Jay Miller reviews Lillian Nećakov's 3¢ Pulp (2022)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Lillian Nećakov's 3¢ Pulp (2022) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Lillian Nećakov is a sharp-witted, empathetic, and really cool human being. Her Mansfield Press poems, Hooligans (2011), introduced me to Mos Def’s Mathematics in a time of my life when I was listening to everything I could get my hands on of conscious rap-inspired songwriters like k-os and Buck 65. It sort of blew my mind.

The majority of her work I am woefully unfamiliar with and today is my attempt to rectify that lack of familiarity by reviewing her 2022 above/ground chapbook 3¢ Pulp.

Funny enough, she might be the only Canadian writer I can think of who bears a diacritic on the C in her surname, so seeing the cent symbol in the title of a chapbook of hers sort of makes me think of that. Is it a little inside joke about being Nećakov, perhaps, or am I reading too much into it? It’s probably actually something relating to philately.

I believe I was around to witness the work-in-progress for her 2021 collection, il virus, published with Anvil Press under Stuart Ross’s imprint A Feed Dog Book. The poems were published on social media during the 2020 lockdown in Toronto and widely shared and discussed if I accurately recollect. I look forward to revisiting those poems in an actual review someday soon.

But for the time being, let’s dive into the chapbook at hand.

The cover design is her own, and the inside of the chap has a ferocious pink flyleaf, front and back.

The first poem is preceded by an epigraph by Diane di Prima, an American beat poet, which reads: My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind..., a line from the third stanza of her poem “An Exercise in Love”.

The first poem opens with a vivid setting of the scene:

    When Birds Were Just Birds
    for those who were...

    1

    Remember that time we were just kids
    and so many of us were still alive
    and we watched Lawrence of Arabia naked
    in our small apartment on Isabella

It’s a poem about nostalgia and a kind of reminiscence in the form of an ode to her friends.

A beautiful line occurs several spaces below:

    and sometimes we’d remember old streets
    we lived on with brothers as subtle as lumberjacks
    and we sat up late listening to records
    on Steve’s old portable, a bottle holding
    down the vinyl so it wouldn’t skip
    we were Trotskyists and sometimes Partisans
    but only for a minute
    mostly we were poets in our tiny kitchen
    and Yonge street
    where voices and faces and the horizon
    all came and went like snow
    was enough

Then the poem concludes the next page over:

    and we were just kids
    and we never thought we’d end up
    we never thought we’d end up
    orphans

You couldn’t ask for a better closing line to an opening poem. Nećakov’s staying force, sense of dramatic build-up, and absolutely nailing the delivery is the same Nećakov I recall from all those years ago seeing her read at The Grad Club, where she read poems such as “Why?” and “Boneshaker” (the name of the bicycle on the cover of the Mansfield book, as well as of her former Toronto reading series).

More than empathetic, I have always found Nećakov to be sentimental. It’s a quality lost on most writers, I think. With the depth of her emotion and her undeterred ability to read the room with every poem and enunciate accordingly, it’s no surprise Boneshaker lasted as long as it did (2010-2020).

Jim Smith (a writer who knows the true meaning of love), said in response to Nećakov’s shuttering the series, “It was the very best, curated by the best, read at by the best, attended by the best! It will never be bested, and on behalf of the readers and the read-to, you are the best! Thank you for the incredible loving effort it was.” Smith and Nećakov go way back, of course (and I’m pretty sure is mentioned in the opening poem of this chap, “two friends named Jim”, in fact).

So that’s what this book is about, I sense. Three-cent, perhaps being a Canadianism for threepenny, speaks to Nećakov et co.’s Brechtian ambitions as young poets in Toronto in the seventies, etc. These are poems about friendship, celebrating what made every person unique, the grassroots atmosphere and intellectual era they shepherded into the 21st century, and so much more.

They are poems but could equally be considered tangible historical record for a period of time stretching two or three decades that has been abundantly documented yet haphazardly archived, that of the late 20th-century Toronto arts and culture, I mean; so many mementos and souvenirs in so many exhibits, documentaries and interviews, to which Nećakov has added a humbly sentimental slice of her own.

From the poem labelled simply “2” the next page over:

    Remember when birds were just birds
    and not a thousand ways to wish
    for the body to stop being broken
    and we cradled our books like dying girls
    because there were never enough words
    or skin to explain what we yet did not know
    and some of us got married
    and some of us got punched
    and we wandered the streets shadow to shadow
    under a softening sky
    while the oak trees creaked and moaned the blues
    all the way down Gloucester
    where we ate pizza and talked about god and
    sometimes Kurt Schwitters
    and we tallied up how much we owed Charlie
    at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library
    for all those damn books we kept buying
    and we wrote our childhood dogs into every ending
    and sometimes our thoughts were as scattered
    as grasshoppers
    and we borrowed jars from Carlo the waiter
    in an attempt to collect every last one of them
    and hurried home to listen to their divinity

Every poem begins with the word “Remember”, sorta how David W. McFadden used to do it, borrowing the technique from Georges Perec, but interestingly putting the verb in the imperative, absent the singular first-person subject pronoun. It’s an intimate invitation to revisit the past with her.

