Rusty Morrison interviews rob mclennan on Canadian poetry, blogging, reviewing and above/ground press,

Writer and Omnidawn co-publisher Rusty Morrison interviews above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan over at the Omnidawn blog, OmniVerse. Thanks, Rusty! The interview concludes with a new poem by rob mclennan.

Marilyn Irwin’s above/ground press chapbook, for when you pick daisies, is reviewed in Broken Pencil #54

Roxanne Hathway-Baxter was good enough to review Ottawa poet Marilyn Irwin’s first chapbook, for when you pick daisies (above/ground press, 2010) in Broken Pencil #54 (winter 2012 issue). Thanks, Roxanne! There are a few copies of Irwin’s chapbook available, here. Also, Irwin has a more recent broadsheet poem still available (and posted here), and new work in the eighth issue of ottawater. We eagerly await a second chapbook manuscript, and possibly more…

He loves me, he loves me not. Many ladies who were once little girls remember this old chant from childhood. Simple, and yet, in the eyes of a child, so very telling. Somehow, as the years pile on and relationships grow and falter, love becomes much more complex and unable to be explained in such few words. For when you pick daisies tackles the idea of love (and other subjects) in a more adult and expressive way.

This zine of poetry is simply bound, with a lovely illustration of a half-plucked daisy adorning the cover. Inside, the reader finds 16 short poems covering a range of topics, but often they seem to focus on love.

Sometimes the obscurity of the language in the poems makes the subject matter hard to decipher. Words seem to be thrown together, which makes finding meaning in each poem like finding a needle in a syllabic haystack.

You might not discover how to unravel the complexity of the work in the first read of this zine, but out of this complexity grows linguistic beauty. Some lovely mental images are painted and emotions are inspired by the simple pairing of words.

The poems of for when you pick daisies may sometimes feel confusing and unclear, but also beautiful. They mirror the consciousness felt by someone mired in the mess of love, who understands both its sweetness and its sting.

span-o presents: The Factory Reading Series: Young, Blouin + Macdonald,

The Factory Reading Series

with readings/launches by:

Deanna Young (Ottawa)  
Michael Blouin (Ottawa)
+ Robin K. Macdonald (Gatineau Hills)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, February 17, 2012;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm

The Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Deanna Young’s second book of poems, Drunkard’s Path, was published by Gaspeareau Press in 2001. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including The Malahat Review and Arc and been aired on CBC radio. She's currently completing her third manuscript, Knowledge from a Previous Life. Born in Lucan, Ontario, she now lives in Ottawa.

She will be launching the chapbook Mediterraneo (above/ground press), a collection of three short poems.

Michael Blouin is a novelist and a poet. He has two books of poetry with Pedlar Press (I’m not going to lie to you 2007, Lampman-Scott Award Finalist) and Wore Down Trust (2011), a novel with Coach House Books (Chase and Haven 2008, ReLit Award Winner and Amazon First Novel Finalist) and a chapbook with Apt. 9 Press. He is represented by Westwood Creative Artists and his online home is www.michaelblouin.org

He will be launching the chapbook let lie/ (above/ground press), an excerpt of a collaboration with Elizabeth Rainer.

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. She has poetry in the most recent issue of ottawater.

new from above/ground press: Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep, by rob mclennan

Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep
by rob mclennan
$4

Vancouver, specifically
for Wayde Compton,

An uneasy mist
rises from this calligraphy of recollection
-- Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedecker: Poems


1.

What is this, beauty. Failed attempts at, something. Stated aims, a viaduct. Specific questions, abandoned. Linger. Exploding at the bedrock, crust. Backwash, a church. A Union, Prior. Streets. A common grave. Or is it, grace.

Impossibilities, suffer. Excised, but not divide, subtract. A family path of clothespins, buttons.

You aren't front lawn, sophisticate. Subsets claim. A learning made of kitchens, home. A Georgian demolition, sweep. A lack of rumoured slums. Estate of longing, else. State, desired looks. Wood sliced into beam, a streetscape. What aren't we seeing.

If less abstracted, tell me. A community suffers, scattered. Brow to leaning brow.

2.

Attempts are not, but statements. Lone survivor, speaks dead language. Restorations. Memory, buffers. Erodes into allotted land. A formless quilt, afforded. Question, its effects.

Mortgage is, but this. Your murdered laughter.

What are we, looking? The look of elsewhere, less. All that glitters. Little controversies, pass the stupid buck. Strathcona is, a name. The trees for city, same. The house but not, paved over. Why did you, did? Could further, else. A glaze.

Of, the shores. What oxidized. Go. Here, not only. Long, into the east.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (www.ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (www.ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Into the Blind World, by Barry McKinnon

 Into the Blind World
by Barry McKinnon
$4

into the blind world –
the new life – the essential tremor /refusal
of diminishment

I see in a double
space – conjunction & irony, that part blind I’m made
to see. it is not Dante’s forest exactly. More
so a sense

/a kind of open door
is beginning /closing – dark turning
- light I didn’t expect.

old flesh renews, that the dim
eye makes almost nothing matter. looks to

what I find ahead.

