some author activity: Boughn, Schapira, Levy, Ross, Clayton, Barton + The Peter F Yacht Club,

Michael Boughn has a YouTube channel, by the way, in which he's been posting a variety of reading videos, including himself and Victor Coleman, etcetera; Kate Schapira writes about the LA wildfires; John Levy has a poem for Stuart Ross up at International Times; Simon Brown has translated poems by Conyer Clayton into French for Revue Watts; John Barton has a new poem up  at Identity Theory; and a stranger recently sent me a photograph of this Peter F Yacht Club hat he picked up in Montreal, asking if know where the real yacht club might be. I have no idea! I would love to know,

some author activity: mclennan, Barton, Deutch, Bolster, Boyle + Niespodziany,

rob mclennan has a new(ish) poem up on his blog; John Barton has a poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, as does Amanda Deutch, and so does Stephanie Bolster; Frances Boyle has new work up at Dust Poetry Magazine; and Benjamin Niespodziany has new work up at HAD, as well as The Boiler.

some author activity: hanna, Thomas, Trivedi, Maguire, Barton, Aigen, Spinosa + Weaver,

natalie hanna has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, as do Hugh Thomas, Amish Trivedi and Shannon Maguire; John Barton is interviewed for the Chaudiere Books blog in the "Six Questions" series; Razielle Aigen is interviewed at Train : a poetry journal; and Dani Spinosa writes on Andy Weaver for Open Book.

ottawater: 15.0 : Barton, Clarke, Dolman, Earl, Graf, Massey, Pirie, Radmore + Reid

A variety of above/ground press authors (as well as plenty of other former and current Ottawa-area poets) have new work in the fifteenth issue of the online Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater, which is now available online.

Edited/published by rob mclennan, you can see new poems at www.ottawater.com by John Barton, George Elliott Clarke, Anita Dolman, Amanda Earl, Adele Graf, Karen Massey, Pearl Pirie, Claudia Coutu Radmore and Monty Reid, among others. 

If you can, why not go to tomorrow night's launch? 7:30pm at the Carleton Tavern, Parkdale Market, Ottawa. Lovingly hosted by editor/publisher rob mclennan.

John Barton named Victoria BC's new Poet Laureate

Poet, editor and above/ground press author John Barton has been named the latest Poet Laureate for the City of Victoria, British Columbia, alongside also-announced Youth Poet Laureate Aziza Moqia Sealey-Qaylow. Congratulations to you both!

Barton is the author of three above/ground press chapbooks, including DESTINATIONS, LEAVING THE MAP (1995), Oxygen (1999) and REFRAMING PAUL CADMUS (2016). See his recent above/ground press 25th anniversary essay here.

See the official press release below:

Meet Victoria’s New Poet Laureate John Barton and Youth Poet Laureate Aziza Moqia Sealey-Qaylow

For Immediate Release

VICTORIA, BC – The City of Victoria and the Greater Victoria Public Library are pleased to announce John Barton as Victoria’s new Poet Laureate and Aziza Moqia Sealey-Qaylow (pronounced Ah-zee-zah Moe-kia See-lee Kay-low) as Victoria’s Youth Poet Laureate.

Selected by nomination, the Poet Laureate serves as Victoria’s literary and cultural ambassador for a four-year term. The Youth Poet Laureate seeks to inspire and engage local youth to share their stories through both the written and spoken word, and serves a one-year term. Both are honorary positions that celebrate the contribution of literature and poetry in the capital city.

“We’re thrilled to welcome John and Aziza to their literary roles at the City of Victoria,” said Mayor Lisa Helps. “Our Poet Laureate and Youth Poet Laureate programs support and inspire the literary arts, enriching our lives and the community. We look forward to all that these two talented poets have to share.”

John Barton is an established poet and editor. Some of his 26 books, chapbooks, and anthologies include The Malahat at Fifty: Canada's Iconic Literary Journal (2017), Polari (2014), For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (2012), and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (2007).  A three-time recipient of the Archibald Lampman Award, Barton has also won an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award, and a National Magazine Award. He will publish We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, his first book of prose, with Palimpsest Press and The Essential Douglas LePan with Porcupine's Quill in the spring of 2019. Signal Editions will publish his 12th collection of poems, Lost Family, a book of sonnets, in 2020. Since stepping down as the editor of The Malahat Review in January 2018, a position he held for 14 years, Barton now works as a freelance editor, writer, and mentor. 

“As the City of Victoria Poet Laureate, I aim to broaden the local audience for poetry, to make readers more aware of the diverse community of poets in the greater Victoria region, and to provide support to LGBTQ2S poets working among us,” said John Barton. “Together, my fellow local poets and I shall hold up a mirror to the city where we live and invite the people who live here to see themselves anew.”

