The Young Tambling Tour Comes to Ottawa

October 21, 2013

It was nippy out but temperatures hadn't yet gone below zero. There's something about venturing out in the cold to attend a poetry reading that always feels magical to me. I bundle up; I am often alone with my thoughts before and after to contemplate the words I am about to hear and have heard.

Upstairs at the Carleton Tavern, site of rob mclennan's Factory Reading Series, the features were three American poets on a small tour through parts of Canada and the USA: DJ Dolack. Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Kate Greenstreet. Young Tambling is the name of Kate's current book, hence the tour name. Tambling or Tam Lin is the name of a character in a Scottish ballad who, in some versions, is rescued by his true love from the Queen of the Faeries. Who takes the virginity of young maids in the woods.  There was something of a fairy tale atmosphere at the reading that night. I wore red. I dropped my glove. It was picked up by a handsome prince. In a cottage by the woods…no, it was the Carleton Tavern in an Ottawa enclave.

For those of you who do not live in Ottawa or for those of you in Ottawa who haven't yet had the chance to experience a Factory Reading Series event, let me describe the environment for you: the Carleton Tavern is one of those rare old establishments that serves Labatts Blue and Molson Export in quarts. Some of the servers have coin belts on their pants to make change. Because people there still pay in cash. I see an elderly woman there every time I go. She's alone, sipping a pint, watching the hockey on the big screen tv.

The Carleton Tavern has been a neighbourhood fixture for eons, back in the days when we used to call that part of town Mechanicsville owing to its blue collar population, rather than Hintonburg or Wellington West, as the realtors say. It's a bar with a big heart. There's an annual xmas dinner for those in need, theatre productions, live music, knitting circles and at one point, a swingers' club met there for pre-hook up convo. The pizza is delicious, the smoked meat comes from Montreal and upstairs behind an unmarked door near the phone booths, on occasional Friday or Saturday nights before the downstairs gets lively with the latest cover band, rob mclennan runs the Factory Reading Series.

FRS is an informal series with no stage and no microphones. (Although that night, Kate brought her own sound system.) Featured readers stand as close to the audience as they want and preferably at a safe distance from the dart board. Audience members sit in rickety wooden chairs that are likely older than most of us.  Sometimes the booze comes to you, other times you have to make your way down the narrow flight of stairs to get your own. Guinness, alas, comes in a can.

FRS has a varied roster of readers, mostly poets, sometimes local, but more often than not out-of-towners who rob has published via above/ground press. Thanks to rob's excellent promotion, they end up wanting to visit our small berg and read here. It was through FRS that I first heard and met Kate Greenstreet and her delightfully supportive husband, filmmaker, graphic designer, renaissance man, and right hand man, Max Greenstreet back in 2007. I also met Paige Ackerson-Kiely when she came to town for an FRS talk a few years ago as part of a VERSeFest fundraiser. I had never met or heard DJ Dolack before, but I certainly enjoyed meeting him and hearing him read this time around.

It's months later, so I guess I don't remember verbatim or even close what everybody read, but I remember the congenial spirit of the reading, the warmth and rapport of the readers. 

DJ Dolak read from his book, "Whittling A New Face in the Dark" (Black Ocean, 2013). The work is minimal. thoughtful and yes, somewhat wry. I do like my wry. He's one of those poets who likes to tell stories surrounding his poems. And he's good at it. I remember one concerning living above --I think it was a sausage making business--and having to explain the smell of sausage to his parents.

His poems about New York were exotic to me and at the same time funny. He had the level of absurdity I associate with a Stuart Ross poem or a Gary Barwin poem. He used some reversal techniques I've also observed from Canada's Jason Heroux. "A word falls because I ask of it. [...] The world has been given its fair chance to avoid us." [NYC Postcards]. There was a warmth to the poetry and to his reading. 

The work is also keenly observational. Like watching a film in slow motion. Some of the many memorable lines from his reading: "I love you/how the elderly love bakeries,//in the way they say cake." [What They Want Me To Tell You]; "What it's like to know/your monster/doesn't give a fuck. [...]Sometimes the metaphor/is too good--//So much that it becomes expensive://the ambulance//spinning its weight/in the mud//while the body bleeds out." [For: Never Young].