The fifth poem opens with this incredible hook: Remember how it was before we met our heroes / each day a museum, I can’t help but linger on the opening lines, only to speed through the rest of the poem and arrive at the end too soon to prevent heartache:

    and we remembered that one day we would sit Shiva
    one day the tether would break
    one day we’d remember how easily we forgot

This opening poem is 7 in total, in fact, but afterwards, the poems begin to have titles again instead of numbers but never shift in tone:

    Zero Sky
    for Gary Barwin

    Remember telegrams and long-distance operators and that time they asked
    Beckett if he had any new year’s resolutions and he said;
    resolutions colon zero stop period. And how I cut my hair and we drove to
    Hamilton in Shirley’s Reliant K for Beth and Gary’s wedding. [...]

This is Nećakov’s contribution to the Beat tradition, something that has always held a special place in readers’ hearts, I imagine. And she is true to the spirit of the letter, really. Toronto’s poetry scene really was a beat-like movement, in its own way, although the movement maybe transformed into an era as background characters gave space to the lead actors and the world stage lurched forward through time.

It is bittersweet to read Nećakov’s poems here, and realize simultaneously how fortunate we are to get this inspired series of anecdotes, with all the names and places sprinkled throughout like we know them as well as her, and she lets us, and how we will never have another generation of poets, so brilliant, so self-reliant, so unfettered, so raw, and so talented, ever again. For a book so brief and light to the touch, it nearly brings a tear to my eye just to hold it and read quietly in my apartment’s warm and cozy solitude of afternoon weekend silence

Villanelles
after Mark Laba

Remember Mark Laba standing in the crow-black, in the crow-black eyes of Goya, always, standing, in the front rooms of John and Peggy’s, above the tailor shop while the Queen car lured 5 am doorways into sleep, standing in the Harpo Marx grins of slaughterhouses, in the 24 hour Freshmart on Church street, standing, carving villanelles into Thursday’s corned beef while the rest of us dreamed punk jesus swinging from the power lines. Remember too, those beautiful boys in stilettos with painted mouths, standing, waiting on the crow-black hearts of monsters, standing, in the jerk-off alleys behind the butcher’s, standing on unsteady legs, like spooked colts. Remember walking north, then south, and always ending up just west of the darkness but east of the light. Remember how every book was a holy cross, a bus out of here an un-hexing, a long nights’ journey into the sun’s holler. Remember decades later, standing together in two different cities, standing, on the shores of permanent wartime, surrendering to all those poets humming in their crow-black coffins.

I read this poem and feel momentarily speechless. I don’t expect most people to relate. Even though, as a reviewer, I should probably at some point slip in a sales pitch for the author at hand, if you haven’t already read any Mark Laba, him and Nećakov are really the take-home points of this review here.

When you’re done reading, go find their works; you won’t regret it, and better yet, you’ll know why I can’t help but shut up and share this poem. It is so Mark Laba. What a prize. All these poems are so good, but this one especially speaks exactly to everything I was saying above. I guess we can just leave it at that.

And John is none other than jwcurry, who also captured the scan of the chap’s cover used in this review.

It’s like Stuart Ross said in his Book of Grief and Hamburgers; I’m paraphrasing: sometimes you catch yourself grieving in the past, present and future tense, and you don’t even know what for.

The number of poets Stuart has introduced me to, on paper and in person over the years, Lillian included, is simply too many to count. Coming from a completely separate generation myself, I know the poets they remember are beyond too many, and I think that’s why, when you stumble across a quiet little black-and-white chapbook such as 3¢ Pulp, hiding its hot pinkness right behind its grayscale cover, you begin to understand the ethos of the group.

It’s not a clique. You’re allowed in. It’s a generation we’re in the process of losing one-by-one, and only a poet like Nećakov could pin down exactly what that feels like and how to lay it down in poems for everyone to reminisce.

The next time I'm travelling and someone asks me what Canadian literature is, this is what I’m gonna tell them it’s all about. Lillian Nećakov is walking-living-breathing Canadian literature. Or, in a word, to quote Jim Smith: Lillian Nećakov is the best.

some author activity: Boyle, Smith, Inniss, Robinson + Rogal,

Frances Boyle has new poems up at talking about strawberries all of the time; Mahaila Smith has new work in the Spotlight series; Scott Inniss has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; Ben Robinson has a poem up in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; and Stan Rogal is interviewed over at Pinhole Poetry.

Jay Miller reviews Jessi MacEachern's Television Poems (2021)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Jessi MacEachern's Television Poems (2021) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

This [past] weekend in Montreal, Jessi MacEachern, author of the 2021 above/ground chapbook Television Poems, will be launching her latest work Cut Side Down. It’s a party and you're all invited.

Her publisher, Invisible Publishing, describes Cut Side Down as “a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory,” and could, by an elongated stretch of the imagination, be seen as a technical extension of the approach used for Television Poems, so now seemed as good a time as ever to proverbially crack the thin stapled spine of this deliciously purple book of poems.

