storm
men and women laying down their tools
children dreaming in the lofts...
disparate lives and disparate refuge...
so the wind plays through these gaps
like the collective heaving of a sigh
that the very walls accommodate
as if to say “we understand.”

And driving by them, autumn nights,
splashing their planks
with the milk of headlight beams,
I have often felt the urge to turn inside
and watch the needles streaming down
in crossing lines of pure geometry,
the delicate puzzle of time and space
suddenly woven into an owl's flight
and swallowed by the air;
but I have rarely stopped:

somehow it seems enough to know
they still exist, these wooden caves
crowded with their ghosts of early dreams
and honest labour, gathering
the same slow crop of the stars
year after year, and promising
these few spilled wagons for us all;
a subtle interplay of gold, a little silence,
and the corner of a field to vanish in.
(from Dying Scarlet, 1997, Nightwood Editions)

Okay, before I say anything else: you probably just noticed that the poem ends with a preposition. Some of you were probably taught that such constructions are no-nos. Ending with a preposition is awkward and inelegent, but not grammatically incorrect. It's no more incorrect than using a phrasal subject, like I did in the last sentence – the phrase “ending with a preposition” was the subject. Awkward, yes, grammatically incorrect, no. And one of poetry's athletic endeavors is to stretch gammar, to make us aware of it by bending the rules, or using them in ways that draw attention to themselves...

Each time I read the poem, I get sluggish toward the end, as if Bowling's getting a little too preachy, a little too pat. Isn't this going to wrap up neatly?, I think. But the thrilling conclusion slightly unbalances the plodding drive toward conclusion that preceeded it. It's precarious, perfect. What a clunker it would have been to end with “in which to vanish” instead!

At 43 lines and 250 words, Tim Bowling's “Old Barns” is quite a bit more dense than some of the poems I've discussed so far. It's got more than twice as many words as Karen Solie's “Dear Heart”; does that make it flabby or inefficient?

Just try truncating it. Here's a summary of the first fourteen lines:


Starlight love barns; it angles in
lofts like golden needles
of a distant harvest falling through space
or as if
a wagonload of hay overturned
and centuries later settled into the barn.

The technical meaning remains, but the conversational tone (more on that in a minute) is gone. But what's most important in these lines, to my ear, is that the gentle image (of light as hay falling through the “galaxies”and where it has “settled in” the barn) is reproduced in the almost weightless line.

The winding roundabout-ness in the first stanza's conclusion is probably an authorial dodge to avoid using “home” twice in one stanza.

Still, “a living thing that knows where it belongs” is gorgeous and somehow – yes – gentle. Indeed, gentle seems to be the dominant mode of the poem, one that a tighter syntax would, I think, have strangled. Watch him string a metaphor over four full lines at the end of the second stanza:


so the wind plays through these gaps
like the collective heaving of a sigh
that the very walls accommodate
as if to say “we understand.”

A lesser poet would have finished with stanza three “I have often felt the urge to turn inside/ and watch the needles streaming down” but not Bowling. Like the chapter endings of the Hardy Boys books I read growing up, stanza three ends with a cliffhanger — “but I have rarely stopped” — left dangling by, and this is an odd choice, a colon. He quietly drives you over that final stanza break with a not-quite-full pause. And it means that, despite the fact that all four stanzas start with full sentences, the final one begins with a lower case letter. In addition to providing a little energy to the stanza break, it also makes that final thought somehow diminutive, less urgent, more spare:


somehow it seems enough to know
they still exist,

But still the line shivers with meaning. He could be referring to family that's drifting apart. Or a much-loved-but-seldom-returned-to piece of art: a novel from adolescence, a favourite poem tucked away on a shelf, a painting in the Louvre. Why does that provoke guilt?


***

I think reading and writing about poems is an
important corollary to the act of composition.
Why do you love what you love?
A look at 12 Canadian poems:

On "Dear Heart" by Karen Solie
On "This Land is Our Land" by John Barton
On "Spell G.O.D" by Kevin Connolly
On "Listening to Satoshi" by DG Jones
On “Shuffle 29, i” by Pearl Pirie
On “Bareback Mountain Camp: A Fucking 
Greek Tragedy” by Jeff Higgins
On “96 Rochester St” by rob mclennan
On “Getting Sick” by Michael Redhill
On “Idleness” by David O'Meara & “Fucking” by Shane Rhodes
On “Glyph” by Judith Miller, “Iowa” by Travis Nichols
and “Gurgle” by Lisa Robertson

Int'l:

On "Shiver" by Seamus Heaney
On "Rainwater Tank" by Les Murray
On “Notebook/To Lucien Freud/On the Veil” by Mark Doty
On “The Connoisseuse of Slugs” by Sharon Olds
On “Poem about morning” by William Meredith
On “The Cure” by Ginger Andrews
On “The Hug” by Thom Gunn & “Lay your sleeping 
head, my love” by WH Auden

2008-06-30T22:54:00.001-04:00

We're officially halfway through the year, so let's look back at some of the best poetry events Ottawa has seen in 2008. What was your favourite event of this little half year? What was your top five?

Re: Reading the Postmodern.
Atomic Rooster, May 10.
Robert Kroetsch, Dennis Cooley, Frank Davey, Louis Cabri, Christine Stewart, Andy Weaver, Stephen Cain, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, and The Max Middle Sound Project.

Ottawa Small Press Book Fair Pre-reading.
Carleton Tavern, June 20.
Mike Spry, Stuart Ross, John Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey.

Ottawa International Writers Festival.
Library and Archives Canada, April 13.
Fred Wah, Rachel Zolf, Stuart Ross, hosted by Michael Dennis.

The AB Reading Series.
The Royal Oak II on Laurier, Feb 15.
Jay MillAr, Monty Reid, Emily Falvey.

Ottawa International Writers Festival.
Library and Archives Canada, April 19.
AF Moritz, Elise Partridge, Kevin Connolly, hosted by Dave O'Meara.

2008-06-25T16:46:00.001-04:00

Burn down the disco! Porn panic comes to Canada.

2008-06-24T16:49:00.001-04:00

I think everyone's kind of, you know, postmodern about their sexuality: Sandra Bernhard.

2008-06-23T18:56:00.001-04:00

I’m pretty sure this is the best thing In/Words has done to date. Aside from Stuart Ross’s Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil, 2005), it was the best value-for-money at the fair. And even then, I made Mark buy Ross’s book. So.

A brown envelope of chapbooks. Apparently the result of a class Rob Winger taught on the Canadian long poem of the 1970s, the crew were selling six long poem chapbooks for a seriously underpriced $5. Yikes! I’m guessing this was a deal only available at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, but it’s worth harassing the In/Words people for copies, if there are any left.

The writers wear what they’ve been reading on their sleeve — a good place to wear what you’ve been reading. Cameron Anstee’s been reading Robert Kroetsch, for one. Phillis Webb, for another. It’s material evidence that good, thorough reading produces the best writing.

What do you really want?

I want the thing after the coastline
want under and before, want to
see right through to where
all at once is now and now
and now and here
and now

(Cameron Anstee, from Down Staircases, In/Words 2008)

2008-06-22T16:17:00.002-04:00

Disaster! Disaster!

For our anniversary today, Mark and I went to see a matinee of David O'Meara's first play, the aptly named Disaster, at the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama. Okay, I like Dave so maybe there is a bias. But the play is honest-to-goodness not-because-I-know-the-playwright good. It's really good. Compact. Tightly written. Fanfuckingtastically acted. Yeah. It's good. You're going to kick yourself if you miss it. $25. Until June 28.

2008-06-08T01:16:00.002-04:00

petty illness leaflet
Marcus McCann

The Onion Union / $5. Handbound, limited edition. Published on the event of the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, June 21 2008 (noon-5pm, Jack Purcell Community Centre.) We all leave a trail.

2008-05-17T08:08:00.000-04:00

Dear Heart
Karen Solie

Rustbucket, little four-popper.
I've seen more of the surface on Mars

than of you, ultrasound shadow.
How you lay me low! Size a fist

and the rest of me a fat glass jaw.

I get reports through the wire of veins.
Your rabbit pinches, feints and jabs. I log

each personal best and sleep
like a swan with an ear to my chest.

You are the first thing I ever built,

drafty and cold despite blood's small suns.
Your joinery came out wrong.

Sweetmeat, my ugly hero, the fault
is mine. I recline and recline.

Now there is no time but yours.
What leisure you afford, what luxury.

(from Short Haul Engine, Brick Books 2001)

Oh, when a poem can be such a compact muscle, when it can pack such a punch! From these 16 lines, some 135 syllables (oh, plus two for the title), spring a complete, complex invitation to understanding..

This is a popular kind of poem: description disguised as direct address. The “you” in the poem, the narrator's heart, is addressed as “rustbucket, little four-popper”, “ultrasound shadow” and “sweetmeat, my ugly hero." Qualifiers make up the rest of the poem, leaving the action unstated. Or seemingly unstated.

Isn't there a whiff of a doctor's visit here? Our first hint is “ultrasound.” Ultrasounds aren't jut for babies; they're often used used to diagnose cases of heart valve abnormalities and heart infection. Then in line six we read “I get reports through the wire of veins,” a simple sentence whose meaning is deceptively ambiguous. At the literal level, it's got a diagnostic air, but it depends how you parse the sentence. Rewriting the sentence to destroy the ambiguity, you get either:

Through the wire of veins, I get reports.

Or

I get reports of veins through the wire.

It depends on where “of veins” belongs. The former's “wire of veins” pertains to how our bodies alert us to problems. The latter's “reports of veins” is literal, the results of a medical device. Then, Solie's most brutal, beautiful allusion to medical equipment seals the deal: the nozzle of the ultrasound equipment is “a swan with an ear to my chest.” By the time we get to the narrator's mea culpa in line 10-14, (“your joinery came out wrong...// the fault / is mine”), we've already confirmed the worst. This isn't a poem about heartbreak, it's about heart disease.

Or is it? Obviously, heartbreak is sewn right into the text. It's a European thing; you can't talk about the heart without it's emotional-symbolic baggage floating to the surface. In fact, the association between heart and emotion is so strong, it floats up past all the signs Solie leaves us that the subject is an actual, physical heart problem.

I love the way this poem sounds in my ear. Listen to the vowels in the first two lines:

Rustbucket, little four-popper.
I've seen more of the surface on Mars

There's a little internal rhyme (four/more), supported by the repeating uh-uh-uh-uh sound. Meanwhile, the hard consonants are going off around it like fireworks. The squished-together neologism “rustbucket,” for instance, rattles with the force of four plosives in three syllables: T-B-K-T. Dense, thrilling. Her assonance is pitch-perfect for my ear—the ah-ah-ah in “fat glass jaw,” for instance, adds extra verve to an interesting metaphor. Or in the denouement: “join... mine... recline...recline... time.”

How vital, how necessary this poem is.

2008-05-14T10:50:00.007-04:00

This Land is our Land
John Barton

How I love to hold it while you pee, without any need

to taste, though some drink their own, one or two meagre
palmfuls until the end, at a loss in the badlands—it has to

go somewhere, you say, the excess nutrients shed, the musk
of asparagus steamed at night, the salty butter-melt running

down our chests, the excess handy for later, you never know
what we may run out of long after the Hasty Market has closed

bodies of water, bodies of steam re-engineering the industrial
revolution from opposing sides, east and west opening up

the wilderness, one dark tunnel after the other blasted through
the mountains we love, the hallucination of a river rearing below

our berthing us, bucking us, for whistles stops miles past
the last spike and Roger's Pass, the body a round-trip ticket

from Vancouver Island to the Alberta highlands, the prairies
the lakes, to Ontario's tower, the excess expelled afterwards

but not the anger or the desire to be full—pour me another glass
of water, cowboy, we've got lots of time; you're holding mine

now and the mirrors we never forget about run slick with steam.

(John Barton, from Peter F Yacht Club #7)

Sometimes a poem's omissions are glaringly obvious. More often though, the poet has carefully excised the unnecessary bits and bobs from his poem—their ingenuity remains completely hidden. The process of editing can be a bit like a surgery, and when the surgery is permanently disfiguring, it is either a sign the patient was in very dire need or a sign of a surgeon of limited capabilities. Here's a good example of where the handiwork remains largely hidden.

This is a poem of implication. Look at the deft use of the pronoun 'it' in line 1. You have to pass 'it' to see what 'it' refers to, and then you must read the subject back into the line, reflexively. Is it the speaker's lover's penis? Or do you just have a dirty mind? The second-to-last line deletes penis again—the word “mine” stands in for it. Sounds kind of old fashioned, doesn't it? Or is it coy, flirty? Barton leaves out three nouns in the first two lines alone. “How I love to hold [your penis] while you pee, without any need / to taste [your pee], though some drink their own [urine], one or two meagre...” and the whole poem is dotted with these excisions.

In a class I took in the University of Ottawa's translation department, the teacher told the class, "It's a sentence fragment if you do it by accident. If you do it on purpose, it's elliptical." Sage advice for poets.

Like “Shiver,” “This Land is Our Land” is one sentence long. Here Barton sets off his main clause with an intricate parenthetical aside caught between the em dashes. It's a reverie, a daydream of water, space and nationhood. (There's one small hiccup to this interpretation, at least to my ear. I hear a break after line 7, between “closed” and “bodies.” But “closed” could technically take “bodies of water” as its direct object, meaning that the convenience store closed the “bodies of water” -- a double meaning, incidentally, meaning either a lake or a person.)

And did you notice Barton uses the term "excess" three times? It's subtle and I think a bit tongue-in-cheek, given the repeated word's meaning. "Excess nutrients... Excess handy for later.... Excess expelled afterwards / but not the anger or the desire to be full." Somewhere deep down, I hope he's referencing Spa Xcess, a Toronto bathhouse, but somehow I doubt it.

Back to mechanics. Throughout, he trades periods for commas, making the sentence bend, wriggle, and snake through 18 lines.Now, look at the way he hangs prepositions over the line breaks—four in a row toward the middle of the poem with “up, through, below, past.” He's built this poem for speed—the elliptical phrasing, dropping periods for commas, running over the line breaks—all in perfect mimic of the action of the poem. The layering is doubly and triply a “hallucination.”

John Barton is certianly one of our expert excisers. His CV looks a bit like this: he's the author of eight books of poetry, including Sweet Ellipsis (ECW, 1998), Hypothesis (Anansi, 2001) and Asymmetries (Frog Hollow, 2004). A former Ottawan now living in Victoria, BC, Barton is the editor of the Malahat Review. With (Xtra columnist) Billeh Nickerson, Barton put together the first historical collection of gay male Canadian poets, called Seminal.

Catch Barton at the Dusty Owl Reading Series. Sunday, May 18 at 2pm. Swizzles. Free (Donations accepted via hat-passing.)

2008-04-19T16:49:00.003-04:00

Spell G.O.D.
Kevin Connolly

The bluebirds in their beige hours nodding;
nothing reasoned nothing reined, the dire
quarrel put by until brunch, another polite
tiff over forcemeats and poaching limits.

Wherefore art thou, rodeo? Not your average
dong presiding over the hazmats and the
gone gone gone. Whittle it down, Georgie.
Yank the big chain back and stare it in the

mangle—this fabulous accident, planes
descending firebrand over the hard knocks
and the breezy frieze. Where's the club pro?
Whither wherewithal? What gives, really?

The shred cry of metal crescending—
grind it up, dogs, you pounds of freedom.

(from Drift, Anansi, 2005)

Canadian poet Kevin Connolly's a sneaky bugger. Like David McGimpsey, Connolly often plays within the bounds of a conventional form. In Drift, Connolly nestles into the book 25-plus poems that could be considered sonnets. Or sonnet-ish, anyway. In form, “Spell G.O.D” is pretty traditional. It's got three quatrains and a couplet. It's got the sonnet's characteristic direction-changing volta in the couplet. And moreover, each line has more or less 10 syllables. True, it's not iambic. True, there are no end rhymes (unless you count the/the in the second stanza) but otherwise, “Spell G.O.D” is formally conventional.

“Spell G.O.D.” takes place mid-air. Like most sonnets, it's an act of balance. Here, beginning in line 5 we have a picture of a plane crash. Connolly invites us to “stare it in the // mangle.” But what's with the first stanza being about something totally different? Where did the “club pro” come from? What does “pounds of freedom” mean?

The logic is associative rather than narrative. It eschews the handholding transitions imply. This is typical of “angry young formalism,” a strain probably encouraged by his editor Ken Babstock (who edited both Drift and Connolly's new book Revolver.)