Paige Ackerson-Kiely has friends in Ottawa and many of them attended the reading. I'm always amazed at what a small world we live in. Paige first intrigued me with her above/ground press chapbook, "Book About A Candle Burning in A Shed" 2011, and then continued to intrigue me when she talked at the FRS lecture series about her interest in Admiral Richard E. Byrd and the subsequent book she wrote, "My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer" (Ahsahata Press, 2012). This is also what she read from. She may have also read from her other book, "In No One's Land" (Ahsahata, 2006) or that may be wishful thinking on my part. 

Paige is a mesmerizing reader, still & quiet, allowing the words to sink in. The piece that has stayed with me over the winter is the one page prose poem, "Lake Effect:" "You're at the bar again, trawling. The net of your eye catches the man in a wheelchair, sitting next to you. Forget pity, it's for the full-bellied. Forget how the northern Lake conceals not only fish, but also trash, petty currents, your foot in the mud sinking lower…" The imagery of this poem moves me still.

Before the readings, I had the fortune to talk a bit to Kate and to her husband, Max, who asked me a series of questions about four things I couldn't do without. I later discovered that Max had created "My Own Eyes"  a wonderful short film for Kate's last book, the Last Four Things.  It was all part of the magic of the night.

Kate gave an enchanting and compelling performance from "Young Tambling"  (Ahsahta Press, 2013). She didn’t so much read from the book as flip through it and riff off of it. She has an artist's way of looking at the world: close up, from different angles. The book is part fairy tale, part poetic memoir. There's an innocence, a kind of child-like naiveté to Kate's writing, partially because the speaker's memories of childhood are there, but also because of the way Kate observes things: "Not a paper frontier. The world/reflected in the place you are,//something you need to see that you cannot see directly." ["unshot"]; "A shadow broke the light beneath the door." ["open voicings"]; "My room had a counter running the length of one wall--I loved this counter, the top was red linoleum. I used it mainly as a place to build small shrines." "I am sending you a book that might be useful./Red is the devil. Gold is God."

One of the images that stays with me from Kate's reading is the long sequence about a deer. I am in no way doing the piece justice by excerpting a small portion here…:

"I was outside and inside at the same time. We were all sitting at a table, in  a way, but we were also out on the street and there was a dead deer  in the street. I went over to it and sat down on the curb. The deer lifted himself then, his bloody head and all, into my lap. I didn't know what to do. He seemed to be talking to me, in a language I couldn't understand. "

On the inside cover of the book, there is a tracing of Kate's hand. When Kate signed her book for me, she made an outline of my own hand on the left-hand page across from her own. Our hands were almost a perfect match. There are people whose world you simply must be part of. I felt that way that night, about Kate and Max, especially.

"--Do you think of poetry as useful?

--Yes, it has been to me.

--Tell me some of the ways it has been useful to you personally.

--It makes me feel that being human is a good thing. Being human, and even just being the way I am..I'm not completely alone."

A lot of people wonder what the point of going to a reading is. The standard response is that it's a chance to hear the writer's work in her own words and that's true enough, but for me, what is more important is achieving a connection with kindreds, as I did that night. Also, I should say that this reading was my favourite of 2013.

Francheteau on Randomage

Local poet JM Francheteau & co-organizer of the latest Ottawa Zine Off has good things to say about my recent offering for the Zine Off, "Amanda Randomage."

VERSeFest Schedule now online

VERSeFest is Ottawa's annual poetry festival & will include, to name a few, Elizabeth Bachinsky, David McFadden, Tim Bowling, Souvankham Thammavongsa, local poets Marilyn Irwin & Selina Boan, American poet Mary Ruefle & …me!

I'm excited to appear at my first festival as a feature, not a host, not a part of a long list, but just as me, as part of the VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour ceremony in which spoken word poet & initiator of good things, Danielle Gregoire & I are inducted as recipients of the honour. To say I am chuffed is an understatement.