On her Instagram, MacEachern has an excerpt of a review by Manahil Bandukwala in Quill & Quire for her début poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks, also 2021, and also with Invisible Publishing, which reads:

MacEachern taps into what poetry does best, which is to bypass logical explanations and dive into an emotional core that here sings of strength above all. Whether the poems aim to draw attention to the interrupted nature of a gendered existence, or uncover a beauty to be embraced in deconstruction, the collection brings a new dimension with each read.

These poems, each of which captures a TV episode wherein poetry is featured in a manner the poet herself describes as “ekphrastic,” speak to me. Granted the suspension of disbelief (Coleridge!) as to why this review is not appearing sharply at 7 am for my newsletter subscribers, quite honestly, I was enjoying a triple feature of Mrs. Doubtfire, My Spy, and No Time to Die with my partner till the wee hours of the morning last night, and am now throwing aspirin and coffee back listening to FKJ do some funky stuff on the keys in “Live From The Greenhouse” to take my time and give Television Poems the attention it deserves.

Suffice it to say, media rules everything around me. Curiously, MacEachern writes: “After all, television is also an art form. It has no national month (as far as I know); of course, this may be because it doesn’t require the publicity.”

When I think of TV, I can’t help but think of Twitch City, a two-season CBC show from 1998-2000 starring Don McKellar and Molly Parker, and, at the time of writing, is available to watch in its entirety on YouTube. Don McKellar’s character, Curtis, is (more specifically than a TV addict) a Jerry Springer addict, although the show uses the stand-in of Rex Reilly for Springer in the series’ fictional canon. He is a fanatic and his unwavering love and admiration for Reilly exemplifies the surrealism of Toronto existence in entirely unexpected ways.

If Montreal is Canada’s ekphrastic city par excellence, Toronto is very much Canada’s surreal city ipso videlicet demonstrandum.

Bref, Jessi MacEachern may very well be to ekphrasis what Don McKellar is to surrealism. Hold my pineapple cookies.

The first poem in Television Poems frames an episode of Taxi. I'm a big fan of Judd Hirsch personally (a big fan of Numb3rs actually), but I never watched Taxi—lots of big names and, more importantly, lots of acclaim. The Wikipedia for it says “widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time” and I’ll have to take the internet’s word for it for the time being because I am an uncultured swine who has literally always never seen that thing you’re talking about. Pretend there’s a salient New Yorker comic between these two paragraphs to illustrate my point about competing listmakers of movies and physical TBRs.

The remarkable thing about MacEachern's poems, however, is that each page has a TV-like window filled with words on every page in the chap:

Photo of first poem in Television Poems, to demonstrate the "TV-like window" that appears in each one in the book.

 

A lot of full episodes of Taxi are available on YouTube but I am only seeing a clip of Danny DeVito for the episode cited for this poem.

On that inspiring note, this poem is full of bangers:

    flowers sun themselves
    looking costs little more / than opportunity
    Into the garage rushes the not-yet-famous actor. Next rushes studio laughter. It sets off a chain reaction. Andy should have known this.

Magnificent. No notes. Jessi MacEachern knows ball.

But I’m not gonna shy away from writing about poems if they’re based on shows I don’t know, that wouldn’t be right.

The next poem is “She Was a Maid of Cleopatra” based on Inside No. 9’s “Zanzibar” episode. I have quite honestly never heard of this show, either, and it’s been on for the last 10 years.

The whole episode is in iambic pentameter and is directed by David Kerr, who’s also done a dozen and a half or so episodes of Mitchell and Webb.

The poem: all iambs. And I’ve gotta hand it to her, they are as sumptuous as calembours:

    You’re stressed. I’m not.
    Daddy, get the knife.
    I am sleeping now.

I have to go back and re-read it two, three times to bask in it, recite it with an RP accent in my head where the emphasis hits correctly. Stunning. I’ll try not to speak like an Islander now.

The following poem is about the pilot episode of Little Fires Everywhere. This series (I strongly dislike the nomenclature “mini-series,” quite frankly, but it’s eight episodes long) is based on the novel of the same name by Celeste Ng and stars Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. In the first episode of the series, so much happens I feel unqualified to paraphrase. But MacEachern’s poem here is titled “The Words are Purposes” which has a special allure to it, being a poem:

    The artist’s daughter twirls
    in the lens of the camera
    held by her mother’s leaning out

    The window is white clapboard
    the boy is a white child who asks
    about the line of poetry in the air

    I came to explore the wreck

    One wall turns blue
    the white mother makes an attempt
    places her hand in the child’s hair

    Repulsion is hair burnt black compulsion
    is the exact measurement of 125 ml
    of white wine

    The television star pulls in sympathy
    he is the favoured parent

    The television star maintains his standing
    in white briefs the artist’s daughter
    is stopped by the size of it

    The house it is a magnificent testament
    to generational wealth

    The artist’s daughter accepts the whipped
    potatoes from the older brother
    she is stopped by the size

    The bird in the throat

Then, in the box in the upper right-hand corner of the page:

    The answer comes
    with blaring sirens.
    What is shown has not
    happened yet. In the
    next moment is the
    present disbelief. Guilt
    sparks a second riot.
    The spectacle is the
    closeness.

