some author activity: Crosby, Witek, Chang-Richardson, Smith, Tucker, Holmes + Young,

Gregory Crosby is interviewed over at talking about strawberries all of the time, as is Terri Witek; Ellen Chang-Richardson is interviewed by Leila Marshy at All Lit Up; Pete Smith is in the Canadian Poets Series over at Peripety and/or Tronies; Aaron Tucker and Michael Holmes and Derek Beaulieu all have new work up at NewPoetry; and Geoffrey Young has new work in the Spotlight series.

some author activity: Boyle, Konchan, Smith, Reid, Kearney + Scroggins,

Frances Boyle has a poem in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; Virginia Konchan has a poem up at Poets.org; Pete Smith has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, as does Monty Reid, Rae Kearney, and even Frances Boyle, as well; and Mark Scroggins has a new poem up at Merion West.

new from above/ground press: Some Failed Eternity, by Pete Smith

Some Failed Eternity
Pete Smith
$5

PREROGATIVE

We gather under the banner of plurality & wait for
trickle down—as if we was a pyramid, I a dividend

As residual tickles pleasure down our collective
past is, we declare, an open & shut mummy

If it’s all the same to you, with your penchant
for song, we’ll take the descant & run

Kingdom come reigning down over Boswell Field—
one end of the panto horse unzipped a wicked grin

A ghazal does not give room for us to stamp
our authority, lick our prerogative, frank our maleness

We lack lustre but make up for it with
shine—always the reflection never the source

Vertigo, he said, is the only way to go. Vortex,
she said, we have the horizontal & we’re holding

One gender, solo, created an onanian agenda
kept the minutes for years but slid into as usual

We lather under the banality of plura—there’s
safety in numbers, but First Kings is torture

As one who has sired but never harboured, seeded
but not enfleshed, I’ll assume the position. Outside

At the tap-tree of osmosis we hold our breath
to be self-evident, enough for one constitution

A host of feathers in a down of Pentecost
flaming imposters burn us at every turn

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Pete Smith lives on the unceded land of Tk’emlups te Secwepémc. He has published poems, reviews and essays in the likes of jacket (1st series), Crayon, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Alterran Poetry Assemblage, the Fortnightly Review, Capilano Review, et al and the book Bindings with Discords, 2015, from Shearsman which collects six long sequences. He was short-listed for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, 2015, Malahat Review’s Open Seasons Award, 2017 & Arc Poem of the Year, 2023. Recent ventures into translation, from Osip Mandelstam’s poems from the winter of 1933-4, are in Snow lit rev #s 9 &10. He has three previous above/ground chapbooks & works in Touch the Donkey, periodicities & G U  E S T #23. Much gratitude to rob mclennan.

This is Pete Smith’s fourth chapbook with above/ground press, after Strum of Unseen (2008), A New Love/An Aching Stone (2016) and S i n g ... d e s p i t e (2019).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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

some author activity: fitzpatrick, Ballard, Jahn, Armantrout + Smith,

ryan fitzpatrick has a poem online at We Did It!; forthcoming author Micah Ballard is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Ben Jahn has a new poem up at Hobart; Rae Armantrout has a new poem in The New Yorker; and Pete Smith has a poem online at Arc Poetry Magazine.

2023 #AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) readings : day four of five: Beaulieu, O’Reilly, Izsak, Qi + Smith,

Furthering this week’s thread as part of the above/ground press thirtieth anniversary as an adjunct to this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair, today’s penultimate post wonders if anyone is even catching these? I hear these events are pretty exciting, albeit expensive. Is everyone at home simply pretending that none of this exists? It’s nearly spring, you know. Isn’t my birthday coming up as well?

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, Silence, is forthcoming from Sweden’s Timglaset Books, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, was published by Toronto’s Coach House Books. Beaulieu has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students, the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for this dedication to literature, and is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award.’ Beaulieu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University, is Banff’s Poet Laureate, and the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian poet; he teaches creative writing at The University of Texas at Arlington. His nine collections include Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Beir Bua Press, 2023), Boulevard (Beir Bua Press, 2021), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), BLUE (above/ground press, 2020) and Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017). His poetry appears in over one hundred journals and anthologies published in fourteen countries, including Another Chicago Magazine, Anthropocene, Cordite, The Elevation Review, Identity Theory, The Madrigal, New World Writing Quarterly, Trasna, Westerly and Wisconsin Review. He is the poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.

Emily Izsak lives and writes in Toronto, ON. Her poetry tends to combine surreal imagery, linguistic play, and formal experimentation. Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House Organ, Cough, The Steel Chisel, The Doris, and CV2. In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Her first full-length collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem, was published by Signature Editions in April 2017. She has published two chapbooks with above/ground press: Twenty-five and Never Have I Ever.

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She has received support from organizations such as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working on more essays and poems in conversation with this work.

“Note: Focal Point came out in October 2021, but Jenny is aggressively bad at making videos (in her own words) and sent this one from earlier that year.”

