5/31/2018

transform, not translate

In the tension between [ongoingness and conclusion] lies the resonance without which a poem is flat, static, which is to say, is not a poem. This resonance can be frustrating for the reader who wants experience to be translated; but poems tend instead to transform, not translate - they are indeed translations of felt and thought experience into verbal presentation, but their business, as it were, is to transform experience so that our assumption about a given experience can be disturbed and, accordingly, made more complicated, deeper, richer. This doesn't mean that we as readers necessarily will feel better. But the purpose of reading poetry is not, to my mind, to be made to feel better, but rather to understand human experience more entirely; this kind of understanding leads to wisdom, not the good feeling that is finally a shallow version of the happiness that wisdom strangely brings in its wake.

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "Little Gods of Making" in The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014).

5/29/2018

poetry's enduring worthlessness

Poems, despite being famously useless, do have a readership. As with academia, nearly all of that readership consists of insiders—other people who write poems. The difference is that comparatively few of them are doing that reading and writing for the sake of tenure, a promotion, or prestige in the grant hierarchy. I can also say, with certainty, that if tomorrow morning I get fired, or exiled to Siberia, I’ll continue to write and read (and probably write about) poetry. (The odds that I’ll continue reframing my dissertation as a monograph aren’t quite so good.) I’m certain that poetry’s enduring worthlessness will outlive the postwar model of academia that’s currently hobbling towards the post-work era.

-Carl Watts, from his essay "Poetry and Precarity" over on rob mclennan's my (small press) writing day blog. You can read the whole thing here.

5/24/2018

I keep coming back to what gives me courage: "Elemental" by Kate Braid


Redwing, I Say - Kate Braid
Sparrow, we say, redwing, magpie, crow
The field goes on.
-Maureen Scott Harris

Redwing, blackbird, able feeder,
what do you have to teach me?

Forgive my demand. It is based on urgency.
I do not say desperate but you will understand.

Redwing, bearing your own epaulettes,
unspeakable courage to always fly

forward. Are you not tempted sometimes to return
to the egg?

Redwing, why did the one who named you
omit the gold, the sun that shines from you to light the way?

Or is it your song that leads, gives me courage,
tricks me some days, into looking up. Just this.

from Elemental
(Caitlin Press, 2018).
Reprinted with permission.


---

Elemental
In the acknowledgments page of her sixth poetry collection, Elemental, Kate Braid thanks a number of people specifically before adding, at the end of her list of thank yous: "I am proud to be a member of the British Columbia poetry community - it's community that keeps me going." This gesture, of pushing her circle of attention and praise a little further out than most would typically venture, feels very in keeping with what I know of Kate Braid, and of her writing.

From her years of teaching creative writing to her work organizing community writing groups, editing anthologies, coordinating reading series', etc. (including the Dead Poets Reading Series, where we worked together for six years), Kate has always endeavoured to draw in and empower new writers. She's proven similarly devoted to exploring the work and life of great artists, be it Emily Carr (Rebel Artist, To This Cedar Fountain), Georgia O'Keeffe (Inward to the Bones) or Glenn Gould (A Well-Mannered Storm). There is a kindness, and a deep attention, that she brings to both the subjects of her poems and her real-life interactions - the two feel inextricably linked.

A few years back, I was invited to present Kate Braid with a Mentorship award. At that time, I asked some of her former students to weigh in on the impact she'd had on their lives. One response came from Amber Dawn, who herself has become one of the leading mentors in the BC writing world. She wrote:

"[Kate] taught not just to respond to poetry, but to show up for other writers. To let the collective knowledge of the classroom lift us all up as poets. To this day, being taught to value my sense of belonging within literary communities has been a lesson even more powerful than being taught about craft itself."

The poems/the writers. The writers/the poems. How can we be kind and generous to one and not the other? It's a question we are confronting over and over these days, and one for which Kate's life demonstrates many of the answers.

For this, and many other reasons, it was a joy to chat with Kate about her new book, Elemental, which widens her circle of attention and praise even further, to draw in the very elements of this world: the water, fire, wood, sky, and earth from which our world is derived. And the redwings, of course. I hope you enjoy.


Kate Braid, in the elements. (Sorry, couldn't help myself).

