issue eight

ottawater:
edited by rob mclennan : January 2012
design by tanya sprowl
8
CONTENTS
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 2
Sylvia Adams
Richard Froude
City Speeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
K.I. Press
Workship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Spectacle of Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Overcast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Mrs. Eiffel Tower Crahses Her Jet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Phil Hall
Rob Manery
Memoir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
from Pulling Short . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
HOMAGE TO A TITLE ROLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
FOLDING LAUNDRY ON JUDGEMENT DAY . . . . . . . . . 4
John Barton
A Rural Pen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
DROWNING SAILOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
A Widower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
SHARED LANDSCAPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Mr. Statue of Liberty Addresses the Nation . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Mrs. Berlin Wall Cleans her Guillotine Collection . . . . . . 44
Bardia Sinaee
Karen Massey
Highway Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
World Exchange Plaza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Bennett Marco’s Poem for Ginsberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Marilyn Irwin
Warning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Stephanie Bolster
This side of pyr | ryp fo edis siht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
I climb out of the poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
jesslyn delia smith
MIDDLE LANDSCAPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
remains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
(end here) echo psalm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
blizzard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Promise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
histories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
BRIEF EXCERPTS FROM LONG EXPOSURE . . . . . . . . . . 6
currents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Alastair Larwill
Frances Boyle
bee hived steam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Christine McNair
risk assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Priscila Uppal
Simultaneous ghosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Anne Le Dressay
proposed applications of engineered
Mockery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
all of Carved Heart to Desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
As I do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
bioluminescence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Student Apologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Drag a long black trail across the light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Wanting to be able to pray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Heart Forgives Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
List poem celebrating the city after 3 years
Justin Million
Sara Cassidy
in a small town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
#1: ‘Pop Life’ Exhibit, National Art Gallery of Canada . . 39
Andy Weaver
Camellias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
List poem celebrating the benefits of 3 years
Hot-Air Balloon Ride (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Three poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Squaring Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
in a small town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
My Life, Once Happy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
La nuque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Cath Morris
Christine McNair — Conflicts & Contrasts:
Apprenticeship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Nervous knees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Fish Fancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
An Interview with Mark McCawley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Stopping by the Old House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
My poetry is turning to prose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Postmodern Sampling Howl of Electric Dream Sheep . . 41
Musings About Writing Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Moon Orphans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Sandhogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Robin K. Macdonald
Colin Morton
Mastectomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
What is the world made of? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Century’s Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Alberta morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Apprenticeship: An Interview with Michael Dennis,
by Bardia Sinaee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Anita Dolman
COVER ART BY: MARC ADORNATO
detail from: Has Anyone Seen This Guy's Dad?
coNtents
Sylvia Adams
ottawater: 8.0 - 3
Workship
HOMAGE TO A TITLE ROLE
Cooler denim shades across my door.
Below the stairs, someone has dropped
a malmsey rose. Canna vines, carefully
careless, drape a seamy withered stalk.
You park, lest poor men pause, dust paws
bleed on glass shamelessly shattered
below. Wherever I go
next I’ll know it doesn’t matter.
We lost whole lives last summer
slipped into other lives and kept on
and kept on and kept on
She tries to reclaim her life at two o’clock in the morning. Long journey, too many partings, too
many other lives clamouring to be lived. Raised by Edwardians raised by Victorians, expectations
ready to mold before the fontanelle closed.
Life’s documentary: blurred screen, voices muffled, story nomadic. Silhouette hovers, retreats,
anonymous. Canadian, of course: lone figure swallowed in snowstorm.
All it should take is some bling and a makeover, wardrobe repair, maybe a rose in a vase. Late
night reruns perhaps, a nibble on something organic, time to consider how long it takes water to
shape a rock; whether to praise the water or stroke the rock.
Ah yes, the homage: dear title role, mourning is so unflattering.
What would it be like if you’d been here all along?
Long years of me-ness, no challenge too great. No
challenge.
Success by attrition: Cakes and Ale; George Burns; Betty White. The one who outlives them all?
Now she wants to hang onto each day, can’t sleep for fear it escapes, the movie finished before
the popcorn ends.
Two a.m., snow falling, a long walk, the sky getting closer to home.
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 4
FOLDING LAUNDRY ON JUDGEMENT DAY
Is it time to go yet?
The sirens went off an hour ago.
History repeats itself like the burp that follows
the long-fingered meal, the pile of greasy napkins.
The old woman goes on scrubbing collars long after
the house is empty.
The hand still rocks the cradle.
The sinner remains nailed to the cross,
a long numbness of misunderstanding.
If we can forgive, why can’t God?
Next to godliness.
Mountain of Gold interactive performance art piece
By: The Latest Artists (Andrew+Deborah O'Malley)
www.TheLatestArtists.com
coNtents
John Barton
DROWNING SAILOR
SHARED LANDSCAPE
after a painting by Jack Nichols
Canadian war artist, 1946
after P. K. Page
Man in the water, head twisting through waves anxious to
Hold him under, lungs
Raw, eyes crazed
Shot out by midnight=s assault of rain. Juggernauting about
For air stirs the vortex
Drags him down, arms wrench
Bands of undercurrent the gangrenous ocean welds about him
Legs wind up, tire, a cross
Country cyclist ascending one more
Steep and endless hill. No longer the apex of glory he’d cap
Sized for, torpedoed far
Off coast, a decoy tossed
About while, unquiet, the Weyburn settles deep—tool belt
Undone, drifting, boots heavy
Weightless as horseshoes thrown
Stalks of his father’s cresting wheat ripe for lying back in moonlit
As, above, clouds break
Open to floods of
Scattering, icy
Stars
Here, where ocean rocks ashore, where stone
and wave part, misty
is mystery, not menacing.
Here the flood
and ebb of distance
focus: the land’s fingers
crooked no longer with qualm, shove
into the ocean’s sunned glove.
And oh the fog, the lull into lucidity
coquetry’s not,
the hot tide
a brow wet
the marsh.
No less the ice-packed Arctic inlet
the cowl of snow
than the steamy
mingling of sand and salt
the hothouse bird of paradise
the flooded barrier
reef.
A moon-made beach
a mouth-joining
retouching the third eye’s harsh
photograph.
ottawater: 8.0 - 5
coNtents
Stephanie Bolster
MIDDLE LANDSCAPE
Antwerp’s okapi lacks
Congo shadows to justify his hide.
The chimp’s bottle,
mum-puppet.
A station nearby, because this
was once the city centre.
Sheep chew the stone-bordered field,
there since the stones weren’t.
Dogs have always chased their tails.
ottawater: 8.0 - 6
BRIEF EXCERPTS FROM LONG EXPOSURE
...
The moon’s back. As though gone were possible.
What stays and what goes is what it comes to.
...
This is the time when butterflies thud sometimes on the window
and the head turns. Then the poem ends
and becomes the poem.
An asterisk.
An ellipsis.
...
To talk is wrong.
We move apart as soon as we enter the gallery,
a dance of disparate particles, each with our notebooks.
...
We are not our skins, we are our walls
and what we put there. Come to my party,
balloons at the door.
coNtents
Frances Boyle
Wanting to be able to pray
breath floating heart through ribs
up and out, leave a hole in
chest where wind blows through
where wings begin. I smoke
snow rings of grey mist. A mosquito
crawls on neck, flea on
baby’s cheek rousts folk remedies
-- cedar curls in the corner, stone
placed under my tongue. What pulse
pulls me, external
heart pumps pink veiled air
not blood, lungs with
wishes showing.
I am automatic, avoid the double
valleyed assemblages of aspirated
vowels. Try not to think of a bear
lye specked, page turned
I’m learning to shift side
in my seat, scrape chair on floor.
Holding on?
by: Stephen Frew, Acrylic on wood
www.stephenfrew.ca
ottawater: 8.0 - 7
coNtents
Simultaneous ghosts
“… every sound that had ever been made in the earth’s atmosphere still
exists somewhere no matter how faint the frequencies are, and if we just
had the right equipment we could still hear... Shakespeare himself playing
the ghost in Hamlet. And I asked myself: are the sounds of the past gone
forever?” (Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, in
Hark! CBC Ideas)
http://www.batteryradio.com/Pages/Hark.html
Hypothetical digital soundtrack
recovers: Will, feigning identity
strange in itself talking, convincing
boy of murder in his ears. Ghosts
of ghosts, measure space molecules. Record
overexposed passages of perils fading
contracting centuries
not a song lost, not a story lost
every detail prepares itself to be told.
Dream an awakening
we caught
don’t have to say is true.
Space Oddity (3)
by: Marc Adornato, Found objects, 2012 www.ADORNATO.com
ottawater: 8.0 - 8
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 9
all of Carved Heart to Desire Drag a long black trail across the light *
red light emptying
his arms a spacious frame for music
limbs flung
so
Manipulate shadow with hard physicality, knot tree trunks into whispers, plait
shreds of envy among the street lamp poles. Drag it though it may take all your
strength, sweat will bead and drench, muscles will ache, cords in neck stand out in
strain. Drag a long black trail across the light. Mark a pale beam with your grit,
sooty hand prints finger smudge. Across the light, too bright to stand, seek refuge
in the band of shade you’ve created. Drag it, negative comet tail. Veil obscures the
shape of what your eye squints to see, figure swimming through the light, into the
light out of darkness, hard edged and flat in the unkind light. Against the light on
rattly rod draw the trail, long and black but gauzy, wind susceptible. Drag it across
the light, hide from sun’s inquisitor gaze, that pins you to your chair, unclinking,
no grace of cloud. Drag a long black trail of murmuring, the eclipse a horror in
the natural order of things, reversed. All clutch at throats, cover mouths; the long
black trail the eye’s own reimagining of the stripe of yellow white that cuts across
a forearm, a face. Drag a long black trail against the light. Fantastic and fatal,
put your back into it, wrench that trail from the undergrowth, mark the light your
own.
rare glaze syllables honey
you tongue gold bright leaves
wounded roundness wooden sky pushes
choosing truth ahead of thick is exhausting
rose-coloured boredom, a holding
her passivity ample for love and complaint
summer a livid claustrophobia
transforms the animal, accompanies fear
through olive trees, teak trees, to wooden bridge
distant sky erupts with precision, complicated
sing
layers
buckled
ground
water folds genial into curious calm sea
kneeling in the boat, you appease the savage
modern imagination, pour cold breath into chance
* after a line from “The Herring Weir” by Charles G. D. Roberts
coNtents
Sara Cassidy
Camellias
Squaring Up
The neighbours’ camellia has bloomed again. I slept beneath its troubled reds. The
petals bear the stains of April’s showers -- sunlight magnified.
Years ago in Halifax, a man rounded a corner too quickly
and his belongings flew from the truck’s open bed.
It was the first day of a new month - moving day.
I laughed at what I helped him collect from the road:
unstrung guitar, dented flashlight, breakfast plate crusted
with egg, handwritten letters blurring in puddles.
Morning wrings me. Shadows tick. At noon I vanish into a bar, its darkness a clap
of ether, the people all gesture, nothing suffering from exactitude.
I’m still young, which means the price of a drink is less than its value; the bartender
could call me thief, the places I go. But the returns are shrinking:
I’ve woken with my hair in dirt, the speechless trees around me foretelling
contusions. My dreams have started to tear at the skin of my sleep. It wasn’t
supposed to go this far.
Someone wake me, really wake me.
In those days I was equal to the world’s violence.
Lovers were bullets or blanks. I could be decimated
or unmoved, a girl in the lineup for the next Greyhound
swaying with booze, backpack a chip on her shoulder.
I cursed the illusion of home. And knew everything: life
a rush of darkness against the light.
Then I rounded my own corners too quickly, lost names
and addresses, fled friendships that threatened pacification.
Even the names of my siblings broke - into syllables,
consonants squawking of loss, inevitability. I am still
re-assembling, in this narrowing future where
everything seeks its smallest self, disloyalty
less and less possible.
ottawater: 8.0 - 10
coNtents
My Life, Once Happy
Apprenticeship
Shorter distances now
and night comes earlier.
Pyjamas. I have never owned
so many pairs. I wear them once
and want them warm
from the dryer again.
What changed,
my friend wants to know, peering
as at the small print
of ingredients on a cereal box.
