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.
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