DANGEROUS LITERATURE

New Puritan & A Tiny Review of Feel Good!

2011-12-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

A couple of things ...

The new edition of The Puritan was launched last week. Issue 15: Fall 2011 features fiction and poetry by a nice spectrum of writers, this time mostly American. While the majority of our submissions come from Canadian writers, and while we continue to publish mostly Canucks, often our American submissions are of such superior quality that we'd be stupid to ignore them.

Check out new fiction by Rich Ives and Robert Earle, new poetry by Ricky Garni, Jenna Jarvis, Meredith Davies Hadaway, Joe Wilkins, Paul Watsky, Bardia Sinaee, and Salvatore Difalco.

We've published Ives, Sinaee, and Difalco before. I guess we like 'em lots. E Martin Nolan also reviews Gabe Foreman's A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People and Jones' The Brave Never Write Poetry. Both books were released by Coach House Books this year.

rob mclennan has posted a tiny review/blurb about my poetry chapbook Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast! (Ferno House 2011). Here it is; read an excerpt and rob's whole post here.

“Toronto ON: After years of his work at co-founding/editing The Puritan, a fiction journal that moved from Ottawa to Toronto a few years back, as well as the Toronto small press Ferno House, Spencer Gordon has released his first poetry chapbook, FEEL GOOD! LOOK GREAT! HAVE A BLAST! (Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2011). Impressive for a first offering, one might have thought Gordon wrote poems like a fiction writer would (there are so many bad examples of such), but these pieces certainly can’t be mistaken for prose, and Gordon has a good sense of the line, such as in the poem “THE YOUNG BAROQUE PAINTERS,” or “A BILLIE HOLIDAY KINDA SUNDAY.” The poems here might be slightly uneven, but there is a clarity here that comes through, and a humour that allows entry where one might not have been able, otherwise.”

Writer Nathaniel G. Moore also mentioned the book as part of his 2011 Year in Review. Head to the link: http://criticalcrushes.blogspot.com/2011/12/2011-in-review-we-were-born-to-diet.html

Imitation of Life

2011-12-23T07:31:00.000-08:00

Breaking Hearts, Harts, and Bones at Savage

2011-11-22T16:47:00.001-08:00

Shaking hands with Smith Hart, one of the legendary Hart brothers of Calgary, Alberta.

Savage came and went. Here's what the A.V. Club Toronto had to say about my poetic finishing moves:

Dropping elbows and reading poetry at SAVAGE.

''One grounding but apt change of pace was Spencer Gordon’s reading, a graceful but straight list of passed-on lives of professional wrestlers and the tragic ways they ended, from the many sudden car accidents, to the more gruesome case of Chris Benoit. 'It’s actually really difficult to write about wrestling,' said Gordon, 'about those things that you love in that way. I figured that typical approaches to Randy Savage and even wrestling in general among my generation are very ironic, just cheeky, taking the piss—often they don’t understand a lot about it; they only see the extravagant, ridiculous, and even negative elements. It meant something to me, and I wanted to do something that would reflect that meaning instead of just [laughing] more about Slim Jims and bandanas.'''

Read the rest of the A.V. Club's coverage of the evening here.

Best in the world.

2011-11-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

TORONTO DANCERS GET SAVAGE FOR UPCOMING TRIBUTE!

And the beat goes on ... yeah ... the beat goes on ...

2011-11-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Savage: Cult of Personality, Pure Media and the Art of Macho Madness: RSVP NOW on FACEBOOK!

I am reading with DAVE BIDINI! MICHAEL HOLMES! GREG OLIVER! ALEXANDRA LEGGAT! NATHANIEL G MOORE! MAT LAPORTE! & DAVID BROCK!

Julie Hart is talking about it.

Open Book Toronto is talking about it.

Canada Arts Connect is talking about it.

The White House is sure talking about it.

Read "Love in the Time of Macho Madness" by Nathaniel G. Moore.

Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast!

2011-10-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

After a successful fall launch, the new chapbooks from Ferno House have now been posted to our etsy site.

Head on over to pick up my chapbook, Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast!

David Brock's Black Metal Melody and Liz Howard's Skullambient are also for sale.

"A Publishing Inferno"

2011-10-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

OPEN BOOK TORONTO has published an interview with me as promo for our FERNO HOUSE fall launch! My book Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast! will be published alongside David Brock's Black Metal Melody and Liz Howard's Skullambient.

You gotta be there!

12 or 20 FERNO HOUSE Questions

2011-10-04T07:05:00.000-07:00

rob mclennan interviews me about Ferno House in anticipation of Thursday's launch. It's part of his ongoing 12 or 20 (small press) questions series.

Read our rather long chat here.

Review of Nick Thran's Earworm

2011-09-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

My longer-than-usual review of Nick Thran's second collection of poetry, Earworm (Nightwood Editions, 2011), is now online at the Maple Tree Literary Supplement. It's three pages, so keep clicking to keep reading. Next issue will feature my review of Jim Johnstone's Patternicity (Nightwood Editions 2010).

Ferno House Fall Launch 2011 | Open Book: Toronto

2011-09-02T12:52:00.000-07:00

Ferno House Fall Launch 2011 Open Book: Toronto

When

Thursday, October 6, 2011 - 8:00pm

Where:

Supermarket

268 Augusta Ave, Toronto, ON

Details:

This fall Ferno House will launch three new chapbooks of poetry:

Black Metal Melody by David Brock

Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast! by Spencer Gordon

Skullambient by Liz Howard

All three books will be on sale. Other back-list titles (Dinosaur Porn, Demons, For Crying Out Loud(s)) will be available as well.

There is no cover. This is a fully licensed event hosted by the good people at Ferno House. Event runs from 8 to 11pm.

ABOUT:

David Brock is a lapsed playwright. His other chapbook of poetry is Gasmask Summer (The Emergency Response Unit). He has written libretto for operas that have been performed in Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Glasgow, and London. He is currently writing text for a black metal opera (bands and sopranos wanted).

Liz Howard, a native varietal of northern Ontario, has taken root in Toronto where she engages in cognition research and poetics. She is a member of the Influency Salon editorial group and co-cultivates AvantGarden, a new readings series that foregrounds innovative text and sound-based performance by women. Her work has appeared in Misunderstandings Magazine and online at Matrix Magazine as part of the New Feminisms Supplemental. In 2009, she was shortlisted for the LitPop Award for poetry. She is the recipient of a Toronto Arts Council grant for poetry. Skullambient is her first chapbook.

Spencer Gordon is co-founder and co-editor of Ferno House. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been published in numerous anthologies and periodicals, such as subTerrain, Joyland, Existere, Contemporary Verse 2, echolocation, Broken Pencil Magazine, The Danforth Review, The Mansfield Revue, ottawater, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and so forth. He is also co-founder and co-editor of The Puritan, an online literary journal. He teaches writing at Humber College and blogs occasionally at dangerousliterature.blogspot.com.

http://www.fernohouse.com/

http://www.facebook.com/fernohouse

info at fernohouse dot com

SAVAGE

2011-08-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

"Savage".... Cult of Personality, Pure Media + the art of Macho Madness

Nathaniel G. Moore is curating an evening of art, readings, and other performance in tribute to the life and work of Randy "Macho Man" Savage, one of the greatest workers, talkers, and performers in the world of professional wrestling.

I'm happy to say that I'll be reading at this event. RIP, Mr. Poffo.

When:
Saturday, November 12, 2011 - 6:00pm

Where:
White House Gallery277 Augusta Avenue, 2nd Floor
Toronto, ON
M5T 2M1

Details:

Be at the White House Gallery for the Savage art show, curated by Nathaniel G Moore.

Featuring artwork, videos and more. At 7:30, enjoy a short reading portion of the evening, with readings by:

David Brock
Mat Laporte
Daniel Scott Tysdal
Greg Oliver
Spencer Gordon
Damian Rogers

with more special guests to be announced soon.

The event takes place from November 12th to 15th, with an opening reception on Saturday November 12th, 2011 at 6pm.

Free Admission and open to the public.

Greg Oliver's book The Heels Hall of Fame (ECW Press), Daniel Scott Tysdal's Mourner's Book of Albums (Tightrope) and Damian Rogers Paper Radio (ECW Press) will be available for purchase (as will David Brock's Black Metal Melody (Ferno House) and Spencer Gordon's Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast! (Ferno House)).

More information: http://theotherwhitehouse.wordpress.com

http://criticalcrushes.blogspot.com

This information is from the White House's website:

Since 2008 Toronto author and critic Nathaniel G. Moore has been collecting renderings of the late wrestler Randy Macho Man Savage who entertained fans in Toronto for years in the 1980s and 1990s. Moore will curate his first art show at the White House Gallery in Toronto which will showcase artwork, sound projects, memorabilia, antique fan letters and more.

Alicia Grant will be doing a low-fi VHS dance piece. Sport writer and musician Dave Bidini, zine illustrators Amanda Sampson, Nadia Uppal, graphic novelist Sonja Ahlers and Vicki Nerino and Montreal musical outfit Ladies Luncheon are also confirmed. Several local authors are scheduled to read short pieces inspired by Savage as well as Savage-inspired sounds and other surprises. (*At present time there is no room for additional readers.)

Moore has been at work on a book loosely based on his teenaged interest in Macho Man for the past seven years. Randy Savage died at the age of 58 in late May of this year from heart complications while driving.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Video art, drawings, collage, audio, or if maybe you have something unexplainable that conveys Macho Madness, go for it.

Deadline for submissions is October 1, 2011.

Submit to Nathaniel at BOWLBRAWL at gmail dot com

http://nathanielgmoore.net/

Ferno House On Etsy

2011-08-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Ferno House now has an Etsy account. That means Demons, For Crying Out Loud, For Crying Out Loud II, and Dinosaur Porn are available for purchase immediately.

Go here to purchase the books!

This fall, Ferno is launching three new chapbooks. More to come!

Ferno House Launch

2011-03-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

Announcing the 'official' launches of two 'new' books from Ferno House ...

For Crying Out Loud 2 is another anthology of fiction and poetry featuring the work of students and alumni of the University of Toronto's MA in English Literature in the Field of Creative Writing.

It is another perfect bound "book" from Ferno House.

This time it contains work by Meghan Adams, Brendan Bowles, Laura Clarke, Spencer Gordon, Alex Grigorescu, Andrew MacDonald, Anne Russell, Jonathan Simpson, Andrew Sullivan, and Catriona Wright.

DEMONS is a chapbook of poetry by Ferno House co-editor Mat Laporte. This is another chance to pick up this little gem.

Join us for some fun at this launch at The Supermarket on Thursday, March 24th. Expect readings and other shenanigans. Support your local micropresses!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146281122102451#wall_posts
www.fernohouse.com

Reading III

2011-03-23T08:57:00.001-07:00

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Richard Yates by Tao Lin
The Mourner's Book of Albums by Daniel Scott Tysdal
Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
Swordfishtrombones by David Smay
Poetry Hotel by Joe Rosenblatt
Story of My Life by Jay McInerney
Dorothy L'Amour by Lynn Crosbie
Pigeon by Karen Solie
Pax Atomica by Campbell McGrath

The CanLit Onesie

2011-02-16T10:44:00.001-08:00

This is awesome.

Check out the CanLit onesy, now available for sale.

Technicolour Music and Reading Series #6

2011-02-12T13:28:00.000-08:00

I am reading at the Sixth Edition of the Technicolour Music and Reading Series at the NACO Gallery (1665 Dundas St. West in Little Portugal) this Tuesday, February 15th. The show starts at 8:30 p.m. I am reading alongside Liz Howard and Sean Braune. Music will be provided by Steven Foster.

Sean and Liz are both good people, and Zoe Alexis-Abrams hosts these shindigs. Those are three good people. Endure me for their sake.

Hope to see you there. Facebook link.

New Poem in subTerrain!

2011-02-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

I have a new poem in the latest issue of subTerrain (the "regret" themed issue). Check it out! A beautiful cover.

The Puritan Issue 12: Winter 2011 Now Online!

2011-02-08T12:09:00.001-08:00

Dear Puritan Friends,

Out twelfth issue -- Winter 2011 -- is up and running. Head on over to our site (www.puritan-magazine.com) and ogle the new writing!

There you will find:

Fiction by Daniel Scott Tysdal, Christine Fadden, Sharon Erby, and Joel McConvey.

Poetry by Mat Laporte, E Martin Nolan, George Moore, Kristine Ong Muslim, Martin Balgach, Bardia Sinaee, Mark DeCarteret, William Doreski, and Richard Kostelanetz.

An interview with John Lavery by rob mclennan!
An interview with Catherine Owen by Darryl Salach!
An interview with Daniel Scott Tysdal by E Martin Nolan!

And a review of Margaret Christakos`Welling by E Martin Nolan.

We are currently accepting submissions for our 13th issue, Spring 2011 up until March 31st. Head over to our site and use our BRAND NEW submissions manager to send us your work.

We still pay respectable bounties for new fiction, poetry, non-fiction, interviews, and reviews! Hope to see your stuff come tumbling in.

Thanks!

Spencer Gordon
Andrew MacDonald
Tyler Willis

The Puritan : Frontiers of New English
puritan-magazine.com
puritanmagazine@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/#!/thepuritan

Strong Words 65

2010-12-01T08:37:00.000-08:00

I have been helping out Gillian Savigny with the Strong Words Reading Series lately. Would love to see you there.

Please join us for the 65th Edition of the STRONG WORDS READING SERIES, featuring Devon Code, Grace O'Connell, Jacob McArthur Mooney, and Robert Sternberg. Hosted by Gillian Savigny.

Devon Code is from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His fiction has appeared in journals, magazines and anthologies in Ireland, England and Canada. In a Mist, his debut collection of short fiction, was published by Invisible Publishing in 2007 and selected by the Globe and Mail as a notable fiction debut of 2008. In 2010, his story "Uncle Oscar" won The Journey Prize. He teaches at Seneca College and reviews fiction for Quill & Quire. He lives in Toronto.

Jacob McArthur Mooney lives in Toronto and is the author of The New Layman’s Almanac (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) and the upcoming Folk (M&S, 2011). Folk is a book about the 1998 crash of Swissair 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia. He maintains the poetry blog Vox Populism and covers matters poetic for The Torontoist. Other recent creative and critical work can be dug up from The Walrus, Quill & Quire, and The Globe & Mail.

Grace O'Connell is a fiction writer. She was the winner of THIS Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt in 2007, and was shortlisted for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for an Emerging Writer in 2008. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. Grace's work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, most recently in EYE Weekly. Her first novel has been purchased by Knopf/Random House Canada for publication in Spring 2012 as part of the New Face of Fiction program. Grace lives in Toronto.

Robert Sternberg is Robert Sternberg until his bio appears.

Ronald Reagan, My Father

2010-11-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

My review of Brian Joseph Davis' Ronald Reagan, My Father is now online at Broken Pencil Magazine. Click the link to read the review.

The Puritan Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2010

2010-11-16T07:15:00.000-08:00

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2010.

Go to www.puritan-magazine.com (snazzily updated) to check out all new ...

fiction by Jessica Westhead, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Kelli Deeth, Victoria Hetherington, and Tom Noe ...

poetry by Gary Barwin, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Diane Tucker, Zoe Alexis-Abrams, Nicholas Lea, Richard Norman, and Matthew R. Loney ...

and all new interviews with Dionne Brand (by E Martin Nolan) and Ken Sparling (by rob mclennan).

We're collecting submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, interviews, and reviews for Issue 12, Winter 2011. And with the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, all contributors in 2011 and beyond will receive payment for their work.

Get in touch with us at puritanmagazine@gmail.com.
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/thepuritan

Spencer Gordon
Andrew MacDonald
Tyler Willis
The Puritan | Frontiers of New English

Reading II

2010-11-09T12:40:00.001-08:00

Hm. It's been about three months since I've done this. What are you reading right now? Here are some titles I've been recently pawing ...

Pope and Her Lady by Leon Rooke

Termite Parade by Joshua Mohr

Antwerp by Roberto Bolano

Where Shall I Wander? by John Ashbery

Mammoth by Larissa Andrusyshyn

Stand Still Like The Hummingbird by Henry Miller

Notes Home From a Prodigal Son by Douglas Glover

The Inquisition Yours by Jen Currin
The Woman On the Shore by Al Purdy

The Fat Man by John Newlove

Goodbye, Ukulele by Leigh Nash

Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch

Barney's Version by Mordecai Richeler

Sans Souci by Dionne Brand

No Language Is Neutral by Dionne Brand

when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds by Sasha Fletcher

We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry

an Island of Fifty by Ben Brooks

The He We Knew by Merle Nudelman

Existere

2010-11-08T07:03:00.001-08:00

Got two poems in the new issue of Existere. The magazines should be in stores by November 19th, where they will obviously sell out in thirty seconds.

JOBBERS

2010-11-02T13:50:00.001-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen this call for submission is scheduled for one fall, and it is for inclusion in the most electrifying anthology in the history of CanLit....

In professional wrestling slang, the term "job" describes a losing performance in a wrestling match. It is derived from the euphemism "doing one's job," which was employed to protect kayfabe (in other words, the portrayal of events in the wrestling industry as real). As professional wrestling is scripted, inevitably a wrestler will be required to lose to an opponent....

Inspired by Michael Holmes's 2004 collection of poetry Parts Unknown: Wrestling, Gimmicks and Other Works and Nicholas Sammond's 2005 collection of essays Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, comes Jobbers: A Can-Lit Wrestling Reader.

Jobbers wants your best non-fiction, fiction, visual art and poetry that reviles, reflects or revels in the art of professional wrestling. Capture the steroidal zaniness of the cartoon rock and wrestling mid 1980s or the over-gimmicked dark ages of the early 1990s. Recall with nostalgia the glory days of pre-McMahon black and white regional integrity, or muse on indy church basement glory.

We are also interested in writing by women who may be able to offer a different slant at this form of pandemonium, a great opportunity to subvert the norm, riff off stereotypes and play with form. Think Cindy Lauper, Aretha Franklin, Salt N' Pepa and other females who have cross-overed, even temporarily, into the fray. You're next!

Explore the exhausted locker rooms of your local small-time wrestling league. Write erotic love poems to your favourite bespandexed hero or villain. Give us a "hell yeah" as you investigate the middle-finger-in-the-air screwjobs of the Attitude Era. Give us humour or heartbreak, caustic wit or hyperbolic fandom.
So whether you're a local hero, heel or not quite sure, send us your best wrasslin'-inspired literature.

No limits, no restrictions, and no rules, but remember to do your "job". Edited by Toronto Literary Tag Team jobbers Spencer Gordon and Nathaniel G. Moore.

Deadline: May 15, 2011.

For more info email NGM at bowlbrawl [at] gmail dot com

New Work in Broken Pencil Magazine

2010-10-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Broken Pencil Magazine is here. Pick it up. It's got my review of Brian Joseph Davis' great new book Ronald Reagan, My Father and the first installment of my new column "Border Patrol: A Small Press Surveillance," which takes a look at various small press publishers south of the border (and also neatly ties in to that Border Patrol Reading Series you may know about ...).

Sunday October 24, 2010

2010-10-24T05:41:00.001-07:00

The Broken Pencil Indie Deathmatch has just amped up its prize package. Apparently they're now offering boxing classes and a crazy-swell indie CD from crazy-swell bands Puggy Hammer, Tomboyfriend, and Hot Panda. Check out details here.

Today is Canzine. Hooray. It's at the Great Hall, 1087 Queen Street West. Bring a friend or two. The show runs from 1 to 7 p.m.

This Tuesday is the Cloverfield Festival of Authors (basically your alternative to the IFOA). We've got 15 readers. That's right. Come in a Halloween costume, throw some garbage, and take part in one of the most punk nights of poetry in recent memory.

Shit is heating up with Ferno House. We've got two new titles to debut sometime over the next few weeks. First is For Crying Out Loud 2, the sequel to For Crying Out Loud, which compiles work from students enrolled in the MA in English and Creative Writing at the U of T. It's a nice time capsule and keepsake of some aspiring and inspiring writers who will no doubt go on to headline main events in the near future. The second is Demons, a chapbook of poetry from Ferno House co-editor Mat Laporte. It's a true orgy of bloodshed and madness. Well, not really, but it's really great! Demons features illustrations by new Ferno recruit Patrick Larkin, is edited by me, and is designed and typeset by Arnaud Brassard.

We'll have a launch party for both these books soon!

The BORDER PATROL READING SERIES

2010-10-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

I am proud to announce the launch of the ...

BORDER PATROL READING SERIES

www.borderpatroltoronto.com
borderpatroltoronto@gmail.com

One Canadian. One American. A reading series celebrating the longest undefended border in the world.

Saturday, Nov. 20, 2010 / Border Patrol Reading #1
Adam Levin (Yank) & Pasha Malla (Canuck)

Hosted by Damian Rogers and Spencer Gordon (and Jeff Parker by Moscow Secret Satellite).

