Saturday, April 28, 2018
some author activity: Wessels, Barwin, Barton, Dennis, Rogal + mclennan,
Thursday, April 26, 2018
new from above/ground press: Catalogue d’Oiseaux, Toronto < — > Mainz-Kastel, by Aaron Tucker
Toronto — Mainz-Kastel
Aaron Tucker
$5
A Sunday afternoon, that morning, our Toronto bed
the cedar smoke from the neighbor Anishinaabe centre
mingles with late autumn rain pecking at the window
with the drums & chants from the ceremony next door
& the clouds bend to our sleep, make themselves soothing
our asleep waterhands over each other, like cirrus or silty dreams
our waking causes the rain to pause momentarily
& it resumes only when we kiss softly good morning, hold
you, soft sea mist, cajole us from our bed eventually
the promise of our favourite simple diner, Chew Chews
the runny yolks over potatoes, toast with strawberry jam
the server overexcited that Cher & Queen Latifah
film there next week, his hands clasped as he repeats
& we finish our breakfast, walk through Cabbagetown
under umbrellas, soft patter, watery dance steps
buy lattes from Jet Fuel, milky & vapoursteam, continue east
this neighbourhood named for the poverty of its Irish settlers
tailoring & lining their front yards with the large green brassica
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
This is Aaron Tucker’s third chapbook with above/ground press, following punchlines (2013) and apartments (2010). He is the author of the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).
His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com).
Currently, he is an uninvited guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teaching creative and academic writing. You can reach him atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca
[Aaron Tucker launches this new chapbook alongside his novel in Ottawa as part of The Factory Reading Series on April 29, with co-readers Brecken Hancock, Christine McNair + rob mclennan]
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Sean Braune
This is the seventeenth
in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends
of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series here.
On above/ground press as it turns 25
Poetry was
supposed to be some kind of vanguard. Someone told me this at some point. I’m
not sure who it was, but someone told me that. In an alleyway. A long time ago.
When one
starts off “being” a poet or going to work at the poetry factory or whatever
else, one expects some sort of linguistic subterfuge—to be in it and also a cause of
it. Maybe. Ideally? Is this impulse the political in the poetic? Sometimes. I
guess it depends.
Poetry is
about community or should be and sometimes it isn’t, but the best presses and
reading series create communities around them. They induce a sort of communal
experience of support and creativity (or they should). Again, this can happen
in the best of circumstances and against some of the more awful, patriarchal
and misogynistic impulses of CanLit.
Here we all
are, standing around the dumpster fire. My feet are cold. Actually, nothing is
warming up. In light of all that is negative about CanLit nowadays, there are
some bastions of “hope” or whatever in the abyss.
rob
mclennan’s above/ground press is one of these bastions. He has fought
tirelessly (and I use that word intentionally) to publish adventurous and
exciting poetry without reprieve for 25 years.
above/ground
was, for me, like some of the more exciting presses when I first got into
Canadian poetry a decade ago: presses like BookThug and Coach House and Wolsak
and Wynn, etc.; and some chapbook presses like derek beaulieu’s own 13-year-old
no press or the wonderful (and far too short-lived) Ferno House Press. rob
doesn’t stop though. He’s a poetry machine. And he’s fighting the good fight.
And poets notice.
I like
above/ground because it hasn’t lost being a bit under/ground and it maintains
that most exciting aspect of poetry, which, for me, is finding some new,
wonderful gem (of a poem, poetry book, or poet) on a shelf in a bookstore or
hearing about an old poet or poem that I hadn’t known about or learning about
some new work recently published. above/ground is a kind of laboratory of
poetry that keeps pressing out fantastic poetry and it is, 25 years after its
inception in 1993, a shining beacon in the darkness of the dumpster fire…
Sean Braune’s first book of philosophy, Language Parasites: Of Phorontology, appeared
in 2017 from Punctum Books. His poetry has appeared in The Puritan, Rampike, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. He is currently in the process of
editing his first feature-length film called Nuptials.
Braune is the author of two above/ground press chapbooks, including the vitamins of an alphabet (2016) and The Cosmos (2018). A third is scheduled for release this fall.
Saturday, April 21, 2018
some author activity: Robinson, Tucker, Saklikar + Trivedi,
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
rob mclennan interviewed via Amanda Earl's Small Machine Talks podcast
https://soundcloud.com/user-301339427/the-small-machine-talks-interview-with-rob-mclennan
For further interviews with rob mclennan, check out the links at his author page; for further audio/video of rob mclennan check out the links here.
