some author activity: Kemp-Gee, Jirgens, Kroetsch, Webb + mclennan,

Meghan Kemp-Gee has three poems in issue six of Couplet Poetry; Karl Jirgens' work is part of Jim Andrews' new Sea of Po site, and Jirgens also has new poems for Al Purdy, Robert Kroetsch, Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek over at The Typescript; Lindsey Webb is interviewed by Madeline Howard for Coveteur; and rob mclennan has a new poem up at John Stiles' How Yah Doon?

Robert Kroetsch 2020 tributes: Lea Graham, Dennis Cooley, Robert Hogg, Frank Davey, Nicole Markotić, rob mclennan + Amanda Earl

A gathering of tributes to the late poet, critic, editor and novelist (and above/ground press author) Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011) have begun to appear online at The Typescript under the heading "Robert Kroetsch 2020," and includes poems by a variety of other above/ground press authors such as Robert Hogg (see his poems here), Dennis Cooley (see his poems here), Frank Davey (see his poems here), rob mclennan (see his poem here), Nicole Markotić (see her poems here) and Lea Graham (see her poems here). The feature even includes an updated version of Amanda Earl's above/ground press chapbook The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman (originally published in 2008 and copies are still available), as well as a new essay by Earl on composing the original sequence.

Robert Kroetsch Conference this weekend : Anstee, Baker, Cooley, Markotić, Hall etc

In case you weren't aware, the 2017 Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa is this weekend: Robert Kroetsch: Essayist, Novelist, Poet. Running from April 27-30, 2017, presenters include a variety of above/ground press authors (and non-authors), including panelists, presenters and chairs Nicole Markotić, Jennifer Baker, Rudy Wiebe, David Eso, Cameron Anstee, Claire Farley, Dennis Cooley, Aritha van Herk, Robert Stacey, Phil Hall and others. I even have a couple copies left of Robert Kroetsch's above/ground press chapbook, as well as the memorial chapbook we put together for him, if such appeals. Apparently the public is more than welcome to attend, and you can see the full schedule for the conference here.

And: I took this photo of Robert Kroetsch during our shared University of Alberta Press on-campus book launch, April 2010.

some author activity: Christie, Jones, Abel, Kroetsch + beaulieu,

Jason Christie has some new poems up at Our Teeth; Philip Lanthier's personal recollection of D.G. Jones is now online at The Walrus; Stan Mir writes on Jordan Abel over at Jacket2; Jean McKay wrote on Robert Kroetsch as part of the Celebration of Canadian Poetry over at Brick Books; and derek beaulieu discusses "The horror of being a novelist."

some author activity; Trivedi, Kroetsch, O'Connor + Hall,

Amish Trivedi has some new poems up at hyperallergic; Jeremy Stewart writes on Robert Kroetsch over at Our Teeth; Wanda O'Connor has some new work up at Asymptote; and Phil Hall is interviewed over at Open Book: Ontario.

some author activity: Kaminski, Pirie, Sand, Mangold + Hall,

Megan Kaminski has a new poem at Alice Blue Review; Pearl Pirie has a new poem up at Paul Vermeersch's Sunrise with Sea Monsters; Kaia Sand has a new poem posted as part of the annual "advent calendar" at Delirious Hem; Sarah Mangold is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Phil Hall is Kroetsching the Long-Poem in spring 2016 via the Sage Hill Writing Experience.

some author activity: MacLeod, Bolster, Kroetsch + Barwin,

Kathryn MacLeod is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; both Stephanie Bolster and Robert Kroetsch are written up as part of Brick Books' year long Celebration of Canadian Poetry; and Gary Barwin has a new poem up at Paul Vermeersch's Sunrise with sea Monsters.

some author activity: Kroetsch, Earl, Schmaltz + Christie,

Robert Kroetsch gets a short write-up by Wendy McGrath as part of Brick Books' Celebration of Canadian Poetry; Amanda Earl provides a short write-up for her most recent chapbook, A Book of Saints; THE ASSEMBLY LINE OF BABEL by Eric Schmaltz opens on September 25 a the Niagara Arts Centre, St. Catharines ON, Schmaltz also has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; and Jason Christie is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

some author activity: Anstee, Graham, Poe + mclennan,

A recording of a reading Cameron Anstee did at Raw Sugar Cafe as part of a recent mini-tour was recently posted online (alongside Michael e. Casteels, Christine Miscione and Nicholas Papaxanthos); Lea Graham has a whole slew of new poems (including some epistolary piecces for the late Robert Kroetsch) up at ditch: the poetry that matters; Deborah Poe has a new poem posted as part of dusie's Tuesday poem series; and rob mclennan has a new little poem up on Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona.