Aziza Moqia Sealey-Qaylow is a slam and spoken-word poet, as well as an honours graduate from Reynolds Secondary School. As the daughter of a Somali refugee and a seventh-generation Canadian, Aziza is a deeply connected to her culture and writes about the adventures of being in a mixed family. She’s an active volunteer within various parts of the community, has traveled to many European and African countries, and likes to view the world with an open mind.

"I'm really happy to have this opportunity,” said Aziza Moqia Sealey-Qaylow. “I love to learn from everyone I meet, and collaborate with open-minds."

A Call for Nominations for poets in the Capital Region was held in the fall. Applicants were required to have an established body of work (written or spoken word) and to have been recognized for notable contributions in their career. Submissions were evaluated by two peer committees comprised of representatives of the literary and poetry community. The Greater Victoria Public Library coordinated the selection process for the Poet Laureate, and the City coordinated the selection of the Youth Poet Laureate.

“John and Aziza will inspire people in our community to tell their stories through poetry,” said Maureen Sawa, CEO of the Greater Victoria Public Library. “We look forward to partnering with them to offer learning opportunities that showcase the power of words and self-expression.”

During the four-year term, the Poet Laureate is required to produce three new original works each year that reflect or represent ideas and issues of importance to the people of Victoria, and present, in-person, at significant City events, bi-monthly City Council meetings, the annual Victoria Book Prize Awards Gala, and other official functions upon request. In addition, the Poet Laureate hosts one project or activity per year to engage the community during Poetry Month in April, collaborates with the Greater Victoria Public Library on programs and workshops, and provides a year-long mentorship to the Youth Poet Laureate.

Over the one-year term, the Youth Poet Laureate will create three new works of poetry, present at bi-monthly City Council meetings, serve as a judge on the panel for the Greater Victoria Public Library Teen Writing Contest, host an event or project that will engage youth, and collaborate with the Greater Victoria Public Library on a poetry workshop for teens.

The Poet Laureate is an honorary four-year term position from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2022. The position receives a $4,500 honorarium and $1,000 of project funding per year, in addition to administrative support from the City of Victoria.

The Youth Poet Laureate is an honorary one-year term position from January 1 to December 31, 2019. The position receives a $1,750 honorarium and $1,000 of project funding in addition to the one-year mentorship with the Poet Laureate and administrative support from the City of Victoria.

Both the Poet Laureate and the Youth Poet Laureate positions are funded by the City of Victoria and the Greater Victoria Public Library.

Victoria was the first municipality in Canada to have a Youth Poet Laureate. For more information, visit: www.victoria.ca/poetlaureate.

For More Information:

Andrea Walker CollinsArts, Culture and Events Liaison
Arts, Culture and Events Office
250.361.0308

Jessica Woollard
Communications Officer
Greater Victoria Public Library
250.940.4875 ext. 346

above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: John Barton

This is the twenty-second 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. 

Weighed Down Pleasantly By Paper

What I admire most about above/ground press is what it eschews. From the beginning, unlike many small- and micro-press publishers, rob mclennan has devised a way to stay afloat without the prosthesis of external support and all it entails. He need not pay homage to the dogged beatitudes—excellence and cultural value; emerging and established; promotion and community engagement; forecasts and bottom lines—that funders expect to be observed, obediently and punctually, before the manna falls benevolently from municipal, provincial, and federal skies. He need not impress, strike a pose, or, mostly crucially, swell (though swell above/ground did).

Instead, rob’s press evinces what I consider to be true literary values, unimpaired by the straightjacket of commercial publishing that well-meaning, if not-so-prescient granting agencies buckled around his betters. Unlike many larger, more adequately leveraged and funded presses that have come and gone, above/ground is alive and well twenty-five years after publishing the first of close to a thousand titles. The key to its longevity—other than rob’s unflagging commitment—must be that the financial outputs supporting its ambitions have never exceeded its inputs. Those ambitions appear to be two-fold: to be a platform for writers wanting to publish new work and to be eclectic. The production values are necessarily pragmatic but pleasing—desktop publishing that’s ridden the giddy laser-jet waves of clipart, xerography, and print-on-demand, ably assisted by seamless saddle-stitching. rob has never migrated to the rococo tactile niceties of handmade papers and fine printing that would hunger after a largesse of capital and mean he’d have to rein in his capacious appetite for poetry. Without having ever seen the press’s financial books, I can only guess that sales are designed to cover expenditures on production and mailing costs to a maintained subscriber list. Unlike larger concerns that endeavour to provide a busy workforce with the pretence of a living wage (a wage that no officer working at a granting agency could ever countenance living on), above/ground does not appear to be designed to keep rob the personage minimally fluid (though I am sure that any net profits, however middling or small, but not streamed back into above/ground, are a welcome and appropriate feathering of his historically threadbare pockets). Instead the two currencies in steady supply are avocation and love (real literary values). Anyone who’s spent lived in or visited Ottawa knows how magnanimously rob spreads the words of his authors. Any friendly, deer-in-the-headlights encounter with him leaves the neophyte and the forewarned alike weighed pleasantly down with paper.