With my first poetry book coming out with Chaudiere Books this year & this honour, I feel ridiculously fortunate.

Every success that happens to me in my literary career has meaning to me. I am always somewhat uncomfortable with praise, but overall I am happy when good things happen. Yeah, I'll say it…failures don't mean shit. Actually I don't consider rejections failure. So I haven't really felt that I've failed other than I've tried a few things that  haven't worked…yet…

Reading at a festival, receiving an award…that's pretty heady stuff. The first ever feeling I had that what I was doing, this writing poetry thing, was somehow real was a few years ago when I was doing a reading in Toronto for Book Thug to launch my chapbook, Welcome To Earth: poem for alien(s). In Toronto's Now Magazine, a free paper I've always picked up & read, even as a teen, I saw my name listed as part of the launch in the events section. I said to myself, "baby, you have arrived." I'm easy to please. I like my ego stroked a little bit. So right now, I'm enjoying the stroking.

To view the festival schedule, go here. Soon tickets will be on sale. I'm reading & accepting my award on the last day, Sunday, March 30 at 7pm. Hope to see you there. I did a lot of readings last year, but it's such a rare thing normally for me to be on stage as something other than the host of a reading. So yeah…I'm pretty jazzed.

It's also fun to say things like "I'm meeting with my publisher." Makes me feel all giggly. I do feel like an imposter. Like Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann, a little girl in the big over-sized rocking chair on Laugh In. "And that's the truth." 

Gleanings from the Web

The Volta - Trash Issue

According to its about page, "THE VOLTA is a multimedia project of poetry, criticism, poetics, video, conversation (audio), and interview (text)."

This online magazine is a prime example of why the Internet can be such a perfect vehicle for the design, publication and dissemination of creative works. It has 8 separate and voluminous sections and not all of them are purely two-dimensional text-based.

This issue focuses on what lies beneath layers of detritus; taboo, unexpressed thoughts, a poetics of wasted life, mourning, desire, the subversion of administered language.

As a wanderer who discovers found objects such as silver spoons at construction sites & various neglected bits & bobs, and a pornographer (a dear friend tells me this word means writer of taboos) I find this issue very alluring, including but not limited to

the surprisingly delicate fan collages layered with garbage from Parisian streets by Alice Notely & subsequent interview:  "I started doing this in Chicago a long time ago, not with fans, but with rectangles; and I used a lot of newsprint, those pages in the Sunday papers advertising hedges and flowers were a favorite. […]There isn’t a lot of garbage in Paris. When I first arrived here I kept finding pearls (faux) on the ground, so there were a lot of pearls on the fans. Women seem to lose pieces of jewelry here more than they did in New York."

Evening will come, a sub-section of the issue is chock full of compelling writing by poets on the how & why of their projects, including but by no means limited to…

Allison Cob's  intriguing excerpt "Garbage" from "Plastic: an autobiography" about a WWII bit of plastic, a Navy ID tag, that had been found inside a dead albatross in the Philippines. "What still exists, we know this—the plastic bits from inside the bird’s body. Maybe they sit in the landfill on Molokai. Or maybe they’re back in the water—washed down a storm drain or blown from a trash bin. The plastic will outlast the bones, the sand, this writing. How long? No one knows. Five-hundred years? A thousand?" Cob first saw the photo of the albatross carcass with the plastic tag inside in a photo in the National Geographic.  The image haunted her…a loose end, along with other loose ends, such as one of her journals, missing from the journals she had  rescued from the rain, after having second thoughts about throwing them out. How does paper break down over time? How does plastic?

CAConrad's quiet feral interiors, a tale of rating semen entitled "Suspension Fluid Magnificence"…its mix of taboo, pathos and humour. "How is wilderness memorized into the body? What lens does it provide? I went to where the wild is mostly hidden."

a. rawlings'  "Rusl: Trash in Iceland," a work centred around the idea of what we choose to delete and which includes an breathtaking slide show of ice, beach stones, degraded plastic bottles, cigarette butts, drift wood, rope. "The island was covered with what the ocean dumped onto and the weather dragged over it. Net buoys, shipwreck wood, rope, plastic containers. I looked closer. Swan death, unidentified bones. The Atlantic pulled green and red seaweed onto the shore, deposited it. I photographed bodies and parts of crabs, freshly dismantled by gulls during tidal recession."

