some author activity: Barwin, Nećakov, Cain, mclennan, Smith + Davis,

Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov have some collaborative work up in the Tuesday poem series; Book*hug Press features Stephen Cain as part of their National Poetry Month spotlight series; rob mclennan has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month; Mahaila Smith is interviewed in the 12 or 20 questions series; and Jordan Davis is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

new from above/ground press: A Mean, Mean Thirst, by Dani Spinosa

A Mean, Mean Thirst
poems for my friends and their books
Dani Spinosa
$5

like--
  most of us
    never even
      o-
         penned it
      quietude letting us
    rest finally
   sleep as if being awake was
    trivial as the closed captions reading
     unalive in some
      video
    we’ve both seen
  x times on
youtube or else me explaining
   zaddy
     after one or several
        beers && ok
     ciders for stephen && vodka sodas for
   dani && kate &&
      each of us wandering wondering what it’s been
         for, these
      gifts we carry
         here again and again
            in case in
                           jest in
                                    kin

(from "sequence dress," for andy weaver)

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

digital illustrations by the author

Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media. She is sometimes a professor, sometimes a web developer, and all the time a co-founding editor of the feminist micropress Gap Riot. She has published several chapbooks of poetry, several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry, one long scholarly book, and one pink poetry book. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

This is Spinosa’s third chapbook with above/ground press, after Glosas for Tired Eyes Volume 2 (2018) and Civilization (2020).

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

new from above/ground press: Mayday, by Stephen Cain

Mayday
Stephen Cain
$5

May 1, 2023
Won’t say sundown
No lightness, no levity
What makes a Canadian?
CBC songs & squibs
Lumps of lyricism
Or that we see it differently
A national imaginary or
An imaginary nationalism

May 2, 2023
Losing leaves, like losing hair
The trees & me
Small schadenfreude
The Great Creep Forward
Aspersions to the contrary
Some Klanada flags
Call the cops on “Commies”
Or mismanage the missive

May 3, 2023
The crash of dishes
Symbols & snares
Percussive aggression
Passive insistence
Red rage is coming down
Pellets against glas
Sing a song of Spring
Sakura suicide
With a cherry on top

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Note:
31 poems of 31 words, where May Day becomes mayday.

Cover design by Eric Schmaltz.

Stephen Cain lives, teaches, writes, & walks with gratitude in Tkaronto. His newest poetry collection, Walking & Stealing, is forthcoming from Book*hug Press.

This is Cain’s fifth above/ground press title, after CIRCA DIEM (1997), ZOOM (2013), Tag & Run: Canto One (2019) and the collaborative Hijinks: A Sequence from Double Helix (with Jay MillAr; 2003).

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

report: Fisher Small and Fine Press Fair 2022

So: this past Saturday above/ground press was in Toronto as part of the Fisher Small and Fine Press Fair, an event that has returned after a three-year (covid) hiatus! Plenty of (masked, mostly) fun was had by all, and I was even able to introduce the chapbook rack that Christine found a while back on one of her buy-nothing groups (honestly, it worked far more effectively than I might have considered, so expect to see it returning for future fairs). It was good to get the whole top row-plus of the festschrifts I've been putting together over the past year, able to actually sell copies of some of them, which is nice (oh, so that's what these are).

This was actually the fourth curated fair in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto (and a limited curation, given the physical limitations of the space), as librarian John Shoesmith originally founded the event around an exhibit of small press items from their collection that above/ground press happened to have items as part of (which is how I got invited). I was there for the first event (which Ryan Pratt was good enough to recap over at his blog), and even the second! Apparently the hopes is to curate a new version of the event every two years, so hopefully they can get back on that particular schedule for future events.

Ken Norris

Bruce Whiteman and Ken Norris

Christopher Patton (right) with his new above/ground press chapbook

Kirby, who radiates joy

And I was able to see so many folk I hadn't seen in moons! Why does Ken Norris (who lives in Toronto these days) look no different now than he did twenty years ago, when I last saw him? I mean, I've done numerous chapbooks of his lately (his tenth above/ground press title landed this past July), so it isn't like we haven't been in touch, but odd to think how long it's been since anything in-person. It was also good to see folk such as Aaron Tucker (with a new knife fork book title), Ralph Kolewe (who has a forthcoming Talonbook, the manuscript of which expands upon his above/ground press title), Christopher Patton (who I met for the first time, coming by to collect his copies of his new above/ground press title), Drew McEwen (should we do another chapbook? we should probably do another chapbook), Lindsay Zier-Vogel (honestly, I simply presumed we'd met years earlier at something, so it was good to finally correct that), Cary Fagan (who mentioned I'd published his stepson in an issue of Touch the Donkey, a connection I wasn't aware of), Bruce Whiteman, etcetera. So many people!