Mid-air, eh? The space formerly occupied by the wrecked plane gets top billing. The air dominates up the entire first quatrain. It's like so much contemporary art photography, where focus and framing provide you with an untold, tertiary or otherwise strange vista. A part standing in for the whole—or something else entirely acting as a stand-in. And that is the key to successful surrealism, as I understand it.

Oh, and word choice. Look how slick Connolly is with the closed form. He packs in vivid words, many of them monosyllabic, to max out the potential of his 140 syllables. I'm talking about words like “tiff” and “yank” and “shred.” Connolly then has the space to use colloquial language (ironically, to my ear) such as “hard knocks” and “what gives, really?” ...I think “What gives” is a brilliant end to the final quatrain: lean and plainspoken but also surreal and pointed.

Kevin Connolly is reading from his new book, Revolver (Anansi, 2008) at 8pm at Library and Archives Canada. Revolver claims to be a book of one-poem-per-voice poems, but they all sound a lot like Connolly to me. And the less they sound like Connolly, the less I like them. Which is, I guess, a compliment. Anyway, I'm curious and I can't wait to hear it straight from the proverbial horse's' mouth. Connolly's books sold out at the Writer's Fest early in the week. I'm not surprised. This is sure to be a monster reading.

2008-04-12T12:10:00.004-04:00

The Shiver

The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,
Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fast
As shields in a testudo, spine and waist
A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage;
The way its iron head planted the sledge
Unyieldingly as a club-footed last;
The way you had to heft and then half-rest
Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage
About to be let fly: does it do you good
To have known it in your bones, directable,
Withholdable at will,
A first blow that could make air of a wall,
A last one so unanswerably landed
The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?

(Seamus Heaney, District and Circle, Faber and Faber, 2006)

What to say about the sinewy, vital tongue of Seamus Heaney? I'm blown away by the grammar of “The Shiver,” a sonnet which contains no periods—and not because of stylistic deviance, but because there's no place for one. This is a single 14-line thought. Caught up in the cool confidence of the poem's opening eight lines, a reader could easily miss Heaney's sleight of hand. He only provides us with noun phrases—not full sentences—hammering it home by beginning each phrase with “The way you,” “The way you,” “The way you,” and ending each with a semi-colon.

Then, bam!, the one and only main clause – a question that begins the sestet: “does it do you good / to have known it in your bones .../ ?” Violence, power and beauty are summed up in the poem's finest line “A first blow that could make air of a wall” before the final couplet beats a hasty retreat. To end with a question is appropriate; it rings through us like the sledge's “shiver” so that we must “half-rest” after reading it.

Most sonnets rhyme, and this is no exception. But look at the internal consonance and assonance. Heaney's ear has caught something so tightly wound up, the whole poem practically rhymes with itself. Listen to “spine and waist / A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage.” In addition to the internal rhyme (waist/braced), “waste” will echo with three slant rhymes (fast, rest, last). But it's the passage's repeating consonants and shifting, recombining vowels that really get the tongue working.

Heaney, who turns 69 this month, is still producing A-list material. While it's tempting to write off the subject as either physical labour or violence, “The Shiver” is essentially a poem of nostalgia. Its narrator is an older man talking to other old men. The poem's physical labour is a memory; Heaney carefully puts the sledgehammer's action into the past with the word “had” in lines one and seven. And so, he asks “Am I a better man because I used to do physical labour?” I read it rhetorically, with a tacit “yes” implied in the octet's loving description. But that's part of the beauty of the poem. An answer is implied, sure, but remains "withholdable" in the "unanswerably" crafted poem.

These days, I'm really stoked about poets who pay close attention to consonance and assonance, in particular who write lines heavy with guttural noises like "The Shiver." I'm talking about the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Les Murray—which finds its Canadian expression in Ken Babstock and Karen Solie, among others. Does this sinewy tongue have a name? Why haven't I learnt it?

2008-03-09T14:32:00.002-04:00

How Andre Gide's Fruits of the Earth ended up in my sweaty, teenage hands is a long story. It involves my high school best friend, her job at a convenience store and one of her customers. At least, that's what I remember. Eventually I was leant the out-of-print book — which after I read it promptly disintegrated. I'm accustomed to books disintegrating (the first half of my dad's copy of Aurelius's Meditations similarly peeled), but I felt awful about Fruits of the Earth.

Later, I read a couple of Gide's novels, The Immoralist and Straight is the Gate, which never did anything much for me (was it a timid translation, perhaps?) The central argument of Fruits of the Earth was not to judge emotions as good or bad. Heartache, longing, hate—allow yourself to feel them. I guess today we would say... you should let yourself “process” your emotions rather than ignoring them. And yes, hedonism too. His philosophy was painfully developed as he came to terms with his love of adolescents and young men, but the content of his ideas are probably applicable to all of us. I know it got me through a lot of pain as a teen (looking back, Gide would probably have approved).

It's out of print; my friend's copy has disintegrated—I obviously can't quote the relevant passages right now, as much as I'd like to.

Again with Susan Sontag. In her early essays (in Against Interpretation), she holds Gide up with the best of the generation preceding hers: Sartre, Genet, Brecht, Kafka, Joyce, Proust. She does so with such offhandedness, it sounds like her assumed reader would have been comfortable with at least some of Gide's extensive bibliography. to wit, in her essay on Albert Camus, she says that Camus is a second-rate writer compared to Gide, Genet and the rest.

Why has Gide fallen so far out of favour, when Sartre and Camus have remained to vital?

2008-03-02T13:46:00.002-05:00

I've been reading Susan Sontag ass-backwards. Which in some ways is an asset. The first Sontag (1933-2004) essay I read was—not surprisingly—“Notes on Camp”. I read it online, possibly here. I crossed paths with her last book, 2003's Regarding the Pain of Others, while working on a self-directed class at the University of Ottawa. Regarding the Pain of Others had a stated predecessor, On Photography. That's as far as I got.

Regarding the Pain of Others was shot through with the idea that suffering isn't noble. It is not noble to suffer—while one can behave nobly during suffering, one is not noble for suffering. If one must suffer, one is noble for enduring.

I was early for a dinner date last week, so I picked up Sontag's Against Interpretation, a collection of essays written between 1962 and 1965. Sontag is among the 20^th century's most readable thinkers. There's a very American straightforwardness about her work. Often enough, Sontag is in the position of translating European writers—in particular writers with a flair for contradiction, ambiguity, and even obfuscation—into the American sensibility.

So... Against Interpretation is blowing my mind. The title essay is a plea for critics to take form seriously, to turn away from the “what does this poem/story/novel mean” model of analysis. The title is a bit of a misnomer then, or at least an exaggeration. But her point is as refreshing today as it was in 1962.

But the essay that I find myself wanting to bring up in conversation—a good proxy for identifying ideas I'm having trouble internalizing—is “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer”. Ostensibly a discussion of the writer's notebooks of Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), the essay is a rumination on Sontag's discomfort with artist as sufferer. Or more precisely, her discomfort with the European glorification of suffering. While Regarding the Pain of Others takes its states antecedent as On Photography, this early essay is clearly part of the same evolution:

Many of Pavese's remarks on love seem like a case history supporting the thesis of Denis de Rougemont and other historians of the Western imagination who have traced the evolution of the Wester image of sexual love since Tristan and Isolde as a “romantic agony,” a death wish. But the striking rhetorical enmeshment of the terms “writing,” “sex,” and “suicide” in Pavese's diaries indicates that this sensibility in its modern form is more complex. Rougemont's thesis may throw light on the Western overvaluation of love, but not on the modern pessimism about it: the view that love, and sensual fulfillment, are hopeless projects.

So, here we are in typical Sontag fashion. The quote above ends the fourth-from-last paragraph in the essay. We love to love, Sontag says, but why to we love failed love so much? What is it about the idea that love is impossible that's so gripping? If love were impossible, why chase it? Her answer is that “it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.”

Discuss.

(Thanks for tuning back into the blog, by the way. January and February have been thin months. Long nights and cold days sap one's energy. I also notice that I tend to be less of a rational and orderly writer in the midst of the winter wastes. It's harder to clearly organize my thoughts. Anyone else feel that way? Will things get better with a thaw underway?)

2008-02-07T14:01:00.001-05:00

Competitive curiosity. I've been writing and editing reviews for seven or eight years now. My guiding principle has always been not to give space to bad reviews of people readers don't know. The two stances of review I find useful to readers are “Let's have a critical look at someone familiar” and, alternatively, “Here's someone you haven't heard of — here's why her obscurity is unjust.” That doesn't mean that one should only write bad reviews of famous people or good reviews of unknown people. It just means that I'm not a fan of “Here's this person you've never heard of. Don't bother with them” because the act of review in that case is redundant.

The New Quarterly (105, Winter 08) has a long, fascinating panel discussion with Mark Callanan, Amanda Jernigan, George Murray and Carmine Starnino about poet-critics. Starnino and Murray seem to be talking a bit at cross purposes:

Part of the problem is you get certain poets, I won't name any names, who are writing these reviews and basically they're writing them as a note that's passed in class from one poet to another. There are not access points for the people who are outside poetry to get in. So what is the point of it? How many people are there who buy books of poetry? About five hundred. And what's being done to broaden that? (George Murray)

Well, I mean, writing criticism for a poet is predatory. It is an act of competitive curiosity. When I review a book by a poet what I do is dismantle the poem into its component choices and then I subject those choices to a kind of professional interrogation. (Carmine Starnino)

I think there's room for both Murray and Starnino. Murray writes reviews for The Globe & Mail, so of course he is concerned with non-poetry readers. Starnino writes more insider reviews (recently, a pan of Atwood's The Door in Arc) and he too knows his audience — dedicated literati.

I would hate for the writer-on-writer-for-writer review to shrivel up. I think it's an important part of the story of Canadian literature. It gives me food for thought as both a reader and a poet. And I think Starnino is one of the few writers today who's willing to be harsh. There are too few who are willing to give a bad review. And I think that where they serve their readers best is in the slightly occult world of literary journals like Arc.

But also, I remember one of my first access points to understanding poems and criticism was the Globe's How Poems Work: simple, direct, infectious critiques of both new and cannonical poems. So yeah, I think it's important that we have what Murray calls “access points” for people who haven't yet caught the poetry bug.

So I guess what I'm saying is both, not either/or.

2008-01-25T15:44:00.000-05:00

Oh, and a little poet-on-poet action from Capital Xtra, courtesy of yours truly and Kent Glowinski, a local poet, lawyer and outspoken conservative.

2008-01-19T13:41:00.000-05:00

The folks who work in student journalism are among the brightest and most engaged students on any campus. That's why it was an absolute treat to be able to speak to about 50 of them this morning at Canadian University Press's annual student journalism conference. And given the challenging time slot (9:30 am on the morning after a bar night) I was surprised to see so many braving the hour. Moreover, they appeared attentive and asked interesting questions and we had great retention. Mad props to Melanie Wood and Rob Fishbook, the conference organizers, and to all the CUP staff and journos.

Of course, it probably helped that the subject was sex and journalism. I was making, perhaps a bit slyly, the case against pandering to prudes. I didn't put it exactly that way. I was inviting the writers and editors to (1) push students to consider the implication of Canada's sex laws and (2) to reduce sexual shame and stigma by asking readers to adopt intellectual and moral positions that more closely lined up with their sex lives as they're lived. The ethical position of a journalist must, I argued this morning, take into account whether articles (or lack of articles) increase or decrease sexual shame. Certainly a fun topic to talk about at any rate. There was certainly some spin off in the Q and A portion and a healthy number of critical thinkers approached me afterwards to talk.

Oh, and they totally sucked up forty copies of Xtra, Xtra West and Capital Xtra. Which is kind of cool.

2008-01-13T13:54:00.001-05:00

When tapped give tongue. Let me say firstly that poets from abroad carry and extra air of authority — a false one, of course. I catch myself ascribing more to them than I do Canadian poets. In this way, the greatest living poets of our age are judged in part by how far away they were born. Thus, an Irish master like Paul Muldoon isn't as great as either the Polish-born Czeslaw Milosz or the Chilean-born Pablo Neruda. And neither, in my flawed metrics, would be as great as Les Murray of Australia.

He's so far away, after all.

I know. Foolish. The other thing is that Ottawa poets tend to isolate themselves from global incursion. I was accused of just such a misstep this summer. And it's not intentional. I'm not being insular, it's just that there are a good number of Canadian poets well worth reading and being inspired by.

Ottawa's de facto ringleader, rob mclennan, is very interested in the local (and national) project. Could that be a part of it? The book I quoted from in relation to DG Jones a couple of weeks ago, for instance, was a gift from him. I expect a lot of us are influenced in a hundred little ways by rob's very local and national (rather than international or supranational) outlook.

And besides, there's the nightmare of finding poetry titles from elsewhere in the world, what with distribution being what it is.

All of which is a lead up to this bit of news: a woman in Australia sent me a copy of Les Murray's The Vernacular Republic through Bookmooch (at my request), and it came just in the mail the last few days. Very cool, although it came with a warning. She told me that the much-hated and recently turfed conservative prime minister of that country, John Howard, thinks very highly of Murray. Murray, who had a political life before he had a writing life, is not to the taste of forward-thinking reading public of Australia I gather. Hmmm...

Rainwater tank
Les Murray

Empty rings when tapped give tongue,
rings that are tense with water talk:
as he sounds them, ring by rung,
Joe Mitchell's reddened knuckles walk.

The cattledog's head sinks down a notch
and another notch; beside the tank,
and Mitchell's boy, with an old jack-plane,
lifts mustaches from a plank.

From the puddle that the tank has dripped
hens peck glimmerings and uptilt
their heads to shape the quickness down;
petunias live on what gets spilt.

The tankstand spider adds a spittle
thread to her portrait of her soul.
Pencil-grey and stacked like shillings
out of a banker's paper roll

stands the tank, roof-water drinker.
The downpipe stares drought into it.
Briefly the kitchen tap turns on
then off. But the tank says Debit, Debit.

(from The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1981, A&R Modern Poets)

Image-wise, it's pretty rich for a poem about a water barrel, don't you think? In stanza one, Joe Mitchell raps on the tank to see how much water is in it “ring by rung”. In stanza two we get the wonderful image of his boy's woodplane producing shavings that look like “mustaches”. In stanza three, we see the ground, complete with hens and flowers which “live on what gets spilt”. As the poem draws to a close (spider's thread is “spittle”, the tank looks like “stacked” “shillings”) we get the final image of taking and lending, “Debit, Debit.”

But it's the language that really does me in. Take the word “tank” for instance, a wonderfully sonorous word which begins and ends with a plosive sound. In the first stanza, “tank” is a ghost; you've heard about it in the title of the poem but it isn't uttered. In the remaining four stanzas, Murray presents it no less than five times, giving a sombre, almost church-like repetition (including in its final instances: “tankstand” and “stands the tank” -- brilliant.)

If one were to check the level of a barrel by tapping, one would hear hollow sounds until hitting the water level. Then the reverberations would be considerably more muffled and at a lower pitch. Here, Murray reproduces his aural memory by giving a lot of assonance in the first four stanzas (plus the first line of the final stanza) in the 'ah' and 'ih' range, at the front of the mouth. And then in the third-from-last line the “downpipe stares drought into it”. 'Ah' and 'ih' are turned into the reverberating “ay” and “eye” and complimented with the think Os of “downpipe” and “drought”. If the poem reproduced the look of a barrel (which it does, with its evenly spaced grooves), then it locating water so far down (and ironically with the word “drought”) -- well, your tank would be more than 80 percent empty. Sombre indeed.

2008-01-09T16:04:00.000-05:00

Today the longlist for the CBC literary awards was announced. Not too much to comment on because both author and judge are still both nameless. Past winners have included Leon Rooke, Michael Winter, John Barton, Jan Conn, Rob Winger (whose manuscript became a part of the GG-nominated Muybridge’s Horse) and Asa Boxer.

As far as I know, CBC runs the only contest that’s so thoroughly committed to fairness that it won’t reveal who's involved at this stage. They'll give out the authors of the longlist (and the judges) eventually, but wouldn’t it have been nice of them to reveal earlier? Wouldn't everyone get a little more publicity out of it that way?

Okay, I admit to Facebooking Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley to ask if “Half-life” was hers, since she’s been working on a suite of poems about Las Vagas, waitressing and nuclear tests. She swears it’s not.

As a list of anonymous titles, it’s kind of haunting in a way. Mysterious. I don’t know.