Monday, April 16, 2018
new from above/ground press: Glosas for Tired Eyes Volume 2, by Dani Spinosa
Dani Spinosa
$5
Judith Copithorne
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media, an on-again-off-again precarious professor, the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press. Her first chapbook, Glosas for Tired Eyes, was published in 2017 with No Press and her first scholarly manuscript, Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry is forthcoming from University of Alberta Press (Spring 2018).
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Saturday, April 14, 2018
some author activity: Caple, Earl, Press, Johnstone, Archer, + Saklikar,
Friday, April 13, 2018
above/ground press at Kanada Koncrete, Loud Mouths: Anstee, Atkins, Beaulieu, Betts, Davey, Earl, Spinosa, etc
See the Facebook event here.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
new from above/ground press: From Being Without Substance, by Andrew Wessels
by Andrew Wessels
$5
The motif of a man
imprisoned in a tree:
might time rise stunned
in a region of hell. Lest mind
or “brother” deceive,
the creature—
traditionally the unbaptized
abode— was accustomed
to strange doubt.
°
The north wind
expresses wandering.
Whether the double being
is used diversely,
which one (of two)
rewards frailty?
Spoil of battle derives from
hazard.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Cambridge, and Las Vegas. Currently, he splits his time between Istanbul and Los Angeles, where he is an editor at Les Figues Press. He has held fellowships from Poets & Writers and the Black Mountain Institute. His writing can be found in VOLT, Witness, Fence, Tammy Journal, Faultline, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, Literary Hub, and Colorado Review, among others. Semi Circle, a chapbook of his translations of the Turkish poet Nurduran Duman, was published by Goodmorning Menagerie in 2016. His first book, published by 1913 Press, is A Turkish Dictionary.
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Carrie Olivia Adams
This is the sixteenth
in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends
of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series here.
Just as no one
becomes a poet to make money, no one becomes a poetry publisher to make money.
And so, it is a discipline that inherently attracts those that are drawn to it
as a calling and those who believe in poetry for poetry’s sake alone. Yet, even
in a discipline composed almost entirely by people who have come to it out of
shear desire and admiration, rob mclennan stands out as someone whose
commitment to poetry and its potential readership is powerfully unique and
true. And as a result, his love and belief in poetry has grown a community that is remarkable for its inclusivity.
Though there
are more people studying and writing poetry than ever before, I fear that the
readership for poetry has not grown in accordance. Instead, just as we have
become enclosed in our own small news media bubbles, many of us poets, myself
included, are too often caught in our own incestuous poetry worlds when it
comes to the books and journals we read. Through above/ground press and Touch the Donkey, rob offers an anecdote
to this. His strength as a publisher and editor is having a wide vision—one
that is not tied to any particular geography or region, not tied to any
aesthetic or cool cohort, and one that encompasses age and profile. Emerging or
established, old school or new—for rob it’s about the work itself. It’s about
what poetry can do and the readers it can find and create.
And this takes
incredible work and time and attention—to find and solicit writers, to paginate
and fold those pages, and to stuff all of those many, many envelopes. It seems
like every week at least one of those joyful white envelopes is in my mailbox—a
regularity and a productivity unmatched in the publishing community. I feel
incredibly lucky that rob reached out to me for an interview after my first
book Intervening Absence was
published almost ten years ago. It established a creative and encouraging
friendship for which I am grateful. We, as poets, are all lucky to have him as
our champion and as a champion of the art to which we’ve all devoted large
parts of our hearts and lives. Cheers to 25 years! Let’s hope for many more.
Carrie Olivia Adams is a Chicago-based freelance book
publicist and the poetry editor for the small press Black Ocean. She is the author of Grapple
(above/ground press 2017) and Overture in the Key of F (above/ground press 2013) as well as the full-length
collections Operating Theater (Noctuary Press 2015), Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013) and Intervening Absence (Ahsahta
2009).
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Marthe Reed : d. April 10, 2018
Monday, April 9, 2018
new from above/ground press: coastal geometries, by Marthe Reed
Marthe Reed
$5
threnody
knowing how this will end
such an awkward alliance
an ache that is not pain
magnolia sweet
raising the levees again and again
shelling boiled peanuts
bowing a fiddle
getting there all along
amid the soak and flow
a good life
up and down the coast
barges and rigs
oilfields
gambling on spring and summer
drilled that hole, toolpushing
and quit come trapping season
boat in the water
boat in the water
it gets away from you
this senseless thrashing
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Marthe Reed has published five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). The author of six chapbooks, her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed’s collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest (2016). Her poetry has been published in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, Entropy, New Orleans Review, HOW2, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, BlazeVOX, and The Offending Adam, among others. Reed lives in Syracuse, NY, and is co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books. Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, edited with Linda Russo, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press (August 2018).