@ The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Ave., Toronto

Doors open @ 4p.m.; Readings begin @ 5p.m.; Border Patrol agents clear the place @ 7p.m.

Event sponsored by Type Books and Broken Pencil Magazine.

Adam Levin is the author of the novel THE INSTRUCTIONS (McSweeney's, 2010) and the story collection HOT PINK (McSweeney's, Fall 2011). Winner of the 2003 Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, his stories have appeared in MCSWEENEY'S QUARTERLY, TIN HOUSE, and NINTH LETTER. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute.

Pasha Malla's first book of stories, The Withdrawal Method, won the Trillium Book Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize, was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Book Award, longlisted for the Giller Prize, and chosen as a Globe and Mail and National Post book of the year. He is also the winner of a National Magazine Award for humour writing and an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction, and the author of a collection of poems, All Our Grandfathers are Ghosts, which won nothing but critical disdain. His first novel, People Park, will be published by House of Anansi in late 2011, probably.

One Bloody Thing After Another Review

2010-10-18T16:45:00.001-07:00

My review of Joey Comeau's One Bloody Thing After Another (ECW 2010), over at Broken Pencil Magazine. Was published in Broken Pencil 48. Read it here.

Keeping myself honest.

Review of Mammoth

2010-10-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

My review of Montreal poet Larissa Andrusyshyn's debut collection, Mammoth, is now available to read over at The Mansfield Revue. Go check it out!

Here's the first paragraph. Read the rest here.

It’s not difficult to explain the enduring fascination of Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibits. Using a technique called Plastination—a strange, exciting innovation in the field of anatomical preservation—the good scientist has erected a gallery of authentic human specimens arranged in lifelike stances of action or repose, with every fleshly layer of skin and muscle peeled away to invite our rapacious curiosity. It’s an attraction fuelled by equal parts genuine inquisitiveness, a kind of “post-beauty” aesthetic appreciation of the human form, and the gory spectacle of the Grand Guignol; a horrific memento mori of the flesh, with rank upon rank of desiccated cadavers reminding us what we are.

First Lines

2010-10-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

The first line of a novel contains the story entire. Or it doesn't at all.

The 100 Best First Lines from Novels, as decided by The American Book Review.

50 to 1, a fun little online review, publishes only first lines (and very, very short things). Check them out to read the first line from a story I've been working on.

That is all.

THE CLOVERFIELD FESTIVAL OF AUTHORS (CFA)

2010-09-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Cloverfield Festival of Authors (CLFA) will be held on Tuesday 26 October 2010 at The Ossington in Toronto. It is sponsored by Broken Pencil Magazine, The Puritan, The Ossington, and an as yet unannounced fourth party.

Halloween costumes are very much encouraged.

Terrifying readers for the evening include:

Evie "Stone Cold" Christie
Christine "Eerie" Estima
Jessica "The Werewolf" Westhead
Lindsay "Traumatizing" Tipping
Spencer "Ghoulish" Gordon
David "Bubonic" Brock
Mat "The Viper" Laporte
Andrew "The Minotaur" MacDonald
Nathaniel "Gorgeous" G. Moore
Angela "Haunted" Hibbs
A.G. "The Poltergeist" Pasquella

"The Demon" Daniel Scott Tysdal
and Jennifer "Mass Murder" Marston

... and more to be announced and added in suspenseful, pre-Halloween drama!

The Ossington
61 Ossington Avenue
8pm-10pm

Then a dj will play music
and we will dance and our
born / yet unborn

children will dance !
SCAAAARY!

Death Match

2010-09-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

Look for the editors of The Puritan to have an alienating and mean-spirited role in dolling out criticism for this year's Indie Writers Deathmatch. More to come!

Broken Pencil Magazine Presents: Indie Writers Deathmatch IV

The world's only battle royale short story contest is coming. Enter your best story (1500-3000 words) by December 31, 2010. Be one of 8 finalists and prepare for battle as your story goes head-to-head with other contestants in an elimination "death match" tournament where the public's vote is cut throat and final! Grand prize includes publication in the Spring 2011 issue, $300 cash money, a BP prizepack worth $300, and, most importantly, bragging rights forever more. Two runners-up will also receive publication in Broken Pencil and paid standard publication rates. Entrace fee: 20 dollars (includes a 1 year subscription to Broken Pencil).

For a peak at last year's carnage, visit http://www.brokenpencil.com/deathmatch

CV2 in stores

2010-08-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

Go grab the new issue of Contemporary Verse 2, now in stores. It has one of my poems in it. That's the only reason you should buy the issue, of course.

Are We Serious?

2010-08-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

I was advised by a fellow-blogger and writer to take a gander at this interview with author Nazneen Sheikh from Monday August 2nd's Globe and Mail.

Apparently, Nazneen Sheikh is the author of a "new memoir," entitled Moon Over Marrakech: A Memoir of Loving Too Deeply in a Foreign Land. She has written a culinary memoir and a number of books for young people.

This interview is one of the most amusing puff-pieces I've read in a while. I can't believe articles/reviews/blurbs like this are still being written. Quite entertaining, if a tad enraging. Give it a read, but get ready.

The Incongruous Quarterly?

2010-08-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

You’ve probably heard of The Incongruous Quarterly. Especially if you live in Toronto, centre nebula, storm eye. Friday night marks the physical launch of the magazine’s first electronic issue, featuring readings by a select few of its contributors, something called “drunk scrabble,” music by Steven Foster, and a few other “surprises,” which are probably donation jars making their jangly way around Kensington’s White House.

The Incongruous Quarterly, three-way love child of Emma Healey, Richard Rosenbaum, and Michael Chaulk, has been embraced and celebrated and lauded like no other debut online magazine, with one issue to its name and no content to download. It boasts the guest editing of several notable young writers (Pasha Malla, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Sheila Heti). It has a very young and snappy feel, punctuated by curse-prone editorial messages, an easy and direct style, and obligatory denunciations of Billy Collins (which make me sad).

As far as their editorial vision, I more or less agree with what they’re saying. Here’s a sample of Emma Healey’s introduction …

“There are a million reasons why a poem or story might not make it into a publication, but almost none of them have to do with the piece’s actual quality. Or how appropriate it is for the magazine. Often, a writer’s publication history and personal relationships (or lack thereof) are enough to decide what’s going to happen to his piece.

And that really, really, really sucks.

There are a bunch of disclaimers here. We know that the editors of most Canadian magazines and journals face a number of concerns – about funding, finances, resources, space, etc. – that influence the way they select pieces. And we’ve been told that complaining about nepotism makes us seem inexperienced, naïve, idealistic in the worst way. That’s just how things work. It won’t ever change. And why should it?

We’ve thought about that question a lot, and the Quarterly is our answer.

When a literary magazine publishes a writer because that writer knows one of the magazine’s editors, or because they (the writer) have already been published somewhere else, or because they’ve won a million awards, they are screwing things up for everyone. Sound overdramatic? Okay, but consider: If you’re not printing a story because you think it’s fantastic – maybe you just think it’s good, but the writer’s a big name, maybe it’s worse than that – you’re printing something that lowers the quality of your magazine and erodes its credibility. If you print enough pieces like that, your magazine starts to suck, and if your magazine sucks, no one reads it. Fewer readers means less funding, which means there’s a good chance the quality of the publication drops even further, along with the amount of time you’re able to spend on it. And eventually writers – the good ones, who are smart enough to be discouraged by the fact that you’re publishing the same boring stories every issue – stop sending you unsolicited submissions. You’re left with no money, no readers, a boring magazine no one cares about or connects with, a bunch of frustrated, disillusioned writers who don’t see the point, and a terrible slushpile.”

Now, here’s something that I wrote for The New Quarterly’s blog, The Literary Type, way back when:

“While editing submissions for a small, independent magazine [i.e., The Purtian], I received a story from a certain writer who was the author of several books, who was celebrated and awarded and endowed. Let’s call him Writer X. Working for a new publication, we were understandably excited to receive work from a well-known, lauded author. But here we encountered a problem: his story was bad. His sentences were syntactically clumsy. His metaphors were burnt-out and saggy; his descriptions were maudlin. Most detrimentally, his story was incredibly boring. Not wanting to sully the already questionable content of our journal, we regretfully rejected Writer X’s piece. After expressing his shock, he then re-submitted with another story. This piece (more like a fragment) was no better. And so we again respectfully and regretfully rejected Writer X’s work, encouraging him to send us something else.

Next month, we were surprised to find Writer X’s rejected story in one of Canada’s most prestigious, government-funded, widely distributed and most gorgeously designed literary journals. I was happy for Writer X, but I was also deeply confused by his success.

This scenario suggests one of only three possibilities.

1. Even though we were thrilled to receive Writer X’s work, and were desperately eager to publish him, and read and re-read his work to find something meriting publication, we ultimately lacked good judgment. The major Canadian literary journal, having a more experienced and refined critical acumen, saved Writer X’s submission from obscurity.

2. Somehow, the major journal’s editorial board lacked good judgment, despite the grants, circulation, advertisers, and prestige.

3. The major journal published Writer X’s story because Writer X is a well-known, celebrated writer.

Without choosing one option over another (though it’s probably not the first or second), here’s something that’s certain. Surely, the major journal had to reject other submissions in order to make room for Writer X’s piece. Perhaps one of those rejected stories or poems was yours. Perhaps it was the best thing you’ve ever written. Now, were you rejected because of a lack of quality in your work, or were you rejected due to some other condition – a condition that might be totally out of your control?

You may never know. I’m not suggesting that factors of prestige, or connections, for example, are the sole reasons you’re being rejected, nor am I trying to anger or enflame you. In fact, I’m saying this to cheer you up. We all know that sometimes stories and poems are selected based on a whole host of factors, and not merely quality alone (despite what some mags tell us). I’ve worked for one, waded through thousands of stories during my short tenure as fiction editor, and made countless and irreversible mistakes. More aspiring writers should recognize that publishing, like any other industry, is sometimes a game of chance. A rejection from one publication does not mean a rejection outright – it means that particular magazine, at that particular point in time, for a very particular reason, would like to pass on it. Remember: a literary magazine is only as relevant or profound as its editors or special selection committees: tribunals composed of people of various ages and experience, all limited by their own peculiar hang-ups, grudges, allegiances, and fetishes.

If there’s anything encouraging I can say – and I am both regularly and gleefully rejected – it’s to take heart and keep on trying. Sometimes it is them, and not you.

Well, mostly it’s you. But sometimes, sometimes …

This was a much-edited, much-rejected piece of writing, because in expressing my real feelings (more in line with what Healey is saying with The Incongruous) the New Quarterly editors felt I was being antagonistic and “inflammatory,” offering a sort of conspiracy theory about selection processes and committees. I was asked to re-write the piece (the version you just read) in order to sound more conciliatory and optimistic. Ironic, writing about rejections, and having the piece rejected … and ending up with a rather de-fanged version of the truth.

Truth is, I’ve been reading some serious horseshit in some established Canadian literary journals. If nepotism, publication history, and personal relationships aren’t to blame, then our slush piles are really terrible. And I don’t believe that.

These editors should be praised and encouraged for taking up this argument. Kudos.

Still – I’m a little baffled at all the attention that The Incongruous Quarterly is getting, simply because I’ve been toiling at publishing other people (mostly unknown, unpublished writers) for three years, with a magazine that has no limits in terms of how much we might want to publish, and when we say the type of things Healey et al. are saying, or throw events that gesture toward the ‘fakeness’ or ‘fixedness’ of the literary world, we often get in trouble. There’s a certain strange irony going on, too, with some of the IQ’s staff and contributors. Here we have Sheila Heti soliciting work from Mary Gaitskill and Jaron Lanier and other more or less famous writers; Daniel Tysdal publishing Nyla Matuk, derek beaulieu, and Souvankham Thammavongsa, names I recognize, authors whose work is already very familiar. The ongoing “Dream Team” feel of the guest editing process (a gimmick that Monday Night Raw recently abandoned) doesn’t make me feel that this is the venue for unknown or unpublishable writing, but simply another variation on what’s already on the market, already embraced, already the establishment. I can go into detail about this; I can draw specific examples from the first issue; but I’m sure you know what I mean.

Another bit of strangeness, from the IQ’s introduction:

“It’s a particularly great time for short stories and poems. These are forms that were once considered difficult – to generate interest in, to market, to read. Now, though, you can read and understand an individual short piece of writing as you would a novel; it no longer needs to be surrounded, collected, anthologized or placed in any kind of context in order to make sense. It gets to live a life that only longer-form writing used to. You can read a story or a poem online, on your phone, at home or at work or on the bus; you can take as much or as little time as you want with it, and when you’re done there’s always more out there – an endless, inexhaustible supply of free art at your fingertips. See? Unprecedented. And awesome.”

First, I have no idea what Healey means by saying that short stories and poems “were once considered difficult.” Are short story or poetry collections now no longer difficult to generate interest in, or to market? That’s an economic and cultural development I’ve certainly missed; some sort of publishing revolution that’s happened overnight, a revolution in terms of how the everyday average person approaches poetry. And difficult? Poetry is no longer difficult? Poetry no longer has alienating or avant-garde or disturbingly difficult practitioners or texts? I don’t buy that …

What does she mean by “you can read and understand an individual short piece of writing as you would a novel; it no longer needs to be surrounded, collected, anthologized or placed in any kind of context in order to make sense. It gets to live a life that only longer-form writing used to”? So, stories and poems used to not make sense, or were incapable of being “understood,” if they weren’t anthologized? What is this new life of short fiction and poetry, the life that “only longer-form writing” used to enjoy? She seems to be suggesting much more by these comments, even a categorical shift in the very boundaries between short and longer works of art. So how is a short story by Kafka unlike short stories by contemporary authors? Why are we reading short stories, or, say, a short poem by Emily Dickinson, as we would “a novel”? I don’t want to read a Dickinson poem like a novel. It doesn’t do the same things. Not even close.

The next part is certainly true. Art is out there, at our fingertips, and is endless. Pretty awesome, both speaking positively and negatively. But haven’t we always been able to “take as much or as little time as [we] want with [art]”? Hasn’t this always been a problem of attention, of endurance, of dedication? The most aggressively new and interesting works being produced today are responding to our inch-worm-long attention spans; are proving that boredom is instructive; that effort beyond the iPod readers’ possible range of attention shatters a kind of instant-tweeted-sound-byte landscape that threatens anything that announces itself as “difficult,” a term that apparently no longer applies to poetry and short fiction …

A tad baffling. In any case, I will do my best to be at the IQ’s launch.

8:00 Friday at the Whitehouse, Toronto.

reading ...

2010-07-29T05:26:00.000-07:00

Summer is often a time when we choose to tackle those bigger, more monstrous tomes that ordinarily sit neglected and sulky on our shelves. This summer I've been scratching through a number of shorter works, gobbling up as much as I can while these months inch by in poverty and sunlight.

What have you been reading? Here's a short list of a few titles I've been abusing these last few weeks, months. Send me some suggestions, or tell me what you thought of what I've been chewing over.

A Good Time Had By All by Meghan Strimas
After Dinner Declarations by Nicanor Parra
Angels by Denis Johnson
A Year of Lesser by David Bergen
Being Dead by Jim Crace
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano
Coming Ashore on Fire by Michael Dennis
Dorothy L'amour by Lynn Crosbie
Expeditions of a Chimaera by Erin Moure and Oana Avasilichioaei
Hamburger Valley, California by David McGimpsey
Hymn by John Barton
The Jill Kelly Poems by Alessandro Porco
Missing Persons by rob mclennan
One Bloody Thing After Another (advance reading copy!) by Joey Comeau
Practical Jean (advance reading copy!) by Trevor Cole
The Reinvention of the Human Hand by Paul Vermeersch
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Wrongbar by Nathaniel G. Moore

Canada Council!

2010-07-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

We are thrilled to announce that our grant application to the Canada Council for the Arts has been approved. Starting in 2011, The Puritan can finally pay its contributors and staff, and fund other sundry literary events (more THROWDOWNS?).

A hearty thanks to the selection committee for the Canada Council, and to everyone who's contributed to our little project.

Scream Day 6

2010-07-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

OLD SCHOOL VERSUS NEW SCHOOL

Sunday, July 11, 2010 - 5:30pm

THE SUPERMARKET

268 AUGUSTA AVENUE

Cost: PWYC, $5 SUGGESTED

Jenny Sampirisi (The Toronto New School of Writing)
Kate Eichhorn (The New School in New York)
Jeff Derksen (The Kootenay School of Writing)

Moderated by Bill Kennedy.

Our panel discusses the fate of “radical” literature, which seems increasingly traditionalist, academic and tame. The Scream pits Old versus New, as our panelists tackle the “avant-garde” and point to literature’s new frontiers. Featuring Jenny Sampirisi (The Toronto New School of Writing), Kate Eichhorn (The New School in New York) and Jeff Dersken (The Kootenay School of Writing). Moderated by Bill Kennedy.

268 AUGUSTA AVENUE

THE SUPERMARKET

Scream in High Park Misinformation

2010-07-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

NOW Magazine has listed the wrong information for The Scream in High Park Main Stage.

The correct date for the Scream Mainstage is Monday, July 12th (this Monday!) and the lineup is as follows:

Gil Adamson, Tony Burgess, Angela Carr, Brian Joseph Davis, Jeff Derksen, Linh Dinh, The Element Choir, Michael Lista, Kathleen Phillips, Damian Rogers, Ken Sparling and Sherwin Tjia. The evening will be hosted by Misha Glouberman.

Please help us out and forward this widely to counter the misinformation. The show is going to be great.

Scream Night Three

2010-07-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

See you tonight!

THE HAND THAT FEEDS

Thursday, July 8, 2010 - 7:00pm

THE STEALTH LOUNGE @ THE PILOT

22 CUMBERLAND STREET

Cost: PWYC, $5 SUGGESTED

Karen Hines
Evan Munday
Darren O”Donnell
Angela Szczepaniak
RM Vaughan
Natalie Walschots

Sponsored by:The Stoof Foundation

Nothing says “radical” like a well-written grant application, so it’s about time that a literary festival celebrates the contributions of our great Canadian arts bureaucracy. The evening will be fair and orderly, ranging through a series of powerpoint presentations, performances and culminating in a Form Slam. Read up on your Roberts Rules of Order and join Karen Hines, Evan Munday, Darren O”Donnell, Angela Szczepaniak, RM Vaughan and Natalie Walschots in our arms-length tribute to Canadian arts policy. Sponsored by The Stoof Foundation. Proper business attire is encouraged.

22 CUMBERLAND STREET

THE STEALTH LOUNGE @ THE PILOT

Scream Night Two

2010-07-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

See you on Ossington tonight!

CHOOSE YOUR OWN POETIC ADVENTURE: A SCREAM PUB CRAWL

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 - 7:00pm

VARIOUS LOCATIONS ALONG OSSINGTON AVENUE

Cost: CHOOSE YOUR OWN DONATION

7:00PM–7:45PM
Camp 4 - 1173 Dundas St. W
Sheila Heti
Gary Barwin
Michael Knox
Red Light - 1185 Dundas St. W
Souvankham
Thammavongsa
Christopher Doda
a.rawlings

8:00–8:45PM
Reposado - 136 Ossington Ave
Kyle Buckley
Zoe Whittall
Nathaniel G. Moore
The Ossington - 61 Ossington Ave
Sachiko Murakami
Shannon Bramer
Jay MillAr

9:00–9:45PM
Baby Huey - 72 Ossington Ave
Aisha Sasha John
Emily Schultz
Daniel Scott Tysdal
LeVack Block - 88 Ossington Ave
Meaghan Strimas
Steve Venright
Beatriz Hausner

Download a guide for the event!

Chart your own course through the evening: 18 Toronto writers are positioned in competing timeslots and venues along Ossington Avenue. Pick up your itinerary, a Choose Your Own Poetic Adventure storybook at each venue, or download a pdf from thescream.ca. Which way to reward, and which to madness? Featuring: Sheila Heti, Jay MillAr, Shannon Bramer, Michael Knox, Nathaniel G. Moore, Steve Venright, Meaghan Strimas, Christopher Doda, Sachiko Murakami, Zoe Whittall, Aisha Sasha John, Beatriz Hausner, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Kyle Buckley, Daniel Scott Tysdal, a.rawlings, Gary Barwin, Emily Schultz.

Make sure to make your way to The Centre for sleep and Dream Studies for the after party. Venue TBA.

This Ain't Lives On?

2010-07-06T11:34:00.001-07:00

http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/2010/07/06/this-aint-the-rosedale-library-to-re-emerge/

Review of Coming Ashore on Fire

2010-07-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

My review of Michael Dennis' latest collection of poetry, Coming Ashore on Fire (Burnt Wine Press 2009) can be found in the July edition of The Mansfield Revue.

Go check it out here.