---
Rob: I spoke with you briefly for PRISM international back in 2014, and at that point you noted: "Looking over my recent poems, I’m a bit alarmed to find I’m writing more personally, neither behind the mask of another or out of my experience as a carpenter – which also became a sort of persona." True to that statement, Elemental, though certainly structured around "elemental" themes, feels in other ways like your first "general" collection (your past collections having channeled Glenn Gould and Emily Carr, among others). In that sense it feels almost like you're living the traditional poet's trajectory in reverse (the early, more personal/general collection, followed by themed "projects").

Do you think of this book in those terms ("general" and personal), and do you think it represents a larger shift in your preoccupations/energies as a writer? Did “removing the masks” allow you to access some more "elemental" part of yourself?

Kate: Ah, interesting question! I’d never thought of it in terms of “trajectories as a writer,” only that when I started writing, I was terrified of being vulnerable, revealing myself. I think this at least partly had to do with the fact that the first poems were drawn from construction where I felt I had to be very, very careful and hide my private self. Or maybe it’s because I’m just more chicken than most poets! Some of the poems in Elemental were actually first-drafted at that time but I didn’t (dare) publish them. I think now I’m braver. Or I care less about what people think of me. This is one of the great joys of getting older.


Rob: Elemental opens with a quote from D.H. Lawrence which speak of "the whole-life effort of man to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos..." In your version of the quote, you've inserted a "[wo]" in front of "man" and a "[her]" in front of his, as though you are pushing open space in Lawrence's description for women, and for yourself.

This feels very in keeping with your life as a construction worker (where you were the first woman to join the Vancouver local of the Carpenters’ Union and one of the first women to run her own construction company), and also for your writing on that subject, including Covering Rough Ground (and Rough Ground Revisited), Turning Left to the Ladies and the memoir Journeywoman.

Could you speak a little about the importance of the quote, and your adjustment to it, in the context of this book in particular? Do you think your background breaking gender barriers shaped or contextualized in some way the way you thought about and approached the "elemental life of the cosmos"?

Journeywoman
Kate: I found the Lawrence quote some years before Elemental came together, in a book of essays about Georgia O’Keeffe who was one of the women (along with Emily Carr) who greatly inspired me during and after the construction years. (O’Keeffe and Lawrence had been friends.) As Elemental was coming together, I felt at a loss as to how to define it; this book was/is unlike anything I’ve written before. As you say – it wasn’t a persona book, nor is it directly about construction. As I kept poking at the question, “What is this book about?” I ran across Lawrence’s quote again and it helped me articulate what I’d begun to see but hadn’t yet dared name – a coherence to the universe and how life-giving, life-enhancing it is, even if we don’t understand – or even acknowledge – it.

I don’t think my gender had much to do with how I approached this “elemental life” and I don’t want to fall into the clichés of women being “closer to the earth” because of menstrual cycles and childbirth. Knowing carpenters, I think men know it too. I’d say it was the job itself – mucking about in dirt and rain and holding hands with lumber all day under the open sky – that sensitized me.

And yes, references to “man”kind and “him” now seem very old-fashioned. They specifically exclude women. I’ll tell you a construction story; in the pre-technology days of the 1980s, union jobs were given out on a first-come-first-served basis. As you left one job, you reported in to the Dispatch Office and your name card was placed on the Dispatch Board. You’d then be called out to the next available job in that same order. But there were actually two Boards – one for Apprentices, one for people with their journey tickets. So when I earned my Red Seal Carpenter’s certificate, I was shifted from the Apprentice to the Journeymen’s board. I’ve always been sensitive to the language of construction (“ballcocks, studs, lesbian connections, erecting walls, depth of penetration” – the list goes on!) so one day I asked some of the guys standing around if we could change the name from “Journeymen” to “Carpenters.” Gender neutral – perfect, right? But the guys objected and said the word didn’t matter. “Journeyman” applies to everyone, they said, male or female. But there’d never been a female on that Board before. So I told them, “If it makes no difference, let’s call the Board, “Journeywomen.” Well, their very vocal response showed that the words clearly do make a difference. (Still, to the union’s credit, a few days later, the name over the Board was “Carpenters.”)


