Sunday, July 29, 2018
Jennifer Kronovet on the Commonplace podcast
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Friday, July 27, 2018
above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: George Elliott Clarke
This is the twenty-sixth
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.
Goin underground with above/ground press
Clearly,
given its name, above/ground press isn’t an underground publisher. That said, there is something subterranean—subtly
subversive—about launching one-page poem-leaflets into the world, followed by
more substantial booklets/chapbooks, all on different-coloured paper. It’s a
wonderful presence and outlet for Anglo-Canadian poetry, that we continue to
have this avant-garde relic of the Beat (US) and Tish (CDN) era, the connection
to bpNichol in aesthetics and Milton Acorn in dissidence/dissonance. I’ve always
been attentive to the material production of poetry, anyway, because I was a
newspaper guy, having helmed two small papers in my life, and having had to do
much of the production work. But I got to like experimenting with the moods
that fonts suggest, and I was a regular reader of Karl Dair’s Design with Type (1967), and I felt then—and
still do—that the “underground” scene of the 1960s is the proper model for
journalism. I’ve always been heartened by a phrase from revolutionary Paris in
May 1968: “Make shame more shameful by making it public.” Similarly, I think that leaflet poems, photocopied,
pasted together, shot into the ether are essential to the health and well-being
of the ART, which is, as we know, the ART
of
making....
The long
preamble is just to say that I was ready for above/ground press, definitely.
For one thing, I’d lived in Ottawa, 1987-94 (with a waste-of-time stint in
Kingston, at Queen’s University, but it may as well have been Kingston Pen, 1991-93),
and met—had-to-meet—rob mclennan, with his Medieval-Jesus-long-hair and
Beat/Hippy passions/aesthetics in garb and in the solidly unpretentious minuscule
typography with a kind of ee-cummings-fetish for punctuation. (Come to think of
it, joe blades has a similar style, both in poetry and in publishing...) But I also gotta describe it a guerilla
poetic—making the ART outta whatever moolah, paper, equipment, and space is at
hand. Like the 60s radicals rollin out their manifestos on Gestetner
machines....
Really, rob
was (is) Mr. Ottawa Poetry, which I had to appreciate, because he’s always been
everywhere, publishing everybody, hearing everyone, attending the readings and
the launches. So, when he
asked me for a poem for his poem series, in 1997, I provided a love poem, “palm
breeze, white lace.” I’d been teaching at Duke University, but had come back to
Ottawa to give a
lecture at Carleton University. rob took the occasion of my presence to issue
that poem AND a booklet of love poems, Provencal
Poems, with a photo of my then-love (and 18 months later, the mother of our
daughter) on the cover. I thought it was
fetching, and it sold out—if I recall correctly. Copies were $5 each (I think).
Two more
single poems followed in 1999 and 2003, following my return to Canada to teach
at the University of Toronto. But I was thrilled to see poems from my
epic-in-progress, Canticles, published in
an above/ground press booklet/chapbook, and given the title of Selected Canticles. rob found a photo of
open shackles and used this image to grace the cover. It was an excellent
choice.
I can’t say
how overjoyed I was to have that 2012 booklet in hand. It made the project
(which is ongoing) begin to seem real. I liked how the poems looked; I liked
how they read. I still do. above/ground press
helped me put out “there” these poems that refer to the still (especially in
Canada) buried histories of African slavery and Indigenous dispossession.
Good job,
rob! I’d sure love to be around to see the press see a 100th anniversary! Keep
on keepin on!
The 4th
Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian
Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke [photo credit: Harvard University] is a revered artist in song,
drama, fiction, screenplay, essays, and poetry.
Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960, Clarke was educated at the
University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Queen’s University. Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of
African-Canadian literature. A professor
of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the
University of British Columbia, and Harvard.