Mark Frutkin reviews Clarke, Brockwell, Burke+Hall and Kroetsch over at the ottawa poetry newsletter,

Ottawa writer Mark Frutkin was good enough to review four recent above/ground press titles over at the ottawa poetry newsletter [see the original post here]. Thanks!

Review of Four Chapbooks from above/ground press

by Mark Frutkin

Selected Canticles by George Elliott Clarke
The Crawdad Cantos (Excerpts from Impossible Books) by Stephen Brockwell
Shikibu Shuffle by Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
Further to Our Conversation – Poems by Robert Kroetsch

A chapbook is by necessity a diminutive taste of poetry. A morsel of a poet’s work – a good introduction to someone you have not previously read or perhaps a reacqaintance, a revisiting with old friends.

I would consider George Elliott Clarke in the ‘old friend’ category, not literally but in the sense that I’ve read much of his poetry over the years (almost all of it, I think) and reviewed previous collections here and there (See http://markfrutkin.blogspot.ca/2011/08/book-review-17-blue-by-george-elliott.html). I would rank his book, Whylah Falls, in my list of top five Canadian collections of poetry, all-time. No other Canadian poet is so lavish with sensual detail and so bold about the physical world and the human body. And in Selected Canticles he delivers again, as he always does, giving us a marvelous slumgullion of a miniature feast, like a serving of appetizers so rich you don’t need to eat the impending meal.

Of course, Clarke always goes for the ear as well as the eye: “not even the squeal of a squall / as waves whacked rock,” or “blossoms blaze a branch.” And he can be humorous too. In ‘À Cristophe Colombe,’ he calls the Spain of Columbus’ day, “a comic-opera Empire”. One can almost picture a Gilbert and Sullivan musical based on Queen Isabella and her famous explorer. 

Of course, no one in Canada comes anywhere near Clarke’s ability to write frankly about sex – raw, graphic and straight-up as home-distilled whiskey. He doesn’t scruple to use the good old Anglo-Saxon sex words: fuck, cunt and anus appear liberally throughout these poems, several of which address the black man’s role as hard-driving lover of white women. In a sense, this becomes a trope of the payback for or escape from slavery. Clarke is always conscious of the black man’s position in our world and in history but these poems are not the least bit didactic. They’re the real thing.

No one joins poetry and science as fluidly as Stephen Brockwell. The Crawdad Cantos contains what has become one of my favourite Canadian poems. ‘A Primer for Drainage’ is from The Evangelical Handbook for Engineers, a wonderful conceit to pull together the world of the spirit and the material world of the engineer, builder, scientist. You could be an atheist and still delight in his take on God as inherent in platinum-iridium bars and krypton-86 emissions. The last few lines are so striking, I must quote them in full: “Among time and distances, he is the absolute constant, / the being that lets being be – and every culvert, / aqueduct, conduit, sluice, grate, trench and duct / merely drains the ephemeral projection of his eternal tears.” I think including the word ‘duct’ in that list is a sure sign of poetic brilliance as it resonates with the last word of the poem, ‘tears’.

There are other excellent poems here, especially ‘Parrots not in Cleveland’ (from Cantos of the 1%). Besides the fact that Cleveland, my birthplace, hardly ever appears in a Canadian poem, this poem has a humorous tone that I very much appreciate. Drinking banana daiquiris in Cleveland in March is odd enough as the subject for a poem but the poet also says he can imitate a parrot’s voice: “I’ll need a trumpet, / a trunk full of Hawaiian shirts, a pair / of holey sneakers spattered with blue paint, / a month of sunlight to give this snow the shaft”. ‘Sunlight’ and ‘shaft’ – once again, a brilliant juxtaposition that plays on the two definitions for ‘shaft’. And again, this poem ends with a striking image. But I urge you to pick up this chapbook to learn what it is.