The direct-action nature of rob’s promotional strategy is simply an extension of his editorial generosity. Having published three chapbooks with above/ground over the arc of its history, I know. rob’s catalogue, which seems to go back and back to a barely discernable vanishing point, is ornamented with titles that he’s either solicited (including two of mine) or received on spec (including my third, which was accepted within a day—or was it inside an hour—of my having emailed it to him). Unlike most publishers, above/ground is, in the broadest sense of the word, truly “open.” Because rob’s unimpaired by what the funding gods might think (with ungracious impunity), he is willing to take small and frequent risks. He will give new authors and new manuscripts a try with hardly a hesitation. I’m sure taste does come into it, for rob has definite predilections and the erudition to substantiate them, but he seems even more inspired by the idea of creativity, as his authors choose to express it—and to support it unwaveringly. above/ground may not publish chapbooks with vellum endpapers or advertise them in avaricious magazines, but rob makes them available. And he provides each author with a generous portion of the print run in lieu of the shell game of royalties. I’ve enjoyed more pleasure out of the publication of Reframing Paul Cadmus, my most recent above/ground chapbook, than I have from many of the books I’ve published with more august, bedizened publishing houses. I was able to send it to my peers without having to worry about cost or a too-speedy exhaustion of my cache of copies. I was even more pleasantly surprised to receive serious, sometimes lengthy comment in a greater profusion than normal. The usual trickle was instead a stream. The chasm between me, as an author, and my peers, as readers, was more quickly and felicitously bridged. None of this would have been possible were above/ground press grounded on a more luxe publishing model.

It’s a lesson in survival, and rob’s betters could learn much about how to more capably serve their authors and mandates. Should all the Scotch tape and glue aiding and abetting the smoke and mirrors of Canadian publishing ever come undone under the government-coffer-exhausting weight of Trumpian tariffs, say, or the reflux of retrograde values in the external funders’ collective craw, rob and above/ground press will no doubt continue to be around to keep a barebones, transnational literature alive and lively—steadily declaiming in a post-apocalypse of near, if not total silence.

John Barton’s recent publications include Polari, Reframing Paul Cadmus, and The Malahat Review at 50. Anstruther will publish his seventh chapbook, Visible But Not Seen, later this year and Palimpsest his first book of prose, We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, in 2019. He lives in Victoria.

Barton is the author of three above/ground press chapbooks, including DESTINATIONS, LEAVING THE MAP (1995), Oxygen (1999) and REFRAMING PAUL CADMUS (2016).

some author activity: Wessels, Barwin, Barton, Dennis, Rogal + mclennan,

Andrew Wessels has a new poem up in the Tuesday poem series at dusie; Gary Barwin has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog for #NationalPoetryMonth, as do John Barton and Michael Dennis; and both Stan Rogal and rob mclennan have work online in the new issue of QWERTY.

Ben Ladouceur reviews John Barton’s Reframing Paul Cadmus (2016) in Hamilton Arts & Letters

Poet and editor (and above/ground press author) Ben Ladouceur was good enough to review John Barton’s Reframing Paul Cadmus (2016) at Hamilton Arts & Letters. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of Barton's chapbook, after Joel W. Vaughan posted a review over at Broken Pencil. You can see Ladouceur's review here.

some author activity: Armantrout, Moure, Barton + beaulieu,

Rae Armantrout has a new poem in The New Yorker; Erín Moure is interviewed over at Ploughshares on translation; John Barton has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; and derek beaulieu is interviewed by Entropy on No Press.

Joel W. Vaughan reviews John Barton’s Reframing Paul Cadmus (2016) in Broken Pencil #74

Joel W. Vaughan was good enough to provide the first review of John Barton’s Reframing Paul Cadmus (2016) in Broken Pencil #74. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

Printed 7” x 8.5”, John Barton presents, here, a sizable, not to mention memorable collection of ekphrastic poetry (ekphrastic is defined as verbal art about other art.) Each of Barton’s eleven poems printed herein demonstrates not only an intense familiarity with the visual work of Paul Cadmus, but a unique ability to transform his paintings into sensual narratives, all of which connect into a near-seamless collection that demands to be read aloud.

