Daniel Barbiero reviews Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross' collaborative Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office (2026)

Daniel Barbiero was good enough to provide the first reviews of Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross' collaborative Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office (2026) via Arteidolia. Thanks so much! You can see the full review here, or below:

There’s a model of intertextuality that holds that every text has its double; in back of every text is another text, largely hidden but partly visible through the cracks in the first text, which in turn came into being as a response to the text secreted behind it. In many instances this second text goes unacknowledged, whether through absent-mindedness, anxious repression, or misdirection. Not so with Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross’s new chapbook Shooky Session 1: John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s Concordia Office, a collectively authored poetic sequence whose authors cheerfully acknowledge the text to which their own text responds.

To write their sequence, Camlot and Ross first chose a book from the library at the Montreal university where Camlot teaches, and then settled in at his office to write. The book they chose was John Ashbery’s As We Know. Next, they alternated between reading and writing: one would read aloud from the book to the other, who’d write while listening, and then they’d switch roles. What and how much to take from As We Know to incorporate into his own poem was up to the writer to decide.

Camlot and Ross selected a book by Ashbery as their point of departure on the strength of Ashbery’s style and the inscrutability of his meaning. Ashbery is a poet of indirection, rapidly changing topics, plain diction, and labyrinthine syntax; negotiating his particular brand of ambiguity by ear is liable to open up a broad field of meaning full of possibilities that can inspire a range of imaginative responses. And the collection’s longest poem, “Litany,” itself is structured as an interplay of two texts. It’s written in facing columns that mimic the counterpoint of two independent voices heard at once, which makes it a fitting forerunner of Camlot and Ross’s own variety of verbal counterpoint.

The chapbook is divided into two parts. Part I consists of a single, quasi-narrative poem, while Part II is made up of discrete sections that can be read as independent poems. (Each part presumably was written by one or the other of the two poets.)

Part I’s discontinuous through-line recalls something of Ashbery’s own constant jumbling and rearranging of subjects, but without his systematic evasion of reference. While the forward motion of the long poem is propelled by a sequence of events that make sense on a local level but refuse totalization into a cohesive account, the things and actions they include often come plainly into view, albeit in contexts that are themselves enigmatic. For example,

We blush before elaborately broken entablatures
of bird-dropped simultaneities,
while smoke lingers,
looms above some simple ornaments
symbolic of beginnings,
of lonesomenesses,
of roundnesses, and of slants,
of thinnesses and generalities,
privatenesses and all things,
of preludes, and of farness,
of wonderfulness and asphalt.

The setting is a smoke-enfolded, presumably classical architectural ruin, which apparently causes embarrassment to the speaker. (But why? We don’t know.). The building’s ornaments are “simple,” but once their meaning is unpacked they turn out to stand for a mounting inventory of airy abstractions that then comes thudding to an incongruous and sudden end on a hard, paved surface. We’re jolted from the realm of the Ideal to something very close to the literally concrete.

This quick-cut shift in register, which pulls the rug out from under the tentative footfalls of common sense, is supplemented by elaborate metaphors and similes whose meanings are the product of their very incongruity:

Artifice is a twist
gaping at a citadelic tree,
a thing lumbering into
the invisible garment huddling
in a bus shelter on the icy
edge of the globe, a kind of
togetherness that injures illusion.

[…] All we know is
existence is waiting for a cab, like a
woman with a baby carriage filled with
fever-stricken mechanisms
I shall never see

The poetry in Part II tends more toward the lyrical and reflective, as in this self-contained section:

Some very pretty views are ascertained.
At dusk, amidst fitful cedars,
an iota of remorse
reverberates against the nightingales.

So, I wander through each dirty street,
as fools rush into my interstices,
and as my holes dream impetuously,
Solemnly, of rich adhesions.

O Sun, I want to enjoy
your work, your shining,
and setting, and rising,
and turning everything around.

There’s a play of ambiguity here that keeps the tone evocative but undecidable. The light is dim and there’s a passing moment of regret, but there’s a suggestion of hope as well: the sun the poet wants to enjoy may just as easily be rising as setting, since “dusk” can describe either dawn or sundown, and nightingales can be heard at both times.

