Translating Pessoa: Winnett, Taddle, Garrison,

another fragment of my creative non-fiction work-in-progress, 'sleeping in toronto,' on Erin Moure, Taddle Creek, Garrison Creek, etcetera, now up at Open Book Toronto;

Ongoing notes, some journals: Grain magazine + Open Letter

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” This is the epigraph to the Riverside edition of Emerson’s essay “Quotation and Originality.” (Susan Howe, The Midnight)

Saskatoon SK: I’ve been admiring poet Sylvia Legris' run over the past number of issues as editor of Saskatoon’s Grain magazine, crafting issues as full units, as opposed to the usual structure that literary journals seem to have. Recently, the summer 2010 issue, Vol. 37.4, “All over the place,” arrived, with highlights by Moez Surani, Chuqiao Yang, Jeramy Dodds, Audrea Lim and photography by featured artist Dianne Bos. There’s a unity to Legris’ issues that come out of careful attention to the writing, careful attention to what work is selected and how it is arranged, blending something between the usual option of “theme” or “non-themed” issues that so many others have simply continued out of, what, habit? Far too often, I’m either finding the idea of the “theme” issue rather tiresome (and somewhat arbitrary), or frustrated that every issue of any particular trade poetry and fiction journal feels almost exactly the same. Kudos to Legris for adding some freshness, thought and sheer attention to the process of literary journals, seamlessly blending poetry, fiction and non-fiction in a way that puts the writing itself first and foremost while creating each issue. How does such a thing become a rarity, I ask?

I am back from the Expo. I saw a woman club another woman in the lineup for the German pavilion. Her bra was sliding off. Two old men started to hit each other. The sweat on my body did not belong to me. I went home and drank four or five giant bottles of beer and sang a really bad rendition of a Chinese song. I think my relatives hate me. (Chuqiao Yang, “Beijing Notes”)

Strathroy ON: Had situations been different, I would have certainly submitted to the most recent issue of the critical journal Open Letter (Fourteenth Series, Number 4, Fall 2010), “George Bowering: Bridges to Elsewhere.” I think you already know why. Between my natural interest in Bowering’s writing, editing of a section on his work for Jacket, furthering the same into a soon-to-be-completed George Bowering: Essays on His Works for Guernica Editions. Constructed as a thesis, I’m wildly impressed at how guest-editor Ian Rae constructed his issue on the work of the Vancouver writer, editor and general troublemaker, George Bowering, very much created to explore his work other than the usual pieces on his Tish and post-Tish poetry-specific exploits, all without diminishing or dismissing that essential part of Bowering history. As he writes in his introduction:

The positive aspects of this post-Tish activity are that 1) as poets they continued to inspire each other to produce daring new works; 2) as colleagues they became each other’s most trusted editors and interpreters; 3) as critics they became experts in their fields and obtained prestigious positions as university professors or writers-in-residence; and 4) the importance of the Tish movement has been effectively enshrined in Canadian literary history. The negative aspects of this activity are that 1) the focus on Tish as a particular West Coast group, publication, and moment has diverted critical attention away from the projects of the individual poets once they had left Vancouver to pursue careers across the continent; 2) they journals to which the poets dedicated longer periods of their life – such as Bowering’s Imago (1964-1974), the subject of Shearer’s essay – are little studied; 3) the Tish poet-critics have now entered retirement and it is uncertain how the group fits into the research projects of younger scholars; and 4) while Jonathan Ball’s parody of Bowering’s A Short Sad Book (1977) in this issue highlights continuities between younger and older generations of experimental writers, new waves of Canadian poets, such as the Kootenay School of Writing, have seized upon the poet-critic model as a means of advancing their own distinct status in the book market. For such avant-garde writers, the first imperative is always to make a break with the literary past, even if this break exaggerates differences and conceals debts. For example, a recent issue of Open Letter demonstrates how hard KSW struggles to distance itself from its Tish predecessors.

The eleven pieces in the journal include works on Bowering’s long poem journal Imago by Karis Shearer, and pieces connecting Bowering to Al Purdy, Nicole Brossard, hockey, Bowering as historian, Earle Birney and the Okanagan itself, as well as a long-lost poem by Bowering on Birney. This might be the shortest and most expansive work on his considerably broad ouvre, and highlights, too, what other work there is that could be done. There could be a piece on Bowering’s reviewing and otherwise critical writing alone, for example. For anyone interested in the work of George Bowering, this is an essential text.