I wish I could oblige
with a tidy list of doses.
Sweating, cycling uphill while I could be hanging
bedding on the line. I’ve planned the day
to this dab of truancy.
I’m scraps, strips of skin, and my children
want these, too, for a craft, their doll hospital,
or a mystery recipe they’ll serve me later.
And my husband’s imprecise love, distractible affection...
Uphill, high on the pedals: no one to apologise to.
Let’s say you are at a play,
the kind where the actors
frequently break the fourth wall
to ask for directions
or where the monster’s hiding.
The audience point and shout and laugh.
The person beside you
falls asleep.
A deep sleep, though
she had been enjoying the play,
really throwing her head back,
showing her teeth, her tonsils, chortling and oh just loving the loose feeling of that.
Now her head falls against you.
Heads are awfully heavy.
You push it away
but it crashes back.
And the actors keep running about on the stage
saying their funniest bits.
The audience howls, roars.
The woman beside you
keeps sleeping.
I never apprenticed in domestic work,
as my mother did. At thirty-one she raised her head
from nine years numbly folding laundry.
At thirty-one my body was just leaving the party,
the roadside, boarding houses, the cool basements
of municipal libraries, the afternoon’s books still open on the floor.
I fight my hands into my mother’s precision happy dash of oregano, joyous unfolding of lettuce head.
But it’s too late, the salad is metaphor. Greenness, life.
A breeze. Downhill, home. My children
glad to see me, husband looking into my eyes
for the story.
ottawater: 8.0 - 11
coNtents
Stopping by the Old House
I hate the past, its boxy rooms and hidden closets,
its grinding of the bones of those I loved
and would love better –
oh, subjunctive: drugged sleep, mirage,
free lunch, cushion against headboard.
Twice a year, I drive up the hill, along the old lane
between city streets, provisionary squiggle
of a planner’s pencil.
Yellow signs counsel 20 km/h. Then 5 km/h. I steer
carefully between the burly elm trees,
at the mouth of the driveway press my foot on the brake.
The engine is left running.
In the back seat, the children turn quiet, watchful.
What can they remember? Slope of the lawn
they rolled down, the red roof and a man on it
bending - at that height! - to replace a broken tile?
I peer through the reflective windows for movement the movement of recognition.
I despise the new tenants, their baroque fountain,
art nouveau mailbox, heritage house numbers.
Sometimes I silence the engine, try to understand
what it was all for, crossing those rooms so many times,
being called to table, stealing to a smaller room to read how could those I loved most have fallen
as if through the floors?
I do not sob: I fight that betrayal of the rest of my life.
The place confirms quickly, so much static.
I start the engine and continue on - but if I’m feeling
desperate, I’ll play vainly at a story in which
the current family know of my passings:
around Christmas, and again at the height of summer
the kids see her, but by the time they’ve called us
to the window she’s gone
I saw the lights of her car once, tail lights
receding in the distance
ottawater: 8.0 - 12
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 13
Political Circus, Justin Trudeau & John A MacDonald puppets
www.fishonfridays.ca
by: Gabe Thirlwall (Fish on Fridays) photography by: Travis Boisvenue
coNtents
Anita Dolman
Sandhogs
Mastectomy
Morning sinks into the cavern.
Thirty men force ground away from itself
in deep, exhaustive breaths of TNT,
one-hundred-metre explosions of new tunnel.
Their days are powderkegged in the dark, one mile, two,
below the growing city sprawling glass and asphalt.
Cancer and breast taken out, taken off,
slipped into a spotless steel kidney bowl,
the rest of her drugged and numb.
They work the rock by pick and hand,
pack the stony walls with extinction.
Above them a lake, a bay, an office tower under construction,
its metal scaffold climbing.
A siren blasts the two-minute warning,
the steel cage pitches grown boys dark with soil
into the pale light of afternoon.
Two blasters stay down, savour the closeness of silence,
a dark without axes, machinery,
the metal cacophony of voices ringing off wet rock;
just earth and the water-drip of the harbour above.
One man yells “Fire in the hole!” and the sizzle
starts its burning tread, the spark
forging its way through last week’s progress
to the waiting caps
and the weight of earth to move tomorrow.
Fast, surgical fingers seal the cavity
with the same precision as all the ones before,
needle the skin, smooth and nippleless, already waiting
for a scar to stitch itself over the ghost of left breast,
the skin’s edges preparing even now to gather under the gauze
into a heavy, pink line.
Six months later, Meg says this time
the joke’s on whoever stole her bikini
from the Turkish bath in Bursa.
What is anyone, she laughs, going to do
with an extra boob?
ottawater: 8.0 - 14
coNtents
Alberta morning
Hardwood, too soft, catches
on the soles of my feet
as I shuffle to the morning windows,
cool and damp with dawn.
The pale blue of lost night colours the valley,
sets the still dark mountains off
against the brightness of open space.
Below, sleeping fog lies gathered, white
over the curve of the river, waiting to be woken
by the impatience of light and morning.
by: Andrea Stokes
ottawater: 8.0 - 15
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 16
Richard Froude
The Spectacle of Empire
First Movement
When I was younger, I had dreams about Margaret Thatcher.
I had dreams about running through cobblestone streets.
Now I dream about Richard Nixon.
He wears woolen overcoats and hobnail boots.
I try to find context for these dreams.
I swing with clenched fists but never connect.
These were younger – of course – much younger, more vulnerable years.
When refrigerators were skyscrapers.
When I stared up to blue kitchen cabinets and tarried over cobblestones at the
weir.
This is Richard Nixon.
These dreams are inappropriate.
This is an inappropriate city.
These are – of course – more vulnerable years.
And I am older now. Old enough that we can marry.
I can buy you liquor, take you home and we can fuck.
There is no Nixon.
These are my clenched fists.
This is us, fucking.
And I appreciate the streets of this city.
I appreciate our walks in the shade of refrigerators.
I can’t stand the sun, sometimes.
I can’t stand to see us married inside blue kitchen cabinets.
I have purchased a fire extinguisher and …
There is no Nixon.
There are no cobblestone streets.
It is beautiful, right now, to be inappropriate.
Here is my fire extinguisher.
These are our walks through more vulnerable years when we could not understand
disgust.
When we marveled at the sun and left everything to the imagination.
coNtents
Second Movement
I have tried to reconcile various dreams.
On cobblestones, I lie and find this city in the rivets.
I wield this fire extinguisher as if it were a weapon.
I can buy you liquor, if you want. We can keep it in blue kitchen cabinets.
Catch our disgust in clenched fists.
These are not cobblestones.
This is Margaret Thatcher.
This is me, fucking Margaret Thatcher.
This is Margaret Thatcher sipping cheap liquor from a fire extinguisher.
I told you, I am older now.
I can buy you things with clenched fists.
I can buy you this city, this cobblestone sun.
We are most comfortable when inappropriate.
Most beautiful in disgust.
I used to confuse disgust with loneliness.
We were pitiful then.
I have tried to say sorry.
I cannot make this beautiful.
Cannot find shade or the means to afford it.
I continue to swing but cannot connect.
There is something quite sinister here.
What is it you expect we will find?
This is a city built entirely of …
This is me staring back.
This is our private means of escape.
These are the ways I attempt to find refuge.
I dismantle my body and rebuild it with light.
I forget my own features. Fail to recognize my eyes.
I drift between inappropriate presentations of myself.
Persuade myself I’ll find myself in the city’s filthy rivets.
I am older now and penniless.
I can’t buy you this disgust.
It would be nice to settle down perhaps, buy you things with light.
We tell each other to be open.
That we don’t know what we’ll run from.
It is useless to look back now, find the language of this city.
I am sinking into Nixon.
I have turned the fire extinguisher on myself.
Doused my clothes with liquor but failed to find a spark.
ottawater: 8.0 - 17
coNtents
Third Movement
Lately I have felt like an Angel.
I drift about balconies of the highest skyscrapers, unable to afford anything but
language.
I fail to recognize myself.
I continue to purchase.
I joke about disgust and pretend I could take you home.
This was when we could look at each other.
When liquor and language and fucking were enough.
I had a job inside a skyscraper.
This is me, as Richard Nixon, with a job inside a skyscraper.
It was nice to have something that placed me inside.
Nice not to drift. Without wings or language.
They told me it was.
I found it hard to believe. Easy to touch.
And it is hard for me to touch you now.
I have lost the door to the skyscraper.
I need back in.
I am disguised as Richard Nixon but the doorman is suspicious.
This is me, disguised as Richard Nixon, unable to touch you and with no
money for
liquor.
And this is the job I always wanted.
And this is the job I got when I abandoned language and seduced Margaret
Thatcher in the shade of another refrigerator.
And this is the job I have now: to scale an abandoned skyscraper, clothe
myself in
language, raise money to purchase new fire extinguishers, new
liquor and a fresh sense of touch.
And I will turn this skyscraper into a museum.
I will exhibit various portions of this life in the shade.
Old wings, a liquor bottle, cobblestones, my disgust.
You, your language, my clenched fists, my am.
The idea has become ludicrous.
There is no elevator to take me.
I can see you, waving from penthouse windows.
There are too many things I am able to touch.
And all I have are these things.
I tack images of us to skyscraper windows.
We are naked and laughing.
We are gathering language and letting it go.
There is no one to touch us.
No disgust to run from.
These are – of course – more vulnerable years.
This is – of course – no time other than now.
I have found no means of escape except cobblestones, this anger.
I separate objects of life in the shade.
ottawater: 8.0 - 18
coNtents
face painting 002mod
by: Mathieu Dubé
dream 3 sculpture print
by: Mathieu Dubé
ottawater: 8.0 - 19
coNtents
Phil Hall
Memoir
A Rural Pen
Verb wax
dainty density
if she’s crazy that spoils it
OK outlaw the work
re-institute soufflé dynasties
*
Pretoria: the land before the story
Patagonia: where all the dads go
*
How To Live On Nothing (1970)
gala who-heap
*
(Char)
My hawthorn alphabet suffers intuition
its creature-turns conform to adverse prescriptions
its fidelity apprehends how to never be consoled
*
I am no gardener / or revolutionary
trite worried elegant changes everything-but
& trite shouted dupes
ottawater: 8.0 - 20
coNtents
A Widower
Out from the blinding swells
of sunflowers & the tight rows of young fig trees
heavy women drift
to shout drunk his old name
to laugh & cant their gowns aside shoving
each other into rude song
his wife is playing cribbage in the nude in the dark
with talons in her wet hair
& here come these overblown bitches
why not just pork it to them they bend over pull themselves
apart blatant caterwauling
no he would preach the astringencies of romance
sober them with flaky ballads
pretend he is marble until he is marble
he turns away into his profile
white-eyed & ravenous they divest him
his battered wing-on-a-strap flung hard into
dripping cliff-roots
ottawater: 8.0 - 21
coNtents
Marilyn Irwin
This side of pyr | ryp fo edis siht
remains
concave
sparks
a heart
a feather
what turns
a place
the weight
of the world
in a wink
weather wax drips
stellar sip trips
fire pours poorly
mothing
light-bulb
shades shadows
from star tangle
and everything
contained
to plank,
whale belly
a ship strong
as captain
as ice
fruit
once love-sown
sleeps in cake-rock
footprints echo
every captured breath
in the hush
soft snowflakes
the depth of sky
wet clay grey
mourning doves
tremolo low
expect nothing more
than themselves
ottawater: 8.0 - 22
coNtents
Alastair Larwill
bee hived steam
anticipation
stepping up
or awaiting
before
the investment
a heightened sense
awareness
trumpeted
by gut fly
swarms
sit and cannot let it set
take dare
the dial tone
line wait
up
helpless activity
the flow
with what
ifs and knots
Knife Shoe
© 2011 Alison Smith-Welsh, Metal, wood, 9 x 4 x 9 (inches, h,w,l)
self interest
to stem
ottawater: 8.0 - 23
coNtents
Anne Le Dressay
As I do
Francisco
The man I see in the food court every work day
has greying hair and beard, a body solid and neat
as his careful beard. He eats alone. He reads as he eats.
Francisco gives my phone number
to his friends, and they call me at midnight,
the sound of the phone dragging me
back from far-down dreams, their voices
part of the dream as they speak a language
I don’t understand.