Rob: Elemental features a number of ekphrastic poems, especially in the first section, “Water”, where you respond to two paintings by Hiroshige and one by Jean Dominique Ingres. Responses to works of art have long played a central role in your writing, be it Emily Carr’s and Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings or Glenn Gould’s music. That said, one of the joys of ekphrastic poems is that what we ask of them is always changing with technology – pre-photography ekphrastic poems were in a sense necessary to convey a sense of the object, and with each subsequent recording technology the necessity of the form has waned, requiring the form to adapt in response. I see your books on Carr, O’Keeffe and Gould as a part of that process – moving into the art, but also the lives of the artists, and conversing with them in a way that expands the circle of what we know and imagine about their art.

In the time since those books were written, technology has changed greatly – the internet has brought with it an unprecedented volume of, and ease of access to, images and songs. Has your thinking about writing-on-art – its nature, its utility, its reception – changed in any way over the course of your writing life? Do you sense ways in which the ekphrastic poem you write now is different from one you may have written in the early 90s?

Inward to the Bones
Kate: To be honest, I’ve never had any conscious goal or technique in writing about Carr or O’Keeffe or Gould, nor in my approaches to them. In each case, I saw something in the art (or the person’s life, or both) that I deeply connected with and wanted – needed – more of. I spent years researching their lives, including a trip to Ottawa to visit the Glenn Gould archive, a trip to New Mexico that made O’Keeffe come brilliantly clear, and of course, I live in rain forest and always loved huge trees but I was still learning about the larger concept of “forest” and a few trips to Tofino were key. With each artist, I wasn’t thinking of anything when I first encountered them except maybe, “I want more of what they have”: in Carr’s case, her courage as a woman in the face of strong opposition; in O’Keeffe’s, likewise, plus her nasty personal character (it was fun to be crabby for a while!); and in Gould’s, his passion for music at a time when I’d just lost my hearing in one ear and was terrified of losing the other. I learned a lot from each of them: from Carr, to be persistent, regardless of what people thought; from O’Keeffe, that I didn’t always have to be a Nice Girl, and I got to celebrate female friendship; from Gould, that even with one ear, there was extraordinary beauty in sound and at least for now, I could drink that in and be grateful.

I’ve long been aware that in writing about artists – especially without the art in front of them – people who aren’t familiar with it will be less interested, but I wasn’t writing for those people. I was writing for me, and then for the people who did know those artists, their art, in some way. This is one reason I begged the publisher (then Michelle Benjamin at Polestar, and since reprinted by Caitlin) to include reproductions in To This Cedar Fountain, the book of responses to Emily’s individual paintings.

I’ve always been surprised at the public response, especially to the Carr books. A lot of women have written thanking me for Cedar Fountain and for Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr, because it turns out those women inspired them, too.


Rob: Connected to the ekphrastic poems, a major theme I see running through all your books – from construction work, to Carr/O’Keeffe/Gould, to Elemental – is “making” (with ekphrasis serving as a "remodeling," in a sense, or perhaps the building an addition onto a house). In Elemental I think first and foremost of your poems for Jude, the cabinetmaker, and the attention you pay in describing his eye and his craftsmanship.

Kate: It feels like all your subjects, yourself or one of your “masks,” are makers of something. Do you think of the process of “making” – both honouring the art and the artist – as a central (dare I say “the” central) concern of your writing?

Interesting you use the word “maker.” It was George McWhirter at UBC who first told me the word in Scots for poet is makaris, meaning “maker,” and surely, as poets we’re all “makers.” But yes, I’m also fascinated by people who create – art, houses, music – as I’m fascinated by their creations, small miracles. I was in awe of my paternal grandfather, an ironworker, for how handy he was – fixing, making anything. And sitting around construction shacks, I heard such great stories that when I taught creative writing, introducing oral history and getting students to interview fishers and mill workers was a delight. It’s something I learned from my first mentor, Tom Wayman – the fascinating stories working class people can tell, and the importance of their work in literally building, “making,” this society, feeding us, etc.


Rob: Speaking of “making,” I’m interested in how you came upon the structural choice to divide the poems in Elemental into sections based on the five elements (Water, Fire, Wood, Sky and Earth). At what point in the process of writing these poems did that become an organizing principle for the book? Did the decision shift the course of the book in any way? When did the idea of an "Autobiography" of each element, opening its section, come to you?