Jonathan Regier's "Dogleaf": "The historian of astronomy tells us that if a glass cathedral existed, it would be a tremendous and communal work, transmitted from generation to generation like sensitive, everlasting grapes."

There's so much magic in this issue. I'm going to stop here & let you discover for yourself.

The February issue is also something to sink your teeth into. It's a special issue on anthologies.

A poet I admire named Lisa Jarnot (read Black Dog Songs) has a list of 50 things for the new year, which includes such activities as knitting one hundred hats & defiant lightness. 

The eighth issue of 17 Seconds, a magazine curated by my dear friend, rob mclennan came out this past fall. It continues the defunct site, Poetics.ca which was run by rob and  Stephen Brockwell. the idea is to spark conversations about poetics through interviews, reviews, essays etc. It's a way to get more critical writing about poetry out there. I am all in favour of such. Hence the AngelHousePress essay series…

The 8th issue of 17 seconds has contributions from 6 poets in Canada and the USA.

Amy Dennis' offers entrancing work in her "Composition c. 1950 Wols.), an ekphrastic series on the art work of Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), a lyrical abstract painter I had never heard of before and will now seek out. I have to say that there is something of the Duende in Amy's poetry, a kind of dark magic. Given my own fascination with colour, it's not surprising that I would glory in lines such as these: And although/a part of me believes//in the roots/of that dark blue flower/drinking from my inner wrist, I say to myself/there can't be such a bloom//living in my body;" (ii. Wols. mashes lilac and geranium/into the circumference of a mauve bruise). But it's not just the colour, don't get me wrong. In this work the poet shows savvy observation abilities and a capacity for deep thought: "So much/of him was gypsum on the wet fingers/of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir who helped him/brawl hangovers" I love the unsualness of the verb "brawl." "All Wols had//was abstraction and an absent father who left/him thinking God preferred flies to men."  I have published Amy's work in the most recent issue of Experiment-O.com, Issue Six. I think she is a writer whose work deserves more attention. Thanks to rob mclennan for bringing her to mine.

Phil Hall has a piece which muses over/critiques/questions a review of Sue Goyette's latest poetry book, "Ocean." The review was written by Chad Campbell and published in Maisonneuve. I haven't yet read "Ocean" but after reading this review of a review and hearing Sue Goyette talk about the book with Sheila Rogers on a recent edition of CBC's the Next Chapter, I have added it to my wish list. Sue describes the as a biography of the ocean, which is a novel idea to me. I found Phil's argument to be both logical and impassioned. He takes apart the notion that there is something wrong with confessionalism in poetry and defends metaphor. I am a fervent admirer of Phil's work. I like the fact that he is willing to passionately come out on the side of a fellow poet in a thoughtful piece that isn't at all a hyperbolic lauding of  the writer's work, but also includes some critique. I'd love to see more critiques and responses to critiques written in this way. It isn't an attack of the reviewer; it calls into question the reviewer's point of reference: academia and offers a few other possibilities.

I was pleased at the opportunity to read more of Joshua Marie Wilkinson's poetry. I have been a fan of his since I first read, "lug your careless body out of the careful dusk: a poem in fragments"(University of Iowa Press, 2006) and winner of the Iowa poetry prize.  I have dog-eared many pages of this books owing to the sensual imagery therein. & lines like these: "Cities are for/breaking you into several people/ at once." The poems in 17 seconds are a series entitled "the Easement" and they are full of lush and beguiling imagery: "In the deepening twilight, the earth swims into its nets/to bring old lovers kissing in a woods,/a street corner,/a beach head with kids oohing/& cheering, a starfish gleaming/a tidepool to the eye of a drifted dog trot/trotting sandy, sort of lost,  happy, lost & alright."