Little Fires Everywhere has all the complexity of an ancient myth but is set in 90s Ohio.

The thing MacEachern gets about ekphrasis and TV is that these poems work like Easter eggs: if you’ve seen it, know it, and then read the corresponding poem, it can be a portal of discovery. A sweet treat. Some poems I can only appreciate at the level of craft because I employed the same technique for 90s PC games for my 2023 chapbook Virtual Lands: MS-DOS Series, with a slightly different execution, but the intents overlap enough for me to get where she’s coming from as a writer.

Do they not have a similar effect, though, if you haven’t seen the series? I can’t make good on my word in the midst of writing this review (in media media res) by copping out saying, “I’ll totally watch it now!” but does it not make you want to see it now that you get this extra layer? Read the novel, watch the series, read the poem: you are now a completely different person. It’s not necessary, we owe the poem nothing, but the possibility lingers. What else is on? Don't flip the channel.

The remainder of the chap (spoiler alert) delves into the following series for a trove of poetic souffle: Sex and the City, The Leftovers, Lovecraft Country, Call My Agent, ER, Mad Men, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gilmore Girls, The Get Down, Transparent, Buffy, Parks and Rec, Roseanne, Dawson’s Creek, Breaking Bad, Dickinson, Simpsons, Deep Space Nine, Better Things, Bob’s Burgers, Ramy, Fargo, Avatar, and finally West Wing.

So, take a show I’m most familiar with and dissect it, shall we? I choose The Simpsons, naturally (she actually has 2 Simpsons poems in this chap). I grew up with them, in an era where most kids’ parents wouldn’t let them watch grown-up shows like that. I never saw the issue. I remember once getting judged by my parents for sneaking into the basement to watch an episode of Barney & Friends in 1999 (never again); and I get it. Compared to peak Simpsons, Barney was not good brain food. It's like Robin Williams said in Doubtfire: don't play down to kids, just play to them. It’s like the 90s TV equivalent of that scene in Ratatouille where Remy teaches Émile about taste. And MacEachern, for all my faults, undeniably has it.

Towards the end of her book, MacEachern writes a Simpsons poem for the episode “Behind the Laughter,” a VH1 parody episode.

How can I not share it? I’ve already printed two of MacEachern’s poems above. I can only resist the urge by writing my thoughts: this is the perfect fan service poem, it incorporates lore while depicting a non-canon episode, while also making room for the dénouement of the episode taking place at hand, and pays homage by way of relying on classic Simpsons tropes like casually dropping crossword-like words mid-dialogue: Gates were closed to the father. / That night, fate wore a cummerbund.

Literally a word I heard Bill Hader use in a clip this morning I saw on Instagram, describing his younger self as looking like Charles Manson. Which then leads MacEachern to what I consider the pinnacle of the poem: Gin, evergreen cash, piles of loose caviar. It perfectly encapsulates the episode and the series all at once. I exhale deeply before concluding my review. I have to.

You may remember me from such poems as...

    Take a Penny, Leave a Penny

    The father is weeping
    while the son receives a shoulder massage,
    a manicure, a foot rub and says yes.
    Learn the secrets
    of rising and falling.
    Swing then rock, rock then swing,
    dissolves into musical argument.
    The dream was over.
    The town in Somewhere, USA
    was put on hiatus. As a young female artist,
    begins the young woman. She is
    cut off by the television,
    always the parental figure. Was the dream
    really over? It was.
    Gates were closed to the father.
    That night, fate wore a cummerbund.
    Backs were turned. But is it
    really over? It is. The red braids lift.
    Will things stay the same? Gin,
    evergreen cash, piles of loose caviar.
    The clown is not the father
    but he is embittered and old.
    Behind the streamers, the family rises
    and falls. The clouds,
    the opening shot,
    Somewhere, USA.

Then, in the bottom right-hand corner of the page:

    We are overly familiar
    with the wife from the
    very beginning. The
    daughter has a face
    streaked with saliva,
    not her own. It’s meta,
    the way real life enters
    the television script.
    Firehouses of respect.

In my ultimate fantasy crossover, my friend Shawn Berman and Jessi MacEachern would do a crazy collab. It would go so hard.

Because, at the end of the day, this chapbook represents a machine that Jessi MacEachern has invented, in the sense that it has a mechanism: pick a show, find poetry literally mentioned in it, and turn that episode into a poem, and don’t forget to add the poem-within-a-poem. Ostensibly infinite in potential.

I was watching Deep Cover the other day and Jeff Goldblum literally quotes Delmore Schwartz, one of my favourite poets of all time, mid-conversation with Laurence Fishburne. I totally freaked out. So it occurred to me: you could always break the rules and reinvent it, include movies for example, and expand the possibilities, truly without end.