Kate: The idea of the five elements has been roughly in my mind for years but I can’t remember why or when or where it came from. It wasn’t until I sat down in 2017 and started pulling together what seemed at the time very disparate poems, that I saw the pattern – or rather, the pattern hit me over the head, it seemed so obvious. The autobiography poem at the start of each section came from a writing exercise in a workshop at UBC with Dionne Brand in the 1990s. Isn’t it amazing, and wonderful, how things all pull together at some point! Poetry magic.


Rob: Oh goodness, don’t go getting everyone all jealous talking about Dionne Brand workshops now…

Sticking with the sections for a second, in the “Wood” section you make a return to carpentry, in a sense. But here your concerns feel more “elemental”, studying and admiring the wood itself (at times sounding like a repentant hunter-turned-vegan, but for trees!). Did that return to a core subject of yours result from, or in, a new perspective on your material (wood)?

Kate: Always, in the past, I’d focused on the relationships of construction – getting along on the job with the people I worked with. Now that I’m “off the tools,” this book was a change, a chance to look back and focus on something else I’d been fascinated by, and respected – the material itself, and its source.


Rob: In the first of two poems for Jude the cabinetmaker, you write “Is this what we call holy, this connection of the whole, / each to every other? // Which brings us to the silence of the island where we live—“

The back-cover blurb of Elemental suggests that your close engagement with construction materials led to your careful attention to the elemental materials of our daily lives, but I wonder to what extent also your return to living on the Gulf Islands (where your journey as a construction worker started in the 70s) precipitated this shift in your attention. Could you speak about the effect that move had on your writing, and on the shape of this book?

Kate: I’ve always yearned to get back to Pender Island, the people and the land, and have been going back for weekends and longer periods of time whenever I can. Pender is my spirit place, renewal place. So yes, buying a house there recently, where we’ll retire one day, was a wonderful sense of “rooting” for me. Amazing how much more physical living in a semi-rural place is – cutting grass, tending a garden, pruning trees and canning food can’t compare with the mostly-sitting and some walking that I do in the city. I think Pender gives me the courage, and the quiet, and the time – the physical grounding – to say a bit more clearly what I know, or feel. I think this is also partly a reflection of this stage of my life. I’m not on the tools, I’m semi-retired. I have time to think.


In Fine Form, 2nd edition
Rob: Speaking of being “on the tools,” you’ve written books both on construction and on form poetry (In Fine Form, co-edited with Sandy Shreve). To what extent do you see your interest in each as flowing from a common source?

Kate: If we follow the theme of “making,” then formal poems certainly fit. They’re “constructed,” following the rules of the material they’re made from – language. But when Sandy and I first came up with the idea of an anthology back in the early ‘90s, I wasn’t thinking of that, I was only aware that the best poems my students were writing were the ones in a given form. Somehow the structure of sonnet or pantoum or glosa forced them to let go of cliché, of ego, and let loose their unconscious, wiser selves. Somehow following the blueprint of a form allows us to be more creative – more poetry magic!


Rob: You include a number of prose poems near the end of the book, and also a number of narrative-driven poems with line breaks. What tips you toward turning a writing impulse into a prose poem v. a lineated poem (or perhaps a non-fiction piece, or something else)? Generally speaking, do you sense the poem’s needed form immediately, or does an “aha” moment come later in the process?

Kate: Another good question! This is something I’ve talked to other poets about without any clear answers. Partly for me it’s based on what feels organic. Very quickly a poem feels “right” one way or the other. I’ll start it as prose poem (or straight prose) and realize this isn’t working, that it wants line breaks, or…

Sometimes the idea of writing in a traditional form comes first. Example: after I read T.S. Lawrence’s memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I desperately wanted to write about it, but everything I tried (free verse by default) didn’t work. Then I realized, “Obsessive guy. Why not try an obsessive form?” So I sat down and within an hour had written two sestinas. They aren’t in this book – perhaps the next!

I’ve been working a lot on essays lately. Perhaps that’s also leading me to a more expansive, narrative form (i.e. prose poems) and I hadn’t noticed?