Sometimes Ashbery’s voice seems to come through on its own, as in this passage from Part II:

Did you ever stop to think
about that other blackened memory,
and whether it was omitted
from the agenda deliberately

or out of innocent oversight,
or perhaps because it was pre-ordained
to be omitted from the
minutes, and so had

also to be omitted from
the agenda, even though
that other blackened memory
was included, for whatever reason.

And that these memories bear little resemblance
to anything but blackened star-shaped flowers?

The subject here—the “blackened memory”–is elusive and defined only in terms of another memory that presumably came up earlier in a conversation we’re only coming to in medias res. What it is we don’t know, and how or why it would be on anyone’s agenda (and anyway, what kind of an agenda would include a blackened memory as a discussion item?) also is a mystery. And meanwhile the syntax takes several serpentine turns as the question, rhetorical or in earnest, unspools. It’s the kind of thing we’d expect to find in Ashbery.

To be sure, in reading Shooky Session 1 it might make for an amusing game to try to draw a direct line between Ashbery’s poetry and Camlot and Ross’s by looking for coincidences of imagery or diction. For example, Part I’s

You can find knowledge like that
flowin’ round the flowers.
In this poem, flowers
stand in for something else.
Flowers are code names
for wishes of different kinds.

may have jumped off from the titular image of Ashbery’s “Flowering Death,” while the “interstices” from Part II may be an echo of “the interstices of my desirings” from Ashbery’s right-hand voice in “Litany.” But such an exercise would be beside the point. In the end, Camlot and Ross’s intertextual relationship to As We Know doesn’t rest on simple appropriation or direct commentary, but rather on the less predictable, and more inventive, ground of inspiration. What they’ve written stands on its own, and provides pleasures of its own besides.

new from above/ground press: Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office, by Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot

Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office
Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross
$6

Toasted church knowledge
is a snapdragon donkey gift,
if you think about it.
You can find knowledge like that
flowin’ round the flowers.
In this poem, flowers
stand in for something else.
Flowers are code names
for wishes of different kinds.
For wishes of lava ears,
and for wishes of rabbits 
having outbursts of thumping
Sex Music. Sex Music
refers to sex music
itself, not to the whole other thing,
but to the event of sex music itself, 
and to the event of sex music 
flowin’, thumpin’ and flowin’ 
into itself.
All this must be as
familiar to you as a pancake person
who comes to your house
purportedly for brunch
but truly to blow dust 
off the drum of living, 
and then to drag your complete luggage set
all the way to the pacific
airport, so it can soar
across the earthworks puddle.


AUTHORS’ NOTE ON THE TEXT

December 6, 2022. Stuart Ross has driven from Cobourg, Ontario, to visit Jason Camlot in Montreal. They have a lot to catch up on, so they go to the university library to select a book. In the PS 3000s they find the books of John Ashbery, whose work is usefully rich in diction and vocabulary, and appropriately incomprehensible. They decide to go with As We Know. In Jason’s departmental office they sit and alternate between reading to each other from As We Know and writing while listening to the other read. They have each used listening as a method of writing poetry for years, but until now they had never before collaborated on listening poetry into existence together. 

Listening poetry is a creative audile technique, a method that works to transform a particular way of listening to something—usually an already published literary text (but it can be anything, really)—into poems. The poems, in this case, were composed in two notebooks with Shooky, the popular KPop character from BT21, on the covers. (In the BT21 universe, Shooky is a mischievous little cookie who loves to pull pranks on his friends.) One of the Shooky books was large and one was small. For each session of listening poetry, Jason and Stuart would read to each other and write poems in one notebook, then do the same in the other notebook. The size of the book informed the size and nature of the poems that were listened into existence. They borrowed as much or as little as they chose from the source texts.

This chapbook presents the poems written during the first of seven listening poetry sessions that Stuart and Jason held between December 5, 2022, and December 18, 2024. It is “Shooky Session 1: John Ashbery, As We Know, 5 December 2022, Jason’s Office” from the larger manuscript THE SHOOKY SESSIONS (A Litany).

This chapbook is set in Goudy Old Style because CRT Electra was too expensive.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jason Camlot is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000), What The World Said (Mansfield, 2013), and, most recently, Vlarf (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021). His critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford, 2019) and the co-edited collections, Collection Thinking (Routledge, 2024), Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2023), CanLit Across Media (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), and a recent jumbo special issue of English Studies in Canada on “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” Jason is director of the SpokenWeb research network that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. He is Professor of English at Concordia University and President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE).

