new from above/ground press: PROPOSITIONS, by Lise Downe

PROPOSITIONS
Lise Downe
$5

out of thin air and into a world of solid matter
a button on a railway platform
hundreds of thousands of magic shining swords
the surprise of signs, the real world
pouring in this afternoon where you are headed
rescued from the brink of dullness
that unbroken succession, an echo that lingers
simultaneous and sometimes a conflict of punctuation
favored by sorting
sorting

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Lise Downe grew up in London, Ontario. She studied art at the Beal Art Annex and at the City and Guilds of London Art College (England). Lise painted for many years before focusing on writing poetry. She has published four books: A Velvet Increase of Curiosity and The Soft Signature, both with ECW Press; Disturbances of Progress with Coach House Books; and This Way with BookThug. She also studied jewellery arts at George Brown College and the Ontario College of Art (now OCADU). Lise lives in Toronto where she continues to write at a snail’s pace and make small objects.

Cover design by the author

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

above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Amish Trivedi

This is the twenty-fourth 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.

Amish Trivedi : for above/ground

            I’m not quite sure how I got in touch with rob mclennan or maybe he got in touch with me— who can recall? I could probably dig back through all our correspondence, though I assume if I did, this brief note about above/ground would really be about my constant negativity regarding the world of poetry publishing, my ever-present anxiety about the world of academia, and my gnawing terror about the world we presently inhabit.

            Actually, this tiny essay is about those things, because in a way, what rob has done with above/ground and, by my last count, his six-hundred other projects, has pushed back against the structures which have made the field we’re all working in seem like a grind. rob does what so many others in our field must do, which is work for the love of it and out of wanting to promote the myriad of writers who come his way and whom he tirelessly supports in their various endeavors. In short, if you’re in with rob, you’re in somewhere good.

            And above/ground has been that somewhere good now for so long. Look through the list of chapbooks and you’ll see some absolute rare works by major poets— tiny tinkerings that rob fell in love with and had to put out. I love chapbooks already: it’s an outlet for the smaller project that maybe isn’t going to become the full, fancy book thing. But the way rob makes them, too— his love for his long-reach stapler (I assume); that stamp at the back with the long Canadian address; the covers, bright, with that old school feel of mimeograph. Always just you and rob, working together to produce this thing that he sends out all over.

            Looking back, I see our first correspondence was really me taking advantage of rob, though I hope he doesn’t see it that way. I had just published him in the second issue of a journal I was running and decided to write him. Ya know— that awful thing where you publish someone and then you hope they’ll return the favor? We rarely admit to it, but with rob, for some reason, I totally did it. Of course, in the one other tiny endeavor that I tried, beyond the journal, I included rob too. It’s what we do in this industry, right?

            Well, rob has gone way beyond a mere trade off at this point. For my one tiny bit of work, he has made me feel not so alone in this world of poor poets— a tall order, he can tell you. He’s always quick with an email, always looking for the next thing of yours he can put out, promote on social media, or just encourage you along in. If James Brown was the hardest working person in showbiz, then rob mclennan is the hardest working person in pobiz, if only because he never stops. You know he’s overwhelmed, you know we’re awful to deal with as a whole, but he never stops working because he really loves this strange little world of ours so much. above/ground is no doubt an extension of that— one project in the midst of so many other things he’s always doing to promote the writers he likes. Isn’t that kind of what this is all supposed to be about?

Amish Trivedi is the author of Sound/Chest, has poems in Kenyon, New American Writing, Typo, etc. He has an MFA from Brown and is at work on a Ph.D. focused on the poetry industry and capital.

Trivedi is the author of two above/ground press chapbooks, including The Destructions (2015) and What We Remembered Before the Fire (2018).

new from above/ground press: What was the sign you gave (a selection), by Allison Cardon

What was the sign you gave (a selection)
by Allison Cardon
$5

k. Never separate a behavior from the account the subject gives of it, for the word penetrates the act throughout.

Have you seen this richer

crown

Do you see anything

else of them but the

face

Did you never see any

sprinkled

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Allison Cardon is a Ph.D. candidate at SUNY Buffalo and edits P-Queue. She has published work in Gramma, Touch the Donkey, Full-Stop, and Jacket2.

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

the above/ground press summer sale! and today is the press' 25th birthday!