A Catalogue of Colour, Texture & Shiny Things in Ken Babstock's Poetry-Part One

" what's left in the dark after colour is spent" (Charmed Shadows - Mean)

I have been fascinated by Ken Babstock's poetry since I first read his third book, Airstream Land Yacht (House of Anansi, 2006) and heard him read a number of years ago. My initial and ongoing interest has been his brilliant play with sound; however, in the back of my mind, I have always also noted the visual nature of his work, his appeal to the senses.

Note that this blog entry concerns Babstock's first two books: Mean (House of Anansi, 1999) and Days into Flatspin (House of Anansi, 2001), the latter shortened as Days. I'll post a second part dealing with his latter two books, Airstream Land Yacht and Methodist Hatchet in April. 

In the text below, the convention I use is to quote the text from the poem and then put the poem's title and the title of the book in parentheses. Rather than clutter up the piece with italics or quotation marks, I've mostly left them off. Any typos or lineation errors are my own.

For my first 5 x 5 theme piece, I decided to focus on the visual imagery, specifically Babstock's use of colour and texture, and in addition, because it feels like a related subject to me, his references to artists and his use of the vocabulary of art. When I read Babstock's poetry, I feel as if I am seeing paintings: sometimes these paintings are representational landscapes in that the colours very clearly map to specific things while at other times they are more like geometric abstractions in the use of shape combined with colour, the patterns and textures.  Like an artist, Babstock builds up colour and texture on the canvas to evoke a tone. Here are a few examples:

A Leave Taking, the final poem in Mean, for example describes the skin of black paint; tired russets; corroded red veined and blotched with lighter shades closer to gold. Northern Ontario Road Metal.  

Vocabulary from visual art is prevalent throughout: in Japanese brushstrokes you were more than you. (Fashion Consultant-Days). the collage of newsprint (1. Mouse Hole-Fall,:Three Views, One Window-Days).

Artists are referenced often: dark, Escher-vision (Deck, It's a Deck - Mean);  this charcoal study by Cézanne (Bottled Rabbit - Days); The front left this time, like a black/Dali clock"(Flat-Days); You like Kandinsky?" Bear 10, Days; Giacometti (City Square, Giacometti-Days); Alone, a squid in profile/by Picasso or Braque. (Clothespins-Days).

In poems like A Free Translation of Hardy's Darling Thrush in Days, so much of the text is visual, very painterly, "a potted/ shrapnel plant, memory's jagged isosceles welded to air./Cellophane wrappers snag on power lines/cross-hatching the sky. Starlings/ like blips on a radar grid.

In Days, Boot Mat (After Géricault's Raft of the Medusa), an oil painting made in 1818-19 when the artist was 27, Babstock's description of the boots seems to echo the configuration portrayed in the painting of the people set adrift on the raft after the frigate Méduse ran aground. Naval vocabulary is used to complete the image. Also, Solid black silhouette, receding,/until distance undermined outline, form bled into field. (Regenerative-Days); heard the traveling s's of garter snakes//playing wet grass blades with cadmium scales (Regenerative-Days); The Painting on the Cover of Otherwise is an ekphrastic poem also, describing the painting, infusing it with the imagination of the speaker. eyeing the lost Pollack/in red on his butcher's apron, (Lines Toward A Strategy for Travel-Days).

Colours or things representing the colours are often used as contrast. a poem often has a specific colour palette, either very minimal with only two contrasting colours or chock full of vivid colours.

In Mean, in Father Thorne's Bad Sunday, the two colours are black and red: blackberries / the sun dimmed to crimson. a cloud shadow like black crepe; [ with a splash of defiant yellow] willow switch/butter cups; Father Thorne's Bad Saturday-Mean.

In City Square, Giacometti-Days,"the two colours used are blue and orange.

In To Willow (Days) only the colours brown, grey, black and white are used or alluded to. For me, the colours evoke the sorrow in the poem.