Should I mention I spent the afternoon pretending not to eat an egg and bacon English muffin? Probably not, given it was in a library, after all. Fortunately, I am very effective in my pretending. Other exhibitors included Aliquando Press, Alan Stein/Church Street Press, Art Metropole, Book*hug, Coach House Books, George A. Walker, Greyweather’s Press, JackPine Press, k|f|b, Liz Menard, Massey College Press, Natalie Draz, Nietzsche’s Brolly, Porcupine's Quill/DA, Shanty Bay Press and Wesley Bates.

Given the hour it took to drive in from Andy Weaver's house out in Burlington on Saturday morning, I secured the "final table" in the space, set between JackPine (doing some neat things I hadn't seen physical copies of for some time) and Massey College Press (college printer Kit MacNeil is clearly doing some interesting things worth paying attention to), who were doing some very cool things, including allowing the public to letterpress print upon wee postcards! I collected a small handful of publications, although not terribly much (Kirby exclaimed, when I went to check out the k|f|b table: Why are you looking? You have everything!), and even managed issue five of JUST LIKE CREAM BUT WORST that Daniel F. Bradley handed over when he wandered by (we traded publications, naturally), which includes a new interview he conducted with Alice Burdick (email him at fdriveshesaid (at) gmail.com if you might be interested in attempting a copy).

Tim Inkster explaining something to Jay MillAr, as the Right Honourable Marshall Hryciuk
prepares his own table in silence

And: sales were good enough, audience was good enough, most folk were masked, so that was all good.

Stephen Cain and Andy Weaver

And after: I even got to hang out with Andy Weaver and Stephen Cain. And the drive home? Hitting the Big Apple, of course, to collect nonsense as wee gifts for the children. I think I got them pens with different coloured inks, and some Pez. Who doesn't love the Big Apple? Scream until your mother stops the car, I say. Oh, and there's another small press fair I'm returning to Toronto for on the 24th, curated by Kate Siklosi as part of TIFA; and of course, the ottawa small press book fair in November. Might we see you at either of those?

new from above/ground press: Tag & Run: Canto One, by Stephen Cain

Tag & Run: Canto One
Stephen Cain
$4

1.

No! I am not Madame Cezanne
Nor was meant to be

Those wine bottles in your neighbour’s garden
Have they begun to sprout?

The Art of Work in the Age
Of Mechanical Oppression

A future right turn
Overwhelm your comfort zone

A lyric in flight

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
in part for the author’s participation in the TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space conference at University College Dublin, Ireland, April 25-27, 2019.
https://textsoundperformance.wordpress.com/
April 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover image by Cyan Cain (ca. 2007)

Stephen Cain is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently False Friends (Book*hug, 2017). Tag & Run: Canto One is his fourth chapbook from above/ground, following Zoom (2013), Hijinks: A Sequence from Double Helix (with Jay MillAr, 2003) and Circa Diem (1997). He lives in Toronto where he teaches Canadian and avant-garde literature at York University.

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

some author activity: Cain, Eleftherion, Robinson + Kronovet,

Stephen Cain is currently being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews, as is Melissa Eleftherion; Elizabeth Robinson now has an author site and Jennifer Kronovet has a poem up in the Poem a Day series at poets.org.

some author activity: Cain, Brockwell, mclennan, Pirie + dueck,

Stephen Cain has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at dusie; a new interview with Stephen Brockwell is now up at Jacket2; rob mclennan has a new poem up at Queen Mob's Teahouse; Pearl Pirie is interviewed over at Apt 613; nathan dueck has a new poem up at The Winnipeg Review; and rob mclennan even gets some Twitter-love from Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket)!

Neal Armstrong reviews Eric Schmaltz's Mitsumi Elec. Co. Ltd.: Keyboard Poems (2014) and Stephen Cain's ZOOM (2013) in Broken Pencil #65

Neal Armstrong was good enough to review Eric Schmaltz's Mitsumi Elec. Co. Ltd.: Keyboard Poems (2014) and Stephen Cain's ZOOM (2013) (both of which are still available) in Broken Pencil #65. Thanks, Neal!

This is actually the second review of Mitsumi Elec. Co. Ltd.: Keyboard Poems, after Ryan Pratt was good enough to review such over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

Mitsumi Elec. Co. Ltd.: Keyboard Poems
Eric Schmaltz

This chapbook is kind of boring, but in an interesting way. Maybe that's not a good way to start a review, but it's true.
    The poems in this collection are actually little visual art pieces made with a disassembled keyboard and black paint. Calling them poems is even a stretch, because there is very little that can be read; a few words and a few letters. This process violently brings the digital world into physical space, reminding us of the abstract visual quality of printed language. The page becomes a field, a space ripe for exploration.
    Schmaltz plays with chaos and order, alternately presenting Dionysian smudges and intricate latticework mandalas in an Apollonian mode.
    These pages are wry works of minimalism and the book contains no semantic content besides an ironic little note about safe typing posture and practices, hence why I called it boring. But maybe that's the wrong way to go into it -- these are meditations on the ambience of language and the tools we use to express ourselves.
    This zine should be approached with a mindset of contemplation, like a poet yogi waiting for the dance of the cosmos, perfect in its imperfections, to reveal itself in a quiet moment. It is compulsively re-readable, hypnotic like looking at a fire or the stars at night.

