Jennifer Kronovet on the Commonplace podcast

above/ground press author Jennifer Kronovet (right; an American currently in Germany) was interviewed recently as part of Episode #56 of Rachel Zucker's (left) podcast, Commonplace : Conversations with Poets (and Other People), and their interview is now live! Kronovet is the author of, among other titles, the chapbook CASE STUDY: WITH (2015) (which they even discuss!), copies of which are still very much available.

some author activity: Flemmer, Polyck-O'Neill, Schmaltz + mclennan,

Kyle Flemmer has a new essay up at my (small press) writing day, as does Julia Polyck-O'Neill; Eric Schmaltz answers the "12 or 20 questions"; and rob mclennan has some new poems up at Selcouth Station.

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 4^th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7^th 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).

new from above/ground press: Sinister Queer Agenda, by Travis Sharp

Sinister Queer Agenda
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

new from above/ground press: LIMPING TO THE BIG BAD, by Beth Ayer

LIMPING TO THE BIG BAD
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

The Factory Reading Series: Jenna Jarvis chapbook launch w Ian Martin + Mia Morgan, July 26

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
above/ground press chapbook launch

for Jenna Jarvis' year of pulses
(before she leaves the country again)

with special guest-readers:

Ian Martin
+
Mia Morgan

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
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.

new from above/ground press: EGOCIDES, by Jon Boisvert

EGOCIDES
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

new from above/ground press: year of pulses, by Jenna Jarvis

year of pulses
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

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.

some author activity: Trivedi, Collis, Braune, Ladouceur + Ayer,

Amish Trivedi has an excerpt of a current work-in-progress, along with a note on the project, now up at Jacket2; Stephen Collis has a new poem up at Train : a poetry journal, as does Sean Braune; Dayne Ogilvie winner Ben Ladouceur is interviewed over at Open Book; and forthcoming author Beth Ayer has a new poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog.

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.