I look forward to reading Cut Side Down. Jessi MacEachern is a gem. In an alternate timeline where Elon Musk didn’t acquire Twitter, this review would have been live tweeted, minute by everloving minute. But if they ever invent time travel, I would gladly go back to 2021 to do so. It was a gorgeous read. Thanks for tuning in.

some author activity: Boughn, Mohammadi, Rogal, Reid, Skrabalak + Smith,

Michael Boughn has a new poem up for National Poetry Month, over at the Chaudiere Books blog; Khashayar Mohammadi has a new write-up at Etcetera; Stan Rogal and Monty Reid have poems in the new issue of Pinhole Poetry, and Reid also has new work up at talking about strawberries all of the time; Ryan Skrabalak has new work in Noir Sauna; and Mahaila Smith is interviewed by Myna Chang.

Jay Miller reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this particular title, after Pearl Pirie reviewed such via The Miramichi Reader. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

From Holler (2012):

    Snow

    Every tree
    a birch
    in winter.

I read my old review of Holler in Literatured’s archives and find allusive words such as Whitmanian, Plathian and Plath-like, and the worst offender among them, housewifery, repulsive to the ear, eye, and sense.

What did I know, at the ripe young age of 19, about Whitman, Plath, or the domesticity (or absurdity) of being a hausfrau?

Whitman, arguably, sure, and Plath, I had certainly run into amongst the university shelves if not the public library. But it’s that last one that really did me in.

I find one salvageable morsel from this more-than-decade-old review, the excerpt I used from her work that still haunts me, (above; a Nelson Ball-like joke that smiles upon the competence porn of botanical poetics) and move on to flipping through Alessandro Porco’s introduction, in Deportment (2018), to her selected works, to get my bearings for this review.

And what do I see in Porco? Whitmanesque, Plath, and housewife.

I can’t help but disagree. Carl Watts had a review in rob mclennan’s periodicities a few years after Deportment was published and wrote something to the effect that on several grounds, Porco doesn’t seem to demonstrate what he says he appreciates about Burdick’s past or current work:

“2016’s Chore Choir, with Kingston’s Puddles of Sky Press, for instance, is a pocket-sized, two-page poetic-prose offering that seems like a more clipped and yet more irreverent iteration of the poetics of Holler’s “Mahone Bay rhapsody.” Pleasure Bristles, a chapbook coauthored with Gary Barwin and published by above/ground in the same year as Deportment, disperses Burdick’s tactics further, raising questions about Porco’s conception of a gradual move toward accessibility while also justifying the editor’s selections by further permuting Burdick’s recognizable forms and splicing them Barwin’s.”

And I published her poems in my 2022 zine, poets against fascism:

    Honking bodies

    Honk once if a homunculus

    is jamming in the city core

    yelling freedom into the feathered

    bodies of city birds. The central

    premise of the vaunted naifs

    is immunity bleeds out the weak,

    as if that’s a good thing. Pillows

    plump up in cardinals’ mouths.

    A crested red bird catches light

    as she flies past stained glass.

    I open a door and an eye peers in,

    a warning to scale down

    expectations, accept the dome

    of the golden mean, tunnel

    below the yellow brick road.

I’m sitting here with a tower of books looming over me, remembering how earlier today, I had experienced a lapse in judgment. I thought Alice Burdick had a book out with Gaspereau Press, because Nova Scotia, and I couldn’t find it in my Gaspereau pile. It’s because it was underneath her 2025 publication with no name or title on the cover, just a line drawing of El Yucateco hot sauce, A Holiday for Molecules (2019).

But I’m only as smart as my reviews make me out to be. I see in Porco something that reminds me of what John Metcalf said of critics echoing one another on In The Village of Viger. Just because you repeat something doesn’t make it so.

So today, I want to veer away from repeating what others and my younger self have said for want of more original reflection and approach Alice Burdick’s poetry for the first time again after so many years: no pretense, no comparison, no assumptions, no garbage.

Let’s just get into it.

The first poem is dedicated to Mary Pratt. Pratt is a painter, who lived with her painter husband Christopher Pratt, according to Wikipedia, very much framing their relationship in rural Newfoundland as part of her paintings, which also included many everyday household objects, to paint a scene.

Let’s not get sidetracked, let’s read part of the poem together (it’s a three-parter):

    It’s a wonderful pain
    for Mary Pratt

    1)

    A window in my arm,
    blood and jello. Jar on
    the windowsill, fat red light.
    Mirror is a little bit of help,
    rather unacceptable.
    A lush, expensive decor -
    I could barely wade through
    the carpet. [...]

In the acknowledgements section of this chapbook, she writes that this poem (a two-parter) and the one after it (the other-parter, but actually a second poem) came after watching documentaries on Mary and Christopher (also a painter).

The first half of the Mary poems ends with this assertion: “[...] Here, in this place, / I’m the only one who can rule.”

The second half opens with a courageous tone:

    2)

    There’s an ease in the beginning.
    I will always be who I was,
    but I don’t know what that will be.
    Life is a self-portrait - it is interested
    in being done. [...]