Rob: Speaking of influences, as I read this book, I kept returning to PK Page’s (elemental and formal) poem “Marble and Water”. It made me wonder if you were inspired, in writing this book, by any particular poems or books by others, which you could use as a guide in some way?

Kate: My breath caught when I read your reference to PK. She was a huge role model for me as a woman and as a poet and I love “Marble and Water”; as you know, Sandy and I used it in In Fine Form as a wonderful example of the stanza form.

But I didn’t consciously use any particular poem or poet as a guide in Elemental. In a general way, of course, I’m always inspired by others. It’s why I read so much poetry and go to poetry readings. I love the work of PK, of W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Crozier and lately David Wagoner, among many, many others.


Rob: Many of these poems are written in the first person, but some, like “Cueva Del Indio, Vinales, Cuba” and “The Door to Rock” are written in the second or third person. Could you speak to why you made those choices, and what different opportunities you think those various perspectives offer a poet?

Kate: For me, first person is up-close and personal. Second and third person, singular or plural, allow more distance, objectivity, and a sterner eye. And sometimes it’s just fun to do a “Mary Oliver” and use the imperative.


Rob: Ha! In addition to Mary Oliver, another poet who’s clearly influenced your writing is Rumi. You’ve read his poetry at the Dead Poets Reading Series, and you close Elemental with an epigraph of his:

We began
as a mineral. We emerged into plant life
and into animal state, and then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring, when we slightly recall
being green again.

What role has Rumi played in your writing, and in your thinking about life?

Kate: I keep coming back to what gives me courage; when I wake in the middle of the night and need a book, I go first to either Rumi or Rilke, both men of spirit, but also of the earth. I’d printed out that Rumi poem years ago and stumbled across it again as Elemental was going to press. It seemed a perfect ending to this book.




---

Keep coming back for Kate Braid's poetry, ok? You can pick one up a copy of Elemental at your local bookstore, or via the Caitlin Press website or, I suppose, from Amazon.

5/08/2018

BC Poetry 2018: An Introduction

Aidan Chafe's
"Right Hand Hymns"
(Frog Hollow Press)
Welcome to year three of the "BC Poetry" series, a project devoted to profiling BC poetry books and presses throughout April. (You can view the 2016 version here, and the 2017 version here.) The series has thus far profiled 60+ books by BC poets and presses. We'll be pushing that number close to 100 by the time we're done BC Poetry 2018!

Each of the last two years, I've opened the series with a note on a BC book or institution that has brought our poets together. This year, I want to take a moment to recognize BC's chapbook publishers. Chapbooks (books of less than 48 pages) have long played an essential role in the BC poetry community - the "calling cards" that are often a poet's first introduction to the writing world. Many of the country's finest chapbook publishers have been - and are - based here in BC, from Nanaimo's Leaf Press, to Vernon's Greenboathouse Press, to Victoria's Frog Hollow Press and Vancouver's Nomados Press and Pooka Press, among others.

Alfred Gustav Press
Chapbook Series #3 (2009)
One of BC's most vibrant and prolific chapbook presses, North Vancouver's Alfred Gustav Press, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Run by Governor General's Award-winning poet David Zieroth, this subscription-based series has published 3 or 4 chapbooks every spring and fall since 2008, and by the end of this year will have released almost 70 chapbooks in total. Each chapbook is hand-decorated and signed by the author, and costs next-to-nothing (the current subscription rate for four chapbooks + shipping is $18, and it used to be even cheaper). Well-loved by its subscribers, it's the kind of publication that can be easily overlooked in the larger writing world - but to miss out on it is a great loss. Alongside debuts (including at least one whose first full-length collection will be profiled this month!), AG chapbooks have provided readers with previously unread work by celebrated poets such as Russell Thornton, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Marguerite Pigeon, Catherine Owen, Kevin Spenst, Shane Neilson, Barry Dempster, Matt Rader, and Zieroth himself.

Rahila's Ghost Press
Last year I made space in the series, generally devoted to full-length trade collections, to promote Ontario-based chapbook publisher Anstruther Press, which had just published new books by BC's own Shazia Hafiz Ramji and Curtis Leblanc. This year I'm pleased to be able to similarly promote BC's newest chapbook Press, Vancouver's Rahila's Ghost Press.