Stuart Ross has published 23 books of fiction, poetry, and memoir/personal essays, most recently the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Coach House Books, 2024), the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022), and the story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022). He has won the 2023 Trillium Book Award, the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize, the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2010 Relit Award for Short Fiction. Stuart teaches poetry at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and has been writer at residence at Queen’s University and University of Ottawa. He runs the 1366 Books imprint for experimental fiction under Guernica Editions and the Feed Dog Books imprint for surrealist poetry under Anvil Press. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

This is Ross’ fifth chapbook with above/ground press, after ESPESANTES (2018), NINETY TINY POEMS (2019), BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS (2023) and AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories (2025). above/ground press also produced the festschrift Report from the Ross Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 in 2022.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

The Factory Reading Series: A Night of Too Many Poets, May 31, 2015

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

The Factory Reading Series presents: A Night of Too Many Poets

featuring readings by:

Eric Schmaltz (Toronto)
Julia Polyck-O'Neill (St Catharines)
Dale Tracy (Kingston)
Andy Weaver (Toronto)
Carl Watts (Kingston)
ryan fitzpatrick (Vancouver)
Deanna Fong (Vancouver)
Cameron Anstee (Ottawa)
Jessi MacEachern (Montreal)
Jason Camlot (Montreal)
+ philip miletic (Waterloo)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Sunday, May 31, 2015;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Eric Schmaltz is an artist who works with text & sound.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill is a curator, visual artist, writer, and co-curator of the Borderblur Reading Series in St Catharines, ON. She is a currently doctoral student in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, and holds an MA in Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts from Brock University as well a BFA in Visual Art and English Concentration from the University of Ottawa. Her research examines historic and contemporary conceptualisms in Vancouver visual arts and literature.

Dale Tracy has her doctorate from Queen’s University, where she studied contemporary poetry. Currently teaching contemporary literature at the Royal Military College of Canada, she is engaged in Kingston’s arts community, reading at poetry events and arts festivals and collaborating in community theatre productions.

Andy Weaver's third book of poetry, titled this, will be published by Chaudiere Books this Fall. His two previous books, Were the Bees and gangson, were nominated for Alberta Book Awards. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at York University.

Carl Watts is a PhD candidate at Queen's University, where he is writing his dissertation on national and ethnic identities in twentieth-century Canadian literature. His poetry has most recently appeared in The Dalhousie Review and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2014. He is looking forward to riding the Megabus all the way to New York City next month, when he will join the Canadian Poetry contingent at the Bryant Park Word for Word festival.

ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. He is the author of two books of poetry: Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) and Fake Math (Snare, 2007). With Jonathan Ball, he is co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac, 2014). With Deanna Fong and Janey Dodd, he works on the second iteration of the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca), originally spearheaded by Susan Rudy. He is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University where he works on contemporary poetics and the social production of space.

Deanna Fong is the author of Butcher's Block (Pistol, 2008). She is also PhD student at Simon Fraser University, where she sifts through the recorded conversations of other poets from 1959 to 1989, so ask her if you want some dirt on your favourite authors.

Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press and is pursuing a PhD studying Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015).

Jessi MacEachern is a PhD student at the Unversite de Montreal, where she studies the feminist poetics of modernist and contemporary writers. She received her MA from Concordia University in Creative Writing. Her poetry and criticism has previously been published in CV2, Lemonhound and Matrix.

Jason Camlot is the author of four collections of poetry: The Animal Library, Attention All Typewriters, The Debaucher, and most recently, What The World Said. His critical works include Language Acts (co-edited with Todd Swift) and Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including New American Writing, Postmodern Culture and English Literary History. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford. Camlot is poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series (DC Books), and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University.

philip miletic is a writer, dabbling in a little bit of vispo, and is currently in his second year of his English PhD at the University of Waterloo. His work includes the pamphlet silver, the chapbook world 1-1 co-written with Craig Dodman, a short story chapbook and the birds sing, and a forthcoming chapbook from wordsonpages called mother2earth. He lives in Kitchener, ON.