Scream Starts Tonight

2010-07-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Scream Literary Festival starts tonight with "Welcome to the Carnival: An Evening with Steve McCaffery and David Antin." I will be there at 14 Elm Street helping out/volunteering my time. Hope to see you there. Here are the details.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - 7:00pm

THE ARTS AND LETTERS CLUB
14 ELM STREET

Cost: $10, OR $5 WITH ORIGINAL POEM (POEMS WILL BE MADE INTO A CHAPBOOK TO BE SOLD AT THE SCREAM IN HIGH PARK EVENT ON JULY 12)

David Antin
Steve McCaffery
Hosted by Carl Wilson

“The future ... will find us all by itself ...I want to occupy the present.” – David Antin, what it means to be avant-garde.

The Scream kicks off its 18th year with two of literature’s greatest provocateurs. The legendary David Antin will deliver one of his trademark talk poems, while Steve McCaffery premieres Carnival Panel III, the third instalment of his seminal series of concrete poems. Hosted by Carl Wilson.

Click the link for a full text of Steve McCaffery's Carnival

14 ELM STREET
THE ARTS AND LETTERS CLUB

This Ain't Closing Down

2010-06-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

From the This Ain't the Rosedale Library's blog. Also here.

We are sincerely touched by the outpouring of sympathy and understanding that so many people have shown us over the last few days. It is overwhelming that such a diverse group of people all feel strongly about the books that we stock, the place that we create for them, and the way that we champion them. We offer our thanks to each one of you, and have trouble finding words to repay this kindness.

We are, however, in the disappointing position of having had our formal proposal to our landlord rejected. Our proposal to work for her to liquidate our stock was dismissed with the argument that the cost of paying security or a bailiff to observe the process would outweigh the gain. Our proposal did not include security or a bailiff’s presence during the process. Clearly we are not trusted. With no negotiation of our terms of payment available to us we have to accept that the store has no future at this location. This might seem anti-climactic, and some of our supporters may feel that there must be something else that we can do. We ask for your trust that we have, for some time now, considered all the options, and have had the support of a lawyer in formalizing them. Our only hope is to imagine that the store may reemerge in the long-term. At this point a fundraiser could only be a Pyrrhic victory. We encourage all those who have shown such enthusiasm for the store to consider helping us and stores of our kind but in the future.

While we are open to suggestions, we are hoping that our own unfortunate case might offer others the opportunity to seriously consider the factors which combine to make creating and running a bookstore such a challenge in North America. Predatory pricing of Amazon, inflated rents in urban centers, remaindering of excessive print-runs demanded by big-box stores and corporate publishing have had a devastating effect on smaller entrepreneurs. We are still of the feeling that without big changes the best and most satisfying way to support indies is to explore the stores in your city, browse their selection, trust your own curiosity, and buy gift certificates if nothing suits you.

We cannot help but feel guilty for disappointing everyone who has demonstrated their hope that we might resolve our difficulties in the short term. We invite anyone who might feel that we have breached their trust in this respect to contact us at info@thisaint.ca

Jesse & Charlie Huisken

This Ain't Update

2010-06-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

http://thisaintblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/an-update-on-our-situtation/

This Ain't Happenin'!

2010-06-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

Sad news.

The amazing, essential bookstore This Ain't the Rosedale Library has been threatened with closure. A bailiff's notice, posted to the door of the independent bookseller, alleges that the owners owe the landlord $40,000 plus costs. Read about the issue here.

I can't imagine a Kensington Market or a Toronto without the Rosedale. Hopefully, the literary community can fire itself up and help Charlie and Jesse Huisken (the owners) avoid closing up shop.

I'd imagine the news of organized support will be posted here, on the "Friends of This Ain't the Rosedale Library" Facebook page. Until then, get your butt down to Nassau and buy some books!

NEW PURITAN

2010-06-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

The 1010 Issue has launched!

Go to www.puritan-magazine.com and check out Issue 10, Spring 2010, featuring ...

fiction by Marko Fong and Brian Allen Carr ...

poetry by Zachariah Wells, Carey Toane, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Leigh Nash, Robert Swereda, Catherine Graham, and Dave Margoshes ...

and a review of Dionne Brand's Ossuaries by E Martin Nolan.

We're now looking for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, interviews, and reviews for Issue 11, Summer 2010.

Send all questions and submissions to puritanmagazine@gmail.com.

The Griffins

2010-06-02T07:44:00.000-07:00

THE FUTURE HIDEAL REPUBLIC

Will suppress all literary prizes

Since we are not race horses

For one happy debtor

How many deserving passed over ...

- Nicanor Parra

2666

2010-05-12T04:17:00.000-07:00

The following passage is from 2666, by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer. The 'trio' described are three young men - two German, one Japanese - living in Berlin just before the onset of WWII. They are friends, drinking buddies. This is from Book V: The Part About Archimboldi, the final 'book' that makes up this monstrous angel of a work. It is a passage like any other, a small and wondrous and beautiful patch of flowers growing at the base of an immense and eternal tree, itself one of many, a tower in a forest that is infinite and terrible.

Take heed, writers of fiction. Were we to produce an author in the same league as the late Bolano, the walls of parliament would surely quake.

"Sometimes, however, as they sat on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich."

Black Bile Press

2010-05-06T10:59:00.001-07:00

Ever hear of Black Bile Press? Here's a short column/interview I did with Matthew Firth, editor and author, for this issue of Broken Pencil Magazine. If you want to find out more about BBP's latest batch of chapbooks, check out the reviews my colleague Tyler Willis wrote for our online magazine, The Puritan, and Mark McCawley's reviews for his new upstart site Fresh Raw Cuts.

----------------------------

Bored by the upper middle class, educated anxieties endlessly detailed in our major literary journals? Tired of bloodless, sexless CanLit fiction that seems to rake in all the major prizes? If so, look no further than Matthew Firth’s Black Bile Press, a chapbook series that puts together stories by past contributors of Firth’s other editorial project: the longstanding and positively heroic litmag, Front&Centre.

Fall 2009 saw the release of three new chapbooks: Men and the Drink by Julie McArthur, Sensational Sherri by Nathaniel G. Moore, and Bill Bailey by Tony O’Neill. “The series stands together in some cohesive way,” Firth says. “Like hearing three different bands on the same bill – some commonalities but also different styles and sounds. McArthur is a straight-ahead storyteller. She brings a nice balance, as her story centres on how a woman feels about getting fucked over by a man. Moore is an irreverent, more discursive storyteller but he gets you somewhere in the end. O’Neill is a full-on, guns blazing shit-disturber of a storyteller and he always works in some surprises.”

I ask Firth about his approach to design craft, often so important to micro press publishers. “I don’t want the chapbooks to look like they were thrown together without any care,” he says, “as that is a disservice to the writer and the reader, but I also don’t want to create some precious artifact-like chapbook with ribbons and bows, that's been dipped in wax or anything stupid like that. Simple, clean, error-free (as much as I can), nice unique feel, but the reader must still be able to easily crack the sucker open and revel in the story.”

Makes sense, considering that Firth’s also committed to printing his stuff out of pocket. “I have never received a cent from any Arts funding agency and that’s the way I like it,” he says. “I like to call my own shots, do it on my own terms, and not rely on having to suck at any publicly-funded tit.”

This year promises yet another batch of books by storytellers definitely left of the mainstream. “A joy of being an editor is finding strong, new voices. In the last Front&Centre, I published the first-ever story published by Joel Williams, a guy who is in prison for life in California. Still, somehow he found my small magazine. I can see a chapbook from Joel being a possibility in 2010.”

Intrigued? You should be. Go to http://www.ardentdreams.com/bbp/home.html to order the fall lineup from Black Bile Press, sold individually for a miniscule $5 or as a set for $10.

More Recent Reviews: Back Off, Assassin, Sentimental Exorcisms, and The Lizard and Other Stories

2010-05-04T14:54:00.001-07:00

Three small press titles reviewed, published in this quarter of Broken Pencil Magazine (#47).

Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems by Jim Smith (Mansfield Press 2009)

Jim Smith – Toronto small press provocateur, ex-publisher of The Front, civil litigator and adventurous, heroic poet – is back, returning with his Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems: a collection that mixes offerings from three decades of writing. I say this with no small exaggeration: Smith’s return to poetry is true cause for celebration. Though oddly enough, it’s an event you probably didn’t know you were missing. I certainly didn’t – up until now I’ve been blissfully unaware of the long, frustrating years of drought this country must have endured without him.

For those of you new to the man’s work, Back Off, Assassin! provides a short but essential introduction. Editor Stuart Ross traces Smith’s explosive, controversial Toronto lit-scene presence, making this reviewer long for a return to the sort of experimental performances for which Smith was known (and perhaps resented) during the 1980s. Without much ado, we’re immersed, intoxicated, and lost in Smith’s incredibly singular cosmology. Unique is an insufficient term; this is an utterly individual constellation of poetic and political heroes; fascist villains; the strangely intimate strangers on the television; ghosts of friends, lovers, and family members whispering from their plots; even a handful of beloved dogs. After a slow, cover-to-cover exploration of the many canyons of Smith’s memory, one becomes certain that one has encountered an entirely singular personality, the way in which all great poets have found the sacred way to express themselves and no other.

For Smith, this means marrying confessional lyricism, surrealist attacks on comfortable, sometimes lazy realism, and an echo of the pitiless, relentless certainty of the headline news. It seems Smith is ready and able to do almost everything: passing between short and long lines, lists, dedications, and prose poems (over which he finds exceptional mastery). His observations and announcements can range in elevation and tone so widely that the absurdly hilarious and the crushingly sad can often resonate in the same line (for example, in his “Declarations of War” we get a confessional voice describing his dog: “he was naked for sixteen years,/ then he died”). Just when we’re most lost in Smith’s personal history, he turns his gaze outward, becoming the strident political poet for our apathetic daze.

Back Off, Assassin!

explores the seeming impossibility of positing an adequate ethical response to a world that sanctions such baffling degrees of cruelty. Smith’s poems express a large-hearted politics, aghast at the monstrous machinery of imperial, colonial policies: the covert murders and tortures of CIA Central America, the bold-faced genocides of Fascist states. As such, his poems celebrate solidarity with those who fight tooth and nail for freedom, whose words and right to language are held more precious than comfort. But enough meditation on the failures of our first-world indifference or the broken promises of the revolutionary avant-garde can shatter the speaker into hallucinations, fancy, sightings of space ships and near-Blakean religious visions. What can the sensitive speaker do to make him or her worthy of the role of poet, knowing the world to be so cosmically sad?

And yet, just as Smith hits his spiritual bottom, he’s back again with sublime comedy, musing on the heart of America in his Schwartzenneger poems, or dreaming of the Big House all great artists share. As a testament to his experience and acuity, Smith embraces ambiguity over certainty, reminding us in beautiful Buddhist fashion of the dream of the world, the little bird whispering at the stump of your severed limb that “none of it is real/ that none of it matters,” after all. As with all great books, there is too much to talk about in Back Off, Assassin!; I can only now hope that it is read, and celebrated, and that its publication has incited a torrent of productivity from the author – an urge to once again flood our magazines and live readings with his weird sort of sanity.

Sentimental Exorcisms by David Derry (Coach House Books 2009)

There’s a small but vocal group of critics who regularly bemoan the abundance of Canadian fiction focusing on the dilemmas of affluent, privileged characters; fictions aimed at accordingly privileged readers. David Derry’s first collection of stories, Sentimental Exorcisms, certainly fits this description, but I’d wager that it’s so eloquently, confidently executed that all complaints of class bias can, and should, be forgiven. In fact, at least in terms of style, Derry’s first collection seems like a breath of fresh air in our small press climate of quiet, minimalist fiction. Reading Derry can be a rich (and sometimes florid) experience – his narrators are erudite and scholarly, employing an exquisitely intricate grammar. But considering our rapidly shrinking attention spans, it’s an oh-so welcome jolt, and completely appropriate to his cast of professional, academic, and cerebral men.

Sentimental Exorcisms explores a world of stamp collectors, top-scoring English undergrads, and art buffs – aficionados and professionals, navigating the fragile ego-systems of their painfully masculine landscapes. In the boldly-titled “Semicolon, Coma, Full Stop: A Treatise on Punctuation,” we’re launched into a grammar-nerd’s fantasy of usage guides, ancient treatises on philology, the dry but peculiar history of the semicolon. In “Distance,” we get a series of insights and interpretations from a dedicated market analyst, and begin to see a world dependent on a rising and falling economy. However, underlying all this impressive terminology and research is Derry’s primary skill as a realist storyteller. These men are by turns pathetic, sniveling, delusional, cruel, bumbling and oblivious, but in Derry’s hands they’re also strangely compelling, sympathetic, and utterly believable. Rather than despise or condescend to his subjects, we feel their private, painful conflictions as shadowy reflections of our own. This sense of kinship is assisted by five out of six of these stories being told from the first person, as well as by their sheer length – another sign that Derry’s working against the status quo of snappy, bite-sized fiction.

Anyone who’s read her Foucault will recall that the intensification of sex as an object of study hasn’t exactly liberated our libidinal repressions and secret desires. If anything, it’s helped force us into a pained awareness of what’s supposedly normal, as dictated by demographic and statistical analysis. I don’t see Derry’s conflicted characters as “latter day” Victorians, as some might have us believe, but entirely contemporary, struggling – as all sensitive men are – with the simultaneous explosion of sexual openness and the sinking ship of traditional masculine identity. I would love to see Derry venture out into more ambitiously experimental fictions, but hey, you can’t ask for everything. For what it is, Sentimental Exorcisms is a solid exploration of these sad and confusing days, and a more plausible portrait of the men who inhabit them than most petulant stabs at subversive fiction on the market.

The Lizard and Other Stories by Michael Bryson (Chaudiere Books 2009)

In The Lizard and Other Stories (Michael Bryson’s third trade paperback), the style is conversational and colloquial; his subjects usually plainspoken men and confused adolescents. While not exactly gritty or subversive, Bryson’s allegiances do seem rooted in the contemporary, urban, and working-class. Unsurprisingly, some of these stories first found homes in collections such as Matthew Firth’s Grunt & Groan, Nathaniel Moore’s Desire, Doom & Vice, and Zsolt Alapi’s Writing at the Edge. The abundant dialogue (loaded with realistic exchanges and banal asides), light descriptive passages, and frequent paragraph breaks means the book moves at a breakneck clip. When this is done well, as it often is, we forget we’re reading (participating in the artifice, so to speak) and slip under the spell of Bryson’s minimal narrative strategy.

“The Adulterer” is the best story in this collection. It’s a single paragraph running only three pages, but damn – its structural adventurousness and unsettling emotional manipulations beat together in the memory like some sinister metronome. “The Book of Job” – a curiously entertaining mixture of Native American and Hebrew legends – shimmers with welcome strangeness, disrupting the familiar march of Bryson’s more conventional offerings. And the story “Flight – the second in a trio of 9/11 stories – is extremely effective in its fragmentation, depicting the spiritual and physical grasping of characters living on the crumbling precipice of history.

However, aside from a number of glowing moments, and the aforementioned gems, the majority of stories tend to bleed into one another, providing an insufficient quantity of memorable or resounding passages. At times, their narrators seem to have a hard time maintaining the right balance between superfluous and essential detail. Moreover, four vignettes (short, unnamed italicized sections – think Hemingway’s In Our Time) crop up throughout, detailing the coming-of-age of some unnamed boy. If they’re meant to be stand-alone, I’m not sure how effectively they illumine or redefine the stories they intersect, and if they’re supposed to be stages of a single piece, they fail at delivering a climactic pay-off, or even a memorable impression of character.

It must be said, though, that this may merely be a problem of editorial direction (and yes, I'm breaking a sacred reviewing rule in saying so). Bryson is a careful and talented writer, and when he gets rolling, the results can be magical. Losing a few of the flabby stories, as well as the vignettes, and including a few more adventurous pieces (such as can be found in his Only a Lower Paradise, for example), would rocket this collection into must-have territory.

ottawater & online journals

2010-03-10T13:56:00.001-08:00

Hey, have you heard about Ottawater?

"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 here. 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."

That was from the official website. Anyways, I've got three silly poems in Issue Six. Check it out! It features some great writers, like John Barton, Michael Dennis, Andrew Faulkner, Gwendolyn Guth, Marcus McCann, Catriona Wright, and Priscila Uppal.

Speaking of Faulkner, McCann, and Wright ... did you know they're all Puritan authors? As is editor, rob mclennan?

And speaking of The Puritan, have you seen our mention over at Open Book Toronto? It's from an article called "Four Canadian Online Literary Journals You Should Know About," by the inimitable Paul Vermeersch. Listed alongside ditch, the poetry that matters, Forget Magazine, and Joyland, a hub of short fiction, we're certainly in great company!

We're still collecting submissions for our 10:10 issue (#10, Spring 2010), so go ahead and send your fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews, and non-fiction to puritanmagazine@gmail.com (but be sure to read our guidelines, first).

New Puritan!

2010-02-23T06:33:00.000-08:00

HEY!

Our new issue has arrived!

Go to www.puritan-magazine.com and check out Issue 9, Winter 2010, featuring ...

fiction by Matthew Barbehenn, Emily Schultz, and Christopher McIlroy ...

poetry by Jim Smith, Marcus McCann, Jenn Blair, Sachiko Murakami, Ben Nardolilli, Jenny Sampirisi, Sean Moreland, Jamie Bradley, Kathryn Mockler, and Robin Richardson ...

and a review of Black Bile Press' One-Off Chapbook Series #3, featuring the authors Tony O'Neill, Julie McArthur, and Nathaniel G. Moore!

With the launch of our Winter issue, we're now looking for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, interviews, and reviews for Issue X: Spring 2010 (it's only taken us three years to get to the X issue ...).

Send all questions and submissions to puritanmagazine@gmail.com (but be sure to read the guidelines on our site before ya do).

Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaahhhhh .....

Love,
Spencer Gordon
Andrew MacDonald
Tyler Willis

echolocation, mag and reading

2010-02-13T08:19:00.000-08:00

I've got two poems in the new issue of echolocation, a literary journal run by graduate students at the University of Toronto. The issue looks great (featuring work by Jeff Parker and Pasha Malla, among others!), and last night's launch was a very strange success, mixing English and poetry-minded people with a whole wack of engineers, pool players, and hecklers. It was the kind of reading everyone should be forced to experience; standard readings are too easy.

Anyways, go to their website and buy the mag. Kudos to Jon Simpson for the cover photo.

Joy!

2010-02-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

I have a work of fiction (a short story?) on the great online fiction journal, Joyland.

It's called "Transcript: Appeal of the Sentence." If you're a fan of Donald Barthelme and Miley Cyrus, then you'll have died and gone to heaven. If not, well ... what's wrong with you?

Go read it HERE.

Recent reviews

2010-02-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

Some recent reviews, published in the new issue of Broken Pencil Magazine.

Walkups by Lance Blomgren (conundrum 2009).

Lance Blomgren’s Walkups was originally published in 2000. Nine years later and this short, so-called ‘novella’ is every bit as original and ingenious as when it first appeared. Here’s the basic set-up. The book is divided into 91 sections; each titled as a real residential street address in Montreal. Call them vignettes, short stories, snapshots, flash fiction, ruminations or paranoid observations – any title will do. Sometimes they’re letters, sometimes newspaper clippings. The sections shift from first to second to third person without unsettling the measured, exceptionally precise tone – a unity of voice that perhaps indicates a character-as-narrator, rather than an unnoticed omniscience, leading us from door to door, room to room.

The world of Blomgren’s Montreal is one of short days and little sunlight, narrators or characters dwelling in drafty apartments who seem to spend most of their time in bed, confused by cloudy, disorienting dreams. We find, as we would in any city, a complete spectrum of actors: solitary students, alternatively fucking and feuding lovers, playing children, ancient men and women. There are even moments of Borgesian surrealism – houses that seem to digest their occupants; a warehouse that turns out to be the structure of one’s own body. However, the most striking quality of Walkups is its rejection of the seeming bedrock of most conventional fiction – character arcs, courses of rising action, climaxes, even conclusions. There is indeed a recurring narrator and small cast of secondary characters – all dwelling in the Apt. d’Amours, the only habitation we see more than once – but the real pleasure of the text is not in the familiar or even the plotted, but in venturing into new lives and new possibilities with each page. And while some passages are perhaps too brief, asking too much of the reader to assume profundity through an omission of detail, Blomgren’s ‘rooms’ typically rise toward a sense of awe or mystery, inviting readers to re-think and savour their quiet, insistent guides. It’s a shame that so few works of Canadian fiction in the last nine years have been as ambitiously original. Perhaps conundrum press will release a third edition in 2018; if so, watch this book remain a marvel, and remain – as the post-script indicates – unfinished.

Review of Copenhagen by Katrine Marie Guldager, translated from the Danish by P.K. Brask (Book Thug 2009).