He is not the only man I see in the food court,
or even the only one I recognize, but he is the only one
I notice, the only one I want to look at.
Though I do not look at him for longer
than it takes to note his presence.
I have never made eye contact with him.
I have no desire to speak to him.
Sometimes when I close my book and get up
from the table to go back to work,
he is at the next table with his book.
I don’t know if he notices me too, or notices that,
like him, I eat alone and read as I eat.
I like to think he does. I like to think that he
takes pleasure in our silent companionship,
as I do.
When I tell them I don’t know
what they’re saying, they apologize in
rapid accented English. They hang up and I
drift in half-sleep and shallow dreams until morning.
People leave messages for Francisco
on my answering machine.
The voices are always male.
Who do they think I am when they hear
my voice on the recording?
Francisco is a Mexican bandit in a Clint
Eastwood western. He is really Basque, or maybe
Italian. He drinks wine in a bar with his friends
after a long week on a construction site
in Canada. He laughs and flashes white
teeth and says ‘Call me.’ Sometimes
he gives his phone number and sometimes
mine.
ottawater: 8.0 - 24
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 25
List poem celebrating the city after 3 years
in a small town
List poem celebrating the benefits of 3 years
in a small town
Transit service.
Enough libraries that I’ll never run out of reading material no matter
how long I live here.
Enough bookstores that I don’t limit my visits to once a month because
I know what’s in stock.
Second-hand bookstores whose range goes beyond romances and westerns.
Enough coffeeshops that there isn’t a single one where the servers greet me
as a regular.
More than one movie at a time in town, and some of them not from Hollywood
and not action movies or family movies.
More than one mall, some of them big enough that you can’t walk their length
in 10minutes.
Ethnic restaurants.
Import stores.
Ikea.
Buildings taller than grain elevators.
Stopping to chat when I run into someone I know because it hardly ever
happens.
Walking in the same direction for as long as I want and not reaching
the edge of town.
Enough choices for things to do that the bar is not automatically on the list.
Buskers.
Good coffee and good bagels.
Jobs.
Visits from out-of-town friends who would not go the extra distance
to a small town.
The absence of a silence so profound it wakes me out of sleep like
a sudden sharp noise.
The soundless underlying hum of thousands of intersecting human lives:
that song that stills the hunger in me for and anonymity and human
proximity at the same time; that song that lulls my urban heart to rest.
More for my rent money.
Easy comparison shopping.
Extras from merchants: free delivery, free hookup of the washer & dryer.
Home-made desserts in the tea shop on the highway.
The red barn across the street from Canadian Tire.
Nights at the bar more convivial than at city bars because I’m sure to run into
friends besides those I go with.
Going to a concert or a play and always knowing at least some of the performers.
Finding entertainment in places I would not have imagined: the police report in
the
weekly paper, in which the most serious crime for weeks is a break-and
-enter of his own home by a teenager who forgot his key.
People to go for walks with who don’t have to drive to my place first.
Being within walking distance of anything I need to get to.
Streets with so little traffic that I step off the curb without even looking.
The chance to catch up on video with all the movies I missed in the last 30 years.
2 for 99 cent Tuesday at the video store.
The good side of the grapevine: help with finding work, finding an apartment,
moving.
Cowboys whose boots have known the barn and whose hats have known the
weather.
Stars and a horizon.
A gradual barely noticed loosing and losing of lifelong tensions.
Putting a name to the taste of my childhood in the country.
Recognizing that however I might long for open space, huge silence, and the smell
of
hay, I need bigger places and more people.
The sound of the train whistle cutting the night with its call to a wider world, its
reminder of miles and a way out.
coNtents
La nuque
Nervous knees
When, seated, he bends his head, and you,
standing close, see the white of his
thin neck against the black of his hair,
he looks fragile, as he does not
when you look at him full face.
A couple sits at a small table
on a coffeeshop patio.
This image from a movie haunts me,
that bent neck the essence of vulnerability,
and the word for it comes to me in French—la nuque.
Under the table, his knees
jerk urgently, violently, constantly, in
that
That fragility is in his hands too—
the long slender fingers, the perfect bones—
and in the angles of his face.
But it’s the back of his bent neck that makes you
notice, so that you see the vulnerability
elsewhere in him.
quick, nervous movement
I associate with drugs, legal
And why do I think the word in French?
Is it memories of the frail necks of small boys
when I still thought in French?
Perhaps the French—the thin, short sound of it,
lighter than the English nape—better captures that quality
in him that calls you out of yourself,
makes you want to shelter and comfort him,
to stroke that white skin with fingers as tender
as you can make them, to trace
the fragile bones.
He rests a hand on her thigh
while she reads the paper.
or illegal. My own knees did that dance
when I was on prozac. I have seen it
in someone cutting off street drugs
(his eyes miserable, his hands
trying forcibly to still the jerking
of his knees).
The woman on the patio is calm.
Sometimes she rests a hand
over his hand on her thigh.
She is his anchor, his rock,
his sanity. He rests his hand
upon her to hold himself
together, to keep from flying off,
to remind himself
that outside the frenzy inhabiting
his knees and mind,
the possibility exists (that close,
so very close he can touch it)
of stillness.
ottawater: 8.0 - 26
coNtents
My poetry is turning to prose
It has been moving quietly in this direction
for several years:
away from the blue stone and the dark flame dancing,
away from movements of the spirit.
It has been grounding itself
in the dust and concrete of city streets,
seeking the exact words to make you
see a small drama among strangers,
feel the textures of the seasons.
It has been turning its back on God’s tears
and the angels whose touch is too heavy,
turning its back on distance
in favour of the here and near.
It is choosing to inhabit time
rather than transcend it.
I do not choose this change.
It happens without me, in spite of me,
in the same way my poetry long ago gave up
rhyme and iambic pentameter.
My poetry is preparing to bury itself
in the rhythms of prose.
It is digging its own grave.
Deep in Blue
by: Stephen Frew, Acrylic on wood
www.stephenfrew.ca
ottawater: 8.0 - 27
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 28
Musings About Writing Poetry
I’ve become aware over the past few years that what I write is increasingly
peripheral to the current mainstream of Canadian poetry and that my approach to
writing is dated. (This is an observation, not a complaint.) I enjoy and appreciate
much of what’s happening in poetry now, but I have no desire to emulate it. So
my musings are those of a poet from an earlier generation than the one(s) now
providing most of the vitality and new directions. I’ve never been radical or
experimental or avant-garde in my poetry. I’ve written in ways that were “in the
air” at the time of writing, and it appears that I’ve lost touch with the vibes over
time.
It’s a cliche that people write what they want to read. When I read poetry,
I want to be challenged, but if I’m not also moved, I’m neither interested nor
impressed. I want to feel the shiver up my spine that Emily Dickinson talked about.
I want to feel taken out of myself and made to see and feel and know in a new way.
I need to have a sense that the poem means something and isn’t simply sound and
cleverness. I don’t have to be able to dissect it intellectually, but I need to have at
least an intuitive connection. I love Leonard Cohen’s lyrics and poems but I don’t
claim to understand them intellectually.
All this to say that I write mostly for personal reasons--to find out what I
think and feel and then to express it as accurately as possible. If I can express it for
others, all the better. If someone tells me I’ve expressed something she’d felt but
never articulated, it pleases me more than any other comment on my poetry. I say
‘she’ because such comments have almost always come from women. If I have an
audience in mind when I write, it’s family and friends and other people like them-intelligent, articulate people for whom poetry is often not part of the regular
reading diet. My imagined audience is probably one reason I’ve never been very
experimental.
I also write in order to remember. If I don’t record events, thoughts,
feelings, they tend to disappear from memory. When I was 21 (or thereabouts), I
burned the diaries I’d kept for seven years, as well as much of the poetry I’d written
up to that point. I decided that a diary was self-centred and I was embarrassed by
much of the early poetry. For the next while, I wrote only an occasional fragment
of journal. I took up the almost-daily journal again three years later--in French,
because I was going to be teaching French. I’ve kept up up the journal since then
(mostly in English).
I didn’t realize what I was destroying. Little remains in my memory of
the years of which I kept no record--almost nothing of childhood, a little more
of the teen years because I did write things down, even if I destroyed most of
it, almost nothing of the years between the book-burning and the taking up of
French practice. The remaining fragments tantalize. They bring back vivid scenes
that seem to stand alone, blurred at the edges because nothing around them was
recorded. A few people lodge in memory only because their names appear in one of
these fragments.
The surviving poems do the same as the fragments of journal. Some of
them can evoke whole scenes beyond what the words say. At some point I become
aware that the brief narrative poems I often write were becoming a patchwork
memoir. Any scene that stays vividly in my memory is likely to end up in a poem
(there are so few vivid memories). I write in order to remember--perhaps as selfcentred an occupation, after all, as a journal. But I don’t remember only for
myself. Increasingly, I remember for my family. Never having married or had
children, family means siblings and cousins, their children, and now, their grandchildren. I’m always glad when my remembering speaks in any way to others
outside my family, but I think first of my family.
I suspect that all this dates me even more than I know. It’s not that I’ve
never experimented or that my poetry hasn’t changed over time. It went minimalist
and then more expansive. It’s played with line breaks, with spacing, with wordplay.
It’s become more sophisticated in one sense and ever more spare. In fact, though it
could never manage prose poetry, it seems to be turning to prose.
So these musings may turn out to be an elegy.
coNtents
Robin K. Macdonald
What is the world made of?
City Speeds
My earliest memories are of playing
in the streets,
that’s what you do in the city
Beneath blankets this morning
I whispered to you
thoughts of the tent
we didn’t sleep in all summer,
how rarely I notice the shape of the moon,
and fragments of last night’s dream:
life in a bleak land with little water
is no accident.
In a parking lot, we played
with kettle bells, laundry
machines and kitchen appliances.
The heart of the earth speaks
It may also fall silent – the way
a person can.
dashing across a winter river
the surface breaking behind each sliding step
reaching for shore, a handful of fine soil
ashtray sand, waterbound legs
hustled by current
barely hanging on.
Small offerings mend
broken connections
Now, I watch wind
brush by late autumn’s lingering leaves
a ladybug scales the wall beam
A tea ceremony of dry herbs
from our little kitchen garden
The sweet crumble and scent
of lavender, lemon balm and camomile
barely moving, both of us
listening to cars on Somerset Street
faster than white water.
The wish to turn
the thought of water
into lively rushing lyrics
Wittgenstein once wrote,
“Thinking is astonishment.”
like the way minds harvest poetry
from heart filtered days.
One May morning
when no one else was listening
I heard lilacs singing.
ottawater: 8.0 - 29
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 30
Overcast
The streets are holiday quiet
rain taps a snow white
January into fog hanging out on concrete
winter washed away in a morning.
Last April I angled my desk
to see what I wanted to see,
the view with the most space
A year of too many desires
planted. In fertile soil, everything
grows. Dormant is alive
first stirrings, silent, hidden
Which gardener isn’t awestruck
by what the elements do with seeds?
reluctance
to thin or weed tender shoots
so I tended it all,
became bent
on accommodating the crowd
The Turkish word “yok”
no, nothing, non existant
described as a multipurpose negative
a useful tool in a foreigner’s backpack
defense against unwanted touch,
or to explain that I am not Iranian.
I say it now, far away from Turkey
“yok” meaning stop
a word to the basswood
bare branches beyond the window
always reaching for something.
Here Too
by: Andrew Morrow, oil and acrylic on canvas, 90"x72", 2011
www.andrewmorrow.com
Andrew Morrow is represented by the Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa, and exhibits with the Angell Gallery in Toronto,
and the Zadok Gallery in Miami.
coNtents
Rob Manery
from Pulling Short
mistaken
stilled
withstanding
as impugned
as prehension
an instance
instilled
within
oneiric
or another
we never
knew
entailed perhaps
or sometimes
entirely
agreeable
ottawater: 8.0 - 31
coNtents
stipulated past
this latent stint
another pulling
short
lament
leans
towards
amends
unmade
ottawater: 8.0 - 32
coNtents
Karen Massey
World Exchange Plaza
Warning
The music congeals, artificial
sound that may have once formed
in actual horns pressed to human lips,
but I doubt it.