I have thoughts I don’t know whether I’m as courageous as these resounding lines sound to say aloud. But I refuse to repeat. And no need anyways, for what she says is very straightforward: life is a self-portrait, as in, every person is a painter in front of the easel of their own existence. It is interested in being done, and forgive me, Alice, and other readers, because I can’t help but hearken back to what Porco mentioned in his introduction about the painful event of her mother’s tragic passing (her mother was visual artist Mary Paisley who, after enduring years of several, severe illnesses, took her own life in ‘94).

So she sees this documentary about Mary Pratt and finds affirmation for life in her portrayal, as though suicide were not a rankling heirloom of a notion but merely something that happens to other people. Alice Burdick’s poetry can be very frank.

But I don’t want to err into the territory of assumption by assuming that, despite acknowledging the inspiration for this poem, the poet herself is the speaker of the poem. It sounds much likelier that it is Mary, in fact: “[...] Life is a violent affair / of primrose paths. I’ll shuffle off / with those who worked. Maybe / one day I’ll be seen. I cannot hope / beyond my own satisfaction. / I hope I reach, but will not care / about your joy.”

Isn’t that a marvellous way to say a thing? “I hope I reach” beyond her own satisfaction; “but will not care” about the joy of her artwork’s viewers. Their joy is beyond her satisfaction; she paints for herself alone. It is a bold statement and unique to her person—a fantastic first poem.

Then, the second poem begins:

    You did it my way
    after Christopher

    Aesthetics are managed by direction -
    put this here and it is much better.
    A tunnel of disturbing balance.
    Amused contribution -
    a control that always asserts.
    Truth and fiction work together.
    Especially the fiction, because truth
    is never believed. [...]

I hope you sense the tension in my expression and my hesitation to overquote her poems, because they so clearly speak for themselves with an effect I can neither emulate or deconstruct. But Burdick here is self-aware of her relation to the subject and the speaker of the poem, slightly different from the Mary ones before, where it was Mary all the way.

Then, the end, to not leave readers hanging, but not give away the middle of the poem:

    [...] I’m not suicidal - bing bang, wharf.
    Sleep, however, forever -
    that is that, left, fine.
    We’ll leave it there.
    It doesn’t bother me.

It’s hard to tell who the speaker of the poem is talking to, because it feels like she is embodying his persona. Meanwhile, he is simultaneously talking to himself in front of a listener, Mary, but as a way to prove his point, opposite the effect of hers: you can totally commit suicide, he says, “bing bang, wharf.” But he doesn’t see it as an existential threat. He wants to avoid the discomfort I didn’t cite above, but occurs between start and finish: “A wheel turns, and we don’t / take each other seriously. [...]” He wants to resolve conflict; he doesn’t want to talk about suicide.

You know that meme, “there are two wolves inside you”? Christopher and Mary Pratt are two such wolves for Alice Burdick. These poems make such a great opening to this latest batch of her poetry, because any dialogue between two opposite characters, to me, borders on the infinite in possibility. It is borderline mythological. I may also be a bit of a sucker for inspired verse, especially when the inspiration is a wife-husband duo of Canadian painters.

You may also be relieved to hear they divorced in 2005.

What’s the rest of I Am So Calm about? Where did the title come from? Is it unassuming or all-encompassing, neither or both?

There is a poem in here that she describes in the back of the book as being written after she and her younger brother met their older brother for the first time (“On the end of the first reunion”). It's touching. The poem captures a delicate bouquet of emotions: closure, hope, excitement, mundanity, unexpectedness, gratitude, and a whimsically familiar sense of solidarity. As a would-be enjoyer, I’ll leave it to you, reader, to acquire a copy if you’d like to check it out at your local library or through above/ground press.

I continue reading and am humbled by the lassosnap wit she corrals words with. In general, critics overcompare, but Alice Burdick is simply masterful.

There is a poem in here that riffs off of Lorine Niedecker’s “Thomas Jefferson” that’s very good, but I won’t get into here to make myself scarce on comparison, as well as to leave some joys unusurped for those inclined to seek it out on their own. It would make an excellent subject for a future review, too (I never said I would eschew speculation).

Finally, there is a poem about ham: “Spiced ham street party.” It’s five stanzas and concludes the collection but it follows two other poems I could readily call my favourites of the bunch (“Reaction time” and “The bed book”). Read the middle stanza with me:

    The best way to prepare for the apocalypse is to lasso
    the pantry. Imagine the taste of cold war meat. Imagine
    that. The hard ham of dollhouses, chipping teeth.
    Develop your project more, ham, to be considered
    for the grant. Form wings to fly closer to the heat
    lamps. Fly the fondue pot to the edge of the volcano.

Funny, uncanny, brilliant, bizarre. What’s not to love?

