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).
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