Upstairs, window reflections of this interior
make people appear to walk through empty winter trees,
to balance food trays toward tables in mid-air
O death,
I am sick of you hanging around
waiting for me to take you
to grief’s house for tea,
I have eaten all of my cake
but there are crumbs still on my plate
and I have yet to flip through the newspaper
while ersatz belugas float suspended,
inanimate and tethered
nearly close enough to touch,
nearly close enough
to draw a discrete finger over the sculpted skin:
Forgive us
O death, you have come and made
heart attacks bloom
and stricken an old friend who lay infirm
I wonder how you work-by agenda or whim;
I feel your sick breath hot around me:
you blew through the hospital and carted off a crowd
and a precious baby, just so you could cradle her
O radiant white mammals
we humans felt the need to decorate with,
and walk beneath all Ottawa winter,
through calving season, and on
They do not like this music, either,
so sensitive that it has frozen them here
repositioned after the renovations,
unable to break away,
to seek their pod
I miss that feeling, too, the smell and heft
of a newborn, all brain waves and breastfeeding,
heat and rapid change
How you distract me
and prompt me
to put you in the same sentence as new life,
to speak death and newborn all in one breath:
I wish it were a shield, a potent miracle talisman
O death, go away,
I am tired of your loitering,
your headphones too loud with morose folk songs
Trade your harp for a banjo,
hike another copse,
turn away from Tintern Abbey
ottawater: 8.0 - 33
Don’t bother trying to entice with your bleak woodcut prints
while plucking out the songs of the unsuspecting;
stop wandering around conjuring consumptive Romantics,
waggling your accusing gimme-gimme finger
coNtents
I climb out of the poem
(end here) echo psalm
night moves in ripples and waves
darkness across the cityscape
urban scrawl erased by midnight and redrawn
for the morning commute
every night this rhythm, repeated dream
you will haunt, we will haunt these woods and paths,
carry their beauty and fragrance in our cells,
we will haul other canoes down to future shorelines
but there will remain this archetype of place, humble cabin,
plentiful raspberries and rock bass, dragonflies and constellations,
silence and loon song: joy.
I will take down other books, and close you like the favourite
secreted in the part of the library no one visits any more.
Years ago, I make a pact with time to always use it fully;
it is only so often that grief looms large, and carries me to the parlour
to paint my portrait with increasing lines.
I wait in patience and planning, with memory;
imperfect archetype, beautiful, indelible.
and finally, moonlight!
sometimes night ends early so we can
awaken to verify the measurements
dawn arrives, we bask in the illumination
then cover ourselves to prepare for the workday
always this song we keep writing and changing and rewriting
its key signature slowly bending over time
we think it is refinement
and it is, but so too, it is simply
change
the flux that brought us here,
the flux that will carry us out
we won’t recognize ourselves by then, redrawn
to a sharper image, with softer shading, a deeper truth
by then it won’t matter, the sun will have erased those shadows
and we’ll be memory
humming and resounding
nothing but the purety of pulsebeat,
brighter melody
the only way to end this is by excision
I extricate myself carefully,
move away from known truth and start down a dark path,
sinews burning with the want of more
thirst for knowledge, deeper passions,
newborn pulse of the world
ottawater: 8.0 - 34
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 35
Promise
Isn’t it promise
we build each day with our silver hammers-stopping long enough to wipe our hands on our aprons,
drink water and take up our tools again
In the dark, we are the shadow and the impact
of what we build
even here in this spectacular jungle
sometimes basic touch is all we can handle
it is that powerful and we are that
meek beside it
shuddering in the easiest, most gentle of conjurings
while mentally we wreck the building down
and set back to work
improving on the ruins
Historia 2011
by: Tim Desclouds, mixed media with music box, electrical signage and working horn
coNtents
Otherness - The Voyage Of Theresa Of Cartier Ville - 2010
by: Tim Desclouds, mixed media with music boxes, electrical signage,
moving parts with working horns and toy piano
ottawater: 8.0 - 36
coNtents
Christine McNair
risk assessment
buzz fuzz shudder
then floor to foot or head
coastline of waves
then more waves
frockless, full of fetter
and water pour over
a city made of waves
children made of waves
buckets wrapped with
red plastic handles
apocalyptic teeter totters
games of chance bets
bookie race flank hoof red
fetlocked wild horses
she went over the sea
in search of heaven came back
eager and ready to depart
Niagara
by: Andrew Morrow, oil on canvas, 90"x72", 2011
www.andrewmorrow.com
Andrew Morrow is represented by the Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa, and exhibits with the Angell Gallery in Toronto,
and the Zadok Gallery in Miami.
ottawater: 8.0 - 37
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 38
proposed applications of engineered
bioluminescence
glowing trees to line highways and reduce government electricity bills
roadrage dissolves perfunctory politesse
fingers pinch pleather
christmas trees that do not need lights, reducing the danger from electrical fires
a gift for predation glow worms
in cupholders
agricultural crops and domestic plants that luminesce when they need watering
plastic bottles caved
under bucket seats
new methods for detecting bacterial contamination of meats and other foods
headlights blank deer
witch flanked eye empty
detecting bacterial species in suspicious corpses
no honey no see no I mean it no
sincere good hearted injunction
bio-identification for escaped convicts and mental patients
squished penchant legs akimbo
plural effusions
novelty pets that bioluminesce (rabbits, mice, fish, etc)
rose etymologies backseat bunny
feather of lead bright smoke
Hunting Dissent
by: Marc Adornato, Found/reclaimed objects from 1890-1970, 2011 www.ADORNATO.com
coNtents
Justin Million
#1: ‘Pop Life’ Exhibit,
National Art Gallery of Canada
Hot-Air Balloon Ride
(2)
no wonder the pictures
The landing was a little rough
as our pilot said it would be
no wonder the busts of who knows &
no wonder paintings of a wild Canadian sun setting over
no one
but gently
tipping the trees of the casual minds strutting with no dull axes
&
no wonder Japanese
pop videos on bubble bigscreens, children
elbowing to have their souls snapped up & up &
no wonder portraits of syphilitic blonde ‘auteurs’ hanging
beside (no wonder) The Great One’s
painting of Gretzky, too many boy
wonders
no wonder
too much
of this full of it space
drove me to the country
feeling that
dragged for fifty feet on our side
before the balloon righted all again
& up we stood in a hay field, grown about two hundred feet
from a Father’s Day patio party, they offered us drinks
& this neighborhood was gorgeous
& the party looked to be by and large shiny-blinding
before we were offered anything or our feet
had touched the ground that young boy running
toward us just as we were belly hardlanding
& after the thing righted itself & we gathered ourselves
& climbed out to golden hay & the boy stood away a few
metres off
asking us senselessly awesome questions
and our pilot Shawn to see
the balloon & Shawn shows him & lifts him inside
to feel it
I’ll never even understand the old state of the art showcasing all of our best &
no people &
& the boy can probably shut his eyes
without it, needing just that recognition when the adults agree
he is indeed in a place logical
for flying away
(thehipwaderswatchingwhileweartistsgoalwayswiththatolda
ll-get-out)
& he got to see us crashlanding into the known
world where we climb
ottawater: 8.0 - 39
out, so unbelievably alive
the boy forced despite pink thought processes to ask the tallest
man
in our flight-group for an autograph, no shit:
me and my
girlfriend’s contest-winning ride
(approximate retail value of 2 adult tickets = $800)
didn’t seem as wondrous for me
suddenly, as thoughts must all be now
for the boy
whose mind was awash despite suburban,
the rinds of magic; of a cube
van packing up a real flying machine
where just before its astronauts toasted with tiny champagnes
to the long escape
coNtents
Cath Morris
Fish Fancy
things were looking bleak, what with the dirth of blue-gilled blenny, solitary
satellites whose orbs were sighted in our small round
these long tapered moonfish chose the path of least existence and filtered through
time’s gateway as we knew it; slipped through seaweed forests in the undersea’s
underbelly, through portentious portals to other worlds, through thick and thin
and all manner of latitudes and lassitudes, poor malentendu, whose job was to
prevent the undersea explosions, so common nowadays, that play a sinister part in
global storming, among other breakages off from the stars
so they cultivated a languorous indifference and engaged in latah, like the Malays
and Snoop Dog, mimicking the ridiculous behaviours of their fellows in such arch
activities as swim-flying and scuttling along the sacred seabed to the tunes of “Blow
Me Down, Matey” and “Too Many Fish in the Sea” (although the sentiments of
the last one were hardly true)
languorous, lost, oceanic, they drifted from their schools like bookless children,
searching for the slipstream that would carry them into the next Big Sea, all silver
and slithery
my heart sang for each individual blithe boy, whose slimy, slender bodies shone in
the sunshafts that pierced the surface…as if they were pieces of tickertape tossed by
the moon, their finny hides uncared for, their destinations unknown
too tender for fillets
destined only to swim through this poem
- August/2009
ottawater: 8.0 - 40
coNtents
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Postmodern Sampling Howl of Electric
Dream Sheep
this is how it was meant to start on the page
even though when it was in my head it looked so much more “sing the body electric
stone”
but now look at it
in the dream of dreams
where all seemed white and official
and the poem was somehow fending off
death’s
electric stone
in the dream, it all glided across the page so whitely
and kingly
whereas now it just looks
street archangels
streaking across the universe of the page
like lost bottle rockets
or lame deer
or grease strokes in a cloud of lightning
public puddle markings
electric sheep gone dreamlike and trapped in thrilling
or running across blades
of outer space
only inside
where everything glides through whiteness and pure
creativity
imagination creates worlds
with thought
and the grand world (of the best minds) prevails
but
as soon as you’re awake
it all
looks
so
thin & pale
& pathetic
not so thrilling electric
and, like the civil war poet, I contradict myself in ¾ time
in a body of stone
howling out of a dream
without rhyme
August 16th, 2011
coNtents
Moon Orphans
The earth, it was revealed, once had three moons; the two lost moons may
have crashed into the surviving moon, or been sucked into the sun, or flung
out of the solar system to drift through deep space. -from
Findings, Harper’s Magazine, August, 2008
or one of the little moons may have felt neglected
and run off with the spoon
while the other decided to make her way north
to the galaxy known as Pegasus Dwarf;
how beautiful the configuration of three- the magic triad!
of wishes, pigs, and little birds,
hauntings, blind mice, circus rings;
they must have looked lovely dancing round our globe
like sad girls doing the moondance at a spherical fancy-dress ball –
a pity how they left the nest to meld their bodies with other worlds;
our orphaned satellites, lost luminous pearls,
leaving their sister all alone to light our lonely Earth.
Cath Morris / August 2008
by: Andrea Stokes
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coNtents
Colin Morton
Century’s Child
You were the century’s child.
Your first words were Boom and Bubble.
You kept your appointments,
made your reservations.
Learned how to suffer in silence
and wound with a word.
You set nothing by. Threw snake eyes
and box cars to the wind.
Gathered up all your winnings
and threw them into the street.
Poured three fingers into a glass,
one for each of your friends.
Your address is the departures lounge
where the wi-fi is free.
High Tops 1
© 2011 Alison Smith-Welsh, Metal, nylon laces, 4-1/2 x 8 x 12 (inches, h,w,l)
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coNtents
K.I. Press
Mrs. Eiffel Tower Crashes Her Jet
Picket fence, barbed wire,
arrows and fighter jets,
latticework of metal going up, up, up!
Everything comes to a point, eventually,
except, what was it, two parallel lines? Forever
distant, unable to kiss, though on the horizon
they may give this illusion.
Distance to the tower: too far.
The tower asks for her intentions.
She is silent and thrumming, thinking
of the architecture of love, resolved
to point her jealous hunk of metal
to ground.
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Mr. Statue of Liberty Addresses
the Nation
Mrs. Berlin Wall Cleans her
Guillotine Collection
It was a shotgun wedding—the guards chased me out of her
when they heard me read religious literature aloud.
Most nights I had to be content with a 12-inch model.
But when too hot for compromise
or too cold for deprivation,
I snuck out to see the lights shimmer on the water,
imagined her crown like a superhero might at the climax
of the movie, the scene of a pitched battle,
the brush with quick death, and then out
on the other side. Eventually
even the plainclothes officers grew to like me-the ones really looking for the nuts—
for I am charming, and wear my allegiance on my chest.
She remembers the day the bulldozers came, plastered all over
Svenska Dagbladet.