He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of
Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He is also a Fellow
of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
His recognitions include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the
Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for
Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the
Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Achievement Award. Clarke’s work is the
subject of Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke (2012), edited by Joseph Pivato. Finally, though Clarke is racialized “Black”
and was socialized as an Africadian, he is a card-carrying member of the
Eastland Woodland Métis Nation Nova Scotia, registered under Section 35
of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
He is, at last, a proud Afro-Métis Africadian.
Clarke is the author of two above/ground press chapbooks—Provencal Songs [II] (1997) and Selected Canticles (2012)—as
well as two above/ground press “poem” handouts (1997 and 1998).
Thursday, July 26, 2018
new from above/ground press: Sinister Queer Agenda, by Travis Sharp
Travis Sharp
$5
Part Five: Romance in late capitalism
I.
It was like a gay romance on Netflix
of which I had seen many
if not all and therefore
I had a strong sense
of what came next:
we made eggs for one another
with a gay zeal
we went down on one another
with sentimental music
in the background
we stared at one another’s
shoes we went to a friend’s
wedding it was really
stunning but full of
wealth everywhere
with nice shoes and nicer
haircuts in the straight
to Netflix film version
there is a token lesbian
and a token sassy black man
and a token unsexed or oversexed
genderqueer person with bad fashion sense
the occasional gay announcing he’s
a top by wearing
gym shorts in February
but in the documentary version of
what really happened there were
lots of happy white gays
reaching for the bouquet
the man I was with said
that will be us
referring to all of them grasping
referring to rabidity
to animus
to both definitions of animus
to some beautiful anathema
II.
We get home
referring to some shitty moldy apartment
we take off our clothes
referring to the clearance rack at Goodwill
we lay down in our bed
unsexed and sexless
the ritual of getting ready took
too long for both of us
and after working
our collective seven jobs
filling out applications
obsessively checking our
credit card statements
shuffling money from
savings to checking and
back again we give up
the notion of fucking
and just sleep for a while
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Travis Sharp is a teacher, writer, and book artist living in Buffalo. He co-edited Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press, 2017) with Aimee Harrison and Maria Anderson. He’s an editor and designer at Essay Press and a PhD student in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Poems and essays have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, The Bombay Gin, The Operating System, LIT, Puerto del Sol, Big Lucks, Entropy, and in other things and places.
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
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
new from above/ground press: LIMPING TO THE BIG BAD, by Beth Ayer
Beth Ayer
$5
Conversation with a Saber-tooth Tiger
As I consider the ratio of immune function
And kindness, a man in a tank top
Knits a scarf in a coffee shop
In Northumberland in November.
In another place they are
Hooking electrodes to couples
Measuring sweat and memories
Negative communication
And its reverberations.
Veterans are walking down this street
With medals and some real flags
And some souvenir flags and a small
Dog. One cub scout waves at the sidewalk
A man makes a record with his iPhone
Only during a parade do you wave
At cars driving down the street,
But maybe every day
We should be like, Holy shit a car.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
front cover artwork and design by Erin Susan Murphy:
https://www.erinsusanmurphy.com/
Beth Ayer is a poet and editor. You can read her poems in Apartment Poetry, Divine Magnet, Jubilat, Dusie, Ocean State Review, and Sixth Finch. She lives in Easthampton MA.
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
Friday, July 20, 2018
The Factory Reading Series: Jenna Jarvis chapbook launch w Ian Martin + Mia Morgan, July 26
The Factory Reading Series
above/ground press chapbook launch
for Jenna Jarvis' year of pulseswith special guest-readers:
(before she leaves the country again)
Ian Martinlovingly hosted by rob mclennan
+
Mia Morgan
Thursday, July 26, 2018;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs), Ottawa
author biographies:
Jenna Jarvis has published poems in such places as Word and Colour, sea foam, and The Puritan. Her poem “syndical not synecdochal” secured an honourable mention for The Puritan's 2014 Thomas Morton Prize. In 2012, she won Bywords.ca’s John Newlove Award. year of pulses (above/ground press) is her third chapbook.