I believe -

fear kept
me speaking, or all would cease to be. so I spoke & the forest flew by
& city lights distorted – the cold stars of love and dark – the beginning, a journey, a descent

the ghost of myself still
alive,
to address the infected world, to stall & cease advance, to the forest one fears
to enter

sad desire/ without a mask –
to journey solely at night dark to the armies
circling themselves – the forest of knives
invisible to those who never make it
or recognize

desire: one heart to pull
the other retract - that the gap maintains its depth & distance

to hell – the hidden road & the river one dares

Afterword

§

This poem/fragment is based on a selection of lines sent to me by Arianwen Goronwy Roberts, a young student, poet, and artist who I jokingly referred to as Virgil one night when she soberly drove me home after a drunken literary event in the fall of 2009. I got Arianwen curious to read Dante’s Divine Comedy & at some other drunken literary event asked her to send me the Dante lines or sections that she liked or stood out for whatever reason. This she did from an on-line translation (http://www.readprint.cm/work -7/inferno-dante-alighieri: The Divine Comedy: Hell - no translator given). Within those stanzas, verses, and narrative fragments I could see certain words/phrasings and images that prompted my own “translation” and improvised responses.

I’ve made no dramatic attempt to describe sinners being dipped upside down in hot tar – or include any of the other dark & menacing monsters contained in Dante’s hell - or developed the relationship between Dante and Virgil, his poet/guide through hell. Instead, I took only words, phrases or images from Arianwen’s choices that I could then reconfigure without, I decided, any presumption to condense the narrative in Book One, or make any literal reference to snakes, lizards, and lions etc. (though somehow a lone fox trotted in).

The “ending” does not wholly contain the sanguine possibility Dante recognized in Canto xxxiv – a “return to the bright world”- “to look once more upon the stars”. More so, I believe it when the poet Robert Creeley writes - “the darkness surrounds us” - yet within it we must live and experience whatever range we are given or decide.

When the writing stalled, I also took lines/ideas from Arianwen’s poem – the forest of knives image, Mateusz Patryka’s poem for his line the ghost of myself, Cecil Giscombe’s email - these days the sisters incoherent, unrequited, incomplete and Robert Creeley’s line happy in hell – sources that kept me going for awhile longer on the hidden road.

Otherwise, all else is missing.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary Alberta, where he grew up.  In 1965, after two years at Mount Royal College, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montreal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton. He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree. In 1969, he graduated with an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and was hired that same year to teach English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived and worked ever since.

Barry McKinnon’s The the was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1080. Pulp Log was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for the B.C. Book Prizes in 1991 and Arrhythmia was the winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook published in Canada in English in 1994. His chapbook Surety Disappears was the runner-up for the bpNichol Award in 2008.

His most recent trade collections include In the Millennium (Vancouver: New Star, 2009) and The Centre: Poems 1970-2000 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2004).

Barry McKinnon reads in Ottawa on Sunday, March 4, 2012 with Paige Ackerson-Kiely as part of Ottawa’s second annual VERSeFest poetry festival.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: let lie/, an excerpt from a collaborative work by Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin

let lie/
an excerpt from a collaborative work by Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin
$4

that’s the way it goes it goes mm hmm mm hmm da… mm hmm mm hmm da… something about the ocean de de de de mm hmm and being pulled from the wreckage you hardly ever hear it on the radio anymore you told me once my vagina was like a small bird and I never asked you how it doesn’t forage for food in the forest in the winter nor does it sing from the trees in the spring I sometimes wonder if you had any idea what you were saying half the time you said anything at all there’s a part in the middle that goes nan a na naa in the middle of the song I mean not in the middle of my vagina and a part that goes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah dried and bedded and sometimes the truth is just the ceiling coming down just the ashes left see you’re carrying that look on your face if you want to make love to me take off your pants and if you want to go just do it just go but either way like men say when they throw the football… go long.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Elizabeth Rainer is a visual artist and a writer. Her work has been published in numerous small magazines. This is her first chapbook. Her online home is www.wordrocket.tumblr.com and although she resides in Vancouver she lives in Alberta.

Michael Blouin is a novelist and a poet. He has two books of poetry with Pedlar Press (I’m not going to lie to you 2007, Lampman-Scott Award Finalist) and Wore Down Trust (2011), a novel with Coach House Books (Chase and Haven 2008, ReLit Award Winner and Amazon First Novel Finalist) and a chapbook with Apt. 9 Press. He is represented by Westwood Creative Artists and his online home is www.michaelblouin.org

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

"poem" broadside #309: untitled, by Amanda Earl

SICKNESS HAD ITS BEAUTIFUL MOMENTS
each with a frozen brief glow I only half regret
Phil Hall, An Oak Hunch, IV Gang Plank, p. 66

i wear my limbo white & the property
of snow is light. to unburden.

i don't know if i begged or prayed
i hear it as a whisper, a song, a hum

as darkness comes. i leave the light on.
wait for the glistening reprieve

of flakes i take on the tongue to chill
the heat my body remembers.

dear ghost, i am sorry i left you behind
the gauze curtain on the stairs,

your hand outstretched...
do i regret not touching your hand?

i am still afraid sometimes

untitled
by Amanda Earl
above/ground press broadside #309

Amanda Earl's poems appear most recently or are forthcoming in Sunfish Journal (UK), Spirits Magazine, University Northwest (USA), unarmed (USA), filling Station (Calgary, AB) and SCRIPTjr.nl (USA). Her chapbooks have been published by above/ground press (Ottawa, ON), Avantacular Press (USA), Book Thug (Toronto, ON), chapbookpublisher (USA), and Laurel Reed Books (Mt. Pleasant, ON), with visual poetry somehow appearing in exhibits in Moscow & Windsor. Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and the (fallen) angel of AngelHousePress. Follow Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle or read about her shenanigans & jiggerypockery at www.amandaearl.com. This untitled poem is in homage to the poet Phil Hall whose work continues to offer solace to the anguished & the battle scarred/weary.