new from above/ground press: Scientia, by Jordan Abel

Scientia
Jordan Abel
$4

Oecanthus ladon

All colour terms are reduced, cut short, not the usual
length. Acephalous: without a head. Those muscid ad-
ditions that give the glandular structure that branching
apex. Abrupt or hidden. Rubbed or scraped. The third
abductor extending past the honeycomb of the op-tic tract.
The tapering surface made white like a siphon.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jordan Abel is a First Nations writer whose work has been published in CV2, Grain and Canadian Literature. He is a contributing editor for Geist and a former editor for PRISM international. His first collection of poetry is forthcoming from Talonbooks. Visit him at www.jordanabel.ca.

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.

some author activity: Anstee, McKinnon, mclennan, Landman, eckhoff, Hall + Bowering,

Over on his mighty blog, Cameron Anstee (briefly) discusses a couple of things, including above/ground press, and his poems in the new issue of ottawater; the first of a four-part interview with Barry McKinnon, conducted by rob mclennan, is now online at the filling Station magazine website, as an extra to their new issue focusing on Prince George BC poets and poetics; Seth Landman has something new in HTMLGIANT; kevin mcpherson eckhoff is offering a series of what he calls "inside fridge painting originals"; and Phil Hall and George Bowering perform along with many others at The Al Purdy Show in Toronto, February 6, 2013, as a celebration of poetry and music to benefit to the Al Purdy A-Frame.

The Factory Reading Series presents: Hugh Thomas, Michael Blouin, Brecken Hancock + Abby Paige,

The Factory Reading Series presents:

Hugh Thomas (Fredericton)
Michael Blouin (Kemptville)
Brecken Hancock (Ottawa)
+ Abby Paige (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, February 22, 2013;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale)

Hugh Thomas lives in Fredericton, where he is a professor of mathematics at the University of New Brunswick. Chapbooks of his poetry have been published by Paper Kite Press (Heart badly buried by five shovels, 2009), BookThug (Mutations, 2004), and above/ground press (Opening the Dictionary, 2011), which was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Franzlations, the imaginary Kafka parables, a book of variations on Kafka texts, a joint project with Gary Barwin and Craig Conley, was published by New star Books in 2011.

Michael Blouin‘s critically acclaimed first novel Chase and Haven (Coach House) was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and won the 2009 ReLit Award. In 2007 his first collected poetry I’m not going to lie to you (Pedlar Press) was a finalist for the Lampman Scott Award. In 2011 Pedlar Press released Wore Down Trust, which won the Lampman Poetry Award in 2012. He was a finalist for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards and his work has been published in many literary magazines includingDescant, Arc, The Antigonish Review, Event, Queen’s Quarterly, The New Quarterly, and The Fiddlehead. He is currently completing work on his second novel and is represented internationally by Westwood Creative Artists. His collaborative chapbook with Elizabeth Rainer, let lie/ (above/ground press, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Brecken Hancock's [pictured, above] poetry and essays have appeared in Grain, CV2, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, Arc, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Originally from Middle Lake, Saskatchewan, she's since lived in Fredericton, Reykjavik, and Kyoto, but she's also been home to hold residencies at The Bruno Arts Bank, a converted historical building in rural Saskatchewan. Her first full-length manuscript of poems, Broom Broom, is forthcoming with Coach House Books. She lives and walks dogs in Ottawa.

She will be launching her chapbook The Art of Plumbing (above/ground press).

Abby Paige is a poet, performer, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in the United States and Canada, most recently in ottawater #9. Her solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, has toured in New England and Quebec. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a former Fulbright scholar.

She will be launching her chapbook Other Brief Discourses (above/ground press).

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

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

Review of Four Chapbooks from above/ground press

by Mark Frutkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

some author activity: Ladouceur, Mangold, Landman, Roberston + mclennan,

Ben Ladouceur reads as part of the Dragnet issue 7 launch on Thursday, January 7, 2013 in Toronto, alongside Lizy Mostowski and A.G. Pasquella; Sarah Mangold has a clever new website; Seth Landman has new work up at Aesthetix; Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler's Revolution: A Reader is now available from Paraguay Press; and rob mclennan posts his 'best of' list of 2012 Canadian poetry titles over at the dusie blog. 

And over the coming weeks and months? You know I've already told you: new works by Sonnet L'Abbe, Helen Hajnoczky, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Abby Paige, Jordan Abel, Brecken Hancock, etcetera...

The Factory Reading Series presents: ottawater #9: reading + issue launch

ottawater #9 launch; featuring a number of this issue's contributors

ottawater: Ottawa’s annual pdf poetry journal
edited by rob mclennan
www.ottawater.com

The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
233 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale)
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Thursday, January 24, 2013
doors 7pm; reading 7:30

The ninth issue of ottawater is now online, featuring new writing by Cameron Anstee, Steven Artelle, Gary Barwin, Jeff Blackman, David Blaikie, Frances Boyle, Ronnie R. Brown, Colin Browne, Murray Citron, George Elliott Clarke, Faizal Deen, Amanda Earl, Laura Farina, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Mark Frutkin, Brecken Hancock, Carla Hartsfield, a.m. kozak, Ben Ladouceur, Nicholas Lea, Anne Le Dressay, rob mclennan, Cath Morris, Colin Morton, Alcofribas Nasier II, Peter Norman, Abby Paige, Pearl Pirie, Nicholas Power, Wanda Praamsma, Ryan Pratt, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Sonia Saikaley, Dean Steadman, Lesley Strutt, Rob Thomas, Lauren Turner and Vivian Vavassis.

Founded to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital city, "ottawater," and its chemical formula/logo "O2(H2O)," is a poetry annual produced exclusively on-line, in both readable and printable pdf formats, and found at (http://www.ottawater.com). An anthology focusing on Ottawa poets and poetics, its first issue appeared in January 2005, 150 years after old Bytown became the City of Ottawa.

All previous issues remain archived on the site as well. Thanks to designer Tanya Sprowl, the ottawa international writers festival, and Randy Woods at non-linear creations for their continuing support.

some author activity: Earl, Irwin, Martin, Betts, beaulieu + mclennan

Cameron Anstee has been on a reviewing-spree lately, recently touching on some of Amanda Earl's latest, including her most recent above/ground press title, and Marilyn Irwin's self-published title; Camille Martin again participates in Third Factory/Notes on Poetry with a 2012 list of recommended reading; Gregory Betts participated in "the next big thing" self-interview; derek beaulieu lists his "most engaging books of 2012" and rob mclennan launches a new book at Ottawa's AB Series on January 29, 2012, alongside Toronto poet Beatrice Hausner.