2007-12-30T17:58:00.001-05:00

Let the sun fall / like a hammer. He didn't even get mentioned in most of the dailies, but at the same time Louise Arbour was made a Companion and Walter Gretzky a Member, DG Jones was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

What can you do? Dozens of titles conferred on a single day, right? An editor's got to pick what's interesting. Oh, another poet? Great. Wait, did you say Walter Gretzky? I hope the Sherbrooke Record (whose editor is former Xtra managing editor Eleanor Brown) finds some room in the paper for a profile of Jones, surely one of Canada's very finest.

Listening to Satoshi

A stone, he says, is a bag of sand
You can cut it like a loaf
with a diamond saw

Crazy man, he finds
barn lights, a winter's dawn
driving to the stone works

As well piss in a pail
except the toilet affords, shit
idiot graffiti

Jackhammers, stone saws, sandblasters
metal on stone, chain life and
flatbed, din, an

eight hour shift, say it, he does
time in pandaemonium
industrial rage

red-eyed with granite dust
--to make this silk shard, this hard
silent line

--DG Jones, The Floating Garden (Coach House, 1995)

Jones, born in Bancroft ON in 1929, taught at Université de Sherbrooke for years, I gather, although according to the press release he lives in North Hatley, not far from Sherbrooke. He's got a good number of books under his belt, including Under the Thunder the Flowers Light up the Earth (what a title!), which earned him the GG in 1978. Jones's monumentally consonant word choices (“shit / idiot graffiti”) are among the most arresting Canada has produced. A lovely addition to the list.

Oh, speaking of the Governor General, 35 “notables” were asked to pick their favourite book of 2007 for the Globe and Mail, Michaëlle Jean among them. Since the project was probably overshadowed by the death Benizir Bhutto (who, from the grave, recommends The Kite Runner), it's easy to have missed the pro-poetry vibe of the recommendations. for instance, whether by design or by editorial pruning, Michaëlle Jean's selections were the two GG award winners in poetry. Not Ondaatje's Divisidaro or Karolyn Smardz Frost's I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. Instead she (or her assistant, publicist,whathaveyou) picked Don Domanski's All Our Wonder Unavenged and Serge Patrice Thibodeau's Seul on est. There were others (Zoe Whittall picked Elizabeth Bachinsky's Home of Sudden Service, for instance) but I can't remember and the feature doesn't seem to be online. Hmm.

2007-12-25T09:23:00.000-05:00

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."
They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

(WH Auden, from For The Time Being, Faber & Faber, written 1941-42)

2007-12-20T20:04:00.001-05:00

Our chests open, arms back,
the teacher said, “This is a a position
of FIERCE VULNERABILITY—”

I thought, That's it, that's
exactly a position one could live
toward, to stand in permeable faith,

and yet such force in that stance,
upright, heart thrust out
to the world, unguarded, no hope

without the possibility of a wound.
“To hold oneself in this pose,” he said,
“takes incredible strength.”

(from “Notebook/To Lucien Freud/On the Veil” by Mark Doty, in School of the Arts, Harper Collins, 2005)

I have the biggest stack of books (not to be a size queen), all given to me in the last week by the wonderful folks in my life: The Collected Poems of James Merrill, Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York, the Hitchens-edited the Portable Atheist, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, Phillip Pullman's Dark Matters trilogy. In other words, a lot. And that's on top of some really freaking amazing books I picked up through Bookmooch.com and Book Bazaar on Bank St: James Dickey (yes, the Deliverance guy, he was a poet too), AE Housman, Noel Coward (yep, he also wrote poems), The Collected Edna St Vincent Millay...

So what made me pick up Mark Doty's School of the Arts today? It came recommended by David, the owner of After Stonewall, Ottawa's gay bookstore. I was in doing other shopping but I couldn't resist. I'm glad I didn't.

Doty is a gay American poet, mid-career, with seven collections of poetry under his belt at the time of School of the Arts. Maybe there's a new one. He's a professor at the University of Houston and lives in Provenance and New York, according to the back of the book. I first encountered him a few years ago in Outside the Lines, a wonderful book of interviews with gay poets (Doty, Carl Phillips, David Trinidad, Thom Gunn...) but yeah, I'm sad to say it took a little extra push to pick up one of his trade collections.

The above is a slice from a series of fragments, written by Doty collaged with quotes from Lucien Freud's notebooks. Listen to the delightfully direct voicing. It's deceptive. Appearing elswhere, a line like “I thought, That's it” would be an instrument of flabby verse; here it's the simplest way of bridging away from the yoga instructor's (or is he a Body Electric instructor?) thoughts and to the speaker's: it's not superfluous, it's actually incredible condensation. There's a lot of that.

The more or less stable line breaks of the first quoted stanza lull you. Then wham! Doty breaks over “a position one could live / toward” and he's totally fooled you. He does it a second time in the quoted passage, here “no hope // without the possibility of a wound.” Zap! I don't think that the enjambments would have as much strength if the poet were showy in his word choice – which here is kept very spare with a couple of exceptions, “permeable faith” for example, which is in my opinion the weak link in the passage...

There's nothing more satisfying than a well-executed suggestion.

***

Anyway, happy holidays to you and yours. I'm travelling tomorrow morning to visit my folks in Hamilton. Back at the end of next week. Lots of love.

2007-12-09T13:01:00.000-05:00

The Jar of Tang. James Moran gave me (scratch that: sold me) a copy of On Spec (issue #69, Summer 2007) last week. Science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy fic -- not usually my bag, but then, it's good to get taken out of one's comfort zone. James's story is an interesting one; it sounds like an excerpt from a longer work. It's set in a future where the 32 "conditions" necessary for human life are all in flux. We learn about four of the conditions in the story: time, gravity, oxygen and unemployment. I would say there's more where that came from. Anyway, I'm a poor judge of fiction to begin with, so pile on a genre I'm unfamiliar with and I'm pretty lost.

Anyone who has judged submissions for a magazine or press will empathize with the palpable frustration On Spec's poetry editor, Barry Hammond, conveys in his submission guidelines. Peppered with bold and all-caps, the text eviscerates pedestrian rhymes, overly emotional work and antiquated language. He fully admits his personal biases; he claims, I think rightly, that he is saving both himself and writers time by being explicit. Is his tone uncharitable or do you have to be cruel to be kind?

"If you want examples of the kind of poetry I do admire," writes Hammond, "here are a few names: Al Purdy, Lorna Crozier, Christopher Dewdney, Gary Geddes, Alice Major, Stan Rogal, Lillian Necakov, John Yau, Bob Perelman, Clayton Eshleman, Lyn Lifshin, Anne Waldman, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Bukowski, Jim Carroll, Diane Ackerman, and John Giorno. Have you at least heard of some of these people? Do you admire their work, or at least relate slightly to it? If you haven't and don't, then don't bother sending me your stuff. I'm probably not going to like it."

But wait, there's more. There's not one but two further pages of don'ts. Anyway, as someone who (a) has spent a couple of years reviewing for local poetry mags and (b) has seen plenty of rejection letters, I appreciate the honesty. And sometimes there's nothing like a good dust up.

2007-12-08T16:35:00.000-05:00

A bright note in the Kanata Capital Xtra box eviction story. Facing pressure from conservative folks in Kanata, the owners of The Broadway Bar & Grill asked that Capital Xtra remove its distinctive purple box from in front of its Bridlewood location. About a dozen gays and lesbians from downtown (including myself and two other Xtra staffers, Kevin Falkingham and publisher Gareth Kirkby) headed out there last night to be bright and gay. It now appears there will be some resolution: when asked about helping out, the folks at The Works (which has a location in the same stripmall as The Broadway -- in addition to locations in the Glebe, Westboro and New Edinborough) expressed interest in hosting a distribution spot -- about 60 feet from our original location. Read more or watch the video here.

2007-12-04T10:04:00.001-05:00

Two interesting free expression / sexual freedom articles came across my desk this morning from Xtra's sister magazine, The Guide.

Did Orlando Weekly's on-going criticism of vice-squad tactics lead to last month's sensational bust? Read more at Is That a Warrant in Your Pocket?

Webmasters, take note: On October 23, a court in Ohio struck down a federal porn law that turns millions of gay men into sex felons. The law requires compiling detailed records about anyone who appears in a sexually explicit image -- even homemade. It's an old law, but the Right Wing is dusting it off and putting it to new and dangerous uses -- such as attacking online cruising. Will the Ohio ruling stick? And if not, is online sex under the gun? Read their series of articles, beginning with Tipping Point for Gay Sex.

2007-11-30T09:12:00.000-05:00

"If you want tragedy and glory, then this is my story." It's been sort of a mixed blessing to see Mackenzie MacBride blogging more these days. What I like most about Mackenzie is her storytelling, her anecdotes, her sense of humour and her drama. So that translates well online. She is nothing if not vivacious.

I say mixed blessing because it's through her blog that I learned that her band, Mackenzie MacBride and the Supermodel Syndrome, had called it quits. I've been a fan for the last two years but I think, sadly, Ottawa failed to understand the Supermodel Syndrome. Mackenzie's mix of sincerity and temerity, of high drama and high camp, the relentless humour and the wonderful melodic lines wove themselves into a complex and engrossing tapestry. Those who were fans became superfans, and I often saw the same faces at her shows: at Dekcuf, at Barrymores, at SAW.

From our conversations throughout the summer, I could tell that Mackenzie was becoming frustrated with a fan base she saw as stagnant, venues that were pay-to-play and bring-your-own-audience, promoters who refused to give a careful listen to her music and a city that had turned a deaf ear. Although she was feeling the increasing pressure of her day job (and intensive French-language training), she was also experimenting more wildly with the performative aspects of the Supermodel Syndrome.

That ended this fall. As she says:

"I wanted the Super Model Syndrome to go out with a big bang rather than a fizz. So, I chose Pop Montreal, 2007 as the the gig that would be our last show as a band. And what a bang it was.

"I will now return to my roots, and simultaneously move forward, by working as a one woman show.

"I am actively seeking to play only a limited number of shows in 2008. So, if you have an audience that would appreciate "heart music" (honesty, humility, stories, simplicity and soul) then please do get in touch with me to further discuss. In a band and want to book a gig together? Also worth chatting about."

Audiences failed to grasp her voice's double hook. It's a voice she herself compares to Tiny Tim and Morgan Fairchild, a voice which is instantly recognizable and not easy to process. It is not a saccharine voice; in fact, it's rather pointed. That vocal quality, which was sometimes exacerbated by nerves, drove the less conscientious away. In later shows, she was experimenting with performing in a lower register.

It was a barrier which Mackenzie might have overcome with time. But since some of her band was made up of "hired hands", promoting her music proved expensive. Shows, like a poorly attended new year's gig at the Avante Garde, were a net loss for Mackenzie. Those losses were not sustainable.

Performing solo is probably a good move for Mackenzie, although I will miss the lushness -- decadence even -- of the Supermodel Syndrome. I've heard there might be other collaborations in the works and that is some solace. And I've made no secret of my hope that she would write a musical, perhaps using some of the songs we've come to know of hers -- "Hollywood in the Morning", "I'm Not Marylin Monroe", "Curtains Came Down" and the relentlessly hummable "This is my Story" -- and all of her trademark humour.

Good luck Mackenzie MacBride, whatever you do.

2007-11-28T18:38:00.000-05:00

Desert of the heart. Oh, I'm just a font of happiness today. It was a sombre afternoon at Capital Xtra's offices after learning that lesbian novelist, activist and icon Jane Rule died yesterday. Rule (1931-2007) had a very long association with Pink Triangle Press which began when Xtra was just a twinkle in the eye of The Body Politic more than 20 years ago. She contributed dozens of pieces - among the very best the press has published. I'm fond of quoting her stance on marriage, "I'm not against people marrying if they want to, but I just wish they didn't want to." She will be missed by friends in both the writing and activist circles. Xtra.ca is lucky to have an extensive archive of her work. It's worth browsing.

2007-11-28T11:20:00.000-05:00

The most significant Inuit writer of his generation. It took two months, but the Globe&Mail has a long obituary of Alootook Ipellie, the Ottawa-based artist and author who died Sept 8, 2007.

2007-11-25T08:30:00.000-05:00

Check out this article in today's Ottawa Citizen about poet Rob Winger's GG-nominated Muybridge's Horse (Nightwood Editions, 2007). It's very hard work to balance an arts or books section in a newspaper. I know poets complain that they never get a break in the mainstream press; heck, I'm still bellyaching about the Globe&Mail's decision to kill How Poems Work half a decade ago. Anyway, the article about Winger was (a) the cover story of the arts section in the Sunday Citizen and (b) mentioned on the paper's cover. So that goes a long way for me to putting the Citizen in good stead in my mind. I also remember them writing longish pieces about David O'Meara and rob mclennan this year. So good on them. And good on Winger, by the way, and you can buy a copy of his book here.

So who next? While Anita Lahey might have gotten a shoutout in the Citizen for her work with Arc earlier this year, I don't remember seeing anything about her Trillium-nominated Out to Dry in Cape Breton (Vehicule) ... or Stephen Brockwell for his outstanding new collection The Real Made Up. Ottawa is lucky to have both as residents. Or maybe they could get them in dialogue, considering the fur that flew after Lahey's questions to Brockwell at the writer's fest.

2007-11-24T15:59:00.000-05:00

I love the CBC Digital Archives. It's awesome. They (archivists? interns?) take 20-plus clips about a subject (The Grey Cup, AIDS, Joni Mitchell) spanning, usually, about 40 years of history. Among these clumps is a collection of interviews about Ottawa-born poet and novelist Margaret Atwood. Perhaps my favourite is the trainwreck of an interview she did with Hana Gardner As amply proved by the other interviews, it's not that she's trying to be a bitch, she's just got a low tolerance for dumb questions. But the catty ones are fun, like this interview with CBC Radio, for instance. She's promoting -- or trying to promote -- one of her books of poetry,The Animals in that Country (Oxford UP). Here's how it begins:

CBC: I'm going to ask you again, Margaret, why The Animals in that Country, the title? You wouldn't tell me before.

MA: I'll simply say that's up to the reader to find out.

CBC: It's one of those things where you put your own meaning on, eh?

MA: Well, it's the title of one of the poems in the book and perhaps if one read that poem, one would have a clue.

2007-11-12T21:46:00.001-05:00

Shuffle 29, i
Pearl Pirie

you’re a summer

watch the fold-hearted pleasure

in song-shade, listen in

again hear the taste lines showing
a red
to family lines
yours is to bring tears

At the ryan fitzpatrick/Natalie Walshots/William Neil Scott reading, I got a lovely little surprise from Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie. She handed me a copy of There are Better Ways to Go than by Aspartame, a handmade chapbook she produced for the Ottawa Small Press Bookfair. She wrote my name in pencil on the top corner.

It was nice to be reminded why I love the bookfair so much. “Shuffle 29” is a serial poem that appears to be pluderverse of a larger project (am I right?). Basically, the seven poems in the “Shuffle” are light-hearted and elastic, showing the telltale grammatical hopscotch of the genre. A treat.

(Don’t expect to get handed ephemera all the time or anything, but the fitzpatrick reading was the first of the AB Reading Series (videotaped by Warren Dean Fulton) at City Hall. Great venue. The next AB event is at the Avant-Garde Bar on Nov 14, featuring Edmonton’s Brea Burton and Jill Hartman.)

Pearl’s poems reminded me a bit of Jennifer Mulligan’s electric “eight words” from her above/ground press chapbook …like nailing jello to a tree…

from eight words

energy
when departing
work feels
something similar
to a question
the bowler and
his stories
with energy
are on my calendar

stories
you question
my calendar
not matching the stories
of the work and the
departing
nothing similar
for the bowler
with the same energy

Pirie’s chap and Mulligan’s have a lot in common. Both women are irregulars at local readings and it’s clear they’ve absorbed a lot. Both jello and Aspartame tackle a range of poetic forms, choosing to eschew consistent tone for reader surprise. Yeah, hmm. And they're both named after mod 70s iconic foods.

Oh, another thing. I noticed U of O English grad Jeff Fry is back in town! I haven’t seen him at any readings yet (no, mostly just waiting for buses on Bank St) but hopefully we will soon. Another poet my age! Rock on. When will we see more from Fry?

Halifax Bomber crash, 1942
Jeff Fry

Kinder, steht auf! Steht auf!

and we ran out to witness
a wing span wider than a house
flaming in the woods.