This is Reed’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after After Swann (2013).
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Saturday, April 7, 2018
some author activity: Brockwell, Flemmer, Archer + Notley,
Friday, April 6, 2018
above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Gregory Betts
This is the fifteenth
in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends
of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series here.
Bespoke, Be Spoken
I am likely the
last poet in the country who published rob mclennan before being published by him. I was, however, back in Victoria in
1999, already acutely aware of the generative role he played with his
publishing venture—the presses, zines, anthologies, and now blogs and more.
above/ground (rolled out in 1993) is the hub of a wheel made up of an
extraordinary range of poets, each taking a turn as a spoke in its constantly
regenerating progress, rolling over the years, now decades. Poets learn to
speak in public, to become spoken, through getting published. For 25 years,
mclennan has created space for poets to write themselves into authorship, or to
become spoken of, often for the first time in one of his constantly appearing reviews
or scene surveys. To ride the metaphor to its last spoke, he has carved roads
into this country and built vehicles to travel them.
I was the Managing Editor of a small
press zine (Laughing Gland, edited by Lori Emerson, whose issues (I realize in
retrospect) suspiciously resemble above/ground), and remember well the meeting
when Lori presented work by rob. We were excited to publish those poems, and
fascinated by the package of leaflets and chapbooks of other people’s works
that he sent with them. We passed them around, read them carefully over coffee
and cigarettes. It was the combination that struck me the most — the ethic of
creating a space for other writers while finding a place for yourself. Self-expression
and other-promotion. It all seemed perfectly positive, generous, and strangely
misfit as I dropped copies here and there around the campus and town, watching strangers
pick them up read or toss them aside.
A few years later, above/ground
published a chapbook of mine. It was a collection of poems responding to the
legacy of the explorer David Thompson, who cut the Canadian/American border.
rob mailed a box (Canada Post owes him at least his image on a limited edition
stamp for all he has spent on postage), a real Staples box full of folded and
stapled chapbooks. I guiltily remembered the short run of zines we had mailed
him years before (It was, I confess, my job to balance the budget, and limit,
therefore, the print run—but take notice of rob’s method of constant bigheartedness,
of overabundance and wildly free circulation, and emulate it freely. He’s doing
it right.).
I
marveled at the simple, bespoke object filled with my words that he had made. I
promptly started handing out copies to ever and whomever crossed my path. I met
people by doing so. What a delightful pleasure it is to give your own small
book to people you barely know or don’t at all. Christian Bök calls chapbooks
and books expensive “business cards” for future services, but they are, really,
more like greeting cards: greetings, here
I am, this is some kind of record of me and where my mind sometimes strays,
come have a conversation. I marvel at the range of rob’s imagination that
sees the contours and recognizes the value of each of the imaginary worlds in
the almost-a-thousand objects he has made.
When I first started publishing with
above/ground (or should that be, ‘surfacing’?), it never dawned on me that
literature could fashion communities, that giving away things brings constant
returns. This was my entrance into the gift economy. In the wider literary
world in Canada, I was made quickly aware of the fiercely guarded aesthetic and
social fiefdoms. But rob, all the while, was creating communities across such
pale garrisons. I, one of his minions, have probably handed out thousands of
copies of his chapbooks and zines filled with writing by countless authors I
have never yet met—except that I feel I have met many of them through his maze
of pathways that cross the space above/ground. I don’t know them, but I have
met them, and share a common space.
My first three poetry readings were
all with rob, including the very first that happened to be in St. Catharines,
where I moved a few years later and have stayed ever since. I even ended up
taking over that literary series where we read and curated it for a number of
years. I have become in a much, much smaller way, a local bike builder (in the
literary sense) here in town, trying to build a space for writers of all types
and sorts to speak themselves into authorship. rob sends me messages – whose coming, what can we do? Still
carving borders every bit as real and imaginary as the one cut by David
Thompson, still extending his hub into all the marvelous worlds one can find
above/ground.
Gregory Betts is
the author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, six books of poetry, and editor
of six volumes of experimental Canadian writing. He curates the bpNichol.ca
Digital Archive. He is a poet and professor at Brock University in St.Catharines, Ontario (but will be the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies
at the University College of Dublin next year).
Gregory Betts is the author of four above/ground press
titles, including The Cult of David Thompson (2005),
The Curse of Canada (2008) and Who Let the Mice in Brion Gysin (2014)
as well as another title to release later this month. He also appeared in the
four poet anthology READ YORK (2004),
and as an above/ground press broadside (#221, 2004).
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