IT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY (July 9, 1993) that I launched the first two official above/ground press titles (after a year or two of a variety of titles and semi-random press names, if at all) at an event at the long-since disappeared Stone Angel Institute coffeehouse on Lisgar Street. Where does the time go, exactly?

While there are a number of other anniversary-specific schemes currently in production, I thought we should also celebrate A QUARTER CENTURY OF CONTINUOUS PRODUCTION (getting remarkably close to nine hundred publications) with a glorious summer sale!

$25 for any seven 2018 chapbook titles! (until August 15, 2018

including: Spell to Spell, Lea Graham; 1962 - 2018, Tim Atkins; Signs of Our Discontent, Arnold McBay and Gregory Betts; The Book of Mark, Amanda Earl; tattered sails (after un coup de des), Derek Beaulieu; Catalogue d’Oiseaux, Toronto — Mainz-Kastel, Aaron Tucker; Glosas for Tired Eyes Volume 2, Dani Spinosa; From Being Without Substance, Andrew Wessels; coastal geometries, Marthe Reed; po po poems, Kate Siklosi; americana, Edward Smallfield; The Cosmos, Sean Braune; What We Remembered Before the Fire, Amish Trivedi; The Landscapes Were in My Arms (figure 1), Sara Renee Marshall; The Peter F Yacht Club #26, VERSeFest 2018 special, edited by rob mclennan; CERTAIN WORDS, a septipartite structure investing the seven ideas of Hermogenes, Steve McCaffery; gravitynipplemilk anthroposcenesters, Gary Barwin and Tom Prime; PLEASURE BRISTLES, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick; snow day, rob mclennan; Go Under The Surface, Stephanie Gray; Undo, Alice Notley; muscle memory, Stan Rogal; rib and instep: honey, Rachel Mindell; SEARCHING FOR A SPECIES, Eleni Zisimatos; Gestational Trail, Adrienne Gruber; Phantom Equator, Andrew Cantrell; faux foe, kevin martins mcpherson eckhoff; and MOTHER OF ALL, Anna Gurton-Wachter; as well as issues #16-18 of Touch the Donkey!

while supplies last (like, obviously,

To order, send cheques (US orders, add $2 for postage; outside Canada/US, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

with numerous rarities/backlist titles still available as well!

with forthcoming titles by Beth Ayer, Lisa Rawn, Ian Dreiblatt, Jenna Jarvis, Jamie Townsend, Cole Swensen, Jason Christie, Allison Cardon, Melissa Eleftherion, Uxío Novoneyra (trans. Erín Moure), Travis Sharp, Stuart Kinmond / Phil Hall, Natalee Caple, Jon Boisvert, Lise Downe, Dennis Cooley, Michael Martin Shea, Jennifer Stella and Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez! (and more, most likely,

and you've seen the anniversary essays that have been appearing over the past few months? celebratory essays by authors and friends of the press including John Barton, Eric Schmaltz, David McKnight, Susanne Dyckman, Kristina Drake, Michael Dennis, Sean Braune, Carrie Olivia Adams, Gregory Betts, Marthe Reed, Gil McElroy, Ken Norris, Colin Morton, Aaron Tucker, Phil Hall, Gary Barwin, Erín Moure, Jason Christie, Amanda Earl, Stan Rogal, Eleni Zisimatos, Derek Beaulieu and Jessica Smith; more of those to come as well,

and keep an eye out on the annual above/ground press anniversary reading/launch/party at Ottawa's Vimy Brewing Company on Saturday, August 25th! readings and new titles already confirmed by Jason Christie, Natalee Caple, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, as well as plenty of others!

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS! BE AWARE THAT I AM EXPECTING THE TRADITIONAL GIFTS OF SILVER!

there is so much to come I can't even,

a selection of Rachel Mindell's rib and instep : honey (2018) translated into French

A selection of poems from Rachel Mindell's above/ground press title, rib and instep : honey (2018) has been translated into French by translator (and current subscriber) Simon Brown and included in #16 of the online WATTS. Thanks so much! You can see Mindell's poems included as part of the issue here.

some author activity: Polyck-O'Neill, Braune, Deen, Syersak, Schmaltz + Tokar,

Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Sean Braune, Faizal Deen and Jake Syersak etc all have new work in the sixth issue of where is the river; Eric Schmaltz is interviewed at the ottawa poetry newsletter; and Janice Tokar is shortlisted for the 2018 Far Horizons Poetry Award, via The Malahat Review.

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).