Young people who, in another life, might have been hipsters,
crushing it to concrete turds with their stolen sledgehammers,
ventricle ripped from aorta and aorta from ventricle.
She clutched at her stomach that day, and every day after,
keeping the name, though married to rubble, an historical
curiosity.
The venom, she had taken it, the blame, she had shared it,
but this—unprepared for the blood dripping from her mouth,
her body’s ashes.
Today she cleans the guillotines.
Blunt, and smaller than you pictured them,
but free of dust and lint. They filled her basement each by
each,
since that day, begging for someone to love them.
coNtents
Bardia Sinaee
Highway Pastoral
Bennett Marco’s Poem for Ginsberg
Bright, buttery yolk of sun against the grain.
Wind-marshalled wheat heads size up the horizon
and decide it isn’t time. The clouds are ticklish,
full of good cheek, and we’ve seen this sky before
in an insurance brochure or churchyard somewhere.
Mother Russia brainwashed Raymond Shaw
with turd-sticks and hypnotics,
but he, like me,
is bleeding into the real world. Allen do you think
Rosey’s a good name for a spy?
Allen I need nicotine like I need a gun to the head,
but why does every cigarette these days
taste like shit?
What I really need, Allen, is Rosey, but she
doesn’t want a victim in her bed.
We can tell from the scarecrow’s expression
that he dreams of fleeing the county for office lotteries
and full dental. Doors burned by old flames, the barn
gapes insatiably: I’m sick of chaff and combines, it says.
Bring me your limbs.
Allen what do you do when you realize
no one is coming for you?
I can’t buy two cents worth of intelligence
in this or any other agency, Allen.
Agency isn’t what it use to be.
Rosey doesn’t know this, Allen,
but I’m cashing in my chips—have you met Rosey?
swell gal—Allen I can’t stand my own mind—
she’s got family in Maryland
or Delaware somewhere.
Rosey’s got brains enough
for both of us, Allen. She’s not exactly
the Ladies’ Garden Club type. Swell gal,
sick though
of my insane demands.
I Am Not A Sounding Board she says
like I don’t know that. And maybe I don’t.
Who knows what I know... Allen if you had
a cigarette for everything I thought I knew for sure
two months ago, you could drown the world
in smoke. But the next world won’t be perfect
so why bother?
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coNtents
When I Grow up
by: Paul Sharp 16 x 20in
Eat_It_Anyway
by: Paul Sharp 11 x 14in
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coNtents
jesslyn delia smith
blizzard.
histories.
currents.
he is better than i am, he
recognizes winter,
treats it like a storm
what has been is
history colliding,
a war on wars,
you and
me impaled on you,
the shrunken city wanders
horizontal, a hopeless
meander into
what it assumes must be out
there, since it
is not here
i don’t, dry
comparisons only,
attachments to items
lighters i call
things they aren’t
these things aren’t
mine, with ease and convenience
they’re found in the drawers,
or in bowls, in pockets
of someone
else’s sweater, they’re sweeping
the streets, the blizzard away
this taste a welcoming
of river banks, white salt,
a jawline breaking with waves
i wait for you and watch
the bridges buckle,
currents changing minds
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coNtents
Priscila Uppal
Mockery
Student Apologies
You were good to me and for me
growing up, though I didn’t appreciate you then,
always angling for a big city life,
neon excitement and rotating restaurants,
24-hour everything and all. But you bloomed green
in expertly groomed parks and civil servant
pockets. Government safe: shopping malls,
school field trips, and tulip festivals.
The students apologize for not finding the right words;
for the last assignment on the printer, streaked
with late-night distemper and indecision; for the pat
rhyme on line four, for overused nature metaphors
and idiosyncratic obsessions, for
(for Ottawa, my hometown)
I was wild and wanted out. Fighting
you at every turn—so lame, even on
Canada Day you can’t carry a beer up the Hill.
Rideau Centre a mecca for fast food and leather
shoes, I’d squat so I didn’t have to head home
to my winding street, my Ottawa bungalow
with the neglected garden and wheelchair ramp,
ugly, puffy, hydrangeas heads mocking me
each year, so much like my unruly hair.
Ungrateful daughter, I never gave you
credit or slack for how hard you tried, how carefully
you planned, to please. No, I was always grounded,
regulated, never free to be the exile I was.
Wouldn’t I show you—clock tower, war memorial,
Algonquin trail—I could do much better than this.
And now, like most ungrateful children, I am in turn
an office for complaints. A questionnaire of wrong
answers, suspicious definitions, undesirable options.
Today, I’ll consider myself lucky, at home,
if I can just recall correctly the smell of hot chocolate
and marshmallows on a cold winter day as I used to
skate circles over your tear-frozen face.
dangling participles
and poor orphans; the repetition of due dates,
corrected spelling mistakes, twenty pages
instead of ten.
They keep apologizing for the unfinished
poem. To this poem, through me, they keep
apologizing, as if it can hear them,
as if it weren’t a helpless activity.
The students don’t apologize when they’re late
for presentations; for not opening the door when I’ve
dragged my bulky red bag across two subways;
for being simply unbearable the day
we had to put my beloved cat down.
Their attention fixed on words,
not people.
Please, don’t think I’m a bad writer.
Please, please, recognize my poet’s soul.
I want to advise: eat well. Get a good night’s sleep.
Help your mother with the laundry.
Don’t cheat on him/her;
you’ll regret it. Trust me.
But I don’t.
Or, I don’t do it enough.
Right this instant, several apologies stutter
on the desk in my secretary’s office, waiting
anxiously for my attention, and I am moved,
as poetry always moves me,
by the misplaced concern.
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coNtents
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The Heart Forgives Nothing
not the puck scored in the last seconds of the 3rd
not the racial slur
not the ill-divided cheque at the cocktail bar at midnight
not the last complimentary words stinging old wounds
not the airiness of prayers swaying in the wind
not the way you looked at her when you thought I wasn’t looking
not the lateness of arrival at the graduation or birthday party
not the rain on vacation
not the knowledge the other sibling was the most beloved
not the glass shard in the rug
not the early-morning emergency phone calls
not the way you looked at her when you thought I had too many
not the rushed homecoming present
not the neurotic ticks that barred you from the hospital
not the cold plates of cold leftovers
not the way you looked at me after you looked at her
not the little white lies
not the great big lies
not the everyday lies without which the heart would cease beating
Saint Pierre Luc and St Laurent Siblings 2010
by: Tim Desclouds, mixed media with electrical signage, music box and moving parts
Canada Council Art Bank collection
coNtents
Andy Weaver
*
*
1981
2011
Kelly Laycock, moment’s notary, overtures’
performed quintessence. Revolutionaries shifting
through Utopic valences would Xanadu you. Zounds!
Arcadian bliss couldn’t deflect eyes from gazing
her immanent justness.
time
to dream
to dissolve
the unmistakable lightness of having been
Auden scribbling
it is dead, they are dead
words dreamt
lost to sleep
This is what I wrote on the
morning of August 22, 2011
Today is a day for quiet elegies,
A day for the public doors to shut.
Tomorrow we will work to thaw this freeze.
Now, we are all low, worn, and ill at ease,
There is nothing but nothing’s slow rebut.
Today is a day for quiet elegies.
We will study until pain is our expertise,
Today sorrow will be our surfeit and glut.
Perhaps tomorrow we will work to thaw this freeze.
Who knew that life was its own cruelest disease,
Preparing our silent beds without respite.
Today is a day for quiet elegies.
And yet, readers still read this journalese.
Against our best wishes we heal from the cut,
And tomorrow we should work to thaw this freeze,
we’ll rub our hands and flex our knees. So what
if life swings us from its shabby trapeze?
Today is the day for quiet elegies
if tomorrow we work to thaw this freeze.
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coNtents
Christine McNair —
Conflicts & Contrasts
An interview with Mark McCawley
The words I type are only contrast. Placement might tell us their
importance. Or someone literate might read them for us; could explain the
symbols and turn all these flat angles into speech.
Maybe we will languish in a pile of similar pages or better ones. Kick the
clock hand forward several decades and our sheet will yellow and become
brittle. Or maybe it was recycled and remade into notepads or shredded years
ago for a bird cage lining. Or maybe water damaged or mould damaged or
rodent gnawed or insect venomed. Even if someone were to find us, there
would be little meaning to an isolated page, to stringed words floating
without provenance.
A snowflake loses coherence in a snowstorm. Whatever beauty or uniqueness
it may possess, this will be lost in the rageful obliteration of too much else.
What does one poem, one page, one poet matter when there are many?
~ Christine McNair, a ‘poetic statement’ written in the fall of 2oo8 as part
of a poetry workshop. Read the statement in its entirety here: http://www.
angelhousepress.com/essays/christine%20mcnair%20antistatement.pdf
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Christine McNair’s work has appeared in CV2, Poetry is Dead, Prairie Fire, Arc,
The New Quarterly, Misunderstandings, The Bywords Quarterly Journal, ditchpoetry.
com, and sundry other places. In 2011, she was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch
award for innovative poetry. Her first book of poems, Conflict, will be published by
BookThug in spring 2012.
Over the span of several months from June to October 2011, I had the opportunity
to read a proof of McNair’s BookThug manuscript Conflict, and pose to her a
wide range of questions concerning her poetry and poetics, how they related and
interrelated to her education and career as a conservator, and their bearings in
Conflict as a first book by this poet.
Mark McCawley: What were your earliest influences as a writer/poet? Do
these influences still influence you and your writing?
Christine McNair: Weird mishmash of Scottish grade school teacher reciting Tam
O’Shanter, Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie, and Morag trying to describe the colour of
a bird’s chest in The Diviners. Witchy teenage love for Sexton, Dante’s Inferno,
anything with a little fire in it.
My aunt Trish was a strong influence in my early development as a writer. She
and her partner took me to some readings in Toronto, pushed me on the open mic
stage when I was sixteen, and helped me make my first chapbook. She introduced
me to lots of CanLit and fed my bookishness. Lots of good music too. All these things probably still thread though my work now: aural preoccupation, a
tendency to image, incantory aspects.
MM: Did you take creative writing in University? If so, where? With whom?
CM: I took a few creative writing courses with Donna E. Smyth and Wanda
Campbell during my undergrad studies at Acadia University. You could write either
an academic or creative thesis in your final year. I chose to write a mixed fiction/
poetry thesis and Wanda was my supervisor. I also took some very short workshops
outside of school. One with Don McKay and one with Stephanie Bolster.
MM: Do you see a connection between your creative writing, your love
for language, both visual and auditory, and your chosen profession in
book restoration?
CM: Yes. Although I’d quibble that I’m a conservator not a restorer. It’s a
subtle difference but (traditionally) the restorer tries to keep the book as object
perfect. A defined best-example-of, as though it’s had no history or wear, which can
be a kind of forgery. There are shades of grey in the definition, but I’m of the branch
coNtents
that balances function and aesthetics with the evidence inherent in the physical. I’m
interested in the character of the thing of it for its own sake and context.
There’s an element of the hands-on and the process of working with base materials
(leather, cloth, wood, metal, paper, thread) that shades into my writing, and my desire
to work with the materiality of language. The careful negotiation of conservation
work and how you have to be shrewd and balanced and creative, all at once.
MM: Are you a micro-press publisher?
Sort of, yes. I published a chapbook of my own last year and I have a chapbook in
the works that features work by a clutch of writers. Random thematic centre of the
cyclic. I’m tinkering with the layout and the binding design.
MM: What was the title of your first poetry chapbook? What is the title of
your poetry chapbook in the works? What is the name of your micro-press?
I admire the pushing of all boundaries, no more so than in the publishing
of chapbooks and literary ephemera. How much does your work as
a conservator coincide creatively with your efforts as a micro-publisher?
CM: Evidence. It was mostly made up of poems from Conflict.
I haven’t figured out the title of the anthological chapbook. I chose a fairly random
theme and it has taken much longer than I anticipated to put the book together.
I spent some time working for a small press so I spend a fair amount of time on
design and don’t know where that will end up.
The micro-press itself is called cartywheel, which was influenced by my interest
in the cyclic, and a specific visual image of St. Catherine and her wheel. It’s also
related to the name of my blog (notes from a cartwheel) and the recent chapbook
with AngelHousePress, notes from a cartywheel. Cartwheel as humourous physical
gesture, as base wagon component, as wheel of fortune, etc.