The most striking aspect of Katrine Guldager’s stick-thin Copenhagen is its economy of language – its third-person narrator speaking simply and without ornament, committed as much to brevity as to a constrained vocabulary. This is minimalism for the purist – blunt indications of emotion; the banal, routine interactions of unexceptional individuals. In many instances, characters and places seem barely there, boiled down to their essential outward actions, or left uncompromisingly mysterious. As a work of realism, P.K. Brask’s English translation of Guldager’s Danish text certainly succeeds at evoking the small despairs of urban living – a kind of everyday, oblique melancholy, where aspirations are never that high, love and adultery both fumbling affairs, and cruelty all too casual. Guldager rarely allows her characters a sense of greater awareness, and doesn’t go anywhere near the physical resonance of an epiphany. This can work to devastating effect, as in the pitch-perfect second story, “Break-in” (a man discovers his mother, murdered in her bed, with her jaw missing …). But it can also generate its own host of potential problems – and principally, that of boredom. Sometimes all that banality manages to swallow or preclude beauty (or ugliness, for that matter). Sometimes the sudden, seemingly arbitrary endings call for some further justification. Sometimes I just wanted to be moved or challenged, or to feel as if I should re-read or hover over a passage; that I shouldn’t be anticipating the next story or asking myself, “so what”. That being said, Copenhagen is still highly commendable for its depiction of place. Copenhagen-as-city is as much a character as the men and women who populate it – and perhaps more so, considering their occasional interchangeability. Many of these eleven stories take their names from physical locations, and often the third-person narrator leaps across the map, effortlessly juggling numerous radically different personalities. The streets, the subways, and the trams of the city all radiate that aforementioned mood of underwhelming defeat, and for that, Copenhagen can be seen as a kind of novella, stunning in its cohesion, arguing the age-old notion that place and setting largely determine who and what we are.

Of DIY and Dino Porn

2010-01-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

The wonderful Suzannah Showler has just written a great article on our soon to be released project, Dinosaur Porn, for The Torontoist.

Read the article HERE.

The Puritan: A Mighty Small Mag

2010-01-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

HEY!

The Puritan is a MIGHTY SMALL MAG, according to The New Quarterly's blog, The Literary Type.

Read the article here.

Thanks to Melissa for the link.

Porn & Puritans

2010-01-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

Jacob McArthur Mooney blogging about Dinosaur Porn and The Puritan here.

Very nice of him to do so.

A Conversation with Sheila Heti

2010-01-18T10:36:00.001-08:00

Read my interview with author Sheila Heti in the new issue of The Puritan, my resurrected literary journal.

I sat down with Sheila in December 2009, in Toronto, Ontario. We talked about The Production Front, comedy sets gone wrong, good interviewing practice, Misha Glouberman, The Middle Stories, Ticknor, brain exercises, national literature, Web 2.0, the potential evils of MFA programs, and her upcoming book, How Should a Person Be?

Here's just a tiny excerpt of this rather long conversation.

Sheila Heti: But that’s the human element; a human is rough. You don’t want to always be eliminating the failure. Often the thing that sticks in your mind about something is how it’s bad, which strangely makes it good. If you take away all the bad, and you just have the good, then you end up with nothing. I think that every really great writer has something that he or she simply doesn’t know how to do. They become great by devising very ingenious ways of distracting the reader from noticing that one poorly-done thing. The writer’s body changes; you grow different appendages. If you just try to make everything good, nothing happens.

Go on and read the rest of it!

DINOSAUR PORN TRAILER

2010-01-12T06:57:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS THIS?!

A DINOSAUR PORN TEASER TRAILER?

HUH?!

DINOSAUR PORN LAUNCH

2010-01-05T19:16:00.000-08:00

Attend on Facebook!

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2240060756#/event.php?eid=234790465901&ref=mf

Thursday January 28th, 2010
7:30 - 10:30 PM
The Supermarket (268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto, ON)
No Cover

A LAUNCH PARTY SIXTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING.

Well, more like six months, but hey - thanks for your patience.

DINOSAUR PORN has been lovingly edited and designed by the DIY dream team combination of Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit. This is a limited-edition, lovingly handcrafted, and perfect bound collection of poetry and fiction.

DINOSAUR PORN features the prehistoric poetry and/or fleshy fiction of Louise Bak, Gary Barwin, David Brock, Andrew Faulkner, Warren Dean Fulton, Spencer Gordon, Corrigan Hammond, Joe Hickey, Penn Kemp, Henry Lee, Christine McNair, Dave Miller, Nathaniel G. Moore, James Nadel, Leigh Nash, Kenneth Pobo, Shannon Rayne, Carey Toane, Jordan Trethewey, and Sara Wilson.

So join us for a night of merryment, and come pick up this weighty tome for a mere $15. Other chapbooks released by Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit will be availble for sale, as well.

To help us hatch this behemoth, we've invited some contributors to come and read their work. Come see readings by:Louise Bak, Gary Barwin, David Brock, David Miller, Nathaniel G. Moore, Christine McNair, and Carey Toane.

Louise Bak is the author of Tulpa, Gingko Kitchen and emeighty. She’s gained widespread attention as the co-host of Sex City, Toronto's only radio show focused on intersections between sexuality and culture on ciut 89.5 fm. She is a sexual, cultural columnist with toro. Her performance work has appeared in numerous galleries, festivals and video collaborations, including Broadcast, Partial Selves, and Crimes of the Heart. She also hosts a salon series called The Box, which encourages communication across creative borders. She wrote a feature called The Ache, which is currently in development. She is also working on another collection of poems.

Gary Barwin is responsible for such body part innovations as fur, feathers, claws, differentiated teeth, water-impervious skin, water-impervious eggs, and the penis. Stress fractures in some of Barwin’s vertebrae may have been caused by the weight load of copulation. Barwin once was reconstructed so that his head was placed at the end of his tail instead of its rightful place on his neck. The largest of Barwin’s eggs ever discovered had a liquid capacity of almost 6 litres. He has the longest skull of any land-living poet—it is 9 feet long. Barwin’s vertebrae suggest that he may be 120 feet long. Gary Barwin always walks on his toes (for more see serifofnottingham.blogspot.com).

David Brock is a playwright with a zoology degree. Recent work has appeared in Event, Eye Weekly, Poetry is Dead, and Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine. He is currently writing a Spring/Summer line of fashion poetry for a literary collaboration with Vancouver-writer Sean Horlor, libretti for two new operas, and a collection of Saved by the Bell essays. A chapbook of poetry is forthcoming from The Emergency Response Unit in the fall of 2009.

Christine McNair has been published in The Antigonish Review, Misunderstandings, fireweed, Prairie Fire, ottawater, the Bywords Quarterly Journal and a few other places. She's akin to wives-in-watercolours and badlands field jackets. She works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Dave Miller has had work published in several places including The Malahat Review and The Fiddlehead. He's gone to a few universities including the University of Guelph where he's finishing his MFA. He's lived here and there and a few places in between, and is currently enjoying Toronto. He previously had very little experience with either porn or dinosaurs.

Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Pastels Are Pretty Much The Polar Opposite of Chalk and other books like Bowlbrawl. He is an editor at Broken Pencil and a fan of Bam-Bam.

Carey Toane is a Toronto-based journalist, poet and host of the reading series Pivot at the Press Club. In 2009 she was grants coordinator of the Scream Literary Festival. Her poems have been published in CV2, This Magazine and Peter O' Toole, while her chapbook Ministry of the Environment was released in 2008 on Bench Press. Current projects include editing her grandmother's journals and investigating the social histories of domesticated plants and animals. Her favourite apple is the Westfield Seek-No-Further.

Hosted by the editors, Spencer Gordon, Leigh Nash, Andrew Faulkner, and Arnaud Brassard. Hope to see you there! No cover! 7:30 PM!

http://theemergencyresponseunit.wordpress.com/
http://www.fernohouse.com/

The Puritan Returns!

2010-01-02T08:37:00.000-08:00

Back by marginal demand! The Puritan returns!

After sixteen months of dormancy, The Puritan is back with a brand-spanking new, twenty-first century online format, now publishing poetry, reviews, interviews, recipes, as well as prose.

Thank you to all our friends and supporters for sticking with us throughout our prolonged hiatus. Even if you haven’t been thinking of us in sixteen months, we’ve certainly been thinking of you.

Our new online issue – #8, Fall 2009 – features work by Angela Hibbs, Nathaniel G. Moore, Andrew Faulkner, Catriona Wright, Mike Spry, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid, John Goldbach, Eva Moran, Michael Bryson, John Lavery, Sarah Dearing, Michael Blouin, Rebecca Rosenblum, and never-before-seen interviews with Sheila Heti and Jan Zwicky.

In typical fashion, we plan to release our next issue at the end of the season it claims to represent. So, we’re opening our pod-bay doors to submissions of fiction, poetry, reviews, recipes, and interviews. Check out our website’s submission guidelines for more information. The address is the same as it ever was – www.puritan-magazine.com.

Also, we’re open to the idea of considering your artwork for upcoming covers. Potential covers should reflect the general visual theme of our current issue’s cover and our wonderful website.

To help us pay down our monstrous debt, we’re opening our archives to you. That’s right – we’re selling our back issues at rock bottom prices. E-mail us for more details at puritanmagazine@gmail.com. Veteran and senior discounts available.

We won’t bore you any longer. Our new site hopefully says it all. Please visit often, as changes will be frequent and intriguing.

With love,

The Editors
Spencer Gordon
Tyler Willis

Publicity
Andrew MacDonald

Web Crew
Derek McCrone
Jamie Weir

www.puritan-magazine.com

puritanmagazine@gmail.com

Jeff Parker Can't Lose (an interview)

2009-11-13T06:16:00.000-08:00

An interview with author Jeff Parker, published in Broken Pencil Magazine.

JEFF PARKER CAN'T LOSE
US author is here to stay ... but what’s with all the ties to Russia? Spencer Gordon investigates...

Are we to assume Jeff Parker is telling the truth? Sure, he may want you to believe that he's just your average everyday up-and-coming American author, living in Toronto, editing anthologies of Russian fiction. You know - the sort of career move every celebrated American writer dreams of making. He may try to convince you that it's every American's wildest fantasy to live low-key and under-the-radar in a frigid northern city, far from the prying eyes of Washington, able to frequently fly to St. Petersburg to "research" an upcoming project...

Seems pretty typical, right? Or does it? What's Parker's agenda? What's his interest in our fair city, so far north of his native Florida? What does he find so interesting about those Reds? And why does he carry a suitcase, a revolver, and a strange red button? Whatever it is that Agent - er, I mean Mr. Parker is doing here, I think it's high time the loyal readers of Broken Pencil found out.

I recently caught up with Parker in his rad-and-bullet proof office in the bowels of the University of Toronto campus to discuss his position of influence and authority, his business with our nation, his suspect trips to the former Soviet Union, and this so-called American 'literary' tradition.

Here in big bad TO it's always nice to discover another great writer (even a suspect one) hard at work in our own backyard. And Jeff Parker - writer, editor, and professor - just might be one of Toronto's best kept secrets. He's the author of Ovenman (Tin House 2007), the story collection The Back of The Line (DECODE), and the editor of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey 2004). He's also the acting director of the prestigious Master's program in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, where he preps and coaches aspiring writers enrolled one of the most unique MA degrees in the country.

Parker received his own MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied under such heavyweight authors as George Saunders, Arthur Flowers, and Mary Caponegro. “The most important thing for me was the reeducation I got in terms of what it means to be a writer,” he recalls. “I kind of knew that it meant you have to call out the world and yourself on all the bullshit. And I kind of knew that it meant you had to strive for things that had never been done before. What grad school and particularly the writers I worked with there taught me that I didn't understand was that failure was a part of it, that most of us do time in the trenches (even the Chosen Ones) and are the better for it, and that to be any good you have to really care.”

Parker spent his younger years split between Tallahassee and Destin, Florida – a section of state situated somewhere between “the theme park culture of Orlando and the profound Southern-ness of Georgia," fondly referred to by locals as the "Redneck Riviera". But since his Central-Floridian beginnings, Parker's lived just about everywhere in the US, spent a great deal of time in Russia, and now calls Toronto home - a move which has allowed him a far greater awareness of the sometimes mysterious world of Canadian writing. "With publishing, the border is like a one-way strainer," he explains. "American lit tends to sieve through, whereas Canadian lit doesn't go the other way. I think it's a real shame. There's a lot of really exciting work being done here that goes outside the bounds of CanLit, which is a phenomenon that both intrigues and repels me. There are so many great writers I never would have come across without moving here: Michael Winter, Ken Babstock, Christian Bok, Lynne Coady, Lee Henderson ... I could go on and on."

The effect of his extensive travel throughout North America has been one of “adding tics and grammar and syntax from all those places, in what is," he hopes, "a unique sound on the page. That’s what’s interesting to me at least, sentences as instruments.” It’s a part of what makes his narrators so sharp and distinct; it explains his particular mastery of voice. “Sound drives my writing,” he says. “It’s the engine that makes it go. The South is one of those places with a particularly strong linguistic flavor, like Newfoundland or Glasgow. And I'm pretty sure [my interest in sound] came from an interest in the fucked-up way people talked around me while I was growing up.”

His debut novel Ovenman definitely benefits from this careful attention to voice (a voice, by the way, which counts certain major-league American writers - Mary Gaitskill, Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Padgett Powell, and Sam Lipsyte, to name but a few - as its fans). Ovenman is narrated by When Thinfinger, a skateboarding pizza-cook with a curiously inarticulate, often hilarious take on the world - and who, if you've read the reviews, may be one of the most original-sounding narrators to come along in American fiction in recent memory. “It’s his voice that makes or breaks the book,” Parker admits. “It’s not based on any person in particular, though certainly fragments come from all over. Most of the revisions involved surgery on his syntax.”

Ovenman was edited by the "very sharp" Tin House Books team of Lee Montgomery and Meg Storey. Writer-editor relationships can be fraught with peril: conflicting personalities or domineering visions can ruin a delicate exchange between writer and reviser. In Parker's case, having a book edited the Tin House staff seems like a writer's dream. "In general their stance was: here's how we feel, but it's your book," he recalls. "I took most of their advice."

Since Ovenman, Parker's been hard at work co-editing (with Mikhail Iossel) a collection called Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia, also scheduled for publication by Tin House Books. It's a work which no doubt draws on his extensive experience living in Russia as the program director of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg. "That's been a blast," he says, considering the immense body of contemporary Russian fiction he's been happily poring over for the collection. "The new generation of Russian writers is off the charts. They somehow manage to hold onto everything the great tradition of Russian writers did, and re-construe it in these dark and foreboding contemporary landscapes."

Luckily, Team Parker only seems to be picking up steam. "I'm currently finishing up a story collection The Taste of Penny coming out with Snare in Canada in November, next year in the US," he says. "Got the Russian anthology coming out in September. Finishing a nonfiction book to be published September 2010 on Russia, thinking of it as Fear And Loathing on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. And also piecing together a new novel about animal rights terrorists. We'll see..."

We shall see indeed. Until then, consider yourself watched, Mr. Parker. And consider your writing very carefully read.

Recent Reviews

2009-11-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

Some recent reviews, published in Broken Pencil Magazine.

REVIEW OF SELECTED BLACKOUTS (Insomniac, 2009), by JOHN GOLDBACH

Simply put, John Goldbach is a good storyteller. In the world of Canadian small press hiccups and stalls, his refinement of storytelling is impressively, refreshingly competent. In his debut collection Selected Blackouts, the style is smooth, uncluttered, and clear; his sentences have the air of effortless polish. He attends to the appropriate sensory details and works consistent wonders with dialogue. But what’s also refreshing about Selected Blackouts (if a good blackout can ever truly refresh) is Goldbach’s willingness to entertain a variety of structural and generic options, shifting between television script to short vignette and back to the standard short story (though even more variation would have been certainly welcome). The strongest stories in this collection are the shorter works, such as "Odin Letourneau and Debbie Siskind's Second Date", "Conversations at Four A.M.", or "Wedding" – pieces that showcase Goldbach's rather Spartan efficiency and aptitude as a storyteller, his enviable knack with crafting immediately engaging and arresting opening lines, and his ability to pull out and shut things down when the time is right. Selected Blackouts is raw, bittersweet, and intelligent. It’s about our contemporary malaise – our lives of beautiful addictions and viral loves. This is a very strong work, and surprisingly strapping for a debut.

However, praise for the book seems to verge on the hyperbolic. Of course, it’s Insomniac’s obligation to push its own products, but calling the collection “utterly original” sounds a little fishy. Many of the stories tread upon somewhat familiar ground – sad-sack failed writers, listless alcoholics in their late twenties, smart people who drink or smoke too much and then face the terrible angst of hang-over remorse – so what seems to arise is a blurring of character, voice, and story. In other words, a lack of distinction or challenge. Most of us are sad or promiscuous or addicted or vapid; we only need to turn on the TV (or log-in) to be reminded of our rotten stomachs and bad consciences. Though Goldbach depicts this cultural predicament with a knowing and believable hand, it’s just this knowing that's the problem – we know it, he knows it, and Bret Easton Ellis certainly knows it. Hopefully, for his next collection, Goldbach will pull out all the stops and deliver something entirely unexpected. And judging from his better moments in Selected Blackouts, I bet he’s got the right stuff, the right moxy, to pull it off.

REVIEW OF SOMEWHERE TO RUN FROM (Tightrope Books, 2009), by TARA-MICHELLE ZINIUK

With Somewhere to Run From – her sophomore effort – Toronto writer Tara-Michelle Ziniuk produces another undeniably readable, attractive little book of spare, plain-spoken poetry (maybe the nicest-looking volume Tightrope Books has released, to boot). It’s chock full of sarcasm, cleverly slurred confessions, and the broken-bottle-sharp perceptions of a hurt, vulnerable narrator on the other side of some vague and amorphous blues. Many of Ziniuk’s caustic, biting lines transmit a palpable sense of desperation, anger, and bitterness. References to hip Toronto locales and various pop culture ephemera ground the text in a real-world kaleidoscope of crushed straws, night-scapes, and bar lights, which may indeed prove attractive to readers enamoured by the romanticism of place and time and youth (though to others this might bear a suspect whiff of Toronto hipster bohemia; but hey, tomato, tomahto).

And yet, despite its honest attractions, the success or failure of Somewhere to Run From may be a timing thing. As in, in order for the book to be effective, the reader must necessarily feel the same way as the writer. We can tell the narrator is sad. The voice screams melancholy and regret. But the “delicious anguish” on display either remains a museum piece, preserved and dried, or suffers from being far too personal to reach the universal, as if caught in the minutia and particularities of a life without the liner notes. In other words, it means the reader remains regretfully unmoved. It’s actually quite frustrating – we’re pulling for Ziniuk to make her move and break our hearts, but the moment never arrives. It’s most painfully acute in the shorter poems, which seem like sketches or preliminary drafts of more composed pieces. These fragments do not have the internal strength to stand alone; they rely on the bulk of the collection and the sanctioning binds of the publisher to carry them through. Alternating the tone of the collection would also do wonders; maybe this would also encourage some welcome dabbling with form, which is decidedly absent. In the end, all this criticism should be taken with one hefty grain of salt. As I said – maybe it’s all a timing thing.

Rejection Letters

2009-10-30T12:42:00.001-07:00

I've got a short, fun, inspirational piece on rejection letters currently on The New Quarterly's blog, The Literary Type.

It's called "Editors Make Mistakes, Too". Care to give it a read? Click HERE.

Thanks to Melissa Krone for adding that today.

Review of For Crying Out Loud!

2009-10-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

Just got my hands on the new issue of Broken Pencil Magazine. Ferno House's first publication, For Crying Out Loud: An Anthology of Poetry & Fiction has been reviewed quite positively. I've scanned and copied out the review. Right on. Thanks, Mr. Leslie!
Here it is:

Hand-made chapbooks typically vacillate between the shoddy and the over-ornate – in other words, either photocopied booklets of staple-stitched construction paper or precious little darlings laced with gold thread and pasted feathers. Arnaud Brassard, designer and printer of the new Toronto micro-press Ferno House, manages to avoid either extreme with resounding panache, producing with For Crying Out Loud (Ferno House’s premiere release) a surprisingly beautiful, perfect-bound masterstroke of hand-crafted restraint.

For Crying Out Loud is a collection of poetry and fiction by the students and instructors enrolled in the Masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. It boasts a poem fragment by seasoned veteran George Elliott Clarke, written in his audaciously lyrical, overtly musical hand, and a short story by American-born fiction writer Jeff Parker – a pitch-perfect, hilarious send-up of both presumptuous American ex-patriots holidaying in Canada and a somewhat lesser known, home-grown entity – the French Redneck. The rest of the book is divided between the program’s aspiring writers and students. In terms of poetry, one finds the subtle linguistic play and adventurousness of Catriona Wright; the spare, Biblically-inspired verse of Wendy Prieto; the meditative and sickly sensual lines of Alex Grigorescu, and the morbid, keen-eyed histories of Laura Clarke. As for fiction, Jonathan Simpson writes out the affecting, fragmented history of a father’s love; Andrew MacDonald provides a cheeky, happily-perverse look at voyeurism and crime; and Spencer Gordon (the editor of Ferno House) writes a dark reflection on cigarettes, death, and literary ambition, which takes an apt turn for the surreal. If what’s included in this collection is any indication of promise, then we should expect some remarkable work from these bourgeoning, Toronto-based writers.