In Shikibu Shuffle, two poets, Andrew Burke from Australia and Phil Hall from Perth, (who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his fascinating book, Killdeer) have collaborated to produce a collection of fifteen poems based on the five-line form used by the Japanese poet, Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014). Each poem here is ten lines long (with a few variations). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine who wrote what, and exactly how the process worked. In any case, the result is a kind of medieval Japanese jazz with a flowing series of riffs that sometimes connect and sometimes don’t. The musical play here reminds me somewhat of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (which was influenced more by hardcore jazz than what we now consider the blues). There’s a vibrancy and freedom to the images and their links here, in this back and forth ‘shuffle’, and sometimes the results are striking: “a Chinese dragon of smoke / wearing my dead friend’s clothes / above the marina” or “pale cuticle” (for the moon), or the exceedingly strange and suggestive “to weave submerged antlers / breathing blue at their tips”. This is a collection that can be read more than twice.

The very fine poet (and novelist), Robert Kroetsch, died in 2011. This small chapbook, Further to Our Conversation, consists of three letter-poems to friends, interspersed with three very short poems. The first letter-poem, ‘Dear John Lent’, reveals the wonderful line, “Our first cry is a poem that contains everything” and the intriguing phrase “Icarus in a car...” These actually do feel like thoughts that came to Kroetsch after a late-night conversation with a friend, a kind of soliloquy inspired by a dialogue. Kroetsch’s poetry was always wonderfully experimental and refused to hew to the straight and narrow furrows that characterize much of mainstream Canadian verse. I see him running his plough in all sorts of mad geometries across those prairie fields: ovals within ovals, spirals, secret divinatory crop circles of poetry. His sense of the comic is excellent: “Punctuation is a middle-class pretension. So is a toothache. In heaven you have to sit eternally staring at a bright light, so be sure to take your dark glasses.” (‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’) He ends the same poem with the wonderful lines: “I once travelled halfway across Spain to see St Teresa’s bent left elbow safe in a glass jar. We each write poems as we see fit. But then, what poem isn’t a relic?” (It makes me want to ask if St Teresa wrote left-handed!)

Another line in ‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’ makes light of the inevitable, and probably tells us much about what kind of person and poet Robert Kroetsch was. In four words that embody a kind of simplicity, acceptance and peace, he writes: “Death, that necessary pest.”

"poem" broadside #311: "Robert Kroetsch," by Natalee Caple

Well fuck I can’t believe you’re gone

Your deafening kindness

Your long seeded song

Seemed eternal



We fond moths read on

As you steep as you sink

Into the print and paper



But cars care nothing for culture

That last night sky you saw

I hope it was beaded with stars

Robert Kroetsch
by Natalee Caple
above/ground press broadside #311

Natalee Caple’s two most recent books are a collection of poems, spells, and play fragments titled, The Semiconducting Dictionary, Our Strindberg (ECW) and a collection of fables, ecocritical fairy tales and ghost stories titled How I Came to Haunt My Parents (Joyland.ca and ECW). She lives in Peterborough with her husband Jeremy and twins Casey and Imogen.

some author activity: Graham, Pirie, Bremner, mclennan, McNair, beaulieu

one of Lea Graham's series of epistolary poems for Robert Kroetsch is online at Atticus Review; Pearl Pirie has a new piece online at TRUCK, alongside rob mclennan, and perpetually forthcoming above/ground press author Lary Bremner; two pieces from rob mclennan's "Songs for little sleep," are online at The Offending Adam, alongside a small critical note on mclennan's two poems, and he has an interview over at Open Book: Ontario; Christine McNair has an interview over at Open Book: Ontario as well, and another at the Grey Borders site; and derek beaulieu now has a selected poems. What the...? 


Don't forget the mclennan/McNair pre-wedding SOCIAL tomorrow night, and the SPAO reading the following evening, featuring seven Ottawa poets (Earl, Pirie, Reid, Ridley, Radmore, mclennan + McNair).