The work as a conservator concides primarily in my choice of materials and
methods. Which of course can slow me down if I’m not careful.
MM: You mentioned that your aunt Trish was a strong influence
in my early development as a writer, that she influenced and fed
your “bookishness”, introducing you to Canlit. I would suggest that
this “bookishness” you speak of is an absolute necessity for a creative
writer since no writer or poet exists outside of a literary continuum. Do
you agree? And at what point along this continuum did your undergrad
studies at Acadia with Donna E. Smyth and Wanda Campbell find you? As
with workshops by Don McKay and Stephanie Bolster?
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CM: I think it’s important to read widely and voraciously. There’s always
an opportunity to push the boundaries of your reading. I took a few courses
in postcolonial and world lit during my undergrad. That pushed my reading and
opened up some pathways into the contemporary. My creative writing courses
introduced me to various lit journals, and encouraged me to try things. They
helped me take myself seriously.
All the multitude of short to mid-size workshops including those with Don,
Stephanie, and then subsequent ones with David Donnell, rob mclennan, and
Stuart Ross, have offered me something with regards to how I approach the work
and what texts to pick up off the shelf. And the participants therein have also
shaped my reading lists, suggesting and hinting other bits and pieces. One crumb
then the next.
I’d agree that a writer is built and slivered up by their histories. Inclinations tip us
in particular directions. That’s what can be exciting about taking a workshop, how
it can open you up to possibilities.
MM: In “The Optimisms Project” [http://theexcerpt.com/2010/04/
optimisms-16-christine-mcnair/] you state “what gives me hope are poets
and publishers willing to risk spectacular failure, refusing to abide the
passivity of fixed limits or listen to yellow-bellied guardians of the here and
now, forever and ever, amen. These rare seismic (r)evolutionaries are worth
your tilting broken heart.” Would you care to elaborate on these “rare
seismic (r)evolutionaries”, these poets and publishers who are willing to risk
spectacular failure? CM: I like writers and publishers that push boundaries. This doesn’t necessarily
mean experimental work. I’m fascinated by hybridity and evolutionary quirks that
turn into traits. I would rather read someone trying to expand their art than those
that rely on what’s safe or ordinary (to them). I want to be surprised. I suppose I
could pick names from the ether of publishers/poets, but really, I admire anyone
who abandons the static. It bores me to read poets who write in perfect replica (of
themselves or of those they admire).
MM: In Kevin Spenst blog, “Poetic Edits” [http://kevinspenst.com/?p=464],
you state: “My method of work produces a massive swell of a document.
I write about two hundred pages of raw notes, lines, sequences, and
abbreviations for a full manuscript. I write poems out of this soup, pulling
lines, cannibalizing longer pieces, and cutting things to the quick.” Can
you elaborate further on this process? Particularly this “soup” of which you
describe. I think a deeper glimpse into your creative process and how it is
reflected in each step of your revision process would give your readers a
more profound insight into the genesis of your poetry.
coNtents
CM: Hmmm. It’s embarassingly intuitive. I get stuck on a line or an image and
then let myself write and write, let myself write multiple versions of the same line
in sequence. I tend to work in fever. It becomes a kind of beast. I like to narrow
in on those lines that work best and tune them, until they hit my ear in the right
way. I try to avoid cliches, abstractions, the obvious. I wrote Conflict start to finish
over three months. I seem to be an ebb/flow poet (irritatingly). I can talk about
discipline and research and ideas, but ultimately I’m swung by some chthonic
mood. Some latence that wakes up.
MM: I’ve noted a certain reluctance on your part to make public your private
self in your poetry as is the fashion of much contemporary poetry; rather
allowing your choice of language, texts, and typography to do this for you.
Is this a correct assumption? How much does it reflect in the emergence
of your voice in your first book, Conflict? How do you see your private and
public self changing in terms of your poetry and your poetic voice?
CM: It’s funny because others have said that to me as well but I often feel that my
work is imbued with aspects of my private self. But I’m not into confession for
confession’s sake. I want something more primeval, and for me that means working
with sound and image. I really want the emotion to carry rather than the specifics
of me or mine.
I want the poem to be a thing in and of itself, entirely without me. Conflict was
written during a time of emotional upheaval. Which in itself was a kind of gift
because it helped me loosen the leash. I let some go of some control. I think that
period was crucial to my development because some little wire in my head snapped
and it allowed me to read, write, speak, be, entirely different. Less worried about
what anyone might think of what I’m doing. More intuitive.
MM: Of the many and varied themes that I have discovered in your
manuscript, Conflict, the early, initial themes appear to revolve around
allegories of technology versus nature, infrastructures, and systems in
conflict — both interpersonal as well as verbal, and their tendency to break,
fall apart. Both poet, poem, and content seem constantly in conflict, and
continuously on the verge of breakdown. As in “it would be better”:
ottawater: 8.0 - 53
it would be better to develop a tendency towards buckets, towards the piling up of clocks, torn coupons, chicken wire, postcards. if you could accept a tendency to loss, the solitary mitten
or unpaired tupperware. no iron bled sunset burnt out over endings, only an ebb-flow light poured onto laminate. flower blades wake, bust out of concrete
and lightning strikes again and again. fists punch down gravel and craving superhero nylon stretched across knuckle, I step over every god damn crack but everything still breaks.
CM: Yes, I think this is quite true. Systems/people/words, in opposition. Thin
skate along the line of ‘okay’.
MM: I am particular interested in how this same allegory is layered and
interwoven both physically, metaphorically, and narratively into your prose
poem “interlude: time machine part 1”. Was it your intention to create such
a visual, auditory, and contextual structure by intertwining certain elements
— made up names, slang, proper nouns — and by dropping standard
punctuation altogether, thus removing conventional signposts for your
reader’s grasp of time?
CM: I wanted to create a flow through the poem, a great backwards sucking portal,
so the piece would pull the reader in. It has a certain physical presence as well, due
to the fat block of text. A weight. I removed much of the punctuation because its
job is to disrupt the eye, to allow the reader to pause or twist their thoughts to a
certain pace. I wanted to abandon that so the whole piece flows backwards. Full of
contradictions and moods like the self. I like reading this piece though it often trips
me up in places. It has a kind of manic humour.
coNtents
MM: You also applied an indirect form of confession in your poem
“horoscope” which I found quite uniquely delightful (and similar to what
Daniel Jones had done in ‘Obsessions: a novel in parts’ by borrowing entries
from and making a fictional adaptation to the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory):
horoscope
I have no specific aim in life. I am studious, patient, rigorous, austere. I carry out all the plans I make.
I have difficulty adapting to the modern world, to new technology. I am always at the forefront of progress. Like everything new.
I am frank, honest, full of vigor and ambition. I am amiable, and sociable.
I have problems being open. I accept solitude. I am intuitive, sensitive. Not a fighter and indecisive. Gentle and yielding.
I am quarrelsome, critical and violent. My success is obtained by dubious means.
I am agreeable company and always in demand.
I am not particularly popular in my circle, but am feared and respected.
All medical, paramedic or social work are recommended. Work in the police field.
I can work as a funeral director. I can fight for a particular ideal but might abandon it along the way, being less
convinced than at the beginning of its virtue or because I realize that it is a losing
battle. Conflict abroad. Weak point: the throat. I control my feelings.
Not frightened by the unknown, death. I have a tendency to bad dreams. I have a great sense of observation and quickly grasp the situation. I am a
stay-at-home.
I like long voyages, things foreign, water. I persevere.
ottawater: 8.0 - 54
CM: I like telling things slant/from the side. In horoscope, there’s a contrariness to
the whole, a kind of refusal. Exposing and hiding all at once.
MM: Indeed, themes of mending, of repentance, threads throughout your
manuscript like a tapestry. Much as the scab over of a fresh wound, or cut,
you cannot seem to resist ripping off the bandage to see what is underneath.
As in “mend” :
mend
I can hold back heaven for half a day, maybe more. I can hold back hell for one full week, a month at most, the days in the calendar clicking. I can hold back my heart for half a year, for one full year, for two, for three — I can stop the clocks and burn the books,
forget my name and forget yours. Here — take this scarf and take this glove,
take this and this and this and this. But let me stitch you back together, just let me kiss it better,
let me find the seam and close it.
CM: The themes of repentance and mending are important to my overall sense
of the manuscript. Much of the work is about struggling with systems, on the
individual or personal level, and reads confrontationally. I tend to read the work
forcefully. But the back note is much more gentle, and tries to weave out a kind of
underlying forgiveness or resolution. There’s a certain impossibility to maintaining
the valkyric for too long. MM: Would you say that your manuscript, Conflict, is more of an allegorical
collection of poems? Unlike many first poetry collections which read more
like well ordered and designed gardens, Conflict’s allegories which thread
and weave from one poem to the next, raise the manuscript to an entirely
unique level. Would you agree?
coNtents
CM: That’s interesting (and kind). I like the idea of a disordered garden. The work
could be called allegorical perhaps, in the Greek sense of the word, “to speak so as
to imply something other”. Much of the book implies rather than states. The book
exists for me as a whole because I wrote it so feverishly. It is difficult to amputate
one poem. So it makes sense to me that even though the form and content of the
poems differ quite widely, the overall thematic holds true. It’s the product of a
singular mind-state.
MM: What immediately strikes me about the poems in your manuscript
‘Conflict’ is the sheer variety of forms, themes and allegories you use. Quite
adventuresome for a first book in which one usually finds more restraint. Is
this a quality of your own personal poetic credo readers can come to expect
from you and your work in future collections?
CM: That’s a kind thing to say. I hope so. I want to work in a way that is unsafe
and varied. I want to be braver than not. Restraint at a certain point is subterfuge.
Interesting in its own way but I tend to keep myself on too short a leash, and want
to force myself past my own limitations..
MM: On the topic of first books, are there any particular first books
of poetry which have guided or inspired you in the compiling of your
manuscript, even if only in passing?
CM: My brain immediately blanks and I write ‘brank’ instead of brain/blank. Not
sure if I was conscious of reading a first book or not. I ate books.
I know that certain books such as Paul Celan’s Threadsuns influxed my writing during
that period. Other mish mash that I was reading at the time. And a flood of what I
read in the ten years prior, when my writing slowed for a while. Backlog floods.
MM: On her blog, pesbo, Ottawa poet Pearl Pie comments upon “Poets
against Authorship,” a manifesto by Gregory Betts in a prior issue of 17
seconds in which Betts suggests “Authorship, with false claims of cultural
authority, and with links to anti-intellectual oppression, is the wrong
model for poets. Poetry is fundamentally different than authorship:
legally, economically, and politically.” And that the “authority that enables
authorship has nothing to do with leading society forward or changing
society.”
ottawater: 8.0 - 55
I would presuppose that the role of the poet — whether past, present, or
future — has very little to do with leading society forward or changing
society. Poet as critic, yes. Poet as witness, yes. Poet as cultural activist,
indeed. Yet the instant the Poet crosses the line and becomes entrepreneur
and commodity — intellectual property — all poetry then loses. What are
your thoughts?
CM: I suppose it would depend on your goals. Mine are visceral. I have no interest
in commodity or modification. What I want to do is push.
MM: In your poem “Occidental” you speak of contrasts, of opposites in
collision, a juxtaposition of geographies and language like a map exposing
various trajectories at once in one of the most peculiarly romantic and
sensual poems in your manuscript.
occidental
atlantic set mouths
impulse with souvenired
achings, trestled hearts
printed across jawlines.
if there is this
then there is that
if we are this
then we are that
shelled fingers float
across breastbone but find
no purchase, the syllables algaed
across bow water, each noun
stunned in metal. clouds
collapse inward and fins crest
a knuckle scrape
from careful pricked
geography, safe passage
delayed only by whether.
Do many of your others poems dealing with love, passion, and desire also
use the allegory of treasure maps (pirates, et cetera)?
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 56
CM: Hadn’t thought of that. I’m not sure. Mapping seems to be part of my work,
trying to locate some fragment on a geophysical or personal frame. Love or desire
hidden sometimes flares as an idea. I think there’s power in things stuck underground.