The blaze roared so hard for air
it made a sucking wind
the woods craned with, and whined;

metal chunks gouged through trunks,
the resin in the pine needles fried,
odorous like burning hair,

and I could imagine being there:
even the teeth rooted in my skull
scorched all to powder,

and all my glabrous girl skin
inside this nightslip
slide off onto the molten floor,

and all these muscles and guts
burn to black charcoal, dust.
This process, somehow,

taking all eternity.

-from the Bywords Quarterly Journal Volume 4 Number 1 (Spring 2006)

2007-11-06T10:11:00.000-05:00

I'm always bowled over by a good sex poem. If a poet seeks to unbind herself from the conventional ways of speaking—and of seeing—the sex poem is very dangerous terrain. On the “new ways of speaking” front, writing must find ways to negotiate the topics of love and sex, with all the snares set by cliché, pat phrase and meaningless idiom. And on the other front—the “new ways of seeing” approach—there are only a very few sex acts that get any play whatsoever in verse and by writing outside those, it's easy to find yourself entirely without vocabulary, toolless and very much alone.

So poetry often looks at things from strange angles and sex is no exception. And sex is something badly in need of discussion in all its unspoken iterations. If I follow my fake dichotomy (“new ways of speaking” versus “new ways of seeing”), I want to divide up my favourite sex poems along that axis—while of course recognizing its limited usefulness. At the one end is, say, bill bissett, the Canadian avant garde grenade, and at the other end is the salacious, conversational poetry of Sky Gilbert and billeh nickerson. Somewhere in the middle is Elizabeth Bachinsky's frenetic “She is blonde sin” (reproduced here). Bachinsky's syntactically adventurous manner of writing and the poem's formal constraint (it's an anagram of “On His Blindness” isn't it?) prove she's a word-nerd first, but its content is so glorious one friend of mine carries a copy of “She is blonde sin” in her wallet. Delightful.

I feel like I'm being a bit defensive here, because the poem I want to talk about is likely to surprise some.

The Connoisseuse of Slugs
Sharon Olds

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bodies,
translucent strangers glistening along the
stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the
ends, delicate and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

(from The Dead and the Living, 1984, Alfred Knopf)

The Connoisseuse of Slugs does what I want any good poem to do: confound my expectations. The first sixteen lines quietly explain the premise. Then the final sextet turns the poem on its head (so to speak), revealing the poem's subject: human intimacy. Like the slug that slowly reveals itself, the poem puts out its antennae into human relationships only in the final quarter of the poem.

Think of a date. Often, the bulk of the evening is spent sharing anecdotes of varying degrees of intimacy. Sex is not the stated subject, yet both partners are judging desirability and availability based on those early cues. The naked man in any explicit sense only appears later, although his appearance realligns the previous conversation. And here, the gentleness of the narrator's final assertion—“eager and so / trusting you could weep”—is magnified by the slowness of the piece's build-up. A lovely and surprising poem.

2007-10-31T19:18:00.001-04:00

Is Halifax Canada's Miss Congeniality? If anyone is interested in reading about my trip to Halifax, I ended up writing a gay travel feature about the city for Capital Xtra.

So much ended up on the cutting room floor. I'm sure there's a poignant story to be written about two NZ expats I spent some time with who flew back to Canada to get married. Or a dishy column about my fear of getting arrested when I flew home with a glam obelisk acquired at a Nova Scotia Rainbow Action Project fundraiser. Or about my misadventures trying to peg a sailor. Alas, a story can only have so many words.

One such: speaking to Wayves editor Dan MacKay while I was in Halifax about punoqun (“unbound” upside down), he suggested it might represent the biggest print run of gay poetry in Canada ever. It wouldn't surprise me. He said 6000 copies – which is way more that most presses in Canada print of anything with linebreaks, right? Let alone cocksucking. It shipped with Wayves, the East Coast gay newspaper run by a non-profit collective, at the end of September.

Bareback Mountain Camp: A Fucking Greek Tragedy

Sheepherders dot the “i” in Brokeback Mountain
like a Newfoundland fishing ship sinking into a sea of
Colorado prairie grass. Comic book cowboy clones
ride to the coitus camp. Bareback they saddle up and
drive the mutton into the no grease and lease, longing
after loves empty promise if a cold shack spit dip
up the old dirt road. They clean the caught brown
trout in the cold mountain with no luster lost
on the lures in the tackle. Fellatio, the son of the god
Urophile, chokes and dies on the bitter taste of a
tirer iron. It tastes like a life wasted wrestling with the
four-legged double dick mountain monster locked in
a labyrinth of lodge pole pine. The orphaned Penis
smells the sweet stale scent of a long closeted shirt
and remembers the sting of separation. It feels like
the throbbing aching of a cold cock to the chin.

(Jeff Higgins, pg 11, punoqun 2007, published by Wayves)

There are too few intersections of poetry and faggotry these days. It's not that gay poetry is not being written or read these days, but rather it's not getting the kind of distribution it could really benefit from. It leaves people like me to root around in library databases like I'm looking for my brother's Playboy. Higgins's tongue-in-cheek “Bareback Mountain Camp: A Fucking Greek Tragedy” (the best poem in the collection – a gay poet who cares about word sounds... swoon!) appears with poetry by Joel Arseneau, Rebecca Power and gay activist Albert McNutt and prose by Mike Wedge, Ethan Stillman and Julie Vandervoort.

On a related note, Seminal editor John Barton put me onto Midsummer Night's Press, which is inviting submissions of previously published gay-themed poetry from 2007 for what they hope will be an annual book of gay verse. Which, if you ask me, is fucking awesome. Read the submissions guidelines carefully – the work has to have been previously published elsewhere in the last twelve months.

2007-10-30T19:08:00.000-04:00

Bookmooch. Hayl and I have become relentless bookmoochers in the last week. Well, Hayley first: she's the trendsetter. It's a book exchange; you give away books, earning goodwill along the way and you can use that goodwill to get books mailed to you by strangers. I have to admit, there aren't a ton of hits for the kind of books I like (contemporary poetry) but I have already been able to unload a couple of bad-decision books that have been uglying up my bookshelf. And with the wishlist, the set-it-and-forget-it system lets you know when books you want become available. Which is cool, eh?

2007-10-23T20:52:00.000-04:00

Grifter

Grifter is soon. Kinsey-counted digits,

slick skinned insert, picked the city's
provocative soccerer for visiting.

Curdled, terse outputs—floored outfits—

packed up: away, jersey. Gotta
ask Kesey to cost your proposal,

solve palsy with a blank-K grant.

Be sotted, risking silly for a slice
of exciting. Uneven breathing

wrestles the subtler bunsen
from upturned lungs, anxiety's upswing.

Forget we fought like toddlers. Pluck

up your cup of coddling, douse the
guesting ghost. This story's got legs.

(from Peter F Yacht Club #8, Fall 2007)

The new issue of the Yacht Club is out and, thrillingly, it's got a pile of Alberta writers in it. Yeah, Alberta, meet Ottawa. You can pick up a copy at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair on Saturday. And you should. In addition to the Alberta cadre, it's got the most enticing preview of Stephen Brockwell's new collection, The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007).

Oh yeah, and nestled in there are a couple of things I've been working on for a new chap (working title: The soft, where): "Grifter" and "Cruise ship". Add it to the list of reasons I owe rob mclennan a beer.

I'm off to Toronto for a work thing tomorrow, back Saturday. See you at the fair.

2007-10-21T17:13:00.001-04:00

Parties at the bare bone of listening. The end of the Ottawa International Writer's Festival is today. Or tonight, I guess. Everything always happens at once so I can't be there for the final blowout, but it's been a wonderful program yet again. Not to mention that I'm still recovering from Trangress on Friday, which rocked. At every turn, Sean and Neil Wilson prove themselves to be among Ottawa's treasures. I know there are a lot of people who will be sleeping very soundly this week, including K8, Steve, Leslie, Robert, Carmel...

Okay, that just went a little bit Romper Room. OIWF will be back in the spring (April 12-19), and in the meantime, they've got a great one-off fall schedule which includes Warren Kinsella and Yann Martel.

For me, the end of the Fest is always partly elegiac... a big wonderful thing is over again for six months, you know?

96 rochester street

a portrait of our findings; phone lines break the manes
of horses wild; like a hardy boy blue leans cautious
& a smugglers cove; homemade wild basement bucket wine
& longshore fears that beat the current hooks & tides
beyond the angular cells, beyond the clumsy signs,
the drunken birthdays, parties at the bare bone of listening
; a history of narration; when we sleep, we sleep inside,
quietly disbanding; a kitchen counter note of passage,
quick cautious halo sips; rain obeys gravity and grace;
my fingers lose practice, communal lip of cauterized trees
the backyard planted; dark watered deck at night
of your foreboding; or if like antlers,
the berkshire horse was all we left, a paper trail, a stone
encased in ice; each year a year, a starved gaunt
twisted & eaten, drifted over; who wrote our own way
into immortality

-rob mclennan, from The Ottawa City Project (Chaudiere Books, 2007) and the address book (erasure) (above/ground press, 2006)

In the meantime, the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair is next Saturday (Oct 27, noon to 5pm). As usual, it's on the second floor of the Jack Purcell Community Centre... a great mix of ephemera, chapbooks and small press titles, with work selling for between $2 and $20, mostly, and a smattering of other funky crafts. Poetry, short fiction, novels. There's usually a generous helping of free stuff too. The folks who run most of the city's small presses will be there with tables.

...and you can buy my little chaps there too. At the spring fair, Nicholas Lea, Andrew Faulkner and I launched Basement Tapes ($5), a homolinguistic experiment consisting of 3 original pieces and 15 translations of them. Sort of. Anyway, we sold out of it that day, but the second edition is now out. There will be a few copies floating around, probably. As well, if you're hankering for a copy of Heteroskeptical ($4), my chap with above/ground press, it'll be there (nestled in among dozens of fuckin amazing chaps at the above/ground table). No kidding. You should come.

Was that a bad segue?

Also don't forget about the return of a queer film festival to Ottawa. It starts Thursday night and runs for four days (Oct 25-28). You can read more here.

2007-10-19T16:36:00.000-04:00

The president and vice-president DO NOT travel together. I think we should have limits on the number of Ottawa literati allowed to attend any given Writer’s Fest event. Some sort of quota system. I don’t know. Maybe they could arrange it as part of fire codes: poet capacity. I teased some people (Kate Hunt?) that we’d have been totally snookered if something happened in that room (Salon A) yesterday (during the Rob Winger, Stephen Brockwell, John Pass reading). I think we should consider an Ottawa poets’ natural disaster strategy – you know, just to be on the safe side.

I say that because one shock-and-awe attack yesterday from, say, Cornwall, and our infrastructure would be pretty much shot, between Sean and Neil Wilson (Ottawa International Writers’ Festival); rob mclennan and Emily Falvey (Factory Reading Series); Dave O’Meara (Plan 99); Dean Steadman (Tree Reading Series); Anita Lahey (Arc Magazine); Amanda and Charles Earl (Bywords); Max Middle (AB Reading Series); Pearl Pirie and John MacDonald (web stalwarts); James Moran (event organizer, including tonight’s Transgress); poets Michelle Desbarats (Last Child to Come Inside), Shane Rhodes (The Bindery, Holding Pattern, The Wireless Room), Monty Reid (author of a dozen books, including the Archibald-Lampman Award winning Disappointment Island, Flat Side, Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems, Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts, The Last Great Dinosaurs, These Lawns and Karst Means Stone), Sandra Ridley (Diana Brebner award honorable mention, 2006), Sean Moreland (John Newlove Award winner 2007), Rolond Provost (John Newlove Award winner 2006), Rona Shaffran (John Newlove Award finalist 2006), Jacqueline Lawrence (author of an in/words collection whose name I can’t recall), Anita Dolman (Scalpel, tea and shot glass); U of O Professor Chris Jennings; documentary film maker Josh Massey (Heard of Poets); Writer’s Fest staple and freelance editor Carmel Purkis; cabaret singer Glenn Nuotio…

...anyway, I'm super excited about Transgress tonight, with Ivan E Coyote, Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, Joey Comeau and Mikiki. See y'all there.

2007-10-17T13:13:00.000-04:00

The Power of the Pen is a writing contest for teens in Hamilton sponsored by the Hamilton Public Library, now celebrating its 13th year. University of Chicago doctoral student Aidan Johnson, an early recipient of the award, will be giving the keynote address to this year's winners on Fri, Oct 19, 2007. He asked Power of the Pen alumni to draft a note about what the contest has meant to us. I’m delighted to have been invited to comment. Here’s a truncated version of the letter:

Dear Aidan.

Thanks for giving me the chance to reflect on what the Power of the Pen has meant to me in my development as a writer and as a person.

For me, winning the Power of the Pen was an invitation to keep writing—every day, through rough patches, through busy periods, through writer’s block. Both the trajectory that brought me to the newspaper business and the trajectory that has kept me engaged in literary work began in the auditorium of the Hamilton Public Library in 1997.

Fiction writers and poets deal with a lot of rejection in their early careers. Even well established poets have their work declined regularly by publishing houses and magazines. Winning the Power of the Pen gave me the confidence I needed to handle a rejection ratio that was initially 30:1. It gets easier, I promise.

Friends of mine who have won this award have not pursued writing; for some young recipients, becoming a full-time writer is the furthest thing from their minds. I respect that. Being engaged with literature happens at many levels, enriching the mental life of all who partake. A lifelong reader is a problem solver, an empathizer, a person who understands nuance and other points of view: in short, the best kind of citizen.

The Power of the Pen is an outstanding civic prize for young people to be awarded—regardless of their intentions for their future. Please extend my congratulations to this year’s recipients.

Best,
Marcus McCann

2007-10-14T18:29:00.000-04:00

In Rainbows, Radiohead. It's the final cut that defines a Radiohead album. Think of the “Black Star”/ “Sulk” / “Street Spirit” combo that ends The Bends. What does it say about the album? Well, everything, really. It's no surprise (pun intended) that “Street Spirit” was released as a single. It represented what that the band was at the time: otherworldly, touched by urban anxiety, and still, at that point, mostly dealing with recognizable chords. A creepy rock song for a creepy band, and way more typical of what they were up to than, say, the single "Just".

The end of OK Computer, “The Tourist”, had all the same touchstones: creepy, anxious, ethereal, but “The Tourist” was more musically adventurous. Like the album, it begins with just the standard rock machinary at its disposal, and builds to a distorted choral adventure marked by Jonny Greenwood's then-typical cascading and increasingly-dissonant guitar solo. And as a finale to a—quote—concept album—unquote—“The Tourist” is a perfect synopsis, down to the elevator bell that ends the track.

Should I go through them all? “Blow out” from Pablo Honey was exactly what the album is: a promise, a hint. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” from Kid A utilizes Thom Yorke's computer-altered voice and ironic/deliberately-cliched soundbyte lyrics.

Amnesiac's “Life in a Glass House” and Hail to the Thief's “Wolf at the Door” are undoubtably among the best songs Radiohead have ever written—in fact, they outshine the albums that spawned them. Anyone who didn't think Hail to the Thief was a memorable piece of plastic clearly didn't get to the end of it.

Which brings us to the new 10-track album Radiohead dropped online last week. In Rainbows ends with “Videotape” and as the title of the album suggests, it's not as gloomy. In fact, it's far more straightforward than the heavily orchestrated/produced albums that it follows.

Like the finales that preceded it, “Videotape” bears the marks of the album on which it appears. The most interesting of them is the late appearance in the track of percussive invention, with metronome-like ticking inserted after the main vocal line is finished. It's appropriate for a song about death, a clever delay. And while In Rainbows is hardly a return to verse-chorus-verse, the first repeating section of “Videotape” is not un-verse like, a structure typical of the new album.

“When I'm at the pearly gates
This'll be on my videotape
My videotape”

And later...

“You are my centre when I spin away
Out of control on videotape
On videotape”

“Videotape” far more direct than “Wolf at the Door”, there's no big crescendo like in “The Tourist”, it's more earnest than “Life in a Glass House”—and there are a lot fewer words in the song, making it more like “Motion Picture Soundtrack” than any of the other closers. Hmmm... motion picture...hmmm 'videotape'... Is In Rainbows Kid A-like? Well, a Kid A tinged with The Eraser, Thom Yorke's solo album.

And it's "straight to video"-style release? Not, as it turns out, an indication of quality.

www.inrainbows.com

2007-10-13T15:21:00.000-04:00

Library and Archives Canada, 2pm. The graceful Carmel Purkis took a break from setting up the Ottawa International Writer's Festival book table to tell me I was early for the George Johnston tribute (featuring Robyn Sarah, John Metcalf, Mark Abley, Robert Hogg, Bill Hawkins and Stephen Brockwell). Uh, 24 hours early. I can be such a dufus sometimes.