In Pietà, with Breeze and a District, in  Days the colours evoked are blue and possibly red or pink, at least that's how I imagine the carnations, and the orange of the carp. still very minimal: dish-gloved arms into blue/cisterns of carp between bouquets of horse-sized steaming/carnations.

In Regenerative (Days), which articulates the speaker's witness to the pain and suffering experienced by an injured dog, there are nine colours mentioned directly or alluded to: bluish-white, grey, black(repeated several times), brown, cadmium, blue, white, wild rose, mauve. The gradation of colour from mute to bright and the riot of colour in the poem, for me, is representative of pain. I respond to it as a synaesthete because pain for me comes in a spectrum of colour from a green throb to a white hot sharp jab.

In "To Only Occasionally Ever Actually Look (Days), there is yellow with grey/brown alluded to through gravel, green through high grass and blue through ocean, and then a riot of colour alluded to:  a yellow front-end/loader unmanned on hills of parched looking gravel …to have lost// it in the violence it chose to veil in a sargasso of wildflower and weed.

In 3. F Hole-Fall: Three Views, One Window (Days), there is yellow and red:  Strung over the crosswalk, three/yellow boxes marked X: a lantern/festival in a red-light district. The second poem in this suite, 2. Manhole, contained no colour and the first contained just ochre and tan. The bright, primary colours saved until the final poem in the series, conveying, at least for me, a movement of darkness to light.

In Lyman M. Davis: Built 1873, Burned 1931 (Days), the overriding colours are black and red-orange, which helps to give a strong visual for a ship burning on the dark water: The night sky a frost-tangled tarmac,/ and a moon pouring its mind out over the lake. […] towed out into the ink[…]red-orange tint.

One of the overriding colour combinations of Mean is red and white; these two colours are contrasted several times:

this year's open mouth looks like a red room of your own / heart; tin icebox; bloody plush at his chest (Waiting on a Transplant); red sashes; a white, round snare drum (A Winter Carnival, A Moment of Loss); afternoon dark-berry jam light sequestered between its Mason jar seal of cloud and new snow (Flea Market: A Love Story - Mean); crimson valentines, white trim snipped from doilies (Steady-Mean).

Another example of a minimal colour palette, in this case, black & blue/blueish white: Away from here, unheard, a stunned,/scoured out shadow of Moose bears/its top-heavy echo of shag and girth through blue, intimate forests of snow. (Lines Toward A Strategy for Travel-Days).

Sometimes the contrast occurs in a few lines within the poem: As picked bluebell pines/away. Harmonica pouring out tall stacks yellowish. (Speed Blues Junket Into Harmonica-Days).

Bleakness is emphasized in the black, silver, concrete colours of this poem: "Lovely black tug…The sky sets an/undecided, dead colour, like concrete…the whatever-bird has surfaced with silver in shock/in its throat (Working the Lakefront, Days).

Colour from the urban or non natural world is often brought into a natural setting: the haze of cirrus fades to a passport black (Camping at Glendalough-Mean); houses…like pastel mints on drab green and granite (Crab-Mean); cormorants - full bottles of merlot, just breathing (Victoria Harbour-Mean); the tattoos, fierce green maps of the ten years spent eyeing whitewashed cedarblock; (Ex-Con: Friend-Mean); a damp blurry oatmeal of grey (3-Uncle in Eastport); prairie dogs…soaked in candescent blue (Head Injury Card - Montana Nocturne - Mean); Crow's/dark-closet wings  (Crow, for the Time Being -Mean); margarine-coloured curtains (Bottled Rabbit - Days); A broad bank/of tire-rubber grey cloud (Late Reading-Days); silt clouds that roll like mushrooms/ of cream in black tea (Marsh Theatre-Days).

Textures are also part of the palette, often making for soft & hard contrasts: chalky grind of his teeth / guarding a diamond in your breast (the stars are all around you) (Fighting Space-Mean); bloody plush at his chest/ tin ice box (Waiting on a Transplant - Mean); "The valentine of the bucket seat perched on a spring coil: a metal palm-/leaf saddle burnished to a beach-stone's gleam" ( Tractor-Days); the soft boneless flop/of its form onto bark, its near-weightless skull striking wood/like a mid-range xylophone note. (To Willow-Days); the texture/of tree bark like moon rock…the bubble and warp of fifteen layers of paint (City Square, Giacometti-Days).