Pete Smith. Born in the English Midlands, then moved to Kamloops in 1974. Spent a working life supporting folk with intellectual plus psychiatric disability to find a place in the world and trying to help the rest of the world see the person in each of them – a task each generation must take up anew. Poetry published in a dozen chapbooks (above/ground, Oystercatcher, Wild Honey, Poetical Histories, and other fine presses), sundry magazines, and Bindings with Discords, 2015, from Shearsman. Reviews and essays on writers such as Alice Notley, Lisa Robertson, Lissa Wolsak, W D Snodgass, Keston Sutherland, Sharon Thesen, Barry MacSweeney, Trevor Joyce, John James can be found in such places as Agenda, The Gig, Crayon, Capilano Review, The Salt Companion to John James.  Recently preoccupied with translating Osip Mandelstam’s poems from the winter of 1933-34: some published in Snow 9 and 10. First of a series called Translation Suites appeared in Guest No. 23, edited by David Dowker.

 

new from above/ground press: S i n g ... d e s p i t e, by Pete Smith

S i n g ... d e s p i t e
Pete Smith
$5

Winter
            Gold out of gold
            along alchemical contours
            beneath the compass
            a few degrees off human.
            dna  words as beacon
            across the deep articulation
            of dwarfed graffiti
            outside fucktown.
            An aspirant crossing the lake of fire;
            a geologist
            in a flickering fern enclosure
            an angular altar;
            a fat branch
            beyond
            the narrow Christ.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

The painting in the cover photograph is the smallest panel of an untitled triptych by Lyn Richards, 2017-19. 30 x 36”  76 x 91cms (at widest point). Oil on panel.

Pete Smith has published two previous chapbooks with above/ground press, Strum of Unseen (2008) & A New Love/An Aching Stone (2016); others with Kamloops Poets’ Factory, Wild Honey Press, Eire, Oystercatcher & Poetical Histories, UK; essays & reviews in print & on-line yon & hither. Shearsman Books, UK, published a collection Bindings With Discords in 2015. He lives in downtown Kamloops beside a creek & behind many trees. 

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Pete Smith

This is the thirtieth 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. 

25 & Counting

Nearly Too Much is the title of an early critical book about J.H. Prynne.  When you puts down $65 for a year's worth of chapbooks & by August 31st you've received 43 + three issues of Touch the Donkey (a neat little quarterly mag that comes out quarterly, imagine!, Jan, April, August right on time) + some broadsides & The Peter F Yacht Club anthology #26, well it's both Nearly Too Much & Not Nearly Enough: the former in trying to keep up with the reading, the latter in cost.

I had first stumbled across the small-press world through Peter Finch's extraordinary survey of everything he could lay his hands on in "Small Press Scene" in his mag Second Aeon. The names of the presses signalled their distance from mainstream: Curiously Strong, Strange Faeces, Transgravity Advertiser, Sixpack, Gaberbocchus Press, Baron Samedi.  It was to these presses & mags like Grosseteste Review & Great Works that you came to find a living tradition of restless folk wanting to create  more than museum exhibits.  I was, however, a provincial kid  with no contact with poets who was only looking in on that small press world & starting to seek that kind of energy in his writing but was also working on his 'museum' skills.

Somehow I disconnected from all of it. A switch of continents & if you will, of consciousness brought that exploration to a temporary end.  Recently I described it to a friend thus: "must have been the late 90s when I'd returned to writing poetry after my 'alien abduction' had kept me away for 15 or so years. They took me to their mothership called the Church of Holy Fingerwagging but eventually my agnostic angel came to my rescue." 

The second wind of poetry brought me in touch with poets through readings at the local college, Earl Birney, John Newlove, rob mclennan come to mind, & connection with local poets through Warren Dean Fulton & a fruitful few years of connection to the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. Internet connections took me many places & to publications & readings in England & Ireland in particular but, except for Kamloops Poets' Factory, ksw's W & poems & reviews in The Gig, nothing in Canada.

Enter above/ground.  "You'll know quickly if he wants to go with it & then it will appear surprisingly soon after that."  It did. Strum of Unseen in 2008. I found rob easy to work with & its 'industrial look' echoed Writers Forum chapbooks in England which was a bonus for me. Connection with above/ground I discovered did not end with the chapbook in hand.  The 12 or 20 question interview soon followed (which I treated way too flippantly & would like to see disappear, but I guess that is me some of the time, nervous to acknowledge how vital poetry is to me) & invitations to the Dusie Tuesday poem (not the Rolling Stones song) & to Touch the Donkey.  I don't know what took me so long to finally subscribe to above/ground. I'm late to the party but now I have this box containing everything I've received since 2015. I've even read some of them!  I regularly grab a couple for my coffee house trip.  And feel a bit more connected.

I see the mclennan poetics as L=i=v=i=n=g.  All else follows: as simple and as difficult as that.