Ian Martin is, by and large, bi and large. His writing has appeared recently in Pretty Owl Poetry, In/Words, rout/e, and Absolutely Orbital. Ian has released 4 chapbooks, including PLACES TO HIDE (Coven Editions, 2018) and YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO KEEP THIS UP FOREVER (AngelHousePress, 2018). When he’s not writing, Ian is developing small video games and complaining online. [www.ian-martin.net]
Mia Morgan is the co-founder of Coven Editions, former editor of the Ottawa Arts Review, and former host of the Blue Mondays reading series. Her work has appeared in Bywords, Hussy, Battleaxe, In/Words and more. In her down time, she cooks and tends an ever-growing indoor jungle.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
new from above/ground press: EGOCIDES, by Jon Boisvert
Jon Boisvert
$5
ANEMONES
You walk along the rocks by the sea, gently stroking the green anemones. You let them suck on your fingers. They thank you in small, wet voices. When the moon comes up & everything else is dark, the sea & anemones glisten. You tell me you want soft, green children.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Jon Boisvert was born in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and now lives in Oregon. He studied poetry at Oregon State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. His first book, BORN, was published in 2017 by Airlie Press.
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
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
new from above/ground press: year of pulses, by Jenna Jarvis
Jenna Jarvis
$4
kantō
east of the barrier orleans
amalgamated on a fault line
my chest is plain but i’m no
landscape nor its dianthus
i don’t blame my spine for curving
away from my heart
or from what isn’t there
love or a proper metro system
in ottawa like diphenhydramine
against the spinning detour
the mall punks sulk at a deluge
they’re expected to crave
but rain binds them and clouds
of fresh smoke to the entrance
i vomit over an empty
stomach and bike rack
commuters ignore me politely
over horoscopes, the predictable
the earth deviates in slow time
proleptic and incarnate
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Jenna Jarvis has published poems in such places as Word and Colour, sea foam, my (small press) writing day and The Puritan. Her poem “syndical not synecdochal” secured an honourable mention for the Puritan's 2014 Thomas Morton Prize. In 2012, she won Bywords.ca’s John Newlove Award. year of pulses is her third chapbook.
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
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Feliks Jezioranski reviews Sarah Dowling’s Entering Sappho (2017) in Broken Pencil #79
While
I very much appreciate that Feliks Jezioranski took the time to attempt a
review of Sarah Dowling’s Entering Sappho
(2017) in Broken Pencil #79, I really
think her wee chapbook deserves better attention than this. I mean, I know
sometimes reviewers don’t “get” certain works (it happens to the best of us), but I wish
Jezioranski had worked to find a bit more background (you can see the original review here). Fortunately, this is the
second review of Dowling’s title, so why not go back to see what Amanda Earl was good enough to write on her blog? As Jezioranski’s review reads:
Sarah Dowling’s zine Entering Sappho is a love poem. All we know if the lover written to is that the speaker is completely overwhelmed by “you.” We also know that “your” voice is especially devastating; by my quick count there are 13 references to this voice.Repetition is the poem’s dominant technique. Some of the pages are a listing of places the speaker “is” and persons (and, especially confusingly, concepts such as xenia – hospitality) from Greek antiquity, followed by the words, “I wake up and disappear,” or else, “I wake up without coming to.” Beyond Greece and sex and romance generally, I do not understand the connection to Sappho. These essentially identical lists occupy five out of 21 pages.On the rest I found an approximation of this: “as soon as I see you – hardly / because I have seen you, I lack the / voice – this voice no longer reaches my / lips, and my eyes perceive nothing – I’m / greener than grass – and I die almost / of failure – I trickle with sweat…” There’s some variation in structure but by my count there are 13 lines or couplets about dying/being nearly dead, 18 times about sweating, 21 about trembling or vibrating, twelve about “subtle fire”, 10 about green grass, and 31 about not being able to speak/hear/see in the presence of the lover.There were certain stanzas that seemed interesting but which I had trouble understanding, which was frustrating when sandwiched between repetitions. There several cryptic references to pressing enter.Tallying may seem like a cheap way to evaluate a poem if rhythm and repetition are being used to create the sensation of being overwhelmed. However, getting back to the issue of the lover, I found it difficult to be invested in the speaker’s romantic asphyxiation without having any sense of its cause. Why am I reading 31 examples of the same thing when I could be exploring the poem’s other character? For me, Dowling’s repetition had a deadening effect, boredom taking the place of romantic intensity and empathy.