Zoom
Stephen Cain

This is an excellent collection of poetry for people who don't care if the words make sense. Cain plays with sound, sight, and meaning in a chapbook that harkens back to the Dada days of early modernism. He engages with sound poems by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Claude Gauvreau in a process of reverse-homophonic translation. He listens to poems that lack semantic meaning and finds words in them. It's all quite fun.
    Compare Hugo Ball's lines "zitti kitillabi billabi billabi / zikko di zakkobam / fisch kitti bisch" with Cain's "city kitty liable billy's bi billy's bi / sicko the psycho man / fish kitty bisque." The transfer from meaningless sounds into words with definitions pits sense against nonsense. Cain is a man drunk on word splitting and hollering joyful absurdities. His joxtapositions are rapid and twitchy and unexpected. The work demands to be read aloud.
    Cain is a professor at York University, where he has initiated many a student into the secrets of Dada, Surrealism, and the avant-garde. This guy is deep in the history of experimental poetry, and thus finds himself in line with innovative Canadians like The Four Horsemen, Chris Dewdney, and Christian Bok. His work strikes a balance between thoughtfulness and playfulness that is appealing even when it doesn't make a lick of sense. Highly recommended to weirdos.

some author activity: Brockwell, McElroy, mclennan, Martin, Higdon, Betts, Cain + Poe,

Stephen Brockwell facilitates a TREE Seed Workshop on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 from 6:45 to 7:45pm on French Canadian Poetry; Gil McElroy, rob mclennan, Camille Martin and Hailey Higdon (among others) have new work in the first issue of Touch the Donkey; Gregory Betts writes on M. NourbeSe Philip over at Jacket 2, "Not against expression"; Stephen Cain responds as part of the "At the desk" series at Open Book: Ontario, as does rob mclennan; and Deborah Poe and Megan Burns posted a reading of part of their Poetry Month collaboration-in-progress over on SoundCloud.

Q & A: 20 Years of above/ground press / an interview with rob mclennan on the Broken Pencil blog

Alison Lang, Assistant Editor of Broken Pencil magazine, was good enough to interview me recently on the above/ground press twentieth anniversary [photo by Deborah Poe], posted on the Broken Pencil blog. Thanks so much, Alison!

You can find the original post here.

Poet, novelist, editor and publisher rob mclennan has run Ottawa-based above/ground press since 1993. The press — which specializes in chapbooks and broadsides – celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Through above/ground, mclennan has shone a spotlight on local and national talent, releasing chapbooks by the likes of Marcus McCann, Ben Ladouceur, Marilyn Irwin, Cameron Anstee, Lea Graham and Shannon Maguire, among many, many others. above/ground’s continued existence is a testament to mclennan’s passion and commitment to indie poetry and publishing, and stands as a strong rebuttal to anyone who questions the continued survival of indie publishing. mclennan is proof: if you want to do it, you can. Take a look and subscribe.

Broken Pencil: Did you ever anticipate being around this long when you started above/ground in 1993?

rob mclennan: I don’t think there’s any way I could have seen it going this long. But honestly, I wasn’t looking that far ahead when I was all of 23. How would or could I have known? I just kept doing and making and discovering new things to attempt.

I’ve been telling myself for years that once it’s no longer fun, I’ll stop doing it. This applies equally to above/ground press, the Ottawa small press book fair (twice a year since fall 1994), The Factory Reading Series (which turned 20 years old in January 2013), the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater, Chaudiere Books, the dozens of reviews and interviews I daily post to the blog, and so many of the other things I seemingly do for so very little reward. So far, I haven’t seen a single reason to not continue doing any and all of the above. It’s all still enormously fun. I’ve been doing so many of these things for so long that I consider them essential elements of my writing process and experience. It becomes difficult to separate one from the other.

You’ve spoken in a blog post about there being a larger arc for the press – one that has correlated with your time spent as writer-in-residence at U of A, as well as the focus on local authors, new authors, national and established authors. How has your “arc” manifested itself, and how has it deviated from what you initially imagined?

I think the core ideas for the press have been there from the beginning, if not the near-beginning, and these ideas have simply expanded, or become better articulated and executed.  In so many ways, everything I’ve done over the years as editor, organizer and/or publisher has come from that initial spark of above/ground, expanding further and further out.

above/ground is known – among other things – as having an uncanny ability to divine emerging writers who seem to be on the verge of something bigger. How do you define that feeling when you choose the writers you wish to work with? Are you able to see their future “arc” of development?