Pete Smith: Born & raised in the English Midlands, emigrated to the interior of BC in 1974.  Worked with/for people marginalized from birth by intellectual, behavioural & mental health challenges.  Wrote in the margins of that working life. After a long wrestling match with poetry he acknowledged defeat & began writing again circa 1990. Has since published essays, poems, reviews, a chapter in a book of criticism, chapbooks and a poetry collection gathering six longish sequences. Uncountable thanks for publishing &/or invitations to read to the late William Cookson, kamloops poets factory, Randolph Healy, Peter Riley, John Tranter, Keston Sutherland & Andrea Brady, kootenay school of writing, Nate Dorward, Ted Byrne, David Dowker, Kevin Nolan & Lissa Wolsak & CCCP16, Peter Hughes, rob mclennan, Peter Quartermain, Mona Furtig & Harold Rhenisch, Simon Perril, Andrew Levy, Tony Frazer, Jenny Penberthy, Peter Philpott, Michael Boughn & Kent Johnson. It is still a blast.

Smith is the author of two above/ground press chapbooks, including Strum of Unseen (2008) and A New Love/ An Aching Stone (2016). A third is forthcoming.

Jeff Low reviews Pete Smith's A New Love/ An Aching Stone (2016) in Broken Pencil

Jeff Low was good enough to provide the first review of Pete Smith's A New Love/ An Aching Stone (2016) in Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the review here. As he writes:

A New Love/ An Aching Stone is, contextually, pretty clear from the get go. The cover introduces the text as a somewhat fractured spirit: partial photos of two men are arranged side by side, yet separated by a triangular wedge of negative space. Their half-smiles align but do not meet in the middle. The dialogue is frustrated and I haven’t even flipped the thing open yet. The title page reads: “A double-cento out of Yehuda Amichai Mahmoud Darwish.” The former was an Israeli poet and the latter, a Palestinian poet. And so, the text’s political backbone surfaces. Throughout the text, Pete Smith examines the correspondence of Israeli-Palestinian art and identity with a whisper of futility. “Poetry isn’t poetry / because of the wall. / Which exile do you want?”

A New Love/ An Aching Stone is quick to set up circumstantial boundaries. But there is plenty of poetic ambiguity throughout, rest assured. The speaker laments the loss of identity both individual and collective: “The dust is my conscious, the stone my subconscious: / a heavenly horizon … and a hidden chasm / which wasn’t even good for thorns and thistles / in the emigrant’s night.” History is clouded by dust and dark convictions: “Perhaps I’ve been here once before, / the road of invaders who want to renovate their history, / make again a new love / over an aching stone.”

Pete Smith’s writing is strong and produces a clear poetic vision — a vision of fragmented political and cultural histories. And, in doing so, A New Love/ An Aching Stone remains wholeheartedly empathetic.

new from above/ground press: A New Love/ An Aching Stone, Pete Smith

A New Love/ An Aching Stone
A double-cento out of Yehuda Amichai & Mahmoud Darwish
Pete Smith
$4

Let's go as we are:
wills patched with many patches
and my song needs to breathe:  poetry isn't poetry
because of the wall.
Which exile do you want?

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

Pete Smith: Born mid-century in middle of England. Became an ex-non-pat in 1974. Has lived in Kamloops area of BC since then. Is almost ready to write from that place, meanwhile writes from meetingplaces with poets, artists, photographers, composers, rogues & rascules of different ethnicities, genders, aesthetics, eras etc to discover who else he might be. Has published in USA, Ireland, Canada, England & in the wherever of on-line. A scatter of chapbooks, essays, interviews & reviews plus one preposthumous book, Bindings with Discords, 2015, from Shearsman (UK). No academic record of his existence. A New Love/ An Aching Stone may be his most important & is certainly his most impotent work. Thanks for asking, rob mclennan.

A New Love/ An Aching Stone is Smith’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after STRUM OF UNSEEN (2008).

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

some author activity: Earl, Moritz, Smith + Gunnars,

Amanda Earl has a new poem up at The Steel Chisel; Rachel Moritz is interviewed over at Speaking of Marvels; Pete Smith is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Kristjana Gunnars is interviewed as part of a series of interview with former writers-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

some author activity: Earl, beaulieu, Barwin, Anstee + Smith,

Amanda Earl collaborates with Ikenna Onyegbula; derek beaulieu does a short write-up on a poem by bill bissett as part of the "Singular Encounters : : First Encounters" series over at Coldfront; Gary Barwin has a new poem posted up at h&; Bardia Sinaee wrote an essay on the work of Cameron Anstee for The Town Crier; and Pete Smith has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog.

some author activity: Hall, Smith, Hajnoczky, Weaver + Schmaltz,

Phil Hall has a new poem up at the Flat Singles Press blog; Pete Smith has a new poem up at "A Festschrift for Tony Frazer"; Helen Hajnoczky is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Andy Weaver guest-posts over at generic pronoun with the essay "Robert Duncan: Reading as Divine Insurrection"; and Eric Schmaltz has a new essay in the "On Writing" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

some author activity: Blouin, Pirie, Earl, Smith, Norman + Barwin,

Michael Blouin has an essay in Amish Trivedi's "Where Do You Write, My Lovely?"; Pearl Pirie participates in Amanda Earl's "One More Thing"; Amanda Earl has some new visual poetry up at Our Teeth; poems by Pete Smith and Peter Norman are now online as part of the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2015 longlist; and Gary Barwin has a new poem up at h&.