I'm not sure I'll make it out to the fest tomorrow (Sunday). I'm probably working because this particular production cycle has been punctured by the Ontario election, the Capital Xtra HERO Awards and the upcoming Transgress reading. I'll try. Here are the deets from the website:

Celebrate the life and work of George Johnston with recitals of his most memorable poems, reminiscences and a panel discussion. George Johnston is regarded by many as one of Canada's pre-eminent poets. Educated at the University of Toronto, George Johnston became an RCAF reconnaissance pilot in Africa during the Second World War. After returning to the University of Toronto to complete his graduate studies, Johnston taught briefly at Mt. Allison University, and joined the faculty of Carleton University where he taught until his retirement in 1979. The publication of The Essential George Johnston will bring Johnston's work to a new audience who will appreciate both the formal perfection of his verse and the verbal energy of his poetry as spoken word. A free event. Donations in support of our free literacy programs welcomed.

Anyway, a super week ahead with OIWF. I love that they tend to put writers in threes. For example, last year I was introduced to the work of Erin Knight when she read with Erin Mouré (this spring), the work of Paul Glennon when I went to see Daphne Marlatt (last fall)... and the list goes on. This year's triple bills are just as promising.

Most excited for? Thursday: David McGimpsey, 6pm, followed by the launch of Brockwell's new book (is it the launch, officially?) with John Pass and Rob Winger. So. Pumped.

And I'm anxious to see what Amanda Earl and Pearl Pirie have in store for us, review-wise, as per Amanda's note.

2007-10-10T09:41:00.000-04:00

Better Friends Than Lovers with Glenn Nuotio and Elizabeth Bruce (Thanksgiving, Irene's Pub). BFTL, a fivesome of mostly queer Vancouverites, totally suckerpunched me in my inner teenager when I heard their new CD, Great Loves. As a debut disc, Great Loves is a good calling card for the thrift store / kitchen sink arrangements (two vocalists with sometimes competing vocal lines, a two-keyboard synth player, two guitars, bass, and drums). The live show had a lot of energy and a lot of promise and I'd definitely go see 'em again.

Glenn's set (I guess I've seen him five or six times already) was throatier than normal — he had just returned from Pop Montreal that afternoon after exhaustive partying, he said from stage. But more interesting was the band's rearrangement. He's already undergone one seismic shift in accompaniment (going from traditional rock guitar format to cello-accordian-piano) so seeing him tweak the arrangements shouldn't have surprised me. I have to say I missed Marie-Josee Houle on a few of his songs (Mark even sung one of the counter-melodies into my ear from memory) but Glenn and cellist Patrick Dedauw had such extra sonic freedom that I think it was a net benefit to listeners. Is it permanent?

Opener Elizabeth Bruce has a powerful voice that you can tell she's been working to tame. Her compositions don't go the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift. In fact the piano arrangements were delightfully dissonant. The lyric content put her squarely into the emoter category, but there was a dramatic self-awareness... helpful, even necessary to navigating her dark themes.

Anyway, on the whole, a great night. See you at the next show?

2007-10-09T12:57:00.000-04:00

Two Ottawans on Giller shortlist.

2007-10-02T18:10:00.000-04:00

NAC/Royal Shakespeare Company production of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. Dark. Gruesome. Witty. Fantastically acted. It's only playing until Oct 6, and there were empty seats when Mark and I went yesterday. If you can scrimp together cash for the pricey seats ($30-65), it's totally worth it. And I'm the last person I'd expect to be recommending The Penelopiad. I'm telling you, I had all my wires crossed before I went. Is it better than the book? The first 3/4s works better on the stage than the page. The final 1/4 is a bit of a cop-out compared to the book, but how could it have been staged differently?

2007-10-01T10:32:00.000-04:00

True stupid stories. Twice in one week, being a writer has fucked up my social life.

Last week, I got myself uninvited to a dinner because I couldn’t tell my host what he wanted to hear, namely that my job as a reporter would get left at the door. Later in the week, I found myself half-drunkenly proclaiming “I’ve written about everyone I’ve ever slept with” – effectively ending that night’s gambit. While the latter might sound like me just shooting off my mouth, it’s probably only fair to warn folks in advance.

Because people know I’m a writer – and especially a journalist – they keep that in mind. At least, I thought they did. But it’s blown up on me twice now. I’ll take the hint: I haven’t been sending clear messages.

In my journalistic life, I have pretty high expectations about access to information that’s in the public interest. Public interest meaning, on the one hand, stuff the public should be keeping tabs on (as in, it’s in the public’s best interest to get this information out) and, on the other hand, meaning a curious reader would want to know (as in, whatever factlets are of interest to the public.)

To that end, I ask a lot from people in my professional life. Sometimes, I ask people questions they would rather not answer – and I have difficulty letting them off the hook. That means I spend a little part of most days explaining over the phone or in person that readers expect a lot of transparency. If you don’t like being asked questions, I tell my sources, you should find a field where you’re less likely to get interviewed.

So, given my propensity for peaking into other people’s lives, I feel obligated to keep my personal ledgers open. As a sometime columnist and full-time editor for Capital Xtra, I’ve written about boyfriends, STIs, and the men I meet at parties. I think I’ve mostly done it in a way that’s respectful to both my social circle and my readers, but it’s always possible that something I did with you (for you? to you?) will end up in the pages of Capital Xtra some day. In my creative writing too, people from my real life pop in and out.

I realize that there are lots of writers (journalists and creative writers) who draw the lines differently, who negotiate their personal lives in other ways. But for me, I think a writer’s primary obligation is to her readers. It’s more than just a job; writers play an important role in the functioning of democracy and in the development of their social fabric. If I want people – readers or otherwise – to participate in the dialogue I offer (however humble that offering is) I can’t hedge my bets.

Which sorta sucks, doesn’t it?

2007-09-27T17:58:00.001-04:00

Good Poems For Hard Times. Yeah, I'm such a dweeb. Ginger Andrews' "The Cure" was something I copied from a book I gave my mom called Good Poems For Hard Times, the sequel to Keillor's Good Poems. So let that stand by way of correction. An admission to correct an omission. I'll let you send in your admonitions.

When I was a teenager, I stalked (not stocked -- that came later) the Value Villages and Goodwills in Hamilton. My friends and I used to come across an old English textbook, a book of poems edited by Dennis Lee and Roberta Charlesworth called An Anthology of Verse (hardcover edition: green, softcover edition: orange). Mostly, the copies appeared to have been never returned to the high schools they were from: borrowed, forgotten, and eventually given to the second-hand shops.

Anyway, there are about five friends and I who all have copies, dutifully displayed on our bookshelves. I have a green hardcover one which according to the inside cover I paid $1.50 for. It's from the fourth printing of the book in 1967. The inside also tells me that Charlesworth was "coordinator of English for the Board of Education, Borough of North York" and that Lee was a "teaching member of Rochdale College, Toronto" in 1964, when the book was first issued. It's publisher, Oxford University Press thoughtfully notes that the book was published through its "Canadian Branch."

The book has the Hamilton Board of Education 1968 stamp on it. There are five high school signatures under it, the last of which is Pat McMaster's, dated 1974/75. The stamp says, "You are given the use of this book on the understanding that you will use it with care."

Message received. God, I used to love this book.

I've got a pile of cute anthologies (as I mentioned in another post I used to collect them) including the Billy Collins-edited Poetry 180 and the famous Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Nowadays, they're less to my taste than full-length offerings by single authors for two reasons: one is full-length collections give a fuller feel for the context and intertext of a poem and the second is that it takes you off the beaten path of expected, played out poems.

I'm still a big sucker for author-edited anthologies, because today's poets (who tend to be the only ones reading their contemporaries) can take you off the beaten path. And I guess I'm a bit of a sucker for the personality game played by major authors. I dunno. Is it the cult of the celebrity? Many of my literary infatuations came from reading anthologies, so at least at one point it was an important part of my literary coming of age.

Oh, there's more on the Hamilton Board of Education stamp. "Do not mark it in any way, since another student will use it next year." Is it time for me to pass the book on?

And having promised you something from Good Poems and then not delivered last week, here's another steely one:

Poem about morning
William Meredith

Whether it's sunny or not, it's sure
To be enormously complex--
Trees or streets outdoors, inside whoever you share,
And yourself, thirsty, hungry, washing,
With an attitude towards sex.
No wonder half of you wants to stay
With your head dark and wishing
Rather than take it all on again:
Weren't you duped yesterday?
Things are not orderly here, no matter what they say.

But the clock goes off, if you have a dog,
It wags, if you get up now, you'll be less
Late. Life is some kind of loathesome hag
Perpetually threatening to turn beautiful.
Now she gives you a quick toothpaste kiss
And puts a glass of cold cranberry juice,
Like a big fake garnet, in your hand.
Cranberry juice! You're lucky on the whole,
But there is a great deal about it you don't understand.

(reprinted in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems)

2007-09-26T21:35:00.000-04:00

This caps off a really literary year for Capital Xtra, one I'm super proud to have been a part of. It's the fifth Capital Xtra cover story about a queer writer in twelve months (5/17ths -- not so bad eh?). The Stephen Slessor interview with Joey Comeau follows cover-story interviews with Ivan E Coyote, Megan Butcher, Shane Rhodes and Ken Boesem. That's in addition to interviews we've run with Jane Rule, Julia Serano, Allan Heinberg, Richard Labonte, Marusya Bociurkiw, Wayson Choy and others, plus book reviews like this one by Globe writer Jim Bartley on Brett Josef Grubisic. Or Bartley on Comeau, for that matter. In addition to our shit-kicking anarchist, the current issue's also got interviews with Ivan E Coyote and Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco.

Did you see the Xtra West article about poet Sean Horlor, written by Xtra West (Vancouver) writer and former Event editor Billeh Nickerson? Or the Xtra (Toronto) interview with James St James?

You may not realize it, but the Xtra team works from an explicit mission statement. You can read the whole thing here but there's a part about the written word. It says, "Words are power and they always serve some purpose. Others use them to oppress us. We use them to express our lives. We assail the work of censors. Our drive is to arouse debate, to inform and to enlighten in a fair and honest way."

Join Capital Xtra for Transgress, in conjunction with the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

Transgress.
Fri, Oct 19.
Ivan E Coyote, Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, Joey Comeau and Mikiki.
Library And Archives Canada, 395 Wellington.
Tix $12/10
at 613.562.1243
or Nicholas Hoare, 419 Sussex.

2007-09-26T11:36:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, poems can be tremendous consolation when you're feeling down. I've already mentioned one such poem on this blog, but I thought I'd point out another such. It comes from a poetry anthology (I have a lot of anthologies... I used to really love them), I think Garrison Keillor's Good Poems. Andrews, a house cleaner in Oregon born in 1956, has a no-nonsense attitude towards words. This is, for the record, another poem that my mother loves. While others would disagree with taking the opinion of a non-specialist (my mother) seriously, I think she's a great judge for lots of reasons. Hmmm. That warrents its own post probably, I just wanted to share this poem with anyone who might be feeling a bit deflated.

The Cure
Ginger Andrews

Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk, I'm not really asleep
when my sister calls
to say she's just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bed ridden.
Aunt Bert says
it's snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She's been suffering
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn't work, put on a red dress.

2007-09-19T10:16:00.000-04:00

Great Lake Swimmers and Jen Grant, St Matthew's Church, Halifax, Sep 18. I first saw Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers live as a solo act, still called Great Lake Swimmers, last summer at the Wolfe Island Music Festival. It was an awesome day that also included the Hidden Cameras, The Constantines, and John Rae & The River. When we arrived, the sun was beginning to set behind the dusty baseball diamond. Long shadows and a mellow audience: it was a perfect setting for the melancholy set. I was sad that Dekker didn't bring out one of my favourite Great Lake Swimmers' songs, "Merge, A Vessel, A Harbour" at that show, because the sun was setting and the lyrics would have been so perfect:

I'm speechless,
Naked as a fiery sunset.
You turn, not fleeting,
Destroyed not complete,
A perfect cacophony,
Rising like vapour,
Solid and liquid,
Awkward and trapping,
Stolen but paid for,
Legs and knees and ankles and toes....

How's that for a description of a lover, eh? Anyway, I thought for sure he'd play it last night. As it turns out, he's got a lot of songs about harbours, so he didn't really need to play up "Merge, A Vessel, A Harbour"s water connection, even though the church looks over Halifax Harbour. The church was a good venue acoustically, although I'm not really digging the rock-band-in-a-church thing on the whole. It gives churches too much cred, to my mind. I was won over by Dekker et al's warm sonics and it was, in the end, a lovely show.

Download the Great Lake Swimmer's 5-song live EP, featuring Basia Bulat on backing vocals. Free.

2007-09-17T16:31:00.000-04:00

In Halifax, Nova Scotia... who will visit the pirate museum on Talk Like A Pirate Day if he can. Back on Saturday for the AIDS Walk. If anyone wants to sponsor me, they can do so online at www.aidswalkottawa.ca by clicking on my team, Capital Xtra. Or it's just as good if you support Amanda and the other Ottawa writers in their groups. In the meantime:

"We are the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything!
We just stay home and lie around.
And if you ask us to do anything,
We'll just tell you
We don't do anything!

And I never hoist the mainstay
And I never swab the poop deck,
And I never veer to starboard 'cuz I never sail at all.

And I've never walked the gang plank
And I've never owned a parrot,
And I've never been to Boston in the fall.

"'Cuz we're the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything!
We just stay home and lie around.
And if you ask us to do anything,
We'll just tell you
We don't do anything!"

"The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything", Veggie Tales
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxLza2Lq1-g

2007-09-11T17:45:00.000-04:00

Updates!

Faggadocious. Apparently, the way to get people to a reading is to host it during Pride Week. The Sky Gilbert reading (people spilled out into the front part of Collected Works) was apparently just the beginning. The Factory Reading (feat Amanda Earl, Bill Hawkins and me) was packed. Good turnout at the Deanne Smith appearance at Dusty Owl too. Apparently, Reading Out Loud and Sean Zio at mother tongue were also big hits. Anyone know if the Julia Serano reading went well? Zio will be reading at Rasputin's as part of The Muses reading series this Friday. Yay.

Michael Redhill. Redhill read my post – rob forwarded it to him. I'm told he's living in France now. Did you notice Consolation won the Toronto Book Award last week?

Edna St Vincent Millay. Apparently, fifteen-year-olds really dig her; Pearl says she did a presentation on “Dirge Without Music” at age fifteen. High school is a filthy way to learn about poetry. I'm glad the experience didn't sour Pearl to Vincent. It also reminded me that Molly Peacock wrote a Globe & Mail How Poems Work on Millay's “Love Is Not All” ca 2000 or 2001.

E-mail interviews. Rachel Loden and I had a nice exchange about her George Bowering interview in Jacket Magazine after my little post. She mentions it here.

Heteroskeptical. Apparently, people are reading it. New Brunswick poet Hugh Thomas dropped me a line after seeing a copy. I was at his reading at the Carleton Tavern awhile ago and was quite impressed but that was before I was keeping a blog. It also garnered the attention of several cute boys on Facebook, which is always nice. Note to self: write more homoerotic verse.

Shane Rhodes is apparently travelling for half a year, starting in December. One more casualty? Well, he says it's temporary. Meanwhile, Nick Lea and I are keeping in touch, so maybe this distance thing isn't so bad. Thank you Gen for taking Nick a copy of Heteroskeptical.

...and did I mention that I've got copies of both Heteroskeptical (above/ground press, $4) and a reissue of Basement Tapes (eighteen homolinguistic translations by Nick, Andrew Faulkner and me, $5)? Well I do. Drop me a line if you want to buy one or both. marcus (dot) mccann (at) gmail (dot) com.

2007-09-04T19:40:00.001-04:00

I don't mean to be insulting when I say I loved Michael Redhill when I was 15. To say such things, well it can be insulting (eg I loved City of Angels when I was 15—eugh, true story) but it doesn't have to be. I loved W H Auden when I was 15. I loved Enda St Vincent Millay when I was 15. In some ways I had very defensible tastes back then.

Redhill, yes. When I saw that Consolation, his latest novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize, I thought, holy shit. I remember when his first novel, Martin Sloane, came out in 2001 and being a bit indifferent to the idea of Redhill writing prose. (I was won over by Sloane when I read it—in hardcover—in 2001. I also remember that the Globe&Mail review made a big deal out of the fact he utilized a female narrator...was that really the most interesting thing about it?)