            For a reader generally unfamiliar with Cadmus’s work, I am surprised to feel such a visceral connection with his subjects through the dancing words of Barton’s interpretive hand. This speaks to the skill of the writer, and his ability not only to re-tell Cadmus’s implied narrative, but to develop it into an entity more than its original author conceived. This is the juice of ekphrastic poetry!

            Take, for example, Barton’s textual sketching-over of Cadmus’s 1935 “Gilding the Acrobats”: “Untouchable – For the duration, a man among many/Adept at plummeting down To earth A man up-close So ordinary/A man of ordinary looks”. Barton’s words, here, not only describe the events of the painting, but they enact them, the poem becoming acrobatic itself. A similar action marks the conclusion of a description of the 1987 “The House That Jack Built,” which reads as follows: “Kamikaze-like across his large stubborn/Shoulders while, unasphyxiated, he carries/On reading, indolent and immune to fire/Story after news story conflagrating/In flashes about him, the drifting/Tatters tampted in his damp coiled hair” [22]. The stoic eroticism of so many of Cadmus’s figures comes alive in Barton’s lexicon, perhaps even moreso in the latter than it does in the former. What results is a chapbook which must be consumed.

new from above/ground press: REFRAMING PAUL CADMUS, by John Barton

REFRAMING PAUL CADMUS
John Barton
$5 

DANCER

Egg tempera on pressed wood panel, 1945
1.5 x 1.25 inches

Sprawled in tights
On floorboards in a tiny

Square of time drafted between
Rehearsals near the end       

Of the war, the page
After page he browses so

Distracting from start
To finish, the spine

Of his book broken
His shoulders exhausted

Foreshortened by the score
He has all morning bent

His essence to, the music’s dark
Harmonies without

Remorse forcing his world in
To step with its own, as

No longer lithe, he removes
Himself, gives in, pas

À pas, to oblivion
Reading himself beyond

Men yet to return and others
He loves who never shall

The precise squares
Of time he borrows

So necessary
So seldom spared.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

John Barton has published eleven collections of poetry, including West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a Self-Portrait; Designs from the Interior; Hypothesis; Hymn; For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems; and Polari. He has also published six previous chapbooks. Coeditor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, he has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award, and a National Magazine Award. Since 1980, his poems have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers across Canada and in Australia, China, India, Romania, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. From 1985 to 2003, he worked as a librarian, a production manager, a publications coordinator, and an editor for five national museums in Ottawa, where he also edited Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada for two years and co-edited Arc Poetry Magazine for thirteen years. He has taught or given workshops at the Banff Centre, Sage Hill Writing Experience, Tree, the New Brunswick Writers Federation, and the University of Victoria. He has been writer in residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, the University of New Brunswick, and Memorial. He makes his home in Victoria where, since 2004, he has edited The Malahat Review.

This is his third chapbook with above/ground press, after DESTINATIONS, LEAVING THE MAP (1995) and Oxygen (1999).

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

Cordite Poetry Review: Robertson, beaulieu, Abel, Christie, Bolster + Barton,

As part of the collaboration between Arc Poetry Magazine and Cordite Poetry Review, the new issue of Cordite, "Oh Canada," includes work by a variety of above/ground press authors including Lisa Robertson, derek beaulieu, Jordan Abel, Jason Christie, Stephanie Bolster and John Barton, as well as work by non-above/ground press authors (as yet) Margaret Christakos, Stephen Collis, Sharon Thesen, Sachiko Murakami, Sonnet L'Abbé, Sandy Pool, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Aisha Sasha John and much much much more. Go read it now!

some author activity: Pirie, Barwin, hastain, Barton, Douglas, McKinnon, Simpson, Abel,

Pearl Pirie has a new poem in the March issue of Bywords.ca; Gary Barwin offers the fourth "first reading" of M. NourbeSe Philip's 'Zong' #6 over at Jacket2; j/j hastain responds to Jennifer K. Dick's series of essays on the fragment; John Barton has two new poems up at TRUCK, near the end of Colin Morton and Mary Lee Bragg's month curating March, as does Rhonda Douglas; Paul E. Nelson writes on Barry McKinnon; Rachael Simpson participates in the "My Writing Process - blog tour" interview; and Sean Cranbury interviews Jordan Abel for 49th Shelf.

ottawater #10 : Anstee, Barton, Bolster, Clarke, Dolman, Lea, Massey, Prevost + Young,

The tenth issue of the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater is now online at www.ottawater.com, featuring new work by above/ground press authors Cameron Anstee, John Barton, Stephanie Bolster, George Elliott Clarke, Anita Dolman, N.L. Lea, Karen Massey, Roland Prevost and Deanna Young, as well as numerous others. Happy tenth anniversary!