I look for writing that intrigues, surprises and/or inspires. I want writing that makes me slightly jealous that I didn’t compose it myself. Arc, as such, becomes a difficult thing to define other than simply working to continue those things that I’ve been doing, and be better at them. When I was first aware of Stephanie Bolster’s writing back in 1994 or 1995, I knew she was really on to something. My chapbook offer to her was almost immediate. But not everyone that catches my eye ends up going places. But that’s okay too. One has to have faith, I suppose.

Over the past few years, I’ve been excited watching new writers develop, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to offer help in my own way to their continued development. I don’t know if I can see a particular future arc of development for anyone, but I can certainly spot potential every so often, and am willing to be a next step for someone who might really need it. I also want to be able to provide a space for risky work, writing that might not really fit anywhere else. Already for 2013, I’m publishing new works by a couple of first time authors, including Ottawa poets Abby Paige and Brecken Hancock, and Vancouver poet (and former Broken Pencil Deathmatch contestant) Jordan Abel, none of whom I’d even heard of a few months prior.

Honestly, there’s nothing more exciting than finding great work in a random journal, and that immediate impulse to see more: (does the poet have) a book I should be reading? A chapbook? And if not, how might I get a hold of them to possibly request one?

I consider a part of what I do to be completely open to new writing and new writers, knowing full well that perhaps what I have to offer is less helpful to someone more established, but, by taking on a writer’s first or second chapbook manuscript, it might be the first time their work is promoted so specifically. I would hope that a chapbook through above/ground might make it slightly less difficult for those writers to get work accepted into journals, perhaps have some readings in various corners, and even start getting that first manuscript out into the world. With chapbooks through above/ground, I would hope that Hancock and Abel’s first books then become anticipatory, for those who might not have heard of either of those writers previously.

Can you tell us a little more about the anniversary events you have planned this year?

It’s slightly too early to talk about, but I’m working on a follow-up to Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2003) to cover the press’ second decade. I’m also talking to Sean Wilson at the Ottawa International Writers Festival about doing something at the fall edition of the fest. They were good enough to host a launch for the tenth anniversary, as well as a launch for our opening salvo of Chaudiere Books titles, so they’ve been a great support. I’d say watch the website for details of events happening in August (the press’ official anniversary, which usually includes two to four new titles launched) and October (during the writers festival). Basically: stay tuned.

Are there any releases this year that you are particularly looking forward to and would like to highlight for us?

So far, 2013 includes new chapbooks by Abby Paige, Jordan Abel, Brecken Hancock, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Stephen Cain, Wanda O’Connor and Gil McElroy, among others. I produced a chapbook by American poet Deborah Poe last year, and she’s coming up to do her first Ottawa reading at the end of March, alongside Wanda O’Connor, launching her first above/ground press chapbook (I’ve been trying to get a chapbook manuscript out of her for almost a decade).

Poet and curator Gil McElroy will be launching his chapbook Twentieth as part of The Factory Reading Series’ lecture series at Ottawa’s third annual poetry festival, VERSeFest. I’ve long been an admirer and supporter of McElroy’s work, and this will be McElroy’s fourth above/ground press chapbook, going back to 1995.

Recently, I finally received a chapbook manuscript from British Columbia poet David Phillips, which is enormously exciting for me. I’ve been trying to get a manuscript out of Phillips since I met him in Vancouver in 2004. We have yet to hammer the small mound into a workable manuscript. 

~

In addition to above/ground press, rob mclennan is the author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2011, and was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include the poetry collections Songs for little sleep (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), and A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011). He’s also at the helm of Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-08 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. This fall, Chaudiere Books will publish his collection of short, short stories, The Uncertainty Principle.

new from above/ground press: ZOOM, by Stephen Cain

ZOOM

Stephen Cain

$4

Crowds

hello men hello men left it liminal

women you scale it out

bomb ball a bungle

a chasm glass toll a fire of film flimsy

hello minuscule Pluto crash

rally an adagio

Andre man sax as a flu men float boat at all

feel abashed fall jade a folly die

flu emboss

zero bad add rad day

gray lewd gig load a god dash

glue glad men Golgotha road a gland rib-eye

hello men hello men left it liminal

women you scale it out

bomb ball bungle

a chasm glass toll a fire of film blister

hello minuscule Pluto crash

rally an adagio

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

January 2013

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Zoom is a reverse-homophonic translation of sound poems by Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Paul Scheerbart, and Claude Gauvreau.

Stephen Cain is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent being I Can Say Interpellation (Bookthug, 2011).

This is Stephen Cain's third above/ground press chapbook, after CIRCA DIEM (1997) and the collaborative  Hijinks: A Sequence from Double Helix (with Jay MillAr; 2003).

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