Even if my taste in poetry has changed over time, I still gotta say I love his verse. I think of it as very confident, very declarative. Deliberate. Even definitive, as is the case with “Getting Sick.” I feel like I'll never write on the subject; his treatment is just so good.

Getting Sick
Michael Redhill

The body stops discussing. No more
loose warnings late at night, moss
tongues or headaches. It happens
when you are sleeping, the dreaming
head still thrumming in its shell
and the body bends out. Your shape
disintegrates in those few hours, the
headache settles in a petri dish, spots
up and blurs, the throat peels
like a rind, its music baroque,
the skin goes litmus. In the bathroom
rodent-throated, hunched like a Henry
Moore over the bowl, unable
to speak as your body tells it all.
It knows you much better than you,
does its thing, acts like a parent
who is tired of explaining. Out, poor
franks and gravy, farewell unctuous
creams! Your skin is a sieve,
your whole body shuts down as if
it is testing for mice in the walls
and needs total silence. It carries you
back and forth all day, the brilliant god
evicting the garden from you.

-from Impromptu Feats of Balance (Wolsak and Wynn, 1990)

It's a poem so good, even my mother likes it. The way he works figurative language is to turn a story into the archetypal story. “Your whole body shuts down as if / it is testing for mice in the walls / and needs total silence.” Delicious metaphor. Second-person pronouns. Being so direct isn't always a good thing, but with Redhill, the effect is, like I say, to appear definitive. I think that appeals to a teenager. Now lines like “My body's / about to bolt and go to seed” (from “Heat VII” Light-crossing, House of Anansi, 2001) are the hooks that keeps me re-reading his poetry.

The being definitive and direct thing: it's not always true. There's a wonder elliptical poem in Light-crossing called “Sudden”. The ostensible subject is a near-fatal bee sting the narrator's mother survives. It's in five parts, but none of the parts mention a bee sting. And at the end of the first part, the narrator tells you his mother died. And then the final part, an elegy to the bee, is only obliquely addressed to the bee, such that if you didn't know better, you'd think he was talking about the dead-or-not-dead mother. All of the readers' assumptions work against them in that poem. It's really quite amazing.

His poetry is worth seeking out is all I mean to say. Light-crossing in 2001 was his last, as far as I know. By which I mean, according to his Wikipedia page. Maybe he's got something forthcoming?

2007-08-30T07:20:00.001-04:00

Idleness
by David O' Meara

Heart
Held inside here, wait a while—

What do you hear?
(Hardly anything, hardly anything…)

Silence is not tonelessness; listen.
Untie yourself from straight lines
and money,
traffic, grammar.
Drift.

There is another pace of us;
a time to burn
and a time to cool

and sometimes the cooling
is better.

Each thought be an hourglass,
each whisky tumbler a murky crystal
that predicts you will sleep tonight

even
with all your heartbreak.

There is the sky, three daubs of cloud,
a bit of gossip among the leaves.

The long afternoon a bicycle you can sleepily pedal.

So what if you could've done… should've said…
The persons you never were
can't hurt you.

Easy now.

(from The Vicinity, Brick Books, 2003 -- formatting not exactly as shown).

Okay, that's it. No one else is allowed to leave Ottawa. I mean it. Especially you, Mr O'Meara.

When I heard that David Emery was moving to Toronto (Emery being one of the central figures of the young writer's scene at Carleton which revolves around In/Words, a set that includes Peter Gibbon, Mark Sokolowski, Jeff Blackman and Nick Culhane), I thought, fuck, who next? In addition to his own publishing credits and work with In/Words, Emery is also the organizer of several mixed-media evenings, including the Synestesias and the recent three-day Ottawa Art Bazaar and a fixture of the Avante Garde bar's open mic night.

As you likely know, rob mclennan is taking a temporary leave from Ottawa (Emery's departure for Toronto is also, I gather, only for eight months). As well, both my collaborators on Basement Tapes — Everything is Movies author Nicholas Lea and Ottawa Art Review editor Andrew Faulkner — have evaporated to greener pastures.

Last year around this time, we had to contend with the departures of two former Yawp editors, Sarah Ruffolo (Toronto) and Jen Leap (Vancouver), as well as saying farewell to the prolific Jesse Ferguson (Fredericton). With the exception of rob, all seven of these poets and poetry agitators (Emery, Lea, Faulkner, Ruffolo, Leap and Ferguson) are roughly my age, leaving me feeling, well, lonely.

This is not an exodus. This is not an exodus. I have to remind myself of that, rather than dwell on the departure of Lea in particular, who has pushed me so much in my own writing over the course of our friendship. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I shipped off a hardcopy manuscript to him to edit in Fredericton, since he's been my best sounding board in working through previous things, in particular Heteroskeptical, which has now seen the cold light of day. Thanks to him. And rob. Fuck.

Think happy thoughts, Marcus. Think happy thoughts.

So that got me tracking down work from the sizable pool of authors and poetry organizers still in the city, poets whose work I deeply admire. It got me thinking about the well of talent in the city. The first place I turned, instinctively, was to O'Meara's “Idleness” (above), a poem I have tacked to my corkboard at work, ready for an extra read during, you know, one of those days. Yes, Dave O'Meara hasn't left Ottawa yet. (Okay, I realize this begs a canary-in-the-mineshaft analogy but I refuse to make the comparison. Other than, evidently, obliquely.)

See O'Meara at Sasquatch (Royal Oak II across from the University of Ottawa) Sunday, September 23 at 2 pm.

I was thinking again recently of the Tree Reading Series open set which preceded Don MacKay's appearance at the National Archives (March 27). I can't remember everyone who read, but O'Meara did, as did Rhonda Douglas, recent Trillium finalist Anita Lahey, rob mclennan, Michelle Desbarats (whose reading at Rasputin's in July turned me into such a kitten, by the way) and a handful of others. It was like a whole bonus mixed CD of local, totally awesome poets. Yeah, I thought. Go Ottawa!

Stewing on all this, a poem by Shane Rhodes bubbled to the surface which I'd come across in researching a little essay I did for Capital Xtra about the launch of Seminal, Canada's first historical collection of fiction on gay themes, um, ever (let me know when you're tired of me mentioning Seminal). “Fucking” has embedded itself in me (is that a pun?) over the last four months. Gradually. Sneakily. Now if this is a game of red rover, Rhodes is someone Ottawa has actually won, since he's only lived here a few years.

Fucking
by Shane Rhodes

How it was really our need we were decorating
and nothing else. The condom in my hand
everything physical and comedic an oddity.
Twice it leapt from my hands gliding
through the air in perfect jellyfish oscillations.
My hands, covered with lube and bed lint,
scrambled for it as if it were, just then,
the very edge of both our lives.

And then it was on and we clunked
against each other's hard edges
in our closest approximation of sex.
The thing between us for we believed it
the truest point of passion and everything else
preparation. Pure lubricated fulcrum
of our rocking--holding us back and pushing
us forward. It was probably a Trojan
and I imagine poor Troy in its unbreachable walls
wooden horse covered with a sheet of latex
("ultra sensitive") ("for your pleasure")
thirty Greeks beating the foor trying to get out
lungs full of nonoxynol-9 or astroglide.
The horse rocking through the night
to their blue deaththroes.

This technology of withholding
our selves, what stops us from going too far
into each other. And then both of us
ridged as something outside us
wrenched the last juices out--
The walls of Troy unfallen
and unburned. Another piece
of the future slipped by
unproved.

(from Seminal, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007)

Yeah, Mr Rhodes. You though you could get away with lines like “what stops us from going too far/ into each other” and we wouldn't notice? You're not allowed to climb onto a horse — Trojan or not — and ride out of this town, no matter what province you're from. Can I get an injunction? I mean, seriously, if the courts can keep Conrad Black in Chicago, maybe they can keep O'Meara and Rhodes in Ottawa. I say we make an even ten court orders: O'Meara, Rhodes, Lahey, Desbarats, Douglas, Stephen Brockwell, Max Middle, jwcurry, Monty Reid and Oni the Haitian Sensation. Our fricking brain trust.

One of the things I love, love, love about the Ottawa poetry scene is its online presence, with occassional essays and reviews by rob, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie and Kathryn Hunt (who was the first person to write something nice about me, I think...after Synestesia last year), plus the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter (which I'm now writing for), the photo blogs of Charles Earl and John MacDonald and the community's recent embrace of Facebook. There are also, I understand, a number of blogging Ottawa poets on livejournal, although it doesn't fit my snobby web 2.0 aesthetic (I used to be on lj, way back). And the bywords.ca event listings, holy shit.

I feel like I need some reassurance here. I wonder of Amanda, rob, Pearl or Kate might be interested in picking out a couple of poems by contemporary Ottawans that make them happy they live in Ottawa.

* * *

To anyone using blogger: how come I can't get non breaking spaces, indent and preserve spaces to work with my blogspot? It's super annoying to fuck up Dave O'Meara's formatting. What do I have to do? Scan a picture of the page? Never talk about anything that isn't totally aligned left? WTF?

2007-08-28T11:48:00.000-04:00

"With Marcus McCann's poems I have more of a sense of why. I can feel the rompiness, feel my sense of tension of expectation, the shift away, feel the energy of performance. I can look at the title and say, the portmanteau of Heterosexual and Skeptical and the breakdown of the word into eros kept just zings in so many directions. I can read lines like "That buddy was a husky punk, so much skin – // buddy, that badunkadunk tongue was a thrum sucker," and I can hear the titter of laughter at the sound plays and see how the constraints to vowels that Christian Bok got so much attention for in eunoia and the music click of coming from Twista or the Trace Adkins' badonkadonk hit mashed in there."

2007-08-27T21:30:00.000-04:00

Poem. Poesis. To make. The poet is the maker. A poem is made. Turned in the heart and the hands. On the wheel of melody, the drum of rhythm, windchime of the unexpected. Sound. Sculpted into song. Into making. Poem.

From Glyph by Judith Miller, p. 16 (Pasdeloup Press, 1999)

Nick Lea tells me I should call it a stanzagraph, to recognize its hybrid nature, halfway between a stanza and a paragraph. That's apparently Daphne Marlatt's term. Perfect: stanzagraph. Anyway, I got to thinking about it when Mark lent me Glyph by University of Waterloo professor Judith Miller. Composed of roughly a hundred word histories like the one above, Glyph is part book-length catalogue poem, part intuitive dictionary, part lesson in the history of English. It's a mesmerizing little book, illustrated as it is by Nicholas Rees' artwork, which further hammers home the books resemblance to archaeological field notes. Here is a picture of a boat. Here is a picture of a hay knife.

Stanzagraph. I wanted to turn immediately to Lisa Robertson, but I ended up going through Poetry Bus poet Travis Nichols.

The sleuths and this one kid, My Bones Are Wheat and My Blood Is Vinegar, ran track for a year but got initiated. The loved him. By the shorts, his wide ruddy face almost broke his neck in the urinal. His little mouth quit. I didn't want to be his wild orange ring of hair and his mustache then, but I remember really they loved his side-whiskers and his starched shirts wanting to be like by people. Whenever his baggy pants and his sensible white shoes met them, which wasn't what they loved, his red hands and silver rings flew. Very often I remember being kind of loved. How he alone loved me terribly and shocked me. How he spoke of love when speaking of laws. And they were horrified when he said it was impossible to forbid a man to run genetically closer to the antelope and make a big wax doll to kiss it. Then white runners, which I don't think of. But if this man with the doll is true... But I'm so bat at science who knows... But if her were to sit in front of a man in love and and begin to caress his doll the way their Mom was a white tube of light, the man would caress his beloved, inside of which there must have been the man in love. You would find it unpleasant, something the kids would sigh and pull their brown bright and blank but no one clothes around them about and say, “We know.”

From Iowa, by Travis Nichols, p.17-18 (braincase press, 2006)

GURGLE

I realize now that the tearing was the worst thought in a very awkward installment of the regular and that to swim is nice, especially for my elbow but I feel like later I will understand some properly until and object near a person is no longer suggesting intervention.

From The Apothecary by Lisa Robertson (Bookthug, 2007, first published by Tsunami Editions, 1991)

Some people think that prose poems are the very extreme of freeverse, but of course they're not. In an important way, the poet has added a formal constraint: the poet decides one tool in her kit is off-limits, in this case linebreaks. It's the very definition of a poetic constraint and like most constraints, it's both binding and freeing.

Miller's piece, quoted above, is heavily punctuated. Most of the periods do not demarcate the end of full sentences, as would be expected in prose. Especially with a line like “Sound. Sculpted into song. Into making.” Do you read the period after "sound" as a period? Or as a line break, differently marked? Once you start breaking down those barriers between prose and poetry, we're forced to reconsider the signposts we're accustomed to. Is this punctuation intended strictly rhythmically, or does it carry semantic (uh, syntactic) weight? Of course it's a false dichotomy, since pauses and rhythms also carry meaning, don't they?

In Nichols' Iowa, most of the sentences are strictly speaking grammatically correct. But they're very peculiar sounding, and I think that's because Nichols uses the full range of sentence constructions available to him, which a prose write would almost never do. Short sentences, long sentences, compound sentences, various dependent clauses, often without the the punctuation marks we're used to seeing.

Take the sentence, “By the shorts, his wide ruddy face almost broke his neck in the urinal.” He's describing a lockerroom hazing incident. Rather than saying, simply, “They guys held him by his ankles over a urinal,” he uses the strange “by the shorts” to modify “his... face”. The boy's face becomes the subject rather than the object of the sentence and it, not the other kids, “almost broke his neck.” His face almost broke his neck. The line is visceral, unbalancing. It takes the reader out of herself.

Don't get me started. I could spend a lot of time on, “I didn't want to be his wild orange ring of hair and his mustache then, but I remember really they loved his side-whiskers and his starched shirts wanting to be like by people.”

And that's where, I think, Robertson and Nichols have something in common. Each dust-up of a sentence in The Apothecary appears to be playing with the limits of grammar. Mostly constructed within the bounds of what is technically “correct”, the The Apothecary takes us to places we've almost forgotten, almost totally abandoned in our pre-fab subject-verb-object everyday habits. I think it's' one of the pleasures – or can be, at any rate – of prose poems.

Have you ever been writing and thought, oh fuck, that's the tenth time I've used the same sentence structure in a row? Or, why do I keep using the same grammatical trick to start my poem? In helping break those habitual ways of thinking, Miller, Nichols and Robertson have given us some important food for thought. Given all the arguments that grammar fundamentally effects how people think, reading poems that takes us out of our grammatical comfort zone is more than just a game for word nerds, it's, er, a mind-altering experience.

2007-08-24T15:25:00.000-04:00

"I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, Marcus McCann is a dexterous and agile manipulator of poems having to do with sex and sexuality. His work is highly erotic and at the same time he manages to push languages boundaries. I have read few poets today who do this."

2007-08-22T06:39:00.001-04:00

Thurs, Aug 23, 7:30pm.
Ottawa Art Gallery (at ArtsCourt).
Readings from new chapbooks by
Marcus McCann, Amanda Earl, Bill Hawkins.
Hosted by rob mclennan.
A Factory Reading Series event
celebrating above/ground press's 14th anniversary.

Can't make the reading? You can purchase the new above/ground press chapbooks (my Heteroskeptical, Amanda Earl's Eleanor and Bill Hawkins' the black prince of bank street) by mail. Or better yet, why not pick up a yearround subscription for just $40?

I will be sure to thank rob tomorrow. I'm so excited the delinquent poems in Heteroskeptical found a home. And I also want to thank Emily Falvey of the Ottawa Art Gallery for giving the chapbook's launch a home. And thanks to everyone who's helped promote the little bugger: Mitchell Caplan at CHUO's Click Here and Susan Johnston at CKCU's Friday Special Blend. Also to Steve from Dusty Owl for putting together the Pride reading handbill. It looks spiffy. And thanks to host James Moran, Sky Gilbert and co-opener Mackenzie MacBride for a ripping time last week. And it's great to see listing shout-outs in the Ottawa Citizen and a article in... how did that get there?... Capital Xtra. And Amanda won't let you forget about the reading on her blog. And there's a little bit in... no really, how did that get there?... the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter. And of course on rob's blog, which brings us full circle.

Genus envy: Is our culture fixated on plagiarism?