The end of history: Frederick Campbell (1873-1963)

[Fred Campbell, daughter Harriet, my great-aunt] Since my mother went, digging through the house, through family archives, attempting to articulate the end of history. Digging through shelves, cupboards, boxes of papers and discovering photos, most of which I never knew existed, from both sides of the family: McLennan (and Campbell, Aird) and Page (and Swain, Cassidy). Scanning hundreds of photographs, hoping for what relatives remain to tell their stories, add clarification, confirmation. Almost every picture unlabelled, and some, possibly, completely lost, unknown. Who are some of these?

My great-grandfather, Frederick Campbell, born 1873 in Athol, just north of the village of Maxville, who married Jane Aird of Sandringham. Both are buried in Maxville, he in 1963, and she, seven years later. In most pictures, suspenders, white shirt, as though the range of pictures were from very few days. Sets of shots as opposed to set singles. In one, on his front step with daughter Harriet, he looking in hat and dark jacket very much like Pa Kettle. Already, just there, how I have dated myself. 1940s films replayed thirty, forty years later on Sunday mornings, American Public Television. These people, these events and these tokens help make up who we are, long before we had even existed. According to R.B. Campbell’s expansive The Campbells and other Glengarry-Stormont and Harrington Pioneers (1983), “Fred and Janie farmed on Lots 12 & 13 in the 21^st Concession Indian Lands for a number of years before retiring and moving to Maxville. They had two daughters. Fred was a member of municipal council for a period during his residence in Maxville.” Their house in Maxville, the only residence these photos know. In the book itself, a photo of the same couple my pictures call elderly, younger. A young couple, unknown to my infant father.

[Fred on our front porch, my father the boy in the back] Fred Campbell,1873-1963. The Campbells and other Glengarry-Stormont and Harrington Pioneers provides three generations beyond, from Angus Finlay Campbell (1830-1887) and wife Elizabeth Bennett (1836-1914) to Finlay Campbell (1795-1872) and wife Harriet McKay (1800-1845) to Duncan Campbell, known by name and little more. Only that he arrived in Canada with four sons to western Quebec, two of whom eventually headed further into Glengarry, into what would become the small corner Athol, just north of not-yet-Maxville. Where generations further would come, down to my father’s own mother, the last generation of their line born there. Before the small hamlet disappeared, barely there even in name. A lingering sign on dirt road.

The Village of Maxville a product of rail, incorporated 1891, for the line that first came through between Ottawa and Coteau Landing, a point just prior to Montreal. Maxville, so named for the concentration of Scots in this, Glengarry County, largest concentration of Scottish immigration in Canada, founded as the oldest county in Ontario. The rail, that also drew away from the outer edges, drew out hamlets and corners, some into non-existence, a circle of Dominionville, Dunvegan, Athol, Tayside. When Rev. Charles W. Gordon, the author Ralph Connor, was young, the nearest rail was, he wrote, “25 miles.” Born in the manse house at St. Elmo, between bare miles of Athol and not-yet-Maxville. What would that have been? The Prescott line, a rail from Bytown to what once Caledonia Springs. Another line disappeared, where Royalty and heads of state vacationed, heading first by steamboat, then by rail, the water’s healing properties. The only evidence, bare stone in a farmer’s back forty. From his Postscript to Adventure: The Autobiography of Ralph Connor (1975):

I met my mother first in the Indian Lands Presbyterian manse, Glengarry, to which my father took her after two years or so in Lingwick. I often wonder at his nerve. Indian Lands, settled by Scotia crofters dispossessed from the Highlands and Islands by poverty-stricken lairds and dukes to make room for deer forests, poor, crude in their manner of life, passionate in their hates and loyalties, grand friends but desperate enemies. It was Lingwick over again, but more remote from civilization. The nearest railway was twenty five miles distant. There for eighteen years she lived on a glebe of twenty-four acres, cut from the bush and the deep pine forest, out of which the people had cut their little farms. How desperately lonely she was no one ever knew. She hardly knew herself, she was too busy. Her babies, arriving with biennial regularity, the women and girls of her husband’s congregation, the men and boys too, all demanded her care and got it. She was far too busy for self-pity.