Much like how chapbooks and their publishers are often invisible to even devoted poetry fans, far too many trade-length BC poetry books pass by unnoticed each year. Over the next 30 days I will share with you 30 new books (and sample poems) from our authors and publishers. I hope they inspire you - to read, to write, to pick up a book or subscribe to a series, or to put out that first chapbook of your own!


Details on the Project

A new book will be profiled each day throughout the month. To be eligible, the book must have been written by a BC poet or published by a BC poetry publisher (ideally both), and must have been released in either Fall 2017 or Spring 2018. Weekends will include "wild card" coverage of chapbooks, anthologies, etc.

You can follow along with the series as new posts come via this link or on Twitter at the hashtag #BCPoetry2018.

Participating Publishers

Anvil Press
Book*Hug
Brick Books
Caitlin Press
Expressions Press
Goose Lane Editions
Harbour Publishing
Leaf Press
McGill-Queens University Press
Mother Tongue Publishing
New Star Books
Nightwood Editions
Rahila's Ghost Press
Talonbooks
Thistledown Press
University of Alberta Press
Vehicule Press

Some publishers were contacted and did not reply.

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.


5/07/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "After the Hatching Oven" by David Alexander (Nightwood Editions)



Counting Chickens

At crosswalks they stand on shoulders, 
three-to-a-trench-coat. One does cartoon voices. 
One preens from a billboard above the library.

Six small chicks and their ma can’t recall 
the moral of this short time together. Curled up 
on the couch, their snores sound like daisies.

They ride bikes and rent converted garages, 
yet still we drive past them on trucks. Yet still 
when they hatch, cuts of meat explode out.

Watch what they do when an egg won’t stop 
rolling. When they really go at each other, 
cha-ching! Advertising.

Before hatching, amateur fortune tellers 
often find themselves in personal banking. 
Baking? You wish. Sharp suits dignify death.

Whispering wings in a backyard run.


Who?

David Alexander's poems have appeared in Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, subTerrain, The Humber Literary Review, the Literary Review of Canada and many other fine journals and magazines. David volunteers as a reader for The Puritan and works in Toronto's nonprofit sector.


What?

After the Hatching Oven scrutinizes the world of a most unlikely hero: the common chicken. We are launched into their evolution as a domesticated species; their place in history, pop culture and industrial agriculture; their exploitation and their liberation. These poems relish in the mastery of language and intensity by which Alexander has thought his way into the very cells of his subjects through riffs on ad campaigns, news stores, public health advisories, poems, movies and self-translations.


When?

Published earlier this month!


Where?


Purchase from the Harbour Publishing website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Scrutinizing the most unlikely hero.



The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

5/06/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Unfolding a Lost World" and "Chaos, Great and Wide" by Joy Barratt (Expressions Press)


"Fodder to the Guns" from Chaos, Great and Wide




Who?

Joy Barratt is a graduate of the University of Toronto and OISE. Her writing has focused on the early settler days, from a feminist angle, and the confusion of World War I front line troops. She has found laughter, tragedy, refuge and escape in literature, and has used that perspective to open doors to new realities for students.


What?

Unfolding a Lost World

In Unfolding a Lost World, Joy Barratt chose fragments from the pioneer letters of a trio of early Canadian women, reconstituting them into found poems echoing the dire nature of the writers’ survival experiences. The three knew desolation of spirit, severe winters, devastating fires, near starvation from crop failure and menacing illnesses. In antique spelling and phrasing, they flung these stories across the Atlantic, shedding light on the repressive and restrictive world of women homesteaders. Unfolding a Lost World unearths the deprivations both suffered and surmounted by women of their ilk.


Chaos, Great and Wide

Using the fragments in letters sent home by the troops, from military histories, from memoirs, from novels scripted post-war and from film documentaries, the author has glued together, in a series of found poems, a representation of the chaos and confusion lived by soldiers, sailors and field hospital inmates. Chaos, Great and Wide is part exposé of past atrocities and part hymn to the concept of a prevailing peace, a scream of alarm, a gathering of tears and a sincere gasp of appreciation that the sorts of tragedies enclosed within its pages are lived no longer.