2007-08-21T19:04:00.000-04:00

Suggestions that Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarized passages in her 2005 novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life reached a fevered pitch a year ago in May. In late April, The Harvard Crimson published allegations that Opal Mehta contained passages similar in structure and wording to Megan McCafferty's first two books, called—and nobody is missing the irony here—Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings.

But that wasn't the end of it. On May 1, The New York Times reported that passages in Opal Mehta bore a striking resemblance to Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The next day, the paper ran another story, this time suggesting that Viswanathan had allegedly lifted from Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret. By mid-May, Viswanathan was accused of borrowing from more than a half a dozen books.

The whole thing reared its ugly head again, this time with Ian McEwan, who defended himself against accusations of plagiarism in an interview in The Guardian last November. I was reminded of it when McEwan discussed it in a further Guardian interview this weekend. McEwan went as far as submitting Andrews's book, the one he was accused of ripping off, to his editor when he submitted the manuscript. AND he acknowledges his debt to her in Atonement's gratitudes.

Viswanathan's defense at the time—one that places Opal Mehta in an uncomfortably gray area of, I don't know, everything ever written—was that she had unconsciously internalized passages of McCafferty's book as a young teen. But no defense was possible; even the suggestion of plagiarism is a literary death-sentence and Viswanathan lost her million dollar book deal.

I haven't heard her name in a year. Thankfully. But I found myself referencing her recently, when St Catherines poet Gregory Betts got stuck at my end of the table last month during his Ottawa visit and he had virtually no choice of conversation partners save me.

A newspaper editor told me a couple of years ago that, next to murder, plagiarism was the greatest evil she could imagine. If her comments seem a bit extreme (if, Marcus? If?), consider the glut of media attention that Viswanathan received earlier last year. Think of the combined hours spent by bloggers and journalists, combing through dozens of novels looking for comparisons with Mehta.

Wasn't the media attention a tad... overboard? What is it about literary theft that so captures our interest?

I remember attending a couple of lectures by University of Ottawa professor Naomi Goldenberg in 2004. Okay, I attended a lot of her lectures, but there are a couple that are relevant here. Bear with me.

Goldenberg, a feminist, Freudian religious studies scholar, spoke on the subject of the authorship of sacred texts. Her argument, and I'm simplifying it a lot, is that men needed to be the bearers of cultural production because of male birth envy. It's all tied up in Freud's theory of penis envy, since baby, penis, and feces are “ill-distinguished” in the mind, according to our friend Sigmund, the desire for each being a desire for “a little one.”

The strict policing of female authorship of all “important” texts (but sacred texts in particular), is an indication of male anxiety about their own inability to (re)produce. Finding themselves incapable of having real babies, they seek to make their production – the literary one – more valuable, eventually elevating it to the status of holy, she argues. As a general statement, authorship is important culturally because it's conflated with the fantasy of male birth. So disrupting authorship is about as welcome in our culture as stealing a baby.

Male birth envy doesn't sound credible? Is it a leap to apply to to authorship? Look at Stephen Cain and Jay MillAr's recent poetry collaboration, Double Helix (Mercury Press, 2006)—for whose Ottawa launch I gave up Cique du Soliel tickets, even though it turned out the book wasn't printed yet. Long story. In Double Helix, the Toronto friends each write 26 poems in the other's voice (as an aside: that description already sounds like plagiarism by the nutty standard poor Kaavya Viswanathan was held to, but that's besides the point). Writing from A-Z and Z-A, the two strands form what they describe as a double helix: their own MillAr-Cain DNA. Sounds like a male birth fantasy for the scientific age, doesn't it?

But that takes me away from plagiarism anxiety. After my semi-consensual conversation with Betts, I picked up a copy of his interview in filling Station and in writing about the magazine (see below), I promised a full-on post about Betts.

Betts and Seelig talk about a lot about authorship and only incidentally about plagiarism in discussing Betts's two books, If Language (Bookthug, 2005) and Haikube (Bookthug, 2006). What registers is Bett's dissatisfaction with our understanding of authorship. If Language is a set of 56 anagrams of found text by Steve McCaffery and Haikube uses a Rubik's-like cube with words instead of colours to aide in the manufacture of the poems. So the bounds of authorship are front and centre in Betts's Bookthug output. In fact, in his filling Station interview he collects a virtual curio of other possible authors for his work: including positing the formal constraint as author (or part author), randomness as author, and, in the case of If Language, McCaffery as author.

Poets, who are often the first writers to take us out of our comfort zone, have been experimenting with the bounds of authorship for some time now. From found poems (such as the famously disturbing set in Lynn Crosbie's book Paul's Case, lifted from Karla Homolka's journal) to uncited references, poetry has been playing fast and loose with the rules of plagiarism for some time. Still, Betts's deliberately provocative statements to me this summer – I plagiarize everything I write. That's what I do, I steal – pack a punch. (Uh, caricature much, Marcus?)

He wasn't talking either Bookthug book. He was talking about plunderverse, a method of composition (or is that decomposition?) where the poet begins with a text (usually someone else's) and removes words, creating a whole new piece. The only tool at the poet's disposal is deletion. His original essay on the subject is still online, thanks to the folks at poetics.ca. My first exposure to this was rob mclennan's Variations (above/ground, 2006) chapbook — whose cover art, incidentally, also involves a string of DNA — where he takes longish works by Meredith Quartermain, Stephanie Bolster and others and plunders them.

Is that, as Betts says, plagiarism? The constituent parts, words, aren't owned by anyone, after all. Thus, it would be difficult to compare plunderverse to, say, recutting a feature film into a short film and passing it off as your own – which would be an interesting project, by the way, except that the constituent parts, scenes or camera shots, are owned by someone. Someone with a lot of money to sue you. Nor would it be the same if someone took a pop song and reproduced, for instance, just the beats and that's exactly that which has gotten many a musician into trouble: sampling. Both the scene in the film and the beats in the club anthem are very different from an individual word, which as I said, nobody owns (yet).

Not that I agree with censoring The Grey Album or anything—fair use isn't getting a fair shake today—but I think plunderverse is different, that's all. Can Betts call what he's doing plagiarism? If the arguments against our poor Harvard softmore, Kaavya Viswanathan, are credible, then yes, plunderverse probably fits in. If something as ephemeral as sentence cadence can by copyrighted, as some of the accusations implied, then Viswanathan, Betts, you, me: we're all plagiarists. Which to some extent is Betts's point, I suspect.

Harmless but long-winded caveat: Betts has a longer leash than most artists do. It may be that given the pull of capitalism toward ownership, poetry's relatively relative detachment from the almighty dollar has given the medium extra freedom. When I say that, I realize that ownership and authorship are becoming increasingly disconnected generally (heck, they should just open a Beatles Catalogue Stock Exchange and get it over with). Moreover, there's a Marxist critique that can and should be levelled at any naive “I make, I own” trope put forward in this day and age. Notwithstanding the above, I do believe that the relatively small amount of money involved makes any discussion of plagiarism easier to have in the world of poetry than, say, in the world of gray market DVDs or even music sampling (ugh, again, worth its own post).

Anyway, as my feeble explanations of Goldenberg and Freud show, the more interesting line of questioning doesn't centre around the cataloging of what is or isn't plagiarism. For me, it's the overwhelming hostility plagiarism engenders, its obsessions and it's taboos, that's more interesting.

Future investigation into the cultural importance of plagiarism may find an unlikely future subject: those publishing under pseudonyms. If, as is suggested in The Interpretation of Dreams, a thing and its opposite often originate in the same psychical machinery, then the pen name may be an ideal site for research into plagiarism: after all, plagiarists put their name to other people's work, while pseudonymous authors put other names to their own, while the latter lacks the cultural taboo that would likely hamper research. I'm just saying.

If Viswanathan's absolute withdrawal from media attention during the last few weeks has been any indication, those accused of plagiarism are unlikely to consent to interviews (other than Betts, of course). Therefore, an oblique route, namely the study of those who utilize a nom de plume—incidentally, a practice so common to hip hop artists, graffiti taggers, and practitioners of other urban disciplines from DJing to shoe design that in some circles it is not exceptional but conventional—may prove the more accessible venture.

* * *

For those of you who survived to the bottom: there's a very talented fella in Toronto who reset WH Auden's "Funeral Blues" to new music, a stormy cabaret song. His name's Bryce Kulak. Thanks for introducing me to his work, Mark. You can hear the song on his website or myspace (in the handy last.fm toolbar) ordownload it from iTunes, if you're so inclined. The poem was first set to music by Benjamin Britten and I realize that remaking Britten is a tall order, but have a listen and see if you're not won over.

Here last week, I wrote about how important Auden is to me. Never one of my favourites, "Funeral Blues" is, to my mind, a poem which should not be Auden's calling card. Like several of his classics—"The Unknown Citizen" for instance—the poem has swallowed a lot of attention, more than it should. I would push people toward "In Praise of Limestone", "Who stands, the crux left of the watershed", "Streams" and "Lay your sleeping head my love" as better introductions to Auden.

Was I too dismissive of e-missives?

2007-08-18T09:41:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd mention the George Bowering interview conducted by Rachel Loden over e-mail for Jacket Magazine. In addition to it being a fascinating interview from a content perspective, I wanted to mention it because of my earlier post about e-mail interviews. Here, Loden's meandering digressions lay bare that an interview is a conversation.

I didn't mean in my original post to be curmudgeonly about technology. Here, it's clear that dozens of e-mails passed between the two, rather than Bowering simply being provided with a list. Well, maybe conversation is a bit of a misnomer—I suppose it's more like literary correspondence, which still has its limitations (Bowering is still able to dodge a number of questions, or else answer slyly) but I think it reads better. You be the judge.

The other reason I thought I'd mention it is because of something from Maud Newton's blog I saw on bookninja the other day about how Internet writing gets no respect, which made me immediately flip to Jacket Magazine, the most overwhelming e-magazine for literary types. Jacket doesn't have a print component. You can read John Tranter's manifesto on Jacket here.

"Weird things happen to capitalism on the Internet. Think of one of those pink rubber kitchen gloves. If you pull a (pink) right-handed kitchen glove inside out, you get a (silver) left-handed glove. That’s what the Internet does to capitalism: it pulls it inside out," he says.

There's a generosity of spirit that I can't quite pin down in the (web)pages of Jacket. Their decision to make every first-rate essay, review and interview available for free – even their thirty-something archive issues: it warms my heart.

The other thing about the Bowering interview being solely an online output is that, free from page-length limitations, it's over 8000 words long. Fuck yeah.

Speaking of which, I'm halfway through An English Gentleman, the Sky Gilbert novel James Moran mentioned he was so smitten with at last week's reading. I'll post more when
I'm finished it.

Us bar sluts, polyamorists, serial monogamists, open-relationship types & confirmed bachelors

2007-08-16T16:36:00.001-04:00

The Hug
Thom Gunn

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

(from The Man with Night Sweats, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992)

Thursday, Aug 23, Venus Envy is hosting Reading Out Proud, a very special evening of readings. Host Caro Moffatt will join the AIDS Committee of Ottawa’s Nicholas Little, spoken word performer Sean Zio, DJ Caitlyn Pascal and others reading from books that helped them when they were coming out (8pm, free. 320 Lisgar St). I can’t go, since I’m launching my first solo chapbook Heteroskeptical at the Factory Reading Series that night (7:30pm, Ottawa Art Gallery) but it promises to be a fantastic evening.

I can’t really say that Thom Gunn’s “The Hug” helped me when I was coming out. I came across The Man with Night Sweats when I was in my final years of university. First published circa 1992, the book is about gay men, gay love and aging in the face of AIDS. It was Gunn’s own coming out in a way, since early Gunn was very veiled. Here his muscle-y, direct voice resonates with a kind of heaviness: what he is saying is, finally, at long last, not a secret. He was 63 when The Man with Night Sweats was first published.

There was a lot of mileage between my coming out at 15 and finding Night Sweats when I was 22 (such a young age, the poem chides the reader). By the time I was, whatever, 22, I would have considered myself a fully formed homo. But I don’t think that’s really true—coming out starts when you tell people you’re gay. The process of becoming comfortable with your lusty impulses? That takes longer.

So maybe “The Hug” did, in some small way, help me come out. When we see our stories—here two men in a sleepy embrace (“My shoulder-blades against your chest”) —we find peace in ourselves. No. More than peace. Pride. Gunn shows us the intimacy that can be shared between men “The whole strength of your body set,/Or braced, to mine,/And locking me to you,” the intimacy being echoed in the poem’s quietly-enjambed end rhymes.

It was a wonderful discovery, “The Hug”, when I found it, telling me part of a story I was familiar with (sleeping with fellas) and a part of the cultural history of being a gay man of which, at the time, I very little about (the AIDS crisis).

When I was a teen, it was another poem about intimacy that I clung to. Of all the overtly gay poetry I found in the Hamilton Public Library, it wasn’t Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg or Carl Philips that got to me the most. Nor was it Canadians whose work I was beginning to discover—Sky Gilbert, David Trinidad, John Barton, RM Vaughan—but a rather stolid Brit: WH Auden.

Lay your sleeping head, my love
WH Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

(from The English Auden, Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Faber and Faber, 1988)

In this poem, I found a microcosm of everything I would come to feel about my sexual relationships. It was a kernel that opened slowly, over the course of a decade, revealing truth after truth about both author and reader.

Secular love, love that isn’t invested with a lot of bunk about “destiny” and “the One” can sometimes be hard to find in lit of a certain age. Here the “faithless” embrace of stanza one ends with an existential prayer: “Let the living creature lie,/Mortal, guilty, but to me/The entirely beautiful.” (Later in life Auden became religious, but his early work shines with precisely this acceptance of the human condition, sans God.)

The second stanza warns against mythological, capital-R Romantic love, (“Grave the vision Venus sends/Of supernatural sympathy,/Universal love and hope”) and the third stanza gives up on monogamy and life-long attachment altogether. “Lay your sleeping head, my love” tells me everything I need to know about love—and also what silly societal rules are hogwash: “Certainty, fidelity/…pass/Like vibrations of a bell.”

What is the vision Auden gives us of (gay) love here? It’s human, it’s impermanent—but it’s sure as heck worth it. Auden’s poem is just as riveting if, in your own life, you’re looking out over a sea of one-night stands or if you’re entangled in something longer term, with all the stresses and faultlines that entails. Perhaps it doesn’t read so well if you’re the till-death-do-us-part marrying type in search of The One: but those types already have enough literature that re-enforces their world view.

It’s comforting—especially for non-traditional lovers of all types. “Lay your sleeping head, my love” reminds us that intimacy is not off-limits—as is sometimes suggested—to us bar sluts, polyamorists, serial monogamists, people in open relationships, confirmed bachelors… and the anonymous lover in us all. Whatever the sexual arrangement, “from this night,” says Auden, “Not a whisper, not a thought,/Not a kiss nor look be lost.”

And, “find the mortal world enough.”

Wrestling with e-mail interviews

2007-08-12T10:17:00.000-04:00

I picked up the new issue of filling Station in equal parts for the Adam Seelig interview with Gregory Betts and for the rob mclennan interview with Michael Holmes. Glad I did.

It meant passing over the new issue of EVENT magazine, which has been my default choice for awhile now. I'm sort of okay with that, now that the Elizabeth Bachinsky-Billeh Nickerson duo has been disrupted by Nickerson's departure. Say what you want about the state of litmags in this country. From a reader's perspective, I think they're lots and lots of vital reads, especially for people thirsting for new work from their favourite authors between books.

Anyway, the new filling Station interviews (Seelig-Betts, mclennan-Holmes, plus derek beaulieu on Jacqueline Turner, and Johnathan Ball on Robert Majzels) really got me to thinking about e-mail interviews. In journalism (my day job), an e-mail interview is usually frowned upon because it lets your interview subject off the hook. Any pointed question can be artfully dodged or deleted and threads begging for a follow-up get left dangling. You can hide those problems from your reader if you're only taking little slices from the e-mail exchange and especially if you're not looking for an in-depth perspective or to hold anyone's feet to the fire. Unfortunately, it's all laid bare by the transcription-style Q&As in filling Station.

I'm guessing that most literary interviews these days are conducted over e-mail. For instance, Turner was in an Australian residency at the time of her interview with beaulieu. I'm going out on a limb here, but odds are filling Station didn't pay to fly anyone halfway around the world. Perhaps it was a telephone interview. Perhaps. The interview contains a number of typos and strange punctuation choices and I'm tempted to say it's a counterbalancing charm that an e-mail interview can give you that she-e-mailed-me-herself feeling.

And, heck, no transcribing?