Joshua Harmon, Scape

Solitude is not an absolute number, though if I outlast another night counting on my fingers, it may begin to seem that way. The hedge outside grows nearly as fast as I can prune it, though I prefer to rely on the pity of passersby rather than the fickleness of my own sunlit instincts. And my ladder won’t reach the tallest branches. Objects disappear within the foliage for days at a time, then reappear on the lawn when I least expect. Superstitious, I’m just as happy to hide behind my hedge, gathering whatever folklore I can find, as to peer through that alliance of branches and leaves at the road. (“Summer’s Tenants”)

I was taken by this small gesture, this first small collection of poems by American poet Joshua Harmon, Scape (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2009), recommended to me by Paige Ackerson-Kiely. Wrapping the collection around prose poems, short lyrics and an extended lyric sequence or two, Scape is entirely built from smallness, the subtlety of carefully-considered lyric gestures, gymnastic language and enduring depth.

The landscape remains obedient to previous notions. It is Massachusetts outside my window and Massachusetts in my mind: it is only the site of some larger omission. The landscape an open system of fires, a naïve word’s wound, a trick made of phone wires and a waiting breath. The asphalt taught me as asphalt always teaches, friction and burn, all rough texture. I thought it misfortune, not remedy—a crumpled cardinal’s red feathers in the road. I crammed for hours to learn to predict this weather, to memorize the shape of the overslept-on pillow, to balance my bicycle and my checking account, to locate the surge in my chest, to plot a course even this far. Make it in Massachusetts. (“Landscape”)

Whatever landscapes Harmon writes are linguistic first and geographic second, wrapping around each other in a magnificent way. A follow-up to a first novel, Quinnehtukqut (2007), the book tells me nothing else about the author. What else is there to know? I’m intrigued.

Trepanned: in other words, my mind wanders

no farther than the map I drew from memory,

marking the stone-circled embers memory makes smoke

—wisps to occlude whatever arrow-line I’d draw near.

Next is the legend: asterisk for tree, speck for settlement,

double dagger for ruins, circled star for fallen star,

wave of my hand for broken satellite, exhalation for

exhalation spent climbing the rise step by step

toward the form of the field, the retirement of assent.

Here lake, here site of ambush, here fallen king.

The thistle’s tendency—its bent posture—toward the oracular.

The wolf’s basking ruse.

span-o presents: Turnbull, Fiorentino + Barwin at the Carleton Tavern, Nov. 12

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

three poets at the carleton tavern
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

with readings by:

Chris Turnbull (Kemptville)
Jon Paul Fiorentino (Montreal)
+ Gary Barwin (Hamilton)

Friday, November 12, 2010;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Chris Turnbull lives in Kemptville, Ontario. Recent pieces of continua have been published in Ottawater, Convergences, How2, ditch, and Dusie. continua is a visual text and multi-voiced performative piece. She will be launching a chapbook with above/ground press.

Jon Paul Fiorentino is the author of the novel Stripmalling, which was shortlisted for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and three poetry collections, including The Theory of the Loser Class, which was shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize. He lives in Montreal, where he teaches writing at Concordia University, edits Matrix magazine and runs Snare Books. His most recent poetry collection is Indexical Elegies.

Gary Barwin is a poet, fiction writer, composer and performer. His publications include poetry: Outside the Hat, Raising Eyebrows, Servants of Dust, anus porcupine eyebrow and frogments from the frag pool (with derek beaulieu) ; and fiction: Doctor Weep and other Strange Teeth, Big Red Baby and The Mud Game (a novel with Stuart Ross). Forthcoming books include The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts) and Kafka Franzlations: A Guide to the Imaginary Parables (with Hugh Thomas and Craig Conley). He was the co-winner of the 2009 bpNichol chapbook award for Inverting the Deer and was a recipient of the K. M. Hunter Foundation Artist award. Barwin is also the author of several books for kids, including Seeing Stars, which was nominated for a CLA YA Book of the Year and an Arthur Ellis Award. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his wife and three children. His most recent book is The Porcupinity of the Stars.

the ottawa international writers festival 2010 fall edition, october 20-26

The fall edition of our own little writers festival starts Wednesday night, with venues in and around Ottawa South, and authors including Kenneth J. Harvey, Michael Cunningham, A.J. Somerset, Joshua Ferris, Sheila Heti, Ken Sparling, Tariq Ramadan, Lisa Foad, Amber Dawn, Peter Robinson, Charlotte Gray, Roy MacSkimming, Alison Pick, Kate Pullinger, Marcus McCann, Merilyn Simonds, Wayne Grady, John Lavery, Sandra Ridley, George Murray, Peter Norman, Alexander MacLeod, Elizabeth Hay and plenty of others. Check out their website for event and ticket information www.writersfestival.org; see you there!

a dog + his boy,