Karl Jirgens reviews Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Typescript

Windsor, Ontario writer, editor and publisher Karl Jirgens was good enough to provide the first review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) over at The Typescript. Thanks so much! You can read Jirgen's original post here. As he writes:

Penn Kemp’s latest poetry collection, Lives of Dead Poets, is published by Above/Ground Press, 2025. The cover features images by Penn Kemp’s father. This publication features rob mclennan’s utilitarian design with colour cover and black and white guts. This book offers a series of homages to influential writers who have died. As great literary figures depart, there are resonances. In this brief chapbook, echoes go back 50 years to the 1970s, including the City of Toronto, Coach House Press, Victor Coleman, A Space, the Canada Council, Bronwen Wallace, Fred Wah, George Bowering, audio recordings, Kemp’s archives at McGill University, and P.K. Page’s visit to the Kemp’s residence on Toronto Island. Resonances include Toronto’s Harbourfront,  Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, Robert Creeley, John Ashberry, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Gwendolyn McEwen, the City of Cairo, Sound Operas, the City of Vancouver, Robert Hogg, bp Nichol, GrOnk, Underwhich Editions, the Music Gallery, the Glenn Gould Studio, Sound Poetry, and London’s WordFest. All these people, places, and events resonate along with Penn Kemp’s sense that she was lucky to come of age within such a grand poetic milieu.  

This collection features homages to diverse dead poets while offering an elegiac tribute to past authors who left meaningful impressions on our literary worlds. Penn Kemp’s open stylistics inform these tributes while posing many questions. Are we waving while we are drowning? Why is meaning blurred? Why are possibilities opened? Why is meaning un-fixed? Kemp plays with the building blocks of language. Meanings shift, and become multi-valent, malleable, polysonic, polymorphous, polysemous. Words build and lead to other words, meanings mutate, gears shift, while the line with the lion lying with the lamb goes on the lam. Kemp develops her own signs, her own language. Lexical uncertainties become her style. Doorways open into strange new worlds, open ended, multifarious, rife with free morphemes, rich with latent meaning, and lush with occasional licentious lexicons. Kemp’s style provides an abundance of multiple meanings, language runs freely dialogical. We are granted simultaneous senses of complexities, depths, and layers. With reference to Jack Spicer, Kemp speaks of Rimbaud and says;

read Rimbaud instead and lie

            with the lion on the lam to lie on it,

                        no lie!— loose

occupational hazard—

            pelt, spelt

                        and all played out.

*

Is Kemp echoing Roland Barthes’ (1967) essay, “The Death of the Author,” where he says that the meaning of a poem is not fixed, because it is interpreted by each reader? Or, does Penn Kemp find a greater influence in Derrida, not Barthes? Does each reader hear and see a plethora of wonders? Are these mythologies or writings degree zero (which consider the arbitrariness of linguistic communication)? Does Penn Kemp introduce us to multi-dimensional linguistic spaces? Are we met with subtle or overlooked characteristics which can lead to new insights? Without a doubt. In any case, Kemp hands us a lion in lieu of a line. Are we met with convolutions of the personal and the universal? Are we confronted by undying texts versus human impermanence? I say, yes. See here. Hear for yourself. This is a brief excerpt from Kemp’s poem “Die Verse”;

As if. What matters. As if. What’s left.
As if. We have only our elegies. As if.
Even the need for elegy. As if remembering
and inventing—invenio —as if.
As I come upon. As I discover.
As if in passing through this vale.
As if memory’s world is
as if trudging up sludge,
As if the word that springs to
mind is devotion, as if, despite
the mess, life’s unholy
business forever left
unfinished.

Penn Kemp weaves us spells of language. Makes magic. Bewitches. Casts spells. Which wood have we entered? Witchwood? She leaves linguistic traces. A trail of bread crumbs. Alert readers will find pathways leading to pleasurable open spaces, or strong silences. This writing features multiple layers, meanings and perspectives. In “Alphabet for Ashbery” Kemp says;

Words in proximity to one another
take on another meaning…What you
hear at a given moment is a refraction
of what’s gone before or after.

 Glorious clumps of crimson berries, brilliant in long
September light. Sorbus domestica, a glow
from that prolific rose family. Mountain ash.

“Rowan is the tree of power, causing
life and magic to flower. Not to be
forgotten, set aside, or ignored”—

Pssst! except by the emerald ash borer
that does not attack our rowan,
itself the too-bright green pest—

*

This collection acknowledges various significant periodicals and small presses, including, The Typescript, The Malahat Review, Boneshaker Anthology, Texteditions, Brick, Insomniac Press, Moonstone Press, Above/Ground, plus Penn Kemp’s essay “An Ecology of Intimacy” (https://poets.ca/npm22-blog-penn-kemp/ ). The acknowledgements recognize significant poets including Robert Creeley, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, Robert Hogg, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Wayson Choy, Les Murray, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, bp Nichol, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades, Joe Rosenblatt, Robert Kroetsch, and Ellen S. Jaffe, among others. All of these authors were engaged in the fine art of being. These acknowledgements cover a period from the 1970’s to the present and address years of creative energy. So many heroes are gone now. Friends. One by one, they depart. Leaving voices, memories, wisdoms, and chasms. Penn Kemp’s collection provides a tribute to these and other creators.