And we will see you at the ottawa small press book fair on June 30th, right?

a tribute to Robert Kroetsch: a selection from his writings edited by Nicole Markotic

A tribute to recent above/ground press author Robert Kroetsch on The Capilano Review website, the second issue of their free web folio: a selection from his writings edited by Nicole Markotic.

new from above/ground press: have you learned / nothing kroetsch by Dennis Cooley

have you learned / nothing kroetsch
three poems by Dennis Cooley
$4

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2011
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Dennis Cooley grew up in Southern Saskatchewan. He has studied at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Rochester, and has lived with his family in Winnipeg since 1973. His latest title is correction line, which draws heavily on memories of family and of his life in and around Estevan. He is working on several manuscripts, including a collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Robert Kroetsch’s Further to Our Conversation

Further to Our Conversation
by Robert Kroetsch
$3

You May Not Know the Sender

This message is from you.
It says: Please do not open.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
write for submission/subscription info, c/o 858 Somerset
Street West, main floor, Ottawa ON K1R 6R7,
or check out abovegroundpress.blogspot.com

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2 & in US $) to: rob mclennan, 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7. (for paypal options, drop $5 on www.robmclennan.blogspot.com, & email me yr address at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com)

Renowned poet, novelist, essayist and teacher, Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011) [see my obit/tribute for him here] was one of Canada’s most accomplished authors. With a career spanning well over 40 years, Kroetsch received numerous honours, including the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for his book The Studhorse Man, and penned 9 internationally acclaimed novels, 14 books of poetry, and 5 books of non-fiction, essays, and exploration.

Celebrated as a leading creator of contemporary Canadian literature, his writing, teaching, and critical vision helped shape Canadian literature and culture. His works have been translated, published, and studied extensively worldwide, and he gave readings in countries as various as China, Japan, Finland, Italy, and Australia. Kroetsch taught and mentored countless writers throughout the world. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2000 for The Hornbooks of Rita K.

A Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Alberta, his most recent award was the Manitoba Arts Council Arts Award of Distinction.

“poem” broadside #305: January 9: Before Kroetsch’s visit to my meteorology class, by Nicole Markotić

thank you for boosting precipitation in Alberta. I confess I have always endeavoured to write the weather into line-breaks, wind speeds as enjambment, cirrus as infernal semi-colon, today’s high as the exact moment I read The Snowbird Poems aloud and hear you perusing Jack Spicer. The space between breaks a mutual breathing.

You begin me beginning. The Chinook stretches and reaches and pulls my exhalation across the prairies. Louis and I passed beneath Manitoba last week, when we took a cross-country detour to visit Lorine Niedecker’s birthplace and home town. We started in Windsor, drove to Chicago, then through Wisconsin, up towards Saskatchewan, into Moose Jaw, and on to Alberta. At the wheel, I quoted from Alberta, citing driving records and crocus alerts and overly coddled spring gardens. I craved myself back into the prairies, your prairies, back into provinces where Schmier and the rules that don’t make logical sense, make sense.

You remind me, when you repeat “diadem” back to me, that ancient Greek does not accommodate the word blue. How to crown the poem without a pure lambent sky? Lorine Faith Niedecker lived in a small hut by the Rock River, her mother’s breath supplying the room’s temperature, and wrote, “don’t be afraid / to pour wine over cabbage.” She is buried in the same grave as her parents, her husband’s headstone a footnote beside them. On the family stone, “Neidecker” posthumously insists on e-before-I: direction is important in weathered stones.

What is it about the grave, you ask, that institutes plot? I can only answer with Picasso blues and wavering humidity, with the idea of horizon flames on a crown of winter, and with snowflakes sprinkling over your head in the dead heat of a Calgary January. You lose yourself in disproportionate narrative, on purpose. And we smectite readers follow, determined to unbury the plot, unspell surnames, unpave the TransCanada, and unwrite the inclement page.

In between morning rain and afternoon hail, you noticed what I forget: pronunciation matters. And the invention of the telephone did change how we write.

January 9: Before Kroetsch’s visit to my meteorology class

by Nicole Markotić

July 2011

above/ground press broadside #305

Nicole Markotić is author of two poetry books, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, the novella Yellow Pages, and the novel Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot. She has edited a collection of poetry by Dennis Cooley, By Word of Mouth, has worked as a freelance editor, and has edited special issues for the literary journals Open Letter and Tessera. She was poetry editor for Red Deer Press for six years and has recently joined the NeWest literary board as one of its fiction editors. She publishes a chapbook poetry series, Wrinkle Press, which includes work by Louis Cabri, Robert Kroetsch, and Nikki Reimer. She lives in Windsor, and is working on a book of poems.