According to the Ferno House website, the book might still be found at choice locations around the city of Toronto for a reasonable $15. I say go pick it up – it’s a damn fine combination of DIY, entrepreneurial ‘zine-culture, sophisticated and meticulous design craft, and ambitious literary writing.

by Eddie Leslie

From Broken Pencil 45

Josey Vogels liks Dinosaur Porn

2009-10-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

People are talking about Dinosaur Porn.

I was recently interviewed by Josey Vogels for See Magazine. We talked about our upcoming anthology, Dinosaur Porn, to be released in late November with The Emergency Response Unit.

Here's a sample. Go to the link for more. Although the interview says "Arnaud Brassard", these are all my answers.

"We received everything from sloppily written attempts at degrading, misogynist sex (again, ew) to spare, beautiful poems relating relationships to evolutionary cycles or extinction. We received stories about asteroids and fossilized remains of antediluvian love. Certain stories conflate older, geriatric literary figures with the dinosaurs we so love to imagine. Other poems and stories have engaged the linguistic and syntactical possibilities of our prehistoric friends, exploring dino genealogies and etymologies. Some stories have been more sex-oriented — some is straightforward erotica — while others have attempted to bring a more documentary-realist eye to the world of porn and its more animalistic, cruder realities. Visual art submissions have been as wild and varied and occasionally hilarious as we hoped they’d be. We don’t want to give any more specifics, unfortunately, because we’re still deciding on what made the final cut."

Open Book Toronto also talked to me about the anthology. Read it here.

Check out Susie Bright's journal. She seems excited, too.

So does Gary Barwin.

This is going to be quite singular, people.

Review of God of Missed Connections

2009-10-05T16:32:00.001-07:00

My review of Elizabeth Bachinsky's God of Missed Connections is now up on The Mansfield Revue's website.

Here's the first paragraph. Click here to go to the site and read the rest.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” So says Stephen Dedalus, famously, in Joyce’s Ulysses. To the speaker of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s God of Missed Connections, history can indeed be nightmarish — the hard facts of torture and war and famine; the inability to solve or resolve its contradictions and cruelties. But history, both private and collective, can also be drenched in the sunlight of nostalgia — the happy illusion that things were, at some uncertain point in the past, better. So we dwell in old family photos, use our mothers’ handed-down recipes, stoop to smell our fathers’ coats. What else can we do? For Bachinsky, reminiscence is inevitable; “what was lost / returns,” she writes. We ceaselessly dwell and uncover, though that which we unearth can be both beautiful and horrific. As one poem states, “we can neither love [it], nor turn away."

Interview with John Goldbach

2009-09-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Also posted on the Broken Pencil website.

I hope John Goldbach is nothing like his characters. I'm saying this in the most positive way imaginable; I'm saying this because I can imagine his characters as real people, coach surfing while snogging with their buddy's girlfriend, chain smoking cigarettes and chugging back countless pints of water and aspirin to rid themselves of massive, crippling hangovers.

It's to Goldbach's credit that most readers can recognize somebody they know in one of his stories - someone reasonably intelligent and sensitive, but clouded in ethical obligation and ambition by a certain type of everyday sadness: the kind that manifests in cynicism and bitterness and a tendency to hit the bottle way too hard. These aren't the destitute heroin addicts, pimps and criminals of a novel by Irvine Welsh or Hubert Selby, Jr., but the post-university crowd of men and women inching toward an overwhelming apathy, a pathetic truce with fizzled aspiration - what the late David Foster Wallace might call "the gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." Goldbach's younger crop of characters seem equally recognizable - naïve and stumbling but so desperately eager to feel - which is the typical way most smart kids endure their strange and terrifying high school sentences.

I got in touch with John Goldbach to discuss his debut novel Selected Blackouts (Insomniac 2009), the writing and editing process, his influences, and the literary scene in his home base, Montreal. I'm pretty sure he wasn't blackout during our conversation, but with veteran drinkers it's sometimes hard to tell.

* * * *

Selected Blackouts wasn't the product of sudden inspiration and manic output (a la Kerouac's On the Road), but rather one of slow, steady discipline. Though some of the works included in the book are "connected and interrelated", most were written "independently of each other" over the course of several years. "I spent a good deal of my twenties working toward the book," Goldbach admits. "The book came together over a long period of time, [with] seven or eight of the stories being published in journals before the collection" (journals including Descant, Matrix, Hobart, Smyles & Fish, Waccamaw, The Shore, and The Globe and Mail). For any aspiring writer, this is always nice to hear - that the hurdles and ditches or our twenties can eventually flatten into firm ground, and we realize that it's never been a race, but a marathon.

I find Goldbach's stories to be accessible, stripped-down works that swing between first and third person without a dramatic change in voice - a kind of minimal mixture of Raymond Carver and Bret Easton Ellis, albeit with a decidedly lighter tone. "I don't know if I think of the stories as minimalist," Goldbach counters, "but with short stories there isn't a lot of room for digression, so I wanted them to be fairly tight, in a sense, if possible." It's interesting, then, to discover that several of Goldbach's literary influences and current interests (which he was understandably enthused to share) aren't exactly known as masters of concision. "Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Beckett are a few writers I love to read and reread," he lists, "as are Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler and Gilbert Sorrentino and David Foster Wallace and many more. I'm just finishing António Lobo Antunes's What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? (W.W. Norton 2008) and it's a remarkable novel; in some ways, it reminds me of Faulkner but also of William Gaddis - two other incredible, impacting writers. It's one of the most interesting and awesome novels I've read recently, that's to say, by a contemporary writer (i.e., someone who's alive!). Also, I'm currently reading The Essays of Leonard Michaels (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2008) - which is terrific - and I'm about to start Ann Quinn's Berg (Dalkey 2001), which a friend highly recommended - so I'm looking forward to reading it, too."

I asked Goldbach about his experiences working with Insomniac Press, as well as his editor - fiction/poetry writer and all around very busy guy - Jon Paul Fiorentino. "Working with Jon was good. He didn't change much - just suggested a few cuts, which I was happy to implement, and made a few other suggestions. He's an encouraging editor and I enjoyed working with him quite a bit. Working with Insomniac, too, went well." I suppose if readers want any juicy gossip about the Insomniac editing process, they'll have to pry it from Fiorentino - Goldbach is perhaps wisely keeping details under wrap.

Living in the very literary-friendly city of Montreal, and judging by his characters' social habits, one might imagine that Goldbach is a frequent and enthusiastic attendee of readings. Not so, as it turns out. "I don't read live that often," he says. "I like it, I think, ultimately, but at the time it's a little anxiety-inducing. It can be fun, though I wouldn't want to do it all the time. And I enjoy going to readings sometimes. And as far as the Montreal literary scene goes, I have some friends here that are writers and some that are very good readers and some that are both - a lot of people seem to read literary fiction in this city, which is great - but I don't think I'm that involved in any scene, though I do like to have beers and talk about books with some of my friends sometimes. And I do read my friends' work, too. I think Montreal's a city of several scenes but also a good place to work on what you're working on. I like that about the city; there's a lot going on but room to do your own work."

For enthusiasts of Goldbach's writing, there's some good news: it seems he's already got a few more projects on the go. "I'm working on some new stories and a novel," he says. "It's hard for me to say if the themes are similar in the newer stuff but if the themes are similar, the treatment's a little different, I think. But I'm sure there'll inevitably be some recurring ideas."

And yet, alas - with the good news comes the bad: that's all I could seem to get from him on the subject. All you avid Goldbach fans will simply have to keep your shorts on and wait until these new pieces are revealed in print. One may feel the urge to go on an extended bender until then, but please, take it from me - speeding up time by means of a massive blackout is never, ever a good idea.

Open Book Toronto

2009-09-17T10:39:00.001-07:00

Lonely Planet launch now on OPEN BOOK TORONTO.

Lonely Planet and Other Stories

2009-09-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Ferno House is proud to announce the release of Lonely Planet and Other Stories, a chapbook of short (and not so short) fiction by writer and Ferno House editor, Spencer Gordon.

From the title story's bizarre take on prehistory and pornography, to stories of dysfunctional adolescent wrestling fanatics, single-minded instant messenger addicts, public transit madness in the nation's capital, and the morbid relationship between cigarettes and art, Lonely Planet and Other Stories is guaranteed to make your Monday workday lunch-hour marginally more enjoyable.

Lonely Planet and Other Stories is designed and typeset by designer Arnaud Brassard, and printed/produced by Spencer Gordon.

For its launch, Lonely Planet and Ferno House are hitching a ride with the Pivot Reading Series! The chapbook will be available for sale (at an unbelievably low price) on Wednesday October 7th, 2009, at that week's Pivot event - a very special night of readings by Ken Babstock, Emily Schultz, Meaghan Strimas, as well as Spencer Gordon (stay tuned for the official announcement from Carey Toane, for those of you on the Pivot mailing list).

In case you didn't know, the Pivot Reading Series takes place at The Press Club, 850 Dundas Street West, Toronto. The show starts at 8 PM, is PWYC, and is hosted by Carey Toane.

So come on out to the Pivot on October 7th and pick up a copy of Ferno House's new release, Lonely Planet and Other Stories.

To order a copy, please send an e-mail request to info@fernohouse.com and we'll get back to you asap!

Review of Ovenman in current issue of Broken Pencil

2009-08-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

Ovenman is American-born author and current Toronto resident Jeff Parker's debut novel, published in 2007. Its narrator and protagonist is When Thinfinger, a young man of little means and blotchy tattoos, surrounded by the low-lifes, punks and skaters, skinheads, surfer dudes, and lazy hippies of mid-90s Central Florida. Ovenman is written in a stripped down, straight to the point diction; there’s no wild linguistic or syntactical acrobatics. In other words, if language is music, When's is a down-picked power chord progression – no fancy, self-indulgent guitar noodling, and delightfully free of pretension or pose. In fact, one of the principle qualities that makes Ovenman so special is When's peculiar voice. His mix of oddball colloquialisms (skater and gutter-punk lingo), and truly delightful moments of precision (moments that manage to surprise and amuse without sounding false) proves the perfect fit for a novel about the "pierced and tatted Xtremes" (to borrow a phrase from Padgett Powell) - a world and lifestyle made remarkably attractive by When's unknowing enthusiasm.

When's tale recounts the disappointments and problems of being a full-time, albeit lovable, loser: he gets no respect from the local music scene, his sweet-natured girlfriend is literally broken, their relationship's on the rocks, and his biological father (his "biodad") keeps sending him cryptic, unwelcome letters. Then there's the thorny issue of a mysterious stack of money in a pizza box: the result of a hilariously unintentional, blackout-drunk caper. It's a joy to watch When untangle such problems, but he's at his unmatched best - and his most natural, it would seem - when he's talking about work. When floats between minimum-wage jobs, low in dignity and high in toil - the kind of work most people snub their noses at. But When brings a sort of Protestant work-ethic meets Zen-like calm to his day-to-day grind; a stoic acceptance of the disrespect and the dirt, and an ethical commitment to getting fair treatment in exchange for honest toil (even if that means skimming a few bills off the top of the float). To When, being 'ovenman' at the nearby pizza joint is more than a title; it means taking pride in something, however menial or socially insignificant. And as When describes the right way to scour a mop bucket, slice up a pie, or bleach a floor, the book attains a kind of unlikely, blue-collar, ramshackle beauty.

Published in issue 44 of Broken Pencil

The end of the line ...

2009-08-08T20:41:00.001-07:00

The Conservative government has decided to cut literary publications out of Canadian Periodical Funding.

Here's the source, from Quill and Quire. I think it's something you should read.

But rest assured, gentle reader - important cultural publications like Elle, Fashion Magazine, Flare, and Style at Home (which no doubt absolutely require the 600 to 900 thousand dollars they receive from the government per annum, due to their tiny, marginal audiences and thought-provoking, status-quo challenging content) will still be on the Conservative payroll.

So, if you like to read new writing, by poor or struggling or burgeoning writers, or like to see a viable outlet for anything even remotely avant-garde or 'challenging', please do your country a favour and support the arts.

Here's how:

1) Subscribe to a lit mag (or ten), if you haven't done so already.
2) Repeat step one.
3) Stop voting Conservative, if you haven't done so already for some strange and scary reason that I'm sure wasn't your fault (probably bad parenting or abuse or that accident on the see-saw when you were four that made your forehead look kind of 'funny'). And if you don't vote, please start actively voting against the Conservatives, as this is all mostly your fault, you apathetic loser.

Anyways. Goodnight, sweet magazines. We'll miss you in the fast food concrete suburbs of Harper's happy planet.

Gulch: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose

2009-07-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

I have a story appearing in this upcoming anthology from Tightrope Books, so I thought I'd promote it. It should drop sometime this fall.

GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose
A Steel Bananas Project edited by Sarah Beaudin, Karen Correia Da Silva and Curran Folkers

Inspired by the contemporary theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose is a rhizomatic exploration of the modern Canadian literary community. Drawing on the postmodern themes of detachment and disjuncture, GULCH seeks to create an optimistic snapshot of the pluralities and complexities that constitute the post-pomo literary landscape. Focusing on the theme of fragmentation, Steel Bananas members Sarah Beaudin, Karen Correia Da Silva and Curran Folkers have collected pieces from community artists, Professors, lit students, burgeoning young talent as well as established writers in order to compile a collection that resists the notion of wholeness, privileging instead the multiplicity and diversity found in contemporary globalized culture. This assemblage of poetry and prose bares the innovation and cultural critique of post-millennium Canadian writers, and seeks to expose the beauty of discontinuity.

Discussin'

2009-07-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

This is a wonderful discussion of dialogue by a great writer, Ann Beattie. Thought I'd share.

She discusses John Ashbery, John Cage, James Joyce, Raymond Carver, and Richard Yates.
http://www.kwls.org/lit/kwls_blog/2008/09/ann_beattie_ambient_sound_2008.cfm

The Broken Pencil Fantasy Party ... readings

2009-07-08T14:54:00.000-07:00

I will be reading some fiction or poetry at this event. I may or may not wear a costume. Andrew Faulkner and Leigh Nash will also be there. No word on their costumes.

The Broken Pencil Fantasy Party
Friday, August 21 at 9pm
@ the Whipper Snapper Gallery 587A College Street, Toronto

Watch the trailer here.

With DJ Hemingway, VJ and video performance artist mrghosty, and musical guests Whale Tooth and Dinosaur Bones already confirmed for the night!

Yes, this is an ACTUAL party with ACTUAL FREE BEER. It will feature bands, readings, videos, general weirdness, special guests, and so forth.

But to get in, you have to win ... here are the details from Broken Pencil.

The 15 lucky winners will experience indie-dom in all its awesome extremity including:

Watching the BP staff stuff themselves on the free snacks.
Mingling with boys and girls who haven't recently washed.
Daring to make pee-pee in a gross bathroom cleaned once a week by the tattooed albino with the tongue piercing who sleeps under the bar.

Speaking of bar, lucky winners will enjoy FREE BEER all night long while they take in the ULTIMATE INDIE PERFORMANCES ever including:

Freakish music played by people with their backs turned to you.
Readings about sexual angst by people so tormented you can barely stand to look at them let alone hit on them after the show (but somehow you manage to do both).
Real live artist-led unexpected happenings that include arts and crafts you can take home and show your mommy.

Did we mention the all-you-can-eat vegan, dairy free, peanut safe, no-gluten buffet?

Anyways, follow the link and enter the contest.

Dinosaur Porn? Huh?

2009-07-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

Hey! My new press is working together with Toronto's The Emergency Response Unit to produce a new book slated for release this fall. We are now accepting submissions of poetry, prose, non-fiction, and visual art/illustrations relating to the theme "Dinosaur Porn".

A little background:

dinosaur n.1. Any chiefly terrestrial, herbivorous or carnivorous reptile of the extinct orders Saurischia and Ornithischia, from the Mesozoic Era, certain species of which are the largest known land animals.
2. Something that is unwieldy in size, anachronistically outmoded, or unable to adapt to change: "The old steel mill was a dinosaur that cost the company millions to operate".

porn n. 1. Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.
2. The presentation or production of this material.
3. Lurid or sensational material: "Recent novels about the Holocaust have kept Hitler well offstage [so as] to avoid the ... pornography of the era" (Morris Dickstein).

dinosaur porn n.1. Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal in any chiefly terrestrial, herbivorous or carnivorous reptile of the extinct orders Saurischia and Ornithischia, from the Mesozoic Era, certain species of which are the largest known land animals.
2. The presentation or production of this material.
3. Lurid or sensational material that is unwieldy in size, anachronistically outmoded, or unable to adapt to change.

The small press DIY dream team of Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit wants your writing that takes the prompt Dinosaur Porn as inspiration and a springboard for bigger and better things. This is gonna be one big, loud, and monstrous book - the twisted love-egg of two hard-working micropress hatchlings, to be launched this Fall 2009!

Guidelines: For each submission, the title, genre, and word count of the work should appear in the subject line as well as the name of the author.

Please include contact information, a very short bio (including a list of previous publications), and returning email address in the body of the email.

The actual work can be submitted as a Microsoft Word or .rtf attachment.

Only electronic submissions will be accepted.

Deadline: August 7, 2009

Send all submissions to: pornsaurus@gmail.com.

Any other questions? Please visit http://www.fernohouse.com/ or http://theemergencyresponseunit.wordpress.com/

This is for real.

Recent reviews

2009-06-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

Some recent published reviews of various books and/or chapbooks:

Andrew Faulkner's Useful Knots and How to Tie Them comes as part of the first batch of limited-edition chapbooks released by his new Toronto-based micro-press, The Emergency Response Unit. Useful Knots is soaked with the grey, after-hour burn of fried synapse and regret, the indifferent accumulation of urban and suburban despair: piss-filled bottles, all-night binges, early morning shuffles home, the stench of gas, Value Village parking lots and unfinished basements. The title of the chapbook comes from the 1946 Plymouth Data Book for Rope Users, which also serves as an organizational locus for the text. Entangled (knotted?) image fusions - tied by frequent, almost off-handed metaphors - produce incredibly lucid impressions, showcasing Faulkner's wonderful gift of clarity. One of the finer qualities about this collection is its sheer readability. In each of these twelve taut, polished poems, Faulkner leaves an enticing narrative thread to follow, even when his more obviously logical connections fray and we find ourselves flirting with the edge of abstraction or technical experimentation (including variations on the sonnet, and an exquisite Can-Lit cento). As the quoted knot-book reminds us: "The success of your knot is up to you." In this spirit, Faulkner relinquishes control over final interpretive authority, trusting his readers to keep their fingers busy (and hopefully chapped, sore, and bloodied) with the happy task of teasing out another subtly knotted bond

(published in issue 43 of Broken Pencil).

--------------------

Leigh Nash’s five-seven-five: train poems is another chapbook offering from her brand-new press, The Emergency Response Unit, which “translates train poems into haikus while preserving the feeling and style of the originals”. Nash’s poems share the same titles as their inspirational texts (utilizing works by writers such as Pratt, Eliot, Dickinson, and Avison), presenting a series of distillations of original poems, offering radical translations via intense reduction, simultaneously assisted and restricted by the minimalism of the haiku. This is brave, risky work: ambiguities or multitudinous meanings of the originals are restricted, abridged to monolithically delimiting representations. It’s hard for this slim book to stand alone; only by reading Nash alongside her inspirations can one hear the vital dialogue between disparate voices, or can one interpret her process of conversion. That being said, Nash certainly accomplishes her goal, and offers stunning examples of formal and technical ingenuity. Her translation of “Towards the Last Spike” concentrates a nation-making toil with hammering spondees; there’s an echo of the original playful rhyme in “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat”; original lines are winningly preserved in cut and abbreviated forms, as in “District and Circle” (Heaney) and “Essentialist” (Babstock). She manages the monosyllabic, plain-spoken rhythms of Karen Solie and channels the beat loneliness of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Bravo and many thanks to Nash for striking up such incredibly vivid, intriguing conversations with writers both alive and dead (published in issue 43 of Broken Pencil).

-----------------------

Noble Gas, Penny Black is Ottawa poet David O’Meara’s third collection of poetry, published last year by London, Ontario’s Brick Books. It’s a slim, potent volume from one of Canada’s better-selling poets (his last full-length work, The Vicinity – also from Brick Books, published in 2003 – went on to a second print run, which seems to be an increasingly rare feat for a Canadian book of verse). O’Meara is also the author of the collection Storm still (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999) as well as the stage play Disaster, performed in Ottawa in June of 2008 at the Natalie Stern Theatre.