You should know about Penn Kemp’s poetry and activism. She has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication (Coach House, 1972). Penn Kemp has long participated in Canada’s cultural life. She’s had roughly three dozen books of poetry and prose published, as well as seven plays and multimedia works, plus collaborations (for example see; www.riverrevery.ca). Penn Kemp served as London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate, and The League of Canadian Poets’ “Spoken Word Artist” (2015).  In addition she is acclaimed as “a foremother of Canadian poetry”. In case you haven’t noticed, Penn Kemp is one of Canada’s national literary treasures. Her recent poetry collaborations include “Intent on Flowering,” https://rosegardenpress.ca/intent-on-flowering/ and her anthology for Ukraine titled Poems in Response to Peril, co-edited with Richard-Yves Sitoski, https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril. Penn Kemp’s latest collection of sound poetry, Incrementally, text and album, can be found at https://www.hempressbooks.com/authors/penn-kemp, and www.pennkemp.weebly.com, plus, www.pennkemp.wordpress.com. Kemp has spoken these words for you and for me. Read these readings and writings. Read these pleasures of the text!

Jay Miller reviews Gary Barwin's Seedpod Microfiche (2013)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Gary Barwin's Seedpod Microfiche (2013) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of this particular title, after Scott Bryson reviewed such over at Broken Pencil, and Ryan Pratt reviewed same via the ottawa poetry newsletter. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Seedpod Microfiche: a half dozen poems I received last year from rob mclennan, dated August 2013, and written by Gary Barwin.

The cover and back feature line drawings of faceless individuals bearing stethoscopes in an outstretched hand, a grandma-type figure on the front and a Lord Byron-looking type on the back (under a prominent $4 price tag), turnt away from the device being placed under his left clavicle. The title and author name appear in a lovingly unassuming serif, one word on each line, with title case capitalization, and author name all on one line, roughly 6-8px smaller. Stark inkblack on yellow.

The first of six poems has literary resonances from the first line. Yet, I turn away from them to take what’s left without allusion and nostalgia, not to be a literalist or purist, but to appreciate the imagery for what it is rather than what may or may not indirectly imply or illicit: a grass blade, it begins.

The thing about Gary Barwin is his affinity for assonance. There are a handful of other Canadian poets who sometimes pull off what he’s doing on this single page (and if you’re an optimistic judge, even myself, by inadvertent imitation to some extent). Albeit, it’s this rhythm that yanks you into the rut of a groove that combines the sounds of the words with the images it evokes.

Take a look at the logo for my blog, for example. For a minute, Leigh Kotsilidis and I had discussed whether or not to use ol’ timey medical texts (and microfiche!) to achieve the sort of dark academia vibe I was weighing in my head for the branding of this site. I’m glad we didn’t end up there per se, but you have to agree it is a vibe that exists. It’s the same aesthetic as the line-drawn figures on the covers of Barwin’s chap here in my hand right now. Collage removed from the chaos of collage, just a paparazzi flash of clinical press clippings removed from their historical context.

When you hear the title of the chapbook revealed in this opening poem, then, it all sort of clicks in the nebulousness of it all, without feeling like equivocation of any kind: seedpod, microfiche of twilight/a dewdrop observed, a cobweb/a weed-wrapped tongue or treetop.

The second page over, the dissonance encroaches one step further into your experience of reading it for the first time. The words slightly change, one line off, one syllable off, one noun replaced by one verb, but an evocative one, one that might appear with a red squiggle in your word processor or draft email message: the sewn seed is dropped twilight/microfiche an observation tower for wings/weeds, a rupture of the tongue. The mystery does not reveal itself even as it unfolds.

Next page: now lines are more noticeably moving to form a sextet where before there was couplet or triplet, and the ersatz of sounds, nouns and syntax takes on a new valency or prime order. What is the algebra that reverse engineers Barwin’s paperweight enigmas? Their unassumingness certainly does not warrant the impression we need to don the tinfoil hat of Pascalian curiosity to investigate. Let the puzzle remain unsolved. It is not cryptographic, but cryptic for the sake of beauty, not for the sake of being hammered out for good. Format adds square brackets here, as though instructional or journalistic.

Fourth of six poems: seed is the mitosis of sleep. Reminds me of a Nas lyric: I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death. What is a mitosis? Something to do with mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell? Cytology, the part usually followed by cell division, from Ancient Greek mitos, thread, synonym karyokinesis. Division of a cell nucleus in which the genome is copied and separated into two identical halves. An older dictionary (my beloved Annandale) offers a briefer picture: a somewhat complicated process.

Fifth poem, finneganation nearly complete, wake in progress: the truck, only four, asks/what else would stars do but constellate?

Then, further down the page: the way a scientist follows/an atom’s breath//love like a stethoscope/with neither ears nor heartbeats.

The final and sixth poem, perhaps the circumnavigation, the all-the-way-rounding off of the last decimal place in this irrationally derivated equation of a poem sequence: dusk on the owl of the tongue, it proffers.

And I was right: a stethoscope whose end/is its beginning/and whose beginning/is also twilight.