Yes, there are deeply important advantages to an e-mail interview, especially with shy, retiring poet-types who have the chance to reply to your questions with thoughtful mini-essays about their own work. You lose out on dialogue but you get a higher-quality monologue.

If the Holmes-mclennan interview was conducted in person or over the telephone, mclennan showed a good deal of restraint at either the interviewing stage or the editing stage. But again, the more likely scenario is that what's available in filling Station is an e-mail interview. As such, it underlines the limits of what the e-mail interview is capable of, especially if one simply sends a list of questions to the subject and, after a little editing, fires off the exchange to the mag's editors.

Holmes gets away with a number of provocative statements about free verse which beg for follow-up, especially from a poet such as mclennan. It's like Holmes is saying: En garde! In person, I'm sure mclennan would have employed the snort-and-retort jousting method, but here we get a long passage by Holmes calling free verse crap and this is how it ends:

Holmes: There's no such thing as free verse. You pay for it, always, somewhere along the line.

mclennan: How important is music to the way that you write?

Uhhh....?

Twice, Holmes tears a strip of mclennan, who doesn't bat an eye. Referring to critical response to Parts Unknown, Holmes' latest, wrestling-themed book:

Holmes: But rob, I don't think you “got it” either. At least you acknowledged that, mentioning that maybe the grappling stuff threw you. I wonder if you would have said the same thing about pomo theory, say, or hardcore gender politics. Because I'd argue, like Lisa Robertson writes about in The Weather, the wrestling stuff has nothing to do with the poetry—the music, the formal exploration, the way the words work on the page.

Alright, it seems like Holmes is looking to initiate a little wrestling match, and mclennan could certainly have held his own. But mclennan doesn't engage. Maybe that's the high road, but the reader loses out since it would be nice to see these comments drawn out by further questioning.

Alas, rob sidesteps the invitation to, uh, grapple. Very gentlemanly, but Holmes takes another swipe at mclennan instead:

Holmes. I'm never going to write a wholly successful poem because that “thing” just doesn't exist. Not anywhere; never has. [...] And rob, there's nothing arch or theory-driven in what I'm saying here, not at all. Nobody's that good—it's just not possible. Failure is all there is, all there ever will be. Every breath is a little travesty. That's why we try so damned hard to take another.

Okay, putting aside considerations of Holmes's apparent respiratory problem, don't you want mclennan to follow that up? Doesn't that provocative, dismal statement – which even comes with a personal attack – deserve some probing?

I think it does. The next question, however, is “What is happening with that other poetry manuscript?” And such is the limitation of the e-mail interview.

I think it might be my sort of motherly desire to defend rob mclennan, who's been so good to so many of us in the Ottawa poetry community, that got me into a flap initially, but I am really concerned about the effectiveness of e-mail interviews in being able to present a dialogue. I think that's especially true of poet-on-poet interviews. The calibre of filling Station's interviewers in this issue -- Ball, beaulieu, mclennan and Seelig -- certainly left me wanting more in the way of conversation. Or, uh, sparring.

So beaulieu isn't about to fly to Australia to meet Jacqueline Turner and I too would be weary about putting Holmes and mclennan in the same room. But perhaps a phone, a digital recorder and a $5 investment in a telephone-to-recorder hookup isn't entirely out of order. That's all I'm saying.

You missed the reading

2007-07-29T13:58:00.000-04:00

And now Nicholas Lea and rob mclennan are leaving.

Luckly, unlike Nick and rob, I'm not. Shameless plug: you can catch me twice in August (see below). And for the just-like-you-were-there feeling, check out yesterday's reading's episode summary below.

Sky Gilbert.
w/ Marcus McCann & special guests.
Thurs, Aug 16, 7:30pm.
Collected Works Bookstore.
1242 Wellington W.

14th Anniversary Of Above/Ground Press.
w/ Marcus McCann, Amanda Earl & Bill Hawkins.
Thurs, Aug 23, 7:30pm.
Ottawa Art Gallery.
2 Daly (ArtsCourt).
A Factory Readying Series event.

Episode summary: Farewell for Nicholas Lea and rob mclennan with special pal Marcus McCann
First aired: July 28, 2007, Carleton Tavern

Reading commences 40 minutes late. Monty Reid, bless his heart, gives me a warm-hearted introduction, saying that “we're looking forward to getting to know” me. As in me, the opener. Anyway, it's all very flattering. The entire room is sweating. Reid invites me to read. I read.

“7 facts about the saxophone” goes over like a lead balloon, but the other three pieces seem warmly received. Among them is “The water log: for emerging Ottawa poets” (dredged up from this Spring's Peter F Yacht Club) because I was excited about the batch of dedicatory poems rob read at the inaugural The Muses reading series last week. “The water log” has parts dedicated to Amanda Earl and Nicholas Lea, so it's nice they were both there. I ended with some things I'm working on, tentatively called The Techtonic Suite.

So much for the opener. The evening's greatest stir is caused by Nicholas Lea's reading of a new piece about “the tyranny of the concrete”, which he calls “a lament”. Later, I hear Stephen Brockwell and Grant challenge him about it. He reads with an easy confidence which doesn't always come naturally to Nick. Aside from the lament, he reads a number of glistening new poems which I can't wait to see collected. He also reads from his trade collection – things I don't think he's read before. He's got a lot to choose from in that book, since it's start-to-finish brilliant. A shoe in for the Gerald Lampert award, if you don't mind me saying. Oh yeah, and he has by far the best looking fans.

There's a picture of Nick on Charles Earl's blog today, by the way: www.charlesearl.com

from Songwrithing (Everything Is Movies, Chaudiere Books, 2007):

when this is said to be hymnal in its approach. when the lock-jaw moment rises and sticks. when fall falls but the falls unfall. when we drip mysticism. when our arches collapse. when we feel unthinkingly. when thought ought not to be so congruous. when sinking isn't such a bad idea. when motion is miles from come ocean. when when went unwanting. when the moon was yours uniquely. when it sounded like a dog got hit. when you rented and ranted. when I half-draggingly went with it. when the mothership rescinded. when the car alarm medley'd. when you formed when formulating the question. when each trope choked. when the leaf yellowed under sunlight. when we are fizzy with sedatives. when the fawn on the road is exquisite but not majestic. when hair becomes almighty. when crow leaves her work. when the tourists are getting restless. when riverbank meets piggy bank. when the paperclip saves the whip. when the stigma's lifted slightly. when the catalogue's unclogged. when the onslaught of progress is too furious. when we entertain ourselves with meditations. when this is said to be hymnal in its approach.

Following the break, rob reads from a new work he's been handing out called After Spicer (draft) as well as some things from his new book, The Ottawa City Project. He mentions some little biographical details about Spicer (a gay) and Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan (also gays). His reading was bang on, fantastically timed throughout with his usual spare insights, even if his self-commentary was a bit... lubricated. The absence of rob as poet and frequent reader will surely be felt this year. As publisher and organizer, he will leave a gaping rob-mclennan's-personality sized hole in Ottawa. On the bright side, he reminded us, he'll only be gone eight months.

Jown W. MacDonald has a pic of rob on his photoblog, by the way: www.johnwmacdonald.com

from number two bus (The Ottawa City Project, Chaudiere Books, 2007):

through communities, an east end shopping centre & a west
through chinatown, little italy, westboro, the byward market, low income
housing, canier, heritage buildings, the collusions
through bank street promenade
through highway commuter traffic & the far flung edge expanding city
through every red light
through every moment
through every remarkable delay of intent & circumstance & wanting
through the little place that sides behind the eyes & watches
through the poems disappearing fading slow from banners; ronnie r brown or john flood, mine
through all the hyphenated city sections; a place a place a placelessness; how
does a city make; where hyphen hold memory, a link
to further shores, little
glengarry my apartment; little glengarry archive & a little secret
through the flat line of the page
through delays &amp; delay; twelve minute schedule, up to twenty minutes late
through clout
through routine & ripening
through singing; the flesh cant wait

a shore is not a demon is not a thought of transportaion, public transit we are
all public, displays of affection & transportation; look at where I'm going

Also see Amanda Earl's review on her literary blog: www.amandaearl.blogspot.com.

After the reading, most of the crowd charges out onto the roof of the Carteton Tavern. I had lovely chats with a number of poets, including Michelle Desbarats, Sean Zio, Steve Zytveld, Earl, Reid, mclennan and Lea with partner Gen Wesley. Brockwell paid me some big compliments (or paid my ear a big compliment?) and lots of people shook my hand. That was nice.

Nicer than the part where we got pulled over by a bored police officer on the way home. But that's another story.

Don't forget about the Pride Week literary festivities going on this year:

Sky Gilbert.
w/ special guests.
Thurs, Aug 16, 7:30pm.
Collected Works Bookstore.
1242 Wellington W.

A Theory Of Angels.
Spoken word by Sean Zio.
Sat, Aug 18, 5pm.
Mother Tongue Books.
1067 Bank (a wheelchair accessible venue).
A Dusty Owl event.

DeAnne Smith.
Spoken word and standup.
Sun, Aug 20, 5pm.
Swizzles.
246 Queen.
A Dusty Owl event.

Reading Out Loud.
Local personalities read literature that influenced
them while they were coming out.
Thurs, Aug 23, 8pm.
Venus Envy.
320 Lisgar.
Organized by the good folk at Venus Envy.

14th Anniversary Of Above/Ground Press.
w/ Marcus McCann, Amanda Earl and Bill Hawkins.
Thurs, Aug 23, 7:30pm.
Ottawa Art Gallery.
2 Daly (ArtsCourt).
A Factory Readying Series event.

Julia Serano.
author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman On Sexism And The Scapegoating Of Femininity.
Sun, Aug 26, 6pm.
Venus Envy.
320 Lisgar.
Organized by the good folk at Venus Envy.

Carbon dating

2006-10-25T19:46:00.000-04:00

on Bjork's "Human Behavior"

i.

Predictably bachelors
count bones
then count toward
conception, a pulse

messed up,
dated,

Kyle says,
the pillowcase won't survive my lifetime,
Modern men have no cake batter.

An eye
after direction, looking,
hmm? teasing?

ii.

Isotopes are science.
Radioactive atoms count

14 Phoenicians
applied to a formula.
Carbon fires the horse,

the bomb. We base

science on oranges.

iii.

As radio toward a radio--
equalizing, breathing
cinnamon,

I say the predictable
line. Later, on his chest
I spill
the little wasps.

Hand stilled, his eyes
damp:

table love, and and

iv.

Rational (as they are) bones
count fires, survive
generations.

Time will be hard.

Boxers, not looking, trust
what you trust:

His hand, His highway...

His curse:
anything now
but gently. Let's try
to break bones.

Carbon dating

2006-05-31T18:32:00.000-04:00

on Bjork's “Human Behavior”

Premise: isotopes decay predictably; their rates
are as rational as they are relational. Bachelors
of science collect radioactive atoms in old bones
or caramelized wood, then count backwards toward
conception, a baseline pulse radioactivity—carbon 14
from cosmic equalizing rays and messed up nitrogen.

Did the Phoenicians know they would be applied to a formula
and solved? I will not be carbon dated, Kyle says, breathing
cinnamon, the apocalypse, and other fires onto the pillowcase.
Men won't survive three more generations, my lifetime.

You will be hard to date, I say, ignoring, like all postmodern men
and Muir's horse—after the bomb, we have no predictable baseline...

Later, pancake batter spits up on his chest and boxers,
like sunscreen sweat into an eye, or, after, vitamin E,
and he winces angry and directionless and says,
what's with you and science this morning?
I cross my coffee and nearly spill my expression.
Hmm? lipping the cup, teasing him, if you can't trust

science, what can you trust? The little wasps from the pan
buzz, and he puts his spatula hand on his hip shallow,
his highway hair stilled, his soil eyes cursed and damp—
he could say anything, like lottery numbers, now—
but gently: set the table, love, put out forks and napkins
and oranges. Let's try to remember breakfast into our bones.

Undergrad

2006-03-04T09:55:00.000-05:00

All us sinners chummed like gulls a gaggle,
a scatter, cupping back Friday and Saturday
over stewed beef. Heady months-cum-years.
We struggled over our own motility and the
murphy bed, heavy and awkward. Where to
put our hands? Chimed the bereted snapper:
No oglers. Jump fists in. Shock and clobber.

Slum-baked wood floors groaned, holding up
the grumble-gut snarks to rabble laughs. Tasked
at sad tests. Litmus and lime. The gin-caddy
thumbed our sci-thatched goggler (like loogies
before, or, later, drool): shake the conch, coax
a slight sound out, or leave apple cores hoarded
on an acidic Sudbury beach, and puked the sink bin.

Consideration

2006-03-04T09:46:00.000-05:00

Before we left, the evening rain stopped.
And when we crossed the street to the park,
the cars stopped. And when we came upon
a soccer game, the men evaporated
to Drumlin’s pub around the block. And where
we sat the wind stopped for us, and when
we began to whisper love songs to each other,
the dogs and children scattered and were gone.
For the fern works in mysterious ways:
the clover curled out for us to rest on
and was ready for our weight, and we were happy—
and when we wanted more time, dry,
full-bellied, warm in each other’s arms,
how surprised were we when our watches stopped.

Bus trip, Ottawa-Toronto

2006-02-23T15:01:00.000-05:00

on Sting's "Fields of Gold"

Having gleaned nothing from summer or fall,
the rotted fence and tree poke out of snowed fields;
when the arch wind skips past the evened farm,
she is the big winner. But what could a post
have learned from the gilded sights? Can a log
to be moved by a fine view, or can a dull poplar
tackle what was before it, and, aware, hold fast?

The beaten house can feel the active cursing
of a warped boot in its coatroom, bleeding mud
and water as they puddling melt, and feel the axe
dumbly brought indoors--a reminder of other heavy
tools-made-weapons, of back ache, heath, bird heads,
of pa's black summer tobacco, and the steeling
to survive Canadian cold. And outdoors the passive
stubs anchor the house and scolding, scalding snow.

When sweat fell before the leaves fell, the grains did,
and the fence forgot the stock's troll and pattern,
the sway, lit green, the thumbed leaf and hiding fort,
and later, the diesel fume and slow metallic graze.
Few remember the last September days, or care to--
the fence posts least, now wadded in snow, half broke
half protected, which winking feign some sense.

Tense is a circle; lance and lamb trade privileges,
but a year's field again in six months portends
grain--name a city that will fare the least better,
and I will trade this field for his clay and fired lot.
Strange alchemy to an urban tourist will return
orange and gold to the sullen patch, anticipated
by the twist of wind, the introverted farmers,
and the black loops of fence which make a dance.

Coffee maker

2006-02-23T14:55:00.000-05:00

Stutter-spits gurgle black bubbles,
struck kinetic, plate hot to the sweat,
vapor returned to liquid like a wife.

Maker, leering the brewing stammer’s fits,
unsteady hand, tile tapping, fidgeting lurker
to the foamy preacher’s caging speech.

Breathe out warm, moist air; prove
a mirror wrong. Suck the snake poison
from a bite and spit the gristle in a sink.

Today, today, with hiss and sputter,
nodding to its last anthems, sing-dragging
like a turbine, a tractor, a machine teacher.

Slush pulp

2006-02-23T14:52:00.000-05:00

Slush pulp and crushed salt by metre
rise between the woolen man and me.
Lo, he’s paced a thirty count, and stopped
two-footed, waiting for the traffic light.
“Aloof,” he’d said like a roadside apple sale,
anemic, vegan, pushed to a gravel shoulder.
Now he’s the stronger grunt. I wave and wave.
“Uncertain,” I say and, lousy, smirk at his tracks.

Flag chops can straggle for weeks, but arms
can wave an hour only, then calcium
like plates will rip them down. So nod
and amble off; or else refashion flag to cape,
and prop my arm like a rusting weapon
on your shoulder, and sight and shoot a kiss.

Face down in a lake

2006-02-23T14:36:00.000-05:00

Face down in a lake there's more to see
than face down on dirt: brown algae currents
and fuzzy growths; minnows; your own

waterlogged arm like a stranger-passenger;
the twitch of whatever lived in a finger.
The float fakes a nicer belly, or else the drier

arch of a balloon loafing over Confederation
Park. The cathedral dusk and muscular stench
excite like a gypsy jack-o-lantern, a fox.

A mum spot, a lacquer overcoat reprieves
the eye from leaf and weed and weepy tree,
the consequence of sight distilled, absolved,

or dissolved. Time, only, hates the foggy
sojourn, tickles us away, thrashing the surface,
lest a moment's rest be irrevocable.