A sample of how the found poems in Barratt's Unfolding a Lost World "unfold" as you read the book.

When?

Unfolding a Lost World arrived in July 2017.

Chaos, Great and Wide arrives later this month!


Where?

Purchase from Amazon. $17.75.


How?

Reconstituting fragments.



The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

5/05/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Wayside Sang" by Cecily Nicholson (Talonbooks)





Excerpt from Wayside Sang

fossil fuel psyche

pressed for    time

means for 
transformation
                          means

will travel or    drift




Who?

Cecily Nicholson, from small-town Ontario via Toronto and South Bend, relocated to the Pacific coast almost two decades ago. On Musqueam-, Squamish-, and Tsleil-Waututh-occupied lands known as Vancouver, she has worked, since 2000, in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, most recently as administrator for the artist-run centre and mental health resource, Gallery Gachet. A part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and a member of the Research Ethics Board for Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Cecily was also the 2017 Ellen Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Triage and From the Poplars, winner of the 2015 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.


What?

Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement. This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across the Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath rivers, between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders, in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region.

Engaging a range of discursive fields, the book is informed by various artistic practices. As the author feels for texture and collaborates on infrastructure, new poems are formed in concert. Consider Charles Campbell’s Transporter Project, begun initially as a visual investigation of the phenomena of forced migration; or Camille Turner’s various “sonic walks” which present narratives that explore the complexities of black life in Canada amid a “landscape of forgetting” black history; or Khari McClelland’s embrace of music as a “transportation device” uncovering the experiences of fugitive blacks crossing into Canada. All are concerned with transportation. Even as we dig, build, plant, and root, even as we shelter and grow, we have been, and continue to be, on the move.

This study is, in part, a matter of strengthening relations and becoming situated despite displacement. It is an effort to be relevant at a time of rebellion as Black networks, community, and aesthetics gain new qualities. The routes Wayside Sang follows cannot be Canadian as the interlay of territories – Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Attawandaron, Ojibway-Chippewa, Huron-Wendat … – the presence and histories – Indigenous memory as a constant to land, and constitutive to travel and practice – carry the day.

This book was once in the fields and frequented bars. It rolls out of factories onto roads travelling north across the border and returning again to some understanding of home. In it are passengers and possessions – travelling musicians – memories of places never been – brothers determined by border crossings – daughters reassembled.


When?

Arrived June 2017.


Where?

Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Digging, building, planting, rooting, moving.



The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

5/04/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Short Histories of Light" by Aidan Chafe (McGill-Queen’s University Press)


Thetis

My father, greatest swimmer, 
swam in the ocean of grandma’s
womb for nine months before opening
his eyes to the sun. Nurses ran water
over him, a baptism, so he could teach
grandpa to search for more than a bottle.
Grandpa held my father, confirmed
his genes inside his heavy hands
while grandma hushed the animal inside
him to sleep. Before the sky fell she held
my father’s chest below water, bathed his body
until the thought of Achilles drowned.




Who?

Aidan Chafe is the author of the poetry collection Short Histories of Light and two chapbooks: Right Hand Hymns (Frog Hollow Press, 2017) and Sharpest Tooth (Anstruther Press, 2016). His work has appeared in journals such as The Capilano Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Eastlit, Event Magazine, The Paragon Journal, Scrivener Creative Review and Sulphur.

He works as a high school teacher in New Westminster and during the summer he runs a reading series through the Royal City Literary Arts Society called Poetry in the Park. Originally from BC’s Fraser Valley, he now calls Burnaby home.


What?

In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness.

In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces. Other sections of the book shine a light on the wounds inflicted by systems of patriarchy, particularly organized religion, and the caustic nature of humanity. Imagery and metaphor illuminate Chafe’s writing in a range of poetic forms, both modern and traditional. A boy stares helplessly through the walls of the family home, watches “filaments in glass skulls buzzing.” A father’s birthmark is described as a “scarlet letter.” Grandma is portrayed as a “forgotten girl on a Ferris wheel of feelings.”

Vivid and haunting, at once tender and terse, Short Histories of Light captures what it feels like to be a short circuit in a world of darkness.


When?

Arrived February 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the McGill-Queen's University Press website. $16.95.


How?

Revealing the unintended disasters.



The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.