You borrow this same staccato rhythm from the realm of popular rock music
as you juxtapose images from the popular heavy metal song with present
economic imagery in “dirt cheap done dirty deeds”:
MM: Images and allegories of restoration are reoccurring in the poems in your
manuscript. As in “restoration”: “shadow repairs with minute fibres, patch
them/with paste, flood lacunae with delicate facsimile”. Or in “statement”:
“a glance gone feral,/your soldered/mouth opens/to tell me I will/never be
beautiful”. They also seem to be the most personally revealing and intimate
poems in your manuscript. Is this often the case when you take images from
your real professional life and enmesh them with your life as a poet?
dirt cheap done dirty deeds
CM: I think my day to day infuses the work, particularly with regards to language.
Vocab is addicting and lethal. It’s interesting that you think they’re the most
revealing. A function of the profession? I think restoration (that is, the renewal
of something that’s damaged into something whole) is an interesting idea. In
conservation, you preserve the historic evidence. In restoration, you make it look
like the damage never occurred. In forgery, you create something new that appears
old. All three professions criss-cross. The craft skills have an ability to reveal or
obscure evidence, wear, damage, truth.
I think poetry has the ability to do the same.
MM: One could say that subtlety has very little place in your poetry. It’s
refreshing to uncover such brilliant mixture of in-your-face alliteration and
assonance as which comprises your poem, “when you did what you did”:
when you did what you did
undo what’s done, the doing of the deed
done on that day, dreadful deadening
down dusk fills daydreams, the dripped
deckle of a dancing drowned discovery,
wound dissolved then deepened, drecked
wrecked delicacy, the delicious tendered
damage, what damned dullness in all this
doing, in the dreadfulness of days undone.
economically speaking
the production distribution
and consumption of goods
aggregates demand and
mountain fold or valley fold
self-serve soft-serve stuff
craves cheques and balances
a utility of function this is what
we mean when we talk about
love that there’s a warehouse
full of tnt high volt concrete
shoes 36-24-36 perfection held
together by sparklers and red
balloons pork bellies held on
lay away and a foolhardy notion
in defense of disposable income
Taken together, one can see how time past and time present is woven together,
restored so to speak, into your poems. Is this, indeed, the allegorical ‘conflict’ you
aim to uncover in this collection? The attempt to restore, to weave together, as
only the poet can do, the errand parts of an increasingly conflicted narrative —
only to realize with each new restoration you’ve created something new, a brand
new narrative, a new poem, a new conflict?
CM: I think there are so many threads through everything. So many points of view,
so many particulars, so much, too much. I had a brief Prosperina moment with
these poems in that I tried to exert a kind of control over a larger narrative over
which I had no control. Which is ultimately futile and illusory. But there’s still a
certain puncture in pulling together disparate elements to make a whole.
MM: Much as Robert Kroetsch does in his Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems
of Robert Kroetsch, the poems in ‘Conflict’ also make and gather together personal
lists, as in “misc. lists”:
coNtents
misc. lists
thingsthatwereguiltypleasure
leafcrushinfingersburntmatchsticksthesmellofchlorinerippingbooksin
halfthetasteofcottonmybrokenpaperlanternthatsoundthecarmakesthiss
crapofbentphotoanassortmentofplaydohthecartoonnetworkandskippi
ngsongsguitarchordknucklekissesscouredkitchensinkschurcheswithn
olocuspumpkinpieheadonshoulderfilmclipssweaterflushedcheekswoo
dhugcrackleandslantrockrestsonahighwayoratleastthegettingtothoseb
utnotthestopsandnotanymonththatbeginsorendswither
thingsthatnolongergivepleasure
phosoupticklesthewordkidcarwashes1940snewspeakalmondssemicol
onstavernbreakfastshospitalitysuitesdigitalphotoalbumsnickcavepjh
arveythewordsuchshinylongsleevelessdressesthesmellofvanillafrozenp
izzacandynecklacesthequintehotelbyalpurdythegogos(theymakemesa
d)farmlandcottagesribbonsfullmoonsthewordpalappleskitchensrefere
ncestocandylandseveralmusicplaylistsstoriesaboutleonardcohenredne
edlescomicbooksthesimpsonstheventurebrothersrockyandbullwinkle
mostpubsandtavernsknucklekissesbridgesriversthaibasil
thingsthatweretheoppositeofpleasure
ceramicmalsickswellsleetbluethreadtheword______andtheword______
andthenandthenandjuststopitjustfuckingstopitforchristssake
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MM: One aspect of your manuscript’s unique variety is its use of the prose
poem form, such as “maybe I sound foolish”:
maybe I sound foolish
but temperate seasons are built a-wanting: bric-a-brac and the dense of chlorine.
Those in construction lay concrete cause it dries quicker. Roads resurface, run
minimum temperate requirements: sumer is icumen in, blood to blood, bone to
bone and stitch stitch wove. There’s a stadium full of lawn mown men. There’s
a stadium full of oil slick women. These stadiums never open their gates and the
occupants never meet. The air is yolk.
maybe I sound foolish
but over a period of several months, I could eat only avocado salad. The recipe is
as follows: two ripe avocadoes two ripe tomatoes a fist of cilantro some jalapeño
some onion some salt chop up eat wash bowl sleep. I could eat only avocado salad.
The recipe is as follows: two ripe avocadoes two ripe tomatoes a fist of cilantro
some jalapeño some onion some salt chop up eat wash bowl sleep. I could only eat
avocado salad. The recipe is as follows: two ripe avocadoes two ripe tomatoes a
fist of cilantro some jalapeño some onion some salt chop up eat wash bowl sleep. I
could eat only avocado salad.
maybe I sound foolish
thingsthatarealmostpleasure
thatsoundthecarmakesinflatableskybyn.e.thingcompanythesmellofpai
ntandrainmortiseandtenonjoinsvalkyriesflushjointsleatherparingspap
erburnfriendswithshovelssilverhighlightsonmedievalparchmentthelas
tunicornczechversionsofthelittlemermaidjackspicerpoemsobsoleteca
nonicalrecordswatermelonsakerooibosteakirstymaccollthewetofinkje
tboysinhatsdoublebedscoffeetoohottodrinkdeconsecratedchurchesesp
adrillesaroadanendlessburningroadandmyfeetuponit
but love is a complex question and the men I love are complex too: full of
contradiction. What is A plus B minus C divided by D: compute! What is a word
stretching across an infinite number of syllables? How many angles are there to
right angled triangles? A thief in the darkness gloriously mouths the source of
knowledge -- but is not the least bit wiser for the words in his mouth: explain.
Divinations appear on every street corner, a basket of eggs divides into sugar
pearled segments, and unnatural disaster clocks invisible levees: we are awash in
baby oil and grass clippings.
Would you agree that as much can discovered and inferred from the detritus
of our lives than any straight forward confession — or at very least, would
you agree that is one of many lessons one can walk away with from a reading
of Robert Kroetsch’s ‘Completed Field Notes’?
maybe I sound foolish
CM: Lists are great litany. I agree that bites of a life can be revelatory, but more
subtle. When I first read Completed Field Notes, I was struck by the shape of the
whole, infused by the bits. I think the wielding of a particular detail or the right
word shapes gives the cacophony a mood.
but the living ain’t easy. Although I’m a firm believer in the whole wing/
taketotheskything and I’m willing to impress that belief into concrete or some
other quick drying material. I’ve become an expert in subtraction and distraction.
I’ve constructed a raft made of bone.
I’m often attracted to the prose poem because one can experiment with
content without feeling hindered by thoughts of form. Why are you attracted
to the prose poem form?
coNtents
ottawater: 8.0 - 58
CM: I like the Illusion of straightforwardness. I like subverting that ruler-straight
line. There’s something about the weight of the prose poem on the page that’s
appealing, particularly as a contrast to some of my other poems which can be spare.
MM: Having explored themes and allegories of poet as
alchemist, as conservator, as fabulist, interwoven with new
forms, invented languages, and geography — what explorations
do you have in mind after the publication of ‘Conflict’?
CM: I’m writing some fiction right now, a novel that I can rarely explain correctly.
And I’m pawing at a poetry manuscript that explores eugenics and fairy tales and
other dark things.
Electric Tennemant lighting tower
By: The Latest Artists (Andrew+Deborah O'Malley)
www.TheLatestArtists.com
coNtents
Officium
by: Tick Tock Tom www.ticktocktom.com
Toymaker
by: Tick Tock Tom www.ticktocktom.com
ottawater: 8.0 - 59
coNtents
Apprenticeship:
An Interview with
Michael Dennis
by Bardia Sinaee
Michael Dennis has published over a dozen books of poetry, including This
Day Full of Promise: Poems Selected and New (Broken Jaw Press) and his most
recent collection, Coming Ashore on Fire (Burnt Wine Press). This interview was
conducted by Bardia Sinaee on November 19, 2011 in Michael and his wife Kirsty’s
home in Vanier.
Bardia Sinaee: In the forward to This Day Full of Promise, rob mclennan describes
you as “a streetwise poet, following the working class traditions of Charles
Bukowski and Al Purdy, of hard living, and sometimes hard drinking.” You quote
Bukowski. You’ve written lines like “snow is a mean bastard of a thing.” Stuart Ross
says “Michael shoves a beer in your hand and doesn’t waste your time.” What do
you make of this hardened image of you?
Michael Dennis: [Laughs] Well, Stuart Ross is one of my dearest and oldest
friends, and rob is someone who I begrudgingly respect, but I’d say that compared
to both of them, I am rugged. By any comparison to the rest of society, I’m a pretty
big pussycat
B: How?
M: Well the comparisons to Bukowski, I think, have more to do with the choice of
content and approach to poetry, but there’s no real comparison to be made in terms
of lifestyle. Other than [that] I embodied the idea of living as a poet and being a
poet at a very early age, and I’ve lived in poverty. But I’ve never lived in the kind
of deliberate, desperate poverty that Bukowski chose, or had the same demons in
terms of being a constant ferocious drunk. I’ve had my share of drinking, but I’ve
never embodied [Bukowski’s] lifestyle.
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B: Do you think the image has been good for your career?
M: [Laughs] Well I would argue that there is no career. Image? I don’t know. I
don’t really see myself as having an image. Sorry, I don’t mean to dead-end that
question. Do you perceive I have an image?
B: I can see that there’s a consistent image that people project onto you when they
talk about you and review your work, but I separate that from the person. But I
think yours fits into a mould that people choose very deliberately.
M: Yeah, it makes it easy to quantify. But, you know, my work’s not really that
much like Al Purdy’s either. When I was quite young, I was writing poetry
that--I was looking at Leonard Cohen very very closely and writing poems that
sounded like Leonard Cohen poetry. Not anywhere as good, that’s not what I’m
suggesting, but my poems were clearly imitations of Leonard Cohen poetry. And
then I had the same sort of phase with Irving Layton, and then Tom Waits. So a
lot of my poetry sounded like Tom Waits ballads. I look at it as sort of the same
apprenticeship that a painter might do by repainting the masters, re-figuring the
masters, which is a fairly common tradition.
To this day, I like to think I’ve got a voice that’s my own and that I’m comfortable
with, but I still like to play with styles of others that I admire. I recently had a
couple of poems accepted for a project on A.M. Klein, taking A.M. Klein’s poem
“The Mountain” and re-imagining it (Jason Camlot in Montreal was doing that).
So I still like to do those sorts of things.
B: So how did you end up going from Cohen and Layton to where you are now?
M: Well you just keep reading. It’s like music: you start off liking one thing, but it
leads you to another. I mentioned Tom Waits earlier, and while he’s not recognized
as a poet and I don’t think of him as a poet... I was at one of his concerts in the
mid-1970s and he handed out these 8.5x11-inch sheets of paper that were like
hand-typed bios saying things like “I was born in the back seat of a cab” and it was
really funny. But one of the things he talked about in it was how he was influenced
by Charles Bukowski and I’d never heard of Bukowski. And this was 1976, ’77
maybe. So I first looked up Bukowski because Waits was interested in him.
Bukowski really loved John Fante, so I went out and read all of John Fante.