Noble Gas, Penny Black boasts a compilation of impeccably paced, rather traditional-sounding (if one can even talk about something being ‘traditional’) narrative poems. Most are slim and straight-lined, exchanging linguistic pyrotechnics and boundary-pushing experiments with form, sense, and sound for a meditative and softly understated approach. The tone swings from conversational to brooding, written with a direct and plain-spoken diction. O’Meara is often able to convey an aching degree of emotional weight under the illusion of effortlessness (a sense, I suppose, that the words could not be better arranged – that their place on the page seems foreordained and final). While O’Meara isn’t necessarily a poet to read for the twist and cavort of language itself, his practiced form is finely executed, his voice consistent, and his ear almost flawless. O’Meara is not a poet who tends to make mistakes, and Noble Gas, Penny Black is another pitch-perfect collection of very moving stuff.

Moving because O’Meara knows how to write a love poem – the charged, personal sentiment of “private words … in public”, to quote T.S. Eliot. O’Meara takes a documentary approach to relationships on the verge of dissolution, skirting the edges of ruin, averting what seems like inevitable sadness by another day spent “in … room[s] safe from the great/ alone” (“The Old Story”), in the warm embrace of conversation, shared meals, and laughter. O’Meara’s imagined lovers share emotional pacts against sub-zero temperatures, strung-out routines of temptation and weariness. The poems are sad without having to drum up grandiloquent tragedy, wisely skipping over sentimentality to focus on elements of ourselves – “a held hand, a look, a dumb joke” (“I Used to Live Around Here”), or a “handprint on the mirror, barely/ a smudge” (“The Late Show”) – left behind in the quiet rub of living.

The poems often centre around travel, situating a speaker in the bustle of foreign cities and tongues, the strangeness of hotel beds and missed buses, to isolate and intensify the emotional connections so often taken for granted in the manic rush to rove, and see, and experience. These globe-trotting narrators endure the common mistake of “forgetting/ that being together mean[s] everything” (“Japan Was Weird”), or that flying from a lover can feel like the “saddest thing” (“Airport”). Reading Noble Gas, Penny Blackreminds us of the quiet grace of giving and receiving love; in the face of change, routine, and ambition a speaker tells his lover of his wish to “ditch this city, these jobs, all the bother/ of having things, and keep only each other” (“Charlotte St.”). The end of a relationship is scanned with the same focus on the particular and the personal, providing, in one instance, a “Case study/ of a love life. A wreck” (“The Old Story”). In the particularly minimalist and spare “Ever” – a villanelle – the phrases “maybe” and “we’ll see” hauntingly undercut and undermine all the lofty dreams of a couple, bringing a sober realism to even the most passionate of entanglements.

But beneath all this sadness, all these speakers “distracted by the mind’s great grief” (“This Age”), there is a sense of heroism and courage. It’s tough work trying to break hearts. Art, like the melancholia studied in Noble Gas, is difficult. O’Meara manages a chin-up, existential opposition to what he wisely assumes we all know is coming. These are poems written against time, in spite of time, the great drawing down of opportunity and potential. It’s easy to imagine a lesser poet falling prey to the dangers of such a project, but O’Meara ain’t so green. He’s just quiet, and reflective, running under your radar while so many other poets bluster and spit in their efforts to tear language from meaning.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – our attempts to push art forward, be a little risqué. Just that sometimes it’s a good idea to study what makes a line work, how words can be married to emotion, making you susceptible and weepy as suddenly you find yet another poem has sunk its sharp, sneaky voice through your lowered, fleshy defenses (published in current issue of echolocation).

---------------------

Chase and Haven is Oxford Mills resident Michael Blouin's first novel, published last fall – exactly a year after the publication of his poetry collection I'm not going to lie to you (Pedlar Press 2007). One can sense the seasoned poet lurking behind the lines of this careful, measured work of fiction. Blouin's writing is a case-study of balance; while the majority of the novel unfolds via short, direct sentences – creating a quiet, meditative intensity – the rhythm is continually cranked into high-gear with poetic torrents of vivid stream-of-consciousness. In the balance struck between the wild and the restrained, one can sense Blouin's confidence and maturity as a stylist. Chase and Haven tells the story of the abused childhood and shattered adult lives of its titular characters. It is a book resounding with echo and repetition (think of Gertrude Stein's use of insistence), building a resonance that dismantles linearity in favour of a dawn, day, and night superstructure: events jigsawed together according to the time of day in which they occurred, regardless of chronology. Just as memory shifts from hurt to joy, scars to tiny moments of grace, so too does Blouin's narrative eye, mingling his main characters' vicious childhoods with their haunted, crippled maturity. While the work succeeds marvelously at evoking atmosphere and pity, the ending rings somewhat flat, as if the book's emotional intensity is left dangling or deferred. This is a small point; it's otherwise very good. Expect no happy endings, but no nihilistic doom, either; the lesson is somewhere in the murky in-between. Chase and Haven is, above all, the love story between a brother and sister: two halves of a fractured whole, who learn (along with the reader) that despite the pain and the scars, sometimes the most profound act of heroism is to endure: if not for ourselves, then for each other (published in issue 43 of Broken Pencil).

"Suggesting a Potential Canon: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke

2009-05-31T15:12:00.000-07:00

Suggesting a Potential Canon: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke
can also be found at The Danforth Review.

SG: Aside from being a well-respected writer, you’re also a professor and faculty member in the English department at the University of Toronto. What does regular lecturing and mentoring at the undergraduate and graduate level do for your writing process? Does academia provide you with the same sort of pleasures it did when you first received your Masters or your PhD?

GEC: Like most poets and many writers (apart from bestselling novelists), I cannot expect to survive—or live well—on book royalties or occasional prizes (though both are always welcome). So, one is forced to have a ‘day job,’ and teaching in the academy is one of the better options (apart from having a rich, generous, and non-censorious patron). Even Nobel Laureates in Literature are faculty members at one institution or another, and one presumes they are already well-compensated in terms of royalties and awards. So, what is the pleasure in teaching and mentoring? First and foremost, I think, is that one gets to engage in a serious, playful, and intense discussion of provocative texts with an array of other intelligences: this process of conversation and argumentation can only spark more fruitful thought and writing for each participant. Also important is the ideal that the university is an environment of ‘free speech’—a site for the exchange and exploration of ideas in a respectful manner: I love the fact that the Canadian and Ontario people pay me to read and talk about books and writers I find interesting—and to voice ideas and do research that some may find ‘problematic.’ In short, the academic setting/exchange/milieu is generally liberating, supportive, and beneficial. The downside is, as inspiring as teaching can be, it does decrease one’s creative writing ‘time’—and some of the essential bureaucratic functions of the position can be stultifying. But there are worse jobs for a writer!

SG: On a related note, you also teach grad courses in creative writing at the U of T. The value of creative writing courses has always been somewhat contentious; W.H. Auden, to name but one celebrated poet who weighed in on the issue, believed that teaching creative writing is "dangerous" – that it’s perhaps harmful to the bourgeoning writer to be instructed (in an institutional setting) on anything beyond technical aspects of form or structure. How do you feel about teaching creative writing? How (if at all) has the occupation assisted or hindered your own writing?

GEC: I think that Auden’s view IS right— teaching creative writing is "dangerous" but only if an instructor or faculty believes that ‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘they’ own the ‘rights’ to effective methodology or aesthetics. Such a belief will result in ‘cookie-cutter’ styles of writing, so that, for instance, products of Iowa look a lot like the other products of Iowa. I like to think that what makes a writer exciting is his or her originality and individuality—and neither tends to be fomented in ‘schools’ that impose a single, preferred mode of creativity. I like to say, after Blake, "There are many paths to the palace of Poetry," and the best thing an instructor or ‘school’ can do is point out some of them, then let the student-pilgrim make his or her own way.

I’ve taken creative writing courses as an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, and at The Banff Centre (three occasions: 1983, 1993, 1999). All these courses were beneficial, especially my Banff exposures. But the course that taught me the most about writing poetry was an academic course titled "Tradition and Experimentation in Modern Poetry, 1880-1920," offered at Dalhousie University, 1986-87, and taught by THE John Fraser—the finest critical mind I have ever encountered—and mercifully free of jargon and prejudice. Fraser’s class was not creative writing, but it was concentrated thinking and directed reading. His approach was simple and powerful: read a group of modern(ist) poets and explain why some are better than others—or more effective than others, and why some poems—or parts of poems—are better than others. To answer such questions, one needs to consider everything—biography, social context, form, etc. Fraser’s academic approach remains my preferred approach to ‘teaching’ what cannot be taught, i.e., writing creatively.

SG: Would you be able to speak briefly on your involvement with and thoughts on the documentary *City of Dreams* (2009), and its focus on the Toronto District School Board's decision to open an Afrocentric, Black-focused school that would, according to its advocates, "liberate" African-Canadian young people from a Eurocentric education system?

GEC: This question is huge and would require an entire book to answer adequately. It is also an emotional and complex one, and it needs to be considered carefully—and as reasonably as possible. First, let’s talk about the failure of the political class—especially the Ontario Liberal Party and government—to address the crisis of the secondary school drop-out rate of African-heritage youth. To me, elite and talking-head recourse to emotional rhetoric, accusing black parents of an atavistic desire to regress from ‘integrated’ multiculturalist education to ‘black-only’ schools, instead of saying that WE have—all of Ontario has—a problem when so many promising youth fail to pass tests in basics and graduate to enter trade schools, colleges, and universities, is an object lesson in political cowardice. My own personal response to this crisis in African-Canadian youth education is to say, a la William Lyon Mackenzie King, "Afrocentric schools if necessary, but not necessarily Afrocentric schools." In other words, it is essential that we—as a society—come up with methods and models that educate black youth successfully, and perhaps Afrocentric—NOT black-only (there is a signal difference) schools are one part of a possible strategy. What I do think COULD be viable is to have a school—or preferably classes available in many schools—where ALL students interested could learn more about our COMMON, African heritage in ways that are uplifting for black students in particular. One might say that such is unnecessary: Black people can succeed without having an Afrocentric education. True: just look at President Obama. BUT we cannot forget that, historically speaking in Canada and in the U.S., the education of black people was not a social priority: it was understood that "Negroes" or "Coloureds" did not require much education, for their position in a racist society was to be unskilled workers and ‘gifted’ minstrels. Expressly, it is partly this history of deliberate ‘suppression’ of education for black people that ‘Afrocentric’ school advocates desire to address. If there are better solutions (INCLUDING more parental involvement in black youths’ schooling) than ‘Afrocentric’ schools for advancing young black educational and socio-economic progress (which we all should desire), then the Government of Ontario should be seriously researching and funding these approaches, instead of demonizing the advocates of ‘Afrocentric’ schools.

SG: I & I (Goose Lane 2009) is composed almost entirely of couplets - while an appropriate form for a narrative poem recounting the relationship between two lovers, it also engages with Stephen Scobie's theory: "The artist is always divided into I and I ... ". Some of your other books – Whylah Falls (Polestar 1990) and Black (Raincoast Books 2006), for example – contain numerous experiments with traditional forms. What do you find attractive about form and structure, limits and restrictions? Did you find sticking to couplets throughout a book-length project exceptionally challenging?

GEC: THE John Fraser suggested in his research notes for his Dalhousie University course in Theory, about 15 years ago, that ‘form’ should be understood as an extension of the importance of ‘rules’ in sports and games. It is the performance of players—within the constraints/rules—of the game that allows one to measure the extent of their achievement. To use the sports analogy, if Muhammad Ali had demolished every opponent he ever encountered in a weekend tavern brawl, he would not be ‘The Greatest’ fighter—just a successful brawler: it was his performance and achievement literally within the ropes—the constraints—of the ring that gave his pugilism meaning and prominence, and, importantly, allowed commentators and critics to compare his merits against those of his opponents. To return to poetry, then, if one writes a sonnet—within the ‘rules’—it means that one’s performance may be measured against that of others (say, Shakespeare—or Shelley—or Frost, etc.). Just as vitally, it allows one to determine one’s own relationship to the history of form and to make adaptations where they seem sensible. In short, form is constraint, and constraint tests ability. (This point is true for vers libre too, which is also extremely demanding: the big problems in free verse are where and how to end the poem—and how to maintain rhythm or cadence over a ‘lengthy’ passage or poem.) In I & I, I gave myself the constraint of unrhymed couplets to allude to classical song, popular song, and narrative balladry. Yet, I fell into the form by accident: it just seemed to be the best way to tell a tale I describe as "pop song-opera" and "comic-book ballad": a ‘light’ classicism. It was challenging in terms of deciding the narrative/descriptive content of each couplet and the line-breaks. But, after awhile, the breaks began to seem ‘natural’ as opposed to forced. Now, when I read the book aloud, I am personally amazed at how ‘musical’ and ‘flowing’ it truly is. It is a delight for me to read aloud, for it sounds like natural speech, but also maintains a measure of conciseness and imagery.

SG: Various couplets throughout I & I are footnoted. Often these footnotes are short riffs of verse, expanding or elaborating on what’s been said in the body text proper. Why isolate these fragments as footnotes? In other words, what makes the footnotes bristle against inclusion in the main text? Are the footnotes included to incorporate a digressive quality to the narrative – in other words, an attempt to break or disjoint linearity?

GEC: It was Erin Moure’s Furious (1988) that showed me, for the first time, the possibility of using footnotes to expand upon the lyric, to make it more of a dialogue—or drama, for the footnote is almost always a different perspective, even when voiced by a consciousness identical to the speaker in the body of the poem. M. NourbeSe Philip followed a similar practice in her She Tries Her Tongue, her Silence Softly Breaks (1989). I’ve always been comfortable with endnotes and forewords/ prefaces and even such ancillary matter as epigraphs and discographies, which I usually attempt to use—like footnotes—to give a slightly different (though still—I hope—playfully informative) slant on the text. But I first used footnotes directly in the text in Trudeau: Long March / Shining Path, where some information just had to be related at once (such as the origin of Trudeau’s quip, "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation": he was quoting a journalist; the remark wasn’t/isn’t his). But I also had fun with a few of the informational asides, and so I saw it as a sensible device in I & I—just to provide an extra arena for ‘play’—as well as, occasionally, actual information. In my novel-in progress, in the first draft, I allow my (currently) first-person-narrator to provide a few digressions from the central story, and to do so via footnotes. (This time, I must acknowledge the exemplary practice of J.M. Coetzee in his Diary of a Bad Year [2007].)

SG: Most of your published works include several photographs, illustrations, or illuminations. Whylah Falls contains extracts from provincial archives; I & I has pen and ink drawings by Lateef Martin; Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems (Pottersfield Press 1994), Beatrice Chancy (Polestar 1999), Blue (Raincoast Books 2001), and Illuminated Verses (Kellom Books 2005) are graced by black and white photographs by Ricardo Scipio; you’re even included in several photos in Black. Are certain photographs or illustrations – or certain artists – typically in mind while composing a book, or are they more of an afterthought? How does your body of work participate in the long-standing tradition of poets working in collaboration with visual artists?

GEC: My own theory of the book is that it is—or should be—a total, sensory experience (as much as possible). For me, then, book design is absolutely important—from typography (where I do often try to decide the font or fonts used) to paper quality to illustrations. I first noticed book design in looking at Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970): it is a complete text—even though the photos and illustrations included are not, for the most part, accurate depictions of the events narrated and personalities described. They are present more for mood and context. Still, in working on my second book, Whylah Falls, I knew that photos would be an essential element in the text, and I was lucky and happy to find rare, archival photos of young black women—amid the Nova Scotia greenery—in 1939, just being themselves: it was a coup for the book. After that, I knew that visual matter should always be vital for me. Yet, it is surprising how often the photos get misread. In Execution Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2001), I include two photos of a Salvadoran Native lynched during an uprising in El Salvador in 1932. The information as to his identity (Jose Ama) and the context is given in the back of the book. Yet, some critics have presumed that the photos are of my two executed cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, both hanged in Fredericton in 1949. I also use deliberately contextualizing, but imprecise photos in George & Rue (HarperCollins Canada 2004), and one is of a grave in Venice, Italy, a fact reported in the novel. Yet, one academic has written that the grave is that of one of the brothers! In I & I, I was a stickler for Lateef’s ‘graffiti’ art—to bring a youthful, urban tone to a story of young lust and tragedy of black lovers in 1970s North America. (I was thinking of Parliament/Funkadelic album covers of the era, as well as the cover of Miles Davis’s On the Corner.) But I also chose the typeface: it is deliberately reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s 1970s song lyric collections (set in Monotype Antique—or Bookman Old Style). Likewise, in Beatrice Chancy, I had to have Fournier—nothing else but Fournier—which has the sweetest italic face in all of typography!

SG: Many of the allusions you employ in your poems are more than simple nods or borrowings from other texts; in many instances in I & I, your allusions are direct references, or blatant invocations, even going so far as to suggest, in the lines themselves, that the reader should seek out other works that might better evince a particular setting or mood. Why shirk all allusive subtlety? How did you develop this approach to intertextuality?

GEC: Northrop Frye’s basic argument is that literature comes from literature. If I’ve learned anything from Frye, it’s that. But Frye can be easily expanded and adapted upon: literature does not only come from literature—but from ‘art’—in general. For us, that means graffiti, movies, music videos, paintings, sculpture, video games, etc. Certainly, part of the experience of being an intellectual or an artist is to engage with art or works that are not part of one’s primary practice. So, Linda Hutcheon is a renowned theorist of postmodernism and irony, but is also a foremost critic of opera because of her respect for the form, the art. As someone who began as a poet in my teens—the 1970s—by listening to Top 40 pop music radio and watching the films and popular TV of the day, it was necessary, in I & I, to remember those pop culture roots—the comic book and Elton John/Bernie Taupin, The Planet of the Apes films and Marvin Gaye. Generally, too, in my work, I have tried to voice respect for the art and literature I have encountered—and to direct readers to works they may otherwise not know. In Quebecite (Gaspereau Press, 2003), I introduce the work by referring to films like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and the great Bollywood work, Devdas (2002) and Hitchcock’s only Canadian film, I Confess (1953). My hope in making such intertextual linkages is that the experience of the text will be enhanced in some way. Likewise, in Beatrice Chancy, I direct readers to Taverier’s film, La Passion Beatrice (1988), set in witch-burning, medieval France, while Ricardo Scipio’s photos highlight the physicality of the enslaved black body.

SG: You seem committed to recording where and when the poems in any particular collection were written. At the end of Black, you write that the book "flared up" out of Durham, Barcelona, Bellagio, Sliema, Monte Carlo, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Banff, between the years 1994 and 2005; similarly, at the beginning of I & I, you indicate that the work began to take shape in a hotel in Bonn, Germany, in 2005. Obviously, you’re quite the globetrotter. What are some of the less well-known, writerly advantages of extensive travel? Furthermore, in what way is your recording of setting and environment a distinctively Canadian awareness of place, an acknowledgement of Frye’s classic question, "Where is here?"

GEC: In reading Canadian poetry of the 1960s, especially the work of Leonard Cohen, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, and Al Purdy, one sees a constant referencing of the place of composition. Add George Bowering and Gwen MacEwen to that list too! On the African-American side, in the same era, novelist James Baldwin was also constantly referencing, at the conclusion of each novel, a series of cities (usually including Istanbul—where he lived for many years) where the work had been composed. I have to confess to borrowing this stylistic ‘tic’ from these writers. In terms of the benefits of extensive travel, there are two: a) the provocation to observation that a new or different environment encourages and b)—simply—escape from the demands of home-and-office. Other than that, I can’t say that actually writing abroad helps or hurts my work. BUT it was certainly nice to write a draft of Trudeau in Tahiti—where my subject met Margaret Sinclair in February 1968; and it was also nice to write a draft of George & Rue in Paris— just because it helped me to think of Halifax, N.S., more clearly. As for the ‘Canadian’ identity element of your question, I think that, being the product of imperial conflicts (French and British), and also being cannon fodder for empires (British and American), Canadians tend to be cartographers and communications specialists—in terms of the intellectual work we do and the art that we make. True: Frye asks, "Where is here?" But the black intellectual in the African Diaspora often has an additional question to face: "What home does the ni—er have?" For me, travel has been a way of trying to figure out my specific identity as an "Africadian" (African-Nova Scotian) in relationship to Nova Scotia, Canada, the United States (and African America), Europe, and Africa. Hence, I visited the Canadian War Memorial at Vimy Ridge, France, in March this year, and it was a moving experience, though I had to add, for myself, the missing African-Canadian subtext/context to The Great War and the thousands of heroic Canadian dead. But also important for me was the adjacent, smaller, less visited, decaying, and decrepit memorial to the soldiers of Morocco, slain in France for the glory of that Republic. In terms of my experience of racial alienation, I may have more in common with the dead troops of Morocco than I have with the majority of the dead soldiers of my own country. But the larger point here is that it is the experience of travel that makes such self-questioning and cultural juxtaposition possible ...