Saturday, July 14, 2018
some author activity: Trivedi, Collis, Braune, Ladouceur + Ayer,
Friday, July 13, 2018
above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Eric Folsom
This is the twenty-fifth
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
HOW TO GET PUBLISHED
How do we get published? All of us desperate, aspiring poets want to
know. After a long dry spell, the
question mutates and becomes: what am I doing wrong? Naturally, we want to simplify the business
and say “luck”, or tilt everything the other way and talk about “talent”. The actual complexity of getting creative
efforts out there and into public memory is just too daunting. So, perhaps we should say not “luck” but
“happenstance”, not speak about randomness like a random number generator, but
of continually coming out in the literary environment until we are seen by the
right eyes, handled by the right hands.
It’s circumstance really.
The
circumstances as I remember them went something like this. I did a reading in Toronto many years ago for
Stan Rogal, the inimitable poet, novelist and literary spark plug. The Idler Pub Reading Series on Davenport
Road, I think it was. At the time my
children were still young, and I would write sitting on the couch with them
while the TV blared Thundercats or Transformers. Needless to say, my attention span was
crap. The situation was bound to change
the form of the poems.
Having
been a fan of the legendary John Thompson, a New Brunswick poet who died tragically
in 1976, and especially the ghazals in Stilt
Jack , I began to play with couplets, writing two lines that made some
sense (almost) but not so much when paired with the next couplet. The couplets became ghazals, and the ghazals
became a series. The poems ended up
being “anti-ghazals” both as a nod to Phyllis Webb’s work (see Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti-ghazals; she
seems to have invented the term) and a wincing recognition that no one capable
of reading ghazals in Arabic, Farsi, or Hindi would have acknowledged the
resemblance.
And
I thought those poems would go nowhere.
They were too weird and too few for a book. Except one day much later Stan was talking
with rob mclennan: generous, energetic and brilliant rob mclennan. Stan said something to him about Eric’s
ghazals, which were a decade old by that time, and rob contacted me. Thanks to the incredible underground network
that rob and his above/ground press had developed, the chapbook called Northeast Anti-ghazals found its way
internationally to god knows where. Some
guy in Australia was very complimentary.
It was fantastic.
So,
dear tyros of the internet, all I know is get your arse out there and do
it. It’s about saying ‘yes’ whenever you
reasonably can, about being like the dandelion floating your poems around the
world on the wind (not that your poetry is fluffy of course….. we’re only
talking distribution here). There are
good eyes who will see you. (Like rob
mclennan.) There are great ears who will
hear you. (rob always has his ear to the
ground.) And there is above/ground
press, not just as a place to submit to, but as a model for how to build
superlative, durable and essential networks on a writer-to-writer basis. And there are some damn good poems there.
Thank
you, rob.
Eric Folsom is a poet and a longtime resident of the Kingston
area. He has published four books, most
recently Le Loutre: a Poetry Narrative
with Kingston’s Woodpecker Lane Press.
He also authored Northeast
Anti-ghazals for the celebrated above/ground press. In the summer of 1976
he worked as a bingo caller at a Conklin fairground, refining his poetry skills
by rhyming calls during the games. The unhappy bingo players made him stop.
Folsom is the author of the chapbook Northeast Anti-Ghazals, originally published by above/ground press
in 2005, and reprinted in 2011.
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