Same thing for novelists. You’re reading one novelist who you know really likes
this other novelist, it’s sort of like dominoes, and nobody’s dominoes fall the same
way. To say how I got from there to here... one assumes there’s a progression, some
of your old influences lose their lustre. Poems that you thought were perfect or
couldn’t live without, sometimes you tire of them.
coNtents
B: I guess that’s how you know you’ve been changing?
M: Yeah, the poem is always there, you’re always bringing a different reading to it.
B: The word “confessional” often comes up when people promote or review
your work, but I also see a lot of it as romantic in an 18th-century sort of
way. In “this is a mercy, too” you wrote “it is through time that we learn to
understand joy” and then years later you wrote “there is nothing quite like
growing old into your disappointments.”
M: [Laughs] Well you can be happy and disappointed at the same time! I was
having a conversation with a friend earlier today and I feel like I’m someone who’s
had a lot of really good luck and a lot of really bad luck. And it seems kind of
cheesy to complain about the bad luck with all of the good luck I’ve had--god that
sounds trite.
You’re gonna get [the bad luck] whether you focus on it or not. I don’t want to
talk about my life in that way, I want to talk about my work in that way. And I
don’t have a particular agenda in my work. I write one poem and then I write the
next one, sometimes they’re related, but there really is no deliberate connection.
B: Maggie Helwig wrote “Dennis never explicitly seeks the terrible human reflex
that rejects the possibility of love, but it is one of the themes that runs through his
work.” That made me think of your poem “the children of strangers,” where start
with “my ex-wife and her husband/ have just had their first child” and end with:
“we are happy, healthy, strong
yet we hear it sung
but our parents, siblings, friends
we cannot be
truly adult
until we have children
of our own
I see it
in my beautiful wife’s eyes
every time she holds a child
how much she loves me
how much I’ve betrayed”
M: I don’t think there’s a rejection of love, but the knowledge that it doesn’t matter
how much you are in love, you can’t protect each other from hurting each other.
That’s part of the process. It’s not part of the wish, but inevitably that’s how it
plays out, even in a happy relationship. It isn’t a particular mindset, but rather the
ottawater: 8.0 - 61
acceptance that life is both sides, this continuum of give and take where things
beyond your control govern your life.
B: I’ve also read that when you were in the twelfth grade, you heard a recording of
Earle Birney reading “David,” and after that wanted nothing but to be a poet. Is
that condensing or romanticizing it a lot or is that basically what happened?
M: That’s pretty close to the truth. And I was very very lucky, many years later,
when I got invited to have dinner with Earle Birney. We both read at the same
reading series so it was convenient to take us both out to dinner at the same time,
and we hit it off. It was great. We ended up corresponding and I visited him in
Toronto a few times. It was really one of the great pleasures of my life to get to
spend time with someone who was a real hero.
And [in grade twelve] it was really that sort of moment where I heard the poem
and said, “Yeah! That’s what I want to do.” But funnily enough, of all the writers
I’ve ever emulated, I’ve never tried to write like Earle Birney. The vocabulary,
the knowledge. But the reason I love the poem is the feeling, the sentiment. And
“David,” as I remember it now, really is about that bitter learning that makes you
an adult.
B: “And that was the first I knew that a goat could slip.”
M: Exactly, and that’s the great line in the poem. That’s the moment where the
tension is revealed.
B: Before you read as part of the In/Words event at VerseFest 2011, you said it
would be your last public reading.
M: Yeah and it was. Well, so far. And it was interesting, I was watching a video
afterwards where they spoke with Stephen Brockwell and David O’Meara, and
they were talking about me sort of tearing up when I was reading my last poem
[“Hockey Night in Canada”]. Well in fact I was because I had told my wife, but
I hadn’t told anyone else--except, obviously, you--that I had every intention of
it being my last public reading. And so knowing that, and having been reading
in public for the better part of 35 years, it was very personal to me. I was kind of
sad because I thought it was such a crappy reading on my part, because I was very
overwhelmed with emotions for most of the reading. You know, like a hockey
player thinking “this is the last time I’m skating.”
B: Do you intend to keep the no-public-reading streak alive?
M: I don’t foresee anything changing.
coNtents
B: Is there any reason?
M: Of course there’s a reason: I just wasn’t enjoying it very much anymore. And
there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that. I had always done readings because I
loved it. I loved that moment—and it obviously doesn’t happen with every poem—
that moment when you feel the audience connecting with you.
I wasn’t feeling that anymore. And whether or not anybody in the audience was...
sort of didn’t matter, because I wasn’t getting the pleasure out of it that I needed to
continue. Some of it having to do with your place in the community.
B: So you felt that your place in the community had changed?
M: Well this part you’re going to have to edit out...
ottawater: 8.0 - 62
author
biographies:
Sylvia Adams is the author of a novel, a couple of poetry collections and a
children’s book, facilitator of two poetry groups and, as ADAR Press, has published
their poetry anthology chapbooks.
John Barton has published nine books of poetry and five chapbooks, including
Hypothesis (2001) and Hymn (2009). His selected poems, For the Boy with the Eyes of
the Virgin, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in 2012. Co-editor of Seminal:
The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (2007), he lives in Victoria, where he edits
The Malahat Review.
Stephanie Bolster’s fourth book of poetry, A Page from the Wonders of Life on
Earth, just appeared with Brick Books. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice
Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award in
1998, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk, won the Archibald Lampman Award
and was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. She edited The Ishtar Gate: Last and
Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner and The Best Canadian Poetry
in English 2008, and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems. Born and raised in Burnaby,
B.C., she lived in Ottawa from 1996 – 2000, teaching writing and working at
the National Gallery. Since then she has taught creative writing at Concordia
University in Montréal and now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec.
Frances Boyle’s poetry and fiction have appeared across Canada and in the U.S.
in anthologies and literary magazines including The Fiddlehead, Room, Bywords
and Contemporary Verse 2, and as a LeafPress.ca “Monday’s poem”. Awards she’s
received include Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize, first place (poetry) and third place
(fiction) for This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and second place in
Prairie Fire’s Banff Centre Bliss Carmen Poetry Award. Happily making her home
in Ottawa for the past 16 years, Frances still continues to draw on her strong ties to
Regina and Vancouver.
coNtents
Sara Cassidy lives in Victoria with her three children. She was born in Ottawa and
lived there until she was ten. On her way home from Brownies one evening near
Dows Lake, a man opened his coat and flashed her. She shrieked with laughter,
then ran all the way home, laughing uncontrollably, legs rubbery with fear. For
more about her writing, see www.saracassidywriter.com
Anita Dolman is an Ottawa-based writer and editor whose poetry and/or short
short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, chapbooks, e-publications and
magazines, including, most recently, The Antigonish Review.
Richard Froude was born in London, grew up in Bristol, and moved to the US in
2002. He lived in Ottawa in early 1998 where he frequented the now defunct Duke
of Somerset. He is the author of FABRIC (Horse Less Press, 2011). “The Spectacle
of Empire” is excerpted from his second book, The Passenger, to be published this
winter by Skylight Press. He now lives in Denver, Colorado.
Phil Hall lives near Perth, Ontario. His most recent books are The Little Seamstress
(Pedlar Press, 2010) and Killdeer (BookThug, 2011).
Marilyn Irwin’s work can be found in issues of ottawater, Bywords, Bywords
Quarterly Journal, X-Ray Magazine, and Peter F. Yacht Club. She self-published her
first chapbook in 2012 which was re-issued by above/ground press the same year.
She is amassing pieces of things for her second chapbook.
Alastair Larwill is male, twenty seven and makes noises. He eats people, recycles,
and likes to fall in love. One day he hopes, another he despairs, but always he
thinks it’s a good idea. He was part of jwcurry’s Messagio Galore at the Ottawa
International Writers Festival in spring 2011.
Anne Le Dressay is a past contributor to Ottawater. She has published two
poetry books, Old Winter (Chaudiere Books, 2007) and Sleep Is a Country (Carleton
University Press, 1997). She lives in Ottawa, where she is happily retired from the
public service.
Robin K. Macdonald is a poet, creative non-fiction writer and restorative justice
practitioner. She has recently returned from Writing with Style at the Banff
Centre. Since then, she’s been exploring short-stories as a shape to express her
adventures in northern Manitoba, where she lived for most of her adult life. Robin
now lives in the Gatineau Hills.
In 1988, Louis Cabri and Rob Manery formed EWG and began organizing
readings, talks, and performances at Gallery 101, SAW Gallery and ArtsCourt. In
1990, they launched hole magazine, which they continued to publish until 1996.
Rob currently lives in Vancouver where he is pursuing a doctorate in education at
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Simon Fraser University. He is the author of It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before
(Tsunami Editions 2001).
Poet Karen Massey has one chapbook, bullet (above/ground press), and her work
has appeared in various Canadian literary publications. She has recently completed
her technician job and is moving forward to brighter adventures in living and
poetry. She lives with her partner and their two sons in Ottawa, close to the canal
and the river and the library [email protected]
Founder, publisher, and in-house editor of Greensleeve Editions, Mark
McCawley is the author of ten chapbooks of poetry and short fiction, most
recently, Sick Lazy Fuck (Black Bile Press, 2009), Collateral Damage (Coracle
Press, 2008), as well as Stories For People With Brief Attention Spans (1993) and Just
Another Asshole: short stories (1994), both from Greensleeve Editions. His short
fiction has also appeared in the anthologies: Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of
Short-Shorts, edited by Debbie James (Toronto: Rush Hour Revisions, 1998) and
Grunt & Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex, edited by Matthew
Firth and Max Maccari (Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002). His short fiction has also
appeared in Front & Centre magazine, and The Puritan (Number 7, Summer 2008).
When McCawley is not editing and publishing Urban Graffiti - the online magazine
of transgressive, discursive, post-realist writing [http://urbgraffiti.wordpress.com/] - he
reviews zines, chapbooks and other micropress ephemera at Fresh Raw Cuts
[http://freshrawcuts.blogspot.com/], and blogs about transgressive writers and writing
at Sensitive Skin Magazine [http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/].
Christine McNair’s work has appeared in CV2, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, Arc,
the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Descant, and assorted other places. Her first
collection of poems, Conflict, is forthcoming with BookThug in spring 2012. She
works as a book doctor in Ottawa, is one of the hosts of CKCU Lit Landscapes,
and blogs at www.cartywheel.wordpress.com. She recently launched her chapbook,
Notes From A Cartywheel (AngelHousePress, 2011).
Justin Million is a poet currently residing in Vancouver, B.C.After spending eight
great years in Ottawa, as an editor of In/Words magazine, the curator for the In/
Words Reading Series and a member of Ottawa’s poetry collective VERSe Ottawa,
Million has moved West in search of fool’s gold, or more poems. Hey, Ottawa!
Cath Morris lives in Vancouver. Her chapbook, Venus & Apollo (2009), appeared
with Vancouver’s Pooka Press.
Colin Morton’s most recent books are The Hundred Cuts: Sitting Bull and the
Major (BuschekBooks, 2009), The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), and The
Cabbage of Paradise: The Merzbook and other poems (Seraphim Editions, 2007).
coNtents
K.I. Press wrote her first book while procrastinating about her thesis in the
University of Ottawa English Department in 1996. Today, she is procrastinating in
Winnipeg, where she teaches creative writing at Red River College.
Bardia Sinaee is an Iranian-born, Canadian-raised third-year student at Carleton
University. He works part-time at Ottawa’s historic Mayfair Theatre, mostly in
popcorn production and sales. A previous poetry editor for In/Words, Carleton’s
incessant literary magazine, he currently hosts CKCU’s Literary Landscapes on
the last Thursday of each month.
jesslyn delia smith is a recent Carleton graduate living and writing in Ottawa,
and has had three chapbooks published through Carleton’s In/Words Magazine &
Press. Her poetry and prose can be found on her blog, jesslyndelia.com, which is
updated frequently. Feedback at [email protected] or twitter.com/jesslyndelia.
Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer and York University professor.
Among her publications are eight collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological
Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology
(2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), and Winter
Sport: Poems; the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002)
and To Whom It May Concern (2009); and the study We Are What We Mourn:
The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009). Her work has been published
internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean
and Latvian. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now
during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic games as well as the Roger’s
Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s
coolest poet.” For more information visit priscilauppal.ca
Andy Weaver’s most recent book of poetry is Gangson (NeWest 2011). He lives
near Toronto, and he teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at York University.
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