SG: Were you privy to Jon Paul Fiorentino’s selection process for the poems chosen for Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke (Wilfred Laurier UP 2008)? Moreover, what do you believe are the main strengths of Neil Besner’s Canadian Poets series? How does it feel to be included in the series? What is it like to see a selection of your work sandwiched between Fiorentino's introduction and your own afterword?

GEC: I selected Jon Paul to select and introduce my work because I was impressed by his on-line essay, dating back to 2002 or so, reviewing Blue and other titles of mine, and really tussling with my work—in pro-and-con ways. I really appreciated his taking me seriously as a poet, even when disagreeing, legitimately, with some of my personae or aesthetic decisions. So, I left him alone to make his choices as he saw fit, though he was kind enough to show me a list of his choices and to ask me to point out any salient omissions (as far as I was concerned). Hence, I ended up arguing for—and Jon Paul accepted—one of my first published poems, "Watercolour for Negro Expatriates in France" (1978-1979), as well as my rewrite of Ezra Pound’s translation of Li Po’s poem, "The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter," which I title, "The River-Pilgrim: A Letter" (1988). I was happy to see these works included and happy with Jon Paul’s choices overall (and I should add that his—or our—work has won the collection The Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry 2009). Yet, he is most interested in Blue, and so the selection is dominated by its poems, and there is nothing from Illuminated Verses (which is a shame), and little from Black—which is, I think, my best collection of lyric poems. Also, I would have liked to have added an extra ‘blues’ poem or two. BUT, in the end, it was Jon Paul’s selection, and one set of judges has already given it a ‘thumbs-up,’ and I think it reads well ‘aloud’ when I give readings: always a vital consideration for me.

Of course, I’m delighted to be part of Neil Besner’s series, for it is a bit of a snapshot of a career—or an introduction to ‘the work.’ It does for Anglo-Canadian poetry what The New Canadian Library does for Anglo-Canadian fiction and prose—SUGGEST a POTENTIAL canon. I’m especially glad to see Louis Dudek and Al Purdy represented because we poets and critics do such an abysmal job of remembering and honouring our departed poets. Every other self-respecting, literary nation bothers to remember the birthplaces, towns and cities, and the graves of their writers: we don’t—and we forget 'em as soon as they’re dead. We care only for our hockey players (true primarily in Quebec) and slain soldiers and dead politicians and living-and-dead (British) royalty. (In fact, I think the only Anglo-Canadian writer honoured with a statue is Darcy McGee—and his statue has less to do with his stature as a poet than with his status as an assassinated Father of Confederation.)

The strengths of Besner’s series are fourfold: a) the critical summary of the poet’s work; b) the selection of poems; c) the pairing of critic and poet (especially when they appear to be ‘opposites’ as I do hope is the case for Jon Paul and me); and d) the poet’s own defence/explanation of his or her poetics. I’d like to add a volume to the series as a critic, and the poet I’d like to select and introduce is Irving Layton: frankly, I think I could do a better job of selecting his best poems than some other anthologists have done. I also would love to read Roy Miki’s take on Earle Birney or Louise Halfe’s critique of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Yes, perhaps the greatest strength of this series is—or should be—unexpected pairings ...

Finally, even though my work appears between Fiorentino’s fine intro and my deliberately popular-song-oriented afterward, I think—or hope—the poems answer both to Fiorentino’s postcolonial and interests (though he may make too much of my appreciation of Derek Walcott) as well as to my emphasis on urban experience and popular song. I do think that if I bring anything original to Anglo Canadian poetry, it is the melding of African-American song and the British poetic tradition.

SG: In your afterword to Blues and Bliss, you mention that you’ve been working on an epic, tentatively titled Hymns: Canticles of the Colored Baptists of Nova Scotia. You go on to say that the "catalyst is Walcott, the model is Pound, and the result, should [you] succeed, will be a type of Bible". Can you briefly elaborate on the book’s structure? What do you find fascinating about the ways in which Walcott and Pound engage with the epic genre, in Omeros and The Cantos, respectively?

GEC: I’m still working on and working out Hymns, and so much may change between now and its completion—likely a decade or half-decade away (so long as I live to see it through, God willing). However, I do see the work as falling into four main parts: a) an introductory series of meditations on slavery; b) a review of the history of slavery, resulting in the arrival to Nova Scotia of ex-slaves who will eventually become ‘Coloured Baptists’; c) a rewriting of significant passages of the King James Version scriptures (Hebrew and Greek) into the Africadian idiom and contexts; and d) the ministry of Rev. Richard Preston and the creation of the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. I do see the work as being, itself, a kind of Bible. So far, the ‘working form’ is ‘Books’ (the four main ones outlined above), then chapters and verses (generally ‘free,’ occasionally structured, and mainly narrative). The example I’ve presented publicly is "The Gospel of X"—a retelling of Christ’s story, in first person, Africadian English, and it is drawn from my Africadian Bible—"The Book of Beauty."

Walcott’s Omeros engages with the Western epic tradition, taking its story from Homer, its structure from Dante (partially), and alluding to Virgil, Milton, and Pound, among other epic writers. Pound’s Cantos—even if considered as an inglorious failure—is still a landmark (or landmine), for its suggestion of how history itself may be used lyrically and of how ‘free verse’ can still be constructed to provide a lyrically compelling and encyclopedic narrative.

SG: So, more specifically, how is this work coming along, and what other projects have you been working on? Was Hymns put on hold while I & I was sent to press?

GEC: Hymns is already about 200 pages long—BUT much editing is needed, and much more work will be needed to write the next 800 pages or so, including a concerted study of other epics—from Beowulf to The Bible, from Norse sagas to African ‘orature.’ Hymns was not ‘put on hold’ for I & I: It is the successor to I & I and my other narrative-verse, especially Whylah Falls. However, Hymns is ‘on hold’ while I finish up a new novel manuscript, The Motorcyclist, and a new verse collection, Red (the successor to Blue and Black—my other ‘colouring books’). And there’s a new collection of academic essays in the works!

Radio Spot for Ferno House

2009-05-26T06:00:00.001-07:00

TUNE IN TO CIUT 89.5 FM - "Beyond the Classroom"

IF YER IN THE TORONTO AREA

ON THURSDAY MAY 28th, AT 11:15 AM.

DESIGNER ARNAUD BRASSARD & I WILL BE TALKING ABOUT

FERNO HOUSE

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD: AN ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY & FICTION.

Launch Party! For Crying Out Loud!

2009-05-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Ferno House's debut release is FOR CRYING OUT LOUD - An Anthology of Poetry & Fiction (ISBN 978-0-981253-0-4), a collection of poetry and fiction by the students and instructors of the 2008-2009 Master's Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. They are:

George Elliott Clarke
Laura Maija Clarke
Spencer Gordon
Alex Grigorescu
Andrew MacDonald
Jeff Parker
Wendy Prieto
Jonathan Simpson
Catriona Wright

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD is a hand-made, perfect-bound, and limited edition release.

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD will be launched at the Arbor Room, Hart House (7 Hart House Circle, on the University of Toronto campus) on Friday May 29th, 2009, from 7 PM to 10 PM. The book will be selling for $12. There is no cover. This is a fully licensed event.

All contributors will be reading to celebrate this unique release.

Please visit www.fernohouse.com and direct all inquiries to info@fernohouse.com. Please join the Ferno House Facebook group!

Ferno House is a brand-spanking new publishing house based in Toronto, Ontario, committed to printing hand-made, beautiful chapbooks and full-length collections of fiction and poetry.

Ferno House was founded by Spencer Gordon, Mat Laporte and Arnaud Brassard in early 2009. All publications are designed by award-winning designer Arnaud Brassard and edited by writer Spencer Gordon.

Cover modeling ...

2009-04-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

This issue of Broken Pencil has my reviews of Michael Blouin's Chase & Haven (Coach House, 2008), Andrew Faulkner's Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (Emergency Response Unit, 2008), and Leigh Nash's five-seven-five: train poems (Emergency Response Unit, 2008), which I will post soon on this blog.

I also weigh in on the article "Who Killed the Third Person?", written by Nathaniel G. Moore.

"A Painful Place": An interview with Michael Blouin

2009-04-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

SG: What contemporary fiction and/or poetry currently excite you? What older works do you find yourself returning to for inspiration?

MB: I don't tend to read a lot of contemporary fiction or poetry, for the same reason that I don't tend to watch a lot of television or film - a possibly irrational fear that it will show up in my own work. I do read writers I know personally though. In fiction (if it is in fact fiction) I just finished Stripmalling by Jon Paul Fiorentino and Evan Munday and in poetry I just re-read The Luskville Reductions by Monty Read and some pieces by Sandra Ridley who I've been working with lately. At least if I'm influenced I will be influenced by work of a very high calibre. I find all of the writers mentioned above to be working at an extraordinarily high level.

As far as older works I do read all of the time. I return regularly to the following: Joyce, Nabakov, Kroetsch, and Herge. I also teach Salinger, Dickens, Ondaatje and again, Joyce, so I'm always messing about with those.

I think music informs my writing more than writing does: Kieth Jarrett, Bill Frissel, Miles Davis, Matt Good, Royal Wood. Many, many diverse artists each playing in my head at a different stage in my process.

SG: A related question: do you see yourself (or hope to see yourself) working within a specific artistic tradition, Canadian or otherwise? If so, is this a product of style, subject matter, place, ideology, or otherwise?

MB: I do see myself working within a Canadian narrative tradition though I'd be hard pressed to define just how. That might be best answered by someone else. As a much younger writer I was deeply inspired by the early work of Ondaatje and I have a great regard and respect for the Canadian poetic tradition. Someone other than myself would have to point out to me how my fiction would fit into a specifically Canadian arc. I don't see that but I'd be proud to be counted in I guess. I'm certainly identifiably Canadian in terms of place, both in my poetry and fiction, and I suppose subject matter as well. My new poetry is certainly quite Canadian in subject matter, tone and ideology I think. More on that below.

SG: What role, if any, did the community of Oxford Mills have in the writing of your novel, Chase & Haven? Moreover, how has the Ottawa literary scene (small press included) and its particular cast of characters helped or hindered your creative process?

MB: Chase & Haven is firmly set in the community in which I currently live and work which is Oxford Mills, Kemptville, and the wider North Grenville County area. My next novel takes place here as well as do parts of the novel to follow. Strangely they each take place in the 1970's and I was not living here then. I find it very beneficial to be able to stand in the places that my characters walk. I could take a reader of Chase & Haven on a walking tour and point out Chase and Haven's trailer, the restaurant Chase hangs out at, the highway and roads they ran away on, Chase's basement apartment, the pivotal railway crossing is one concession away from my current house and interestingly several readers have identified it, though it's never named. I hear that train every night from my bed. All of this helps me, I think, to stay close to my characters - they're not just in my head. I can see them when I drive around.

My third novel branches out from this area to travel to St. Thomas Ontario and my new book of poetry travels to the southern U.S. and New Brunswick - in both cases because they are driven there by historical events.

Collett Tracey at Carleton University taught me that it is necessary for a writer to exist within a small community of like-minded individuals. I had never believed that to be true and I now realize that it is, or that it is certainly very beneficial to have one and I feel lucky that I do. At the very least it dissolves the sense of isolation which can easily develop for a writer. At the very real risk of leaving out important names (which I will do, sorry) I have been affirmed both as a writer and as a person who writes (two different fellas) by the following writers (people who write?): rob mclennan, Rhonda Douglas, max middle, Dean Steadman, Sandy Ridley, Monty Read, Sean Moreland, Amanda Earl, Anita Lahey and supported by Arc, the AB Series, the Tree Reading Series, the Newstalgica Reading Series, the Factory Reading Series, and the Writer's Festival. I don't think the whole of the Carleton Tavern would hold the number of fledgling writers who have been supported in one way or another by rob mclennan, though it would be interesting to find out...

SG: What has your editorial relationship with Alana Wilcox and Coach House Books been like? How was the scenario similar or different to the relationship you had with Beth Follett and Pedlar Press for your book of poetry, I'm not going to lie to you?

MB: I was blessed to have both Alana and Beth as my primary editors (with assistance from Emily Schultz on my Pedlar book) and in both cases was fortunate to have my work handed back to me in considerably better shape than it was when I submitted it. I consider both Alana and Beth to be forces of nature, somewhere between gentle breezes and hurricane gale force winds and encompassing both ends of that spectrum. They are similar in their infinite care and their nurturing of the author and of the creative collaboration that editing should be when it is done well. That collaboration is quite different for a collected poetry than it is for a novel of course but they both approached their work with me from a truly generous place and I am grateful for that. The process with the novel has been more elaborate just due to the nature of the project and everyone at Coach House has been phenomenal. I'm currently working on edits with an agent and finding it to be exactly the same type of collaborative and productive relationship. So I've been very lucky.

SG: In Chase & Haven you employ a spare, deceivingly simplistic tone, pounding out a declarative, insistent rhythm (a style Emily Schultz calls "Gowdy-like", but that could also be likened to minimalist American authors). Do you feel this style of writing most befitting of your subject matter? Or is this a style you employ naturally in your fiction?

MB: It certainly could be likened to minimalism. I tend to think of it as removing filler. I take out (or don't start off with) the passages I have trouble reading in some novels. Pieces should be strong enough to connect themselves and readers are certainly smart enough to do that. Why do we continue the narrative spoon-feeding? I try to restrain myself on this topic but... it's 2009 for God's sake. I just don't understand why so much of our fiction is the way that it is. So much of it bores me to death. I'm shutting up about this right now.

I do think that the styles of my fiction and my poetry come from similar, related places. The style does change a little with subject matter but the larger subject matter remains consistent; we're alive, we'll die - what's up?

SG: How long have you written fiction? How has your experience and achievements with writing poetry influenced your work with prose? Do you feel more at home with one form than the other?

MB: I have been writing fiction for an ungodly amount of time - 32 years. When I started writing smoking was a digestive aid that promoted an overall sense of well being. Drinking and driving was just how you got home. An adult cartoon was The Flintstones. Times have changed for the better I think. Except for the cartoons - Fred Flintstone trumps Peter Griffin (I like to have to look for my sub-text). I've been writing poetry about the same amount of time. I feel equally at home with both. I am at home with the narrative process, poetry or prose are just different means to that end. I am likely a better novelist than I am a poet. That will only be true though until my next book of poetry comes out.

SG: What's your writing process like? Raging torrent, slow drip, or somewhere in between?

MB: At the moment, and for the last few years, it is a raging torrent. I have a new poetry manuscript heading off to the publisher, a finished novel in edits with an agent, another poetry manuscript started and a new novel on page 65. I generally write every day which gets tricky with a full time teaching job, three teen-aged children, friends, family, a dog, a cat, a Jeep to take the rust off of, a boat to polish, a masters degree to complete, a gym to get to and other projects on the go. I write in between and during all of that. I do something towards writing each day. I'd like to have a little room to write in. I don't.

SG: Chase & Haven unfolds without much adherence to strict, linear chronology; instead, the reader is forced to assemble a series of fragmented snapshots - often extremely brief - that alternate between the present and the past. Was it your original intent to jump back and forth across time, or was this a surprising (or more spontaneous) development in the novel's composition?

MB: That structure was set within the first few pages of the first draft. I thought that book deserved to be presented in a form that mimicked memory and the way that process works for us (or fails to work). I saw it as the most realistic and honest way in which to present that story. Fortunately Alana agreed. And fortunately she was patient and attentive to detail. The chronology required a spreadsheet in the editing stages. It has to do also with my lack of tolerance for connecting narrative - I think that often it undervalues the contributions of the reader to a work, belittling the role of the reader which if we're honest we have to admit is the crucial role in narrative. It is the reader who writes the book. So the author should collaborate - not dictate, should guide rather than direct.

SG: If a novel isn't quite chronological, accumulating snapshots hopefully add (rather than lead) to a materializing whole. How is this idea - addition rather than chronology - assisted by the use of the ampersand as a divisional mark throughout the book?

MB: I think it says a lot about the collaborative process at Coach House that I can't say with full certainty that the ampersands were my idea as opposed to Alana's. I remember that we went back and forth quite a lot on the format of the book and how the pieces would be connected because they did need connectors. At one point we were looking at little pictures as connectors, and then there were some other thoughts. I believe it was Alana who changed the and to & in the title and then enlarged it for the graphic for the frontispiece and I said hey - that's what will connect the pieces (as in this happened & this happened & this happened...). Then Alana also made it all look very pretty. Like I said, bit of a genius her...

SG: Can you speak on the disturbing subject matter of Chase & Haven for a moment? Did the book require extensive research? What personal experience with abuse were you able to channel and transfigure into your convincing portrayal of child abuse and alcoholism?

MB: Since my parents are both still living and are very nurturing and wonderful people (I tried to signal this in the dedication which is to my father "the anti-Jack" which paints him as the opposite of the father in the book, which he is) I was concerned that the story would be taken as based on my childhood. People make those connections whether they exist or not - there's nothing you can do about that. Except to hide between the sentences. I have had extensive experience in social work with the mentally ill and people on the street and as a school principal working with people on the edges of things. I very much hope that my portrayal honours the people who have had experiences such as those I have portrayed. That was my intent. I have my own experiences as an adult with near death and with other matters. This can be a painful place we're in. As well as breathtakingly beautiful.

& that's all.

also available at Broken Pencil.

Sam Lipsyte, GEA Reading Series Pt. 2

2009-04-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago American author Sam Lipsyte visited the University of Toronto to promote and read from his latest book, Home Land. He also made an appearance at our workshop, offering some words of wisdom and interesting anecdotes from his life as a jaded Manhattan literary superstar.

Sam Lipsyte has written three books - the short story collection Venus Drive (Grove/Atlantic 2000, named one of the top twenty-five books of the year by the Voice Literary Supplement), the novel The Subject Steve (Broadway, 2001), and Home Land (Picador, 2005, which was awarded the first annual Believer Book Award and was listed among the New York Times Notable Books of 2005). You can read some of Lipsyte's fiction and/or essays in Open City, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, The Quarterly, Mother Jones, Nerve, Spin, and the Minus Times. Lipsyte hails from New Jersey, lives in Manhattan, and teaches fiction at Columbia University. He's been named by New York Magazine to be "one of the ten funniest New Yorkers you've never heard of" - well ... until now, that is.

Sam Lipsyte's fiction - aside from being occasionally hilarious - is known for its stylistic ingenuity, beauty, and music. Having the reputation of a stylist, Lipsyte gave us some deceptively simple advice about first drafts and later re-writes.

Sam began with a discussion of plot. A good way to "get to the story" (in other words, finding out what it is you want to say) is simply by following the line, moving meticulously from sentence to sentence, allowing yourself to be surprised by an unexpected turn of phrase or an unanticipated shift in focus. So much of a first draft is pure experimentation, pure discovery; strict adherence to a rigid, restrictive plot outline (cue cards pinned to a bulletin board; a scene-by-scene synopsis; the stubborn visualization of a predetermined outcome or end) can often cripple a piece in its formative stages. Plot should be thought of as a helpful platform, a kind of guide - not as a tyrannical presence. In fact, worries over plot should come after the real creative work - the first bursts of energetic, flawed writing - have been heaped onto the page. This is one of the only ways a piece will surprise its writer, and surprise on behalf of the writer typically makes for rich, dynamic, exciting stuff.

Lipsyte continued by saying that as we allow ourselves the freedom to experiment, our story or plot will inexorably rise up. As words and sentences accumulate we'll find that other, divergent possibilities - other stories jostling for our attention - will fall away. After our first shot at a draft, we can look back over what we've composed in order to decide where the piece needs to go.

In the wake of all that initial writing, we must subsequently become the most anal, ruthless revisers, critics, analysts, and butchers of our work. Another pitfall, again in relation to tensions between plotted intent, raw writing, and later revisions: there's often a tendency in amateur writing to sandwich really great, glittering runs of prose with digressive moments that only serve to reinforce a plot. These plot digressions are often what we might consider the 'boring' parts of a text, servicing structure but weakening our overall effect. Lipsyte smartly reminds us to pay the same level of attention to each and every line of a work of fiction; there can be no 'boring' parts; everything has to sparkle and be strong. We should know our piece, no matter the length, with the same level of familiarity with which a poet knows her fourteen line sonnet, or a musician knows his score or composition. We must live inside a piece, micro-managing every word. By never allowing the prose to fall short or its best moments, the acoustic music of a piece becomes the driving engine for movement, progression, and culmination.

Conversation soon took a different course. Sam had once workshopped with Gordon Lish, and I was eager to hear a personal anecdote about Lish's legendarily eccentric, brilliant, and terrifying workshops. Apparently, all the rumours are true - Lish would make his students read their fiction aloud, and then proceed to cut them off the moment they lost his attention, stumbled, or hit an awkward-sounding line. According to Lipsyte, you got the impression that you were failing in some significant way if you excused yourself to go the washroom during one of his thunderous lectures. A lot of students were ruined by Lish, but supposedly only those who came into the room with an ego.

By the way, I just discovered the recent publication of Raymond Carver's original version (pre-Lish) of his magnificent short story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", which was originally called "Beginners". This is an excellent example of what a strong editorial relationship can add to a piece (and just how much influence Lish actually had). Carver's initial version is much, much weaker, is even somewhat sentimental, which isn't typically one of Carver's trademarks.

The GEA Reading Series has its second installment. This time around, its three readers were Jeff Parker (head of the MA in Creative Writing at the university), Andrew MacDonald (1st year MA), and Brooke Lockyer (2nd year MA). It was a quick, hour-long session with some very nice stuff. All three writers read fiction, which was a welcome departure, although only Andrew got through an entire piece.

I've been going to lots of great readings in the city lately: Stuart Ross' launch of Buying Cigarettes for the Dog , where he read with Steve Venright and Heather Hogan; the art bar reading series, where I heard Dayle Furlong; the Pivot at the Press Club series, where Jim Johnstone, Eva Moran, and Nathaniel G. Moore read ... it's been a good month for readings (by the way, did you know that Stuart Ross, Steve Venright, Dayle Furlong, and Nathaniel G. Moore are all Puritan authors?).

Coming mid-April: I'm doing some reviews inside of the new issue of Broken Pencil and the new issue of the University of Toronto's literary journal echolocation. Also, doing an interview for The Danforth Review. Did you know that I've got a couple poems coming out in Bywords? Also also, our long awaited chapbook For Crying Out Loud will be put together and launched sometime in May.

Fiorentino's Fury

2009-03-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, March 5th, writer and editor Jon Paul Fiorentino sat in on our ongoing workshop at the University of Toronto.

JPF's first novel is Stripmalling (ECW, 2009). His most recent book of poetry is The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006). He is the author of the poetry book Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004) and the humour book Asthmatica (Insomniac Press, 2005). His most recent editorial projects are the anthologies Career Suicide! Contemporary Literary Humour (DC Books, 2003) and Post-Prairie - a collaborative effort with Robert Kroetsch (Talonbooks, 2005). He lives in Montreal where he teaches writing at Concordia University and is the Editor of Matrix magazine.

I'm not going to talk about what JPF had to say. Due to a rare mix of panic attacks, sweat, Jager, mistaken identities, Jim Nason sightings, and pounding headaches, discussions from the evening have been permanently censored. This is quite the shame - JPF had a lot of great things to say.

Instead of summarzing JPF's advice, I give you a very worthy cause that he is currently promoting: the Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazines. I've taken the following passage from their facebook group, which you should promptly join. Stephen Harper and his ministers are jeopardizing almost every literary periodical in the country. It's essential that we all step up together and prevent this from happening.

Here's the run-down.

Canadian literary and arts magazines publishing in either English and French are in danger of losing a key federal funding source.

On February 17, 2009, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore announced in a speech he made in Montreal (http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/minstr/moore/disc-spch/20090217-eng.cfm) that the Canada Magazine Fund and Publishing Assistance Program will be merged to create the Canada Periodical Fund. Initiatives from this new body will come on stream in 2010.

Departing from his prepared remarks, James Moore indicated that eligiblity for funding could potentially be restricted to those magazines with an annual circulation above 5000. With notable exceptions, the circulation of virtually every Canadian literary and arts magazine, large and small, is below 5000.

We have to make sure this possibility does not become an actuality, for if it does, as April 1, 2010, these important and praiseworthy magazines will no longer qualify for funding that they have been receiving for years from the CMF and PAP despite the excellent work that they undertake for the readers and writers across Canada (and around the world)!

The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazine feels strongly that to render these magazines ineligible for this support would be unjust. To quote Andris Taskans, editor of Prairie Fire, to do so would be "a slap in the face"---not only to the magazines themselves but to the many writers that they publish, many of whom began illustrious, international careers in these seminal if modest publcations. To do so would also be a "slap in the face" to the ordinary (and extraordinary) Canadians who read them.

By joining the Coalition, readers and writers everywhere send a strong message to the Honorable James Moore, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Periodical Fund that we believe in our literary and arts magazines and feel that they should continue to do so by supporting them through well-deserved and sustained financial support.

To do so, would be the cheapest economic stimulus package the Government of Canada could initiate. Every single dollar granted to us or paid to us by a subscriber or a newsstand buyer goes back into the economy.

Put it this way, when Canadians get into their Chrysler and GM cars, they have to drive somewhere. A lot of them drive to their newsstands and bookstores to buy a literary or arts magazine.

Say yes to continued Canadian Heritage funding through the Canada Periodical Fund for Canada's arts and literary magazines!

Say yes to the writers and readers of Canada!

For more details about these potential funding cuts, read coverage that appeared on the Quill & Quire website on February 20 and 24, 2009 (scroll through the news section to read both stories):

(http://www.quillandquire.com/omni/article.cfm?article_id=10538).

Here are some useful links:

Magazines that received Canada Magazine Fund assistance through Support for Arts and Literary Magazines (SLAM): http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/fcm-cmf/0809_recpnts-eng.cfm

Magazines that received Publications Assistance Program support: http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/pap/publctn/report-rapport/ann-rep2008/index-eng.cfm

Literary magazines that belong to Magazines Canada: http://magazinescanada.ca/consumer/listing.php?id=11

Arts magazines that belong to Magazines Canada: http://magazinescanada.ca/consumer/listing.php?id=2

Members of Parlaiment: http://webinfo.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainMPsAddressList.aspx?TimePeriod=Current&Language=E

Here are some important MPs to write besides the one for your constituency:

Minister of Canadian Heritage: Hon. James Moore

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-9650
F: 613-992-9868
E: moorej@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
2603 St. John’s St.
Port Moody, BC V3H 2B5
T: 604-937-5650
F: 604-937-5601

Liberal Heritage Critic: Pablo Rodriguez

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-995-5080
F: 613-992-1710
E: rodripa@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
7450, Les Galeries d’Anjou Blvd, Suite 530
Anjou, QC, H1M 3M3
T: 514-353-5044
F: 514-353-3050

NDP Heritage Critic: Charlie Angus

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-2919
F: 613-995-0477
E: angus.c@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
20 Duncan Avenue S.
PO Box 276
Kirland, ON P2N 3H7
T: 705-567-2747
F: 705-567-5232

Bloc québecois Heritage Critic: Carole Lavallée

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-996-2416
F: 613-995-6973
E: lavalC@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
110-5540 Chambly
Saint-Hubert, QC J3Y 3P1
T: 450-926-5979
F: 450-926-5985

Liberal Leader: Michael Ignatieff

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-995-6364
F: 613-992-5880
E: ignatm@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
656 The Queensway
Etobicoke, ON M8Y 1K7
T: 416-251-5510
F: 416-251-2845

NDP Leader: Jack Layton

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-995-7224
F: 613-995-4565
E: laytoj@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
221 Broadway Avenue, Suite 100
Toronto, ON M4M 2G3
T: 416-405-8914
F: 416-405-8918

Bloc Québecois Leader: Gilles Duceppe

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-6779
F: 613-954-2121
E: duceppe.g@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
1200 Papineau Ave, Suite 350
Montreal, QC H2K 4R5
T: 514-522-1339
F: 514-522-9899

Conservative Leader: Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-4211
F: 613-941-6900
E: harpes@parl.gc.ca

Constituency Office
1600-90th Avenue SW, Suite A-203
T: 403-253-7990
F: 403-253-8203

Remember to write MPs c/o both the House of Commons and their constituency offices. That way their entire staff will know about your concerns.

A (Michael) Winter's Tale

2009-03-02T09:49:00.001-08:00

Michael Winter came by our workshop last Thursday. In case you didn't know, MW is the author of the novels The Big Why (Anansi, 2004, winner of the Drummer General's Award and nominated for Ontario's Trillium Book Award and the Atlantic Book Awards Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Prize), This All Happened (Anansi, 2000, winner of the Winterset Award - get it? the Winterset award? - and nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize), The Architects Are Here (Viking Canada, 2007, long-listed for the Giller Prize), and the short story collections One Last Good Look (Anansi, 1999), and Creaking in Their Skins (Quarry Press, 1994).

For the first part of our session, MW discussed the difficulties in maintaining a dynamic, compelling narrative/authorial voice and point of view while writing in the present tense.

The present tense is exceptionally attractive for the contemporary amateur fiction-writer because it gives a sense of immediacy and urgency to a scene. And so often in amateur, present-tense fiction (and I'm as guilty a perpetrator as the next ...), we rely on this sense of immediacy too heavily, forgetting that we desperately need to modulate our point of view, that we shouldn't be afraid of mixing our narratives with interludes from the past. This is especially true of stories written in the first person, which can result in a strange form of static tunnel-vision. Even while writing in the third person, our narratives can get rather monotonous, 'showing' scene after scene, image after image, without varying the tone, tense, or the position of the narrative 'eye'. With all the maneuverability and cunning of the movie camera at our disposal, we fiction writers need to learn how to avoid boring our readers with a too-static perspective and the feeling of being trapped in a moment in time.

However, this all comes the great big caveat that sometimes boredom, density, difficulty, and reward all go hand in hand. Rick Moody, in an essay posted on The Rumpus, talks about our culture's impatience with dense, long-winded, labyrinthine texts: we want things to be more or less immediate, quick, in sound bytes. And so,

"...the most revolutionary act that any artist, writer, or musician can undertake in the current moment is to be purposefully and artistically tedious. I am not speaking, of course, of work that is so tedious as to drive away attention on purpose (Wagner, for me, kind of has this quality, or, differently, Robert Wilson). But rather work that is incredibly demanding, but which then delivers in proportion as you commit to it. In literature, there are many examples. Proust, Melville, Gertrude Stein..."

This is just to say, aesthetic variation on the part of the writer sometimes necessitates a lack of dynamism. A good thing to remember is that if you're going for ease and accessibility, a dynamic narrative perspective, which fluidly blends tense and tone and never bores, there are A MILLION writers who have done this better than you. I would definitely agree with Moody and assert that the CURRENT moment is aching for DIFFICULTY and TEDIUM. But we're not all interested in wading through the entirety of The Cantos or The Making of Americans.

So, back to Michael Winter.

MW showed us a selection from Colette's 1913 novel, The Captive, to discuss how a first-person, present tense work of prose can offer us endless variety without ever falling prey to narrative stasis. Colette is an example of a writer who will (probably) ALWAYS DO THIS BETTER THAN YOU.

Read this section:

"Mary laughed and stretched. She had just come up to my room, wearing only a Rumanian shirt under her Japanese kimono, her bare feet thrust into large man's slippers. She radiated a perishable, impersonal freshness. May has no features and immensely thick hair of unequal degrees of fairness; light on the nape of her neck, silvery on the temples, elsewhere almost brown. Twenty-five! What a waste of precious youth! Anyone would think that this vehement creature had sworn to ruin her looks before she was thirty: the tips of her long eyelashes are discoloured by mascara and her beautiful hair is daily scorched with hot tongs. May never goes to bed, forgets to eat lunch, smokes, drinks and takes cocaine. But what does it matter? In spite of it all the absurd little thing has the clear skin of a twenty-five year old blond, horse-chestnut coloured eyes whose irises leave hardly any space for the whites and a charming, imbecile way of exaggerating fashions which are crazy enough already."

With "she had just come up to my room", Colette places us in a first-person past-tense narrative. We know we'll return to this point of view, no matter what departure the narrator makes, because it operates as a sort of 'promise in the air' (to quote Winter), left dangling at the beginning of a story, that the reader anticipates will be fulfilled later on. With "May has no features and immensely thick hair...", we're suddenly thrust into the present. So, ah-ha! you cry. This isn't actually in the past-tense. She's tricky, that Colette. Just when we thought we were locked into a certain period, the story's clock effectively 'stops', delaying the main line of action to develop her characters in the present (don't you most commonly see present-tense action modulated by pauses of past-tense character development? It's cool to see the reverse, how it operates...).

The fireworks keep coming in the next line. "Twenty-five! What a waste of precious youth!" - exclamatory, emotional lines, to be sure. But the effect of such exclamations is softened and modulated by the next line - "Anyone would think ..." - which is in fact passive. See how wonderful a mixed tone can be? Flashbacks are sometimes best embedded in moments of passivity.

With "her beautiful hair is daily scorched with hot tongs", we get a highly specific detail, maintaining our appreciation of present-tense immediacy. But this is followed by "May never goes to bed...", giving us general details in opposition to the previous points of specificity.

Finally, "In spite of it all the absurd little thing has the clear skin of a twenty-five year old blond" provides us with a detail that dashes our previous expectations. This is a technique borrowed from the sonnet form: establishing one idea and then BAM, providing its juxtaposition. See how important this is for the first person story or novel?

Here's another example.

"I have known Mary for over a year - from eternity according to her - through having met her at a nightclub where Brague and I were performing as honest wage-earners. She was having supper at the next table and behaved outrageously to make an impression on me. She laughed, dipped her hair in the champagne, displayed the rudeness of a child and the cynicism of a young Negress, wept deliciously for no reason, threw coins into the bodice of a Spanish dancer and ruined everything by those simple words: 'I'm a real character, aren't I?'"

Here we have more generalized bits of character development through very specific incidents - "I'm a real character, aren't I?" - all in some point in the past. This provides much needed context for the reader. But now read the very next paragraph:

"The 'real character' walked to and fro in front of my dressing-table, cutting off the sunlight every other instant with the fluttering shadow of her huge sleeves. Dazzled, I powdered my face as best I could. If May trails about in her lover's slippers which make her feet look like Little Tich's, it is neither by mistake nor out of carelessness; it is 'to shock the old fogeys in the corridors'.
'Look at that,' she said abruptly, thrusting her downy arm under my nose. 'That'll be black tomorrow.'"

Suddenly we're back in the present moment, told in the past-tense. We have past-tense in the line "Dazzled, I powdered my face as best I could", but this is suddenly followed by present-tense with "If May trails about in her lover's slippers which make her feet ...". This present tense sentence is followed by a quote from the narrator, culled from May, which is meant to encapsulate her way of speaking and thinking about the world (it is emblematic of her personality). But, again, in the spirit of dynamism, fluidity, and modulation, the next line is a real quote from May. This is actually very exciting to take apart, if you give it a chance. Reading through it is quick and effortless and easy, but behind all that apparent simplicity is real hard work and an amazing discipline for the craft.

Jon Paul Fiorentino comes this Thursday. Hope things work out just as well.

GEA Reading Series, Jonathan Fink, Broken Pencil, and Bywords

2009-02-11T07:07:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was the launch of the new Graduate English Association's (GEA) reading series, held on the 7th floor of the Jackman Humanities Building on the University of Toronto campus. The series was initiated by Barton Saunders, president of the GEA, as a good way to celebrate the recent donation of a whole whack of poetry books from the family of the late, great Canadian writer Hugh Hood (don't know Hood? Check his shit out. He's a beast).

The GEA Reading Series features the work of students enrolled in the U of T MA program in Creative Writing (which mixes graduate-level English literature coursework with intense workshopping with some excellent writers, guest speakers, and mentors). As far as I know, the next reading will be held in about a month, and will feature three different readers.

Last night, Katy Jenks and Edmund Nolan read poetry and I read a piece of fiction (just barely cramming an entire story into an eighteen minute slot, forcing me to read at an extremely fast clip and stomp my boot on the ground to keep time and rhythm and to keep from tripping up - something I later learned to be completely unnecessary, as reading last meant that time wasn't an issue and I could've slowed down ...). The room was jam-packed, mostly with students (I'd say about 45 to 50 people is a good estimate). Also in attendance were writers Andrew Dubois, Jeff Parker, Rosemary Sullivan, Nathaniel G. Moore, Laura Trethewey, and many young writers from the U of T program.

The only thing crazy wrong about the new series is the location. The room was near to capacity, seats were at a premium, and the lighting unfortunately fluorescent and garish. Plus - no refreshments or food options. And what good is a poetry/fiction reading without a beverage? I was drinking stale water out of an apple juice container.

A word on Edmund Nolan: try to get your hands on his city sequence poems ...

In other news, Jonathan Fink recently stopped by our creative writing workshop. Click on his name to read his poem "The Crossing" at Slate.com. Fink's poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review, among other publications. From 2003-2006 he was the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the St. Botolph Club Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He also received the 2006 Editors' Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review. And yet, despite all the accolades, he's never had a book published, which is very unfair considering the amount of shit you see every year published by some of the major houses.

While helping us refine our own work, Jonathan had some very interesting things to say.

He's had experience writing long narrative poems. Some operate as a series of vignettes in emulation of a still life. Using a central, foundational locus - often a historical incident - he hops from perspective to perspective, creating an impression that can potentially trump any singular vision. While his vignettes don't seemlessly line up, one after the next, to tell a complete story in themselves, the reader does the essential work of filling in the gaps, imaginatively re-constructing the spaces between the lines.

Here's a snippet from section 18 of his long poem, "Conflagration and Wage: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 1911", entitled "A Young Woman After Escaping the Fire". The poem is made up of 18 of these stanzas, which indeed seem like "little rooms" in which he can quickly and seemingly effortlessly construct an evocative and powerful scene:

I pushed my way into the crowd and strangers
closed around me. Walking through them felt
like I was passing through a storm. The water
in the street was to my ankles. When a woman placed
her hands against my shoulders so that I would stop,
I raised my head. She seemed so angry, almost shaking me.
She said that I must wait; I must not leave. She asked
my name and when I didn't speak she turned to stop
another girl. I felt the urge to run. A man reached out
and took my wrist, but when I shook him loose
he backed away. I slid between the men and women
in the crowd until it parted right in front of me.
I'd walked this route for months. I knew the buildings,
knew the sounds of venders in the streets, the smell
like rotten fish that rises from the grates. A man across
the street walked briskly back and forth. He'd start to run,
then stop and walk the other way. He called a woman's name.
He grabbed at strangers, turned them towards him.
Something in him made them still, some wildness
as he searched each face before he let them pass.

Notice his use of the mostly sextameter and pentameter iambic line - a metrical rhythm he can sustain for a very long time, and do so without hiccup or stumble or without drawing too much attention to it. It was interesting asking Jonathan about his experience with strict meter - a practice you don't see a lot of young people engaged with. He recommended, for anyone interested in improving their hand at traditional meter, to once again return to the sonnet as a gymnasium for metrical exercise. Imposed limitations and the necessities of economy are good teachers. Imposed form can also be the cure to writer's block, or can shake us from the tendencies we often find ourselves too reliant upon. Fink has a poem in the works about the siege of Leningrad (Stalingrad) which operates in much the same way as his shirtwaist factory fire poem. Would love to read it.

We also discussed the benefits of rhyme, vowels, assonance, and frequency scales. I love slant rhymes. It's why I love terrible rap music.

I also love this chart:

bet
bay
buy

High-Frequency Vowel Sounds (alto)

bit
bet
bat
bird
bud

Middle-Frequency Vowel Sounds (tenor)

bar
bough
boy
thought
book
bone
boo!

Low-Frequency Vowel Sounds (bass)

Feel your mouth opening wide as you follow through the chart aloud. Great practice for seeing the possibilities of slant rhymes and assonance.

In other news, check out the new issue of Broken Pencil for two awful pictures of me (one from Canzine, the other from the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, Fall 2008), and a Pencil Sharpener article on The Emergency Response Unit chapbook press.

Also: as soon as it's online, check out the Bywords.ca February 2009 issue for a poem of mine. It's the first poem I've written since I was 18. Here it is:

"What I Remember of The Wars"

A poster on a pillar
fixed with white, runny paste
gives the stolid, soldiering face
the milk-white translucent veneer
of a blind eye, a foggy pupil,
sightless in soreness, remembering stoically
day-blue skies of vivid technicolour:
visions of years torn away
by twentieth-century jingles. The party line. Who we were,
unspoken in the lime-bowers
of our imagined intensity, the fantasy
of two hearts open, spine-cracked,
read. Your fingers trailing lightly over the leaflets
of my guts. Later, your face turned away, aged impossibly,
hardening like the soldiers'
crusted with glue.

It doesn't come back, the lines are saying,
like the glory
of the raping SS youth,
mind empty in orgasm,
pale, quivering cock
between the thighs of a grimacing Dutch spinster
who gazes out a splintered spidered glass
and sees the first snows of late November
quietly filling the streets
like lace. Or, rather,
a cab waiting outside a theatre, in Moscow,
wheels knee-deep in drifts, idling exhaust for a couple long
frozen in unspoken meter
and the buzzing mid-afternoon pint
bringing on its cloudy, human sleep.
We who are fading photographs, sepia prints of loss, what I remember,
what I
remember:

A woman can be alone, and not lonely,
alone, and not hardened, still soft,
wet, an open eye,
on a soldier's face, post on a pillar,
dreaming of things unseen but remembered
imperfectly.