Abstracts are often coloured too: a long red thought (White Dog-Mean); a sage-powdered bleakness  (Head Injury Card - Montana Nocturne - Mean); a gas-blue helix//of meaning (Head Injury Card - Mean); the world a future-less stop-motion white (Flea Market: A Love Story - Mean); The gas fire exhaled in blue whispers (…Resigned to a Quiet Life -Mean);  the chocolate calm in her eyes  (Carrying someone else's infant past a cow in a field near Marmora, Ont.-Days); the Irish Sea/its crinkled, jade glumness(Sleeping on an Incline-Days); brown-rivered afternoons (To Willow - Days); Or is peace that almond haze (The Painting on the Cover of Otherwise, Days).

Several of Babstock's poems contain no specific colours at all, but they usually have some kind of texture or striking visual image such as "It" which refers to the moon's bleak appendix & the speaker who shat in a porcelain bowl./Picked flecks from his teeth. sat at a "polished desk, went brittle and ached.  The poem He and His Frisby: from Lord of the Little Gesture in Days is a very visual poem: There were squads of Galileos/in slacks and cloth caps…Someone's cocker spaniel looked a gross comet/bounding spastic with spitty teeth.

"He Speaks, I think, On Behalf of Every" in the section, Lord of the Little Gestures from Days echoes the idea of the horse in the poem being langueless, verbless by evoking only the colour of white Winterhorse/Snow is blank-faced/millionteeth/One drift, shaped like Finland./ a glacier through layers of early packed and unpacked snow. There is also the mention of "any number of soft, heated, mushrooming exhales of Equus."

"He Considers Nihilism from Inside a Culvert"-Lord of the Little Gestures-Days contains no colour reference per se and its imagery is given over to sounds: made by the Rain-laden ditch reeds…mossy gurgle, the ping of drips. Static flash, and an echo.

Brightness or a glow appear often in Babstock's work in the form of diamonds, loonies, gemstones, stars: full flat sun a loonie on a busker's fez (Drawing Skeletons-Mean); the jig's chrome flash  (Bonavista 2-Mainland Boy in Eastport-Mean); licks of silver mast ribboned out (Bonavista 3-Uncle in Eastport-Mean); the cop still conscious, sequined with gemstones of glass shards / a dark bubble (School Bus Broadsided by a Patrol Car-Mean); streetlights wear a cut-glass halo (Authority - Mean); Bright-lit, bristling kitchen of angles, hair liquid coal above stainless-steel chair legs (to a Sister, Wherever-Mean); his surface glittered like mineral (Signature-Mean); acres of mirrored glass, under a seed row of streetlight ( Tractor-Days); Reeds like violin bows quiver in the pit, glinting/in low, angled light. They point to grey/weather, an incoming chill curdling beyond/the porticoes of striped yellow. (Marsh Theatre-Days); Dew, meltwater cold, slid down my calves/like wet wrists unburdening jewels in my boots. (Regenerative-Days); the ionized cobalt glow that fish-tanked the air. (Public Space-Days); any other bright variant//we might pull out of the toy box: sand in the cement's cracks;/a snow slope/in the Pyrenees. Unripened pear/left over from something's extinction. (The Off Chance, Days); before the palace itself and its plated,/ imported shinings (Epilogue-Days).

Similar to brightness, or what is also bright, is the metal in Babstock's poetry: tin icebox (Waiting on a Transplant), the jig's chrome flash (2-Mainland Boy in Eastport-Mean); fumbling with buckles, buttons--into dark (Two Divers Lost, Howe Sound-Mean); Blue sparks spit off chrome (What We Didn't Tell the Medic-Mean); Town, metallic herd. (Wolf-Tells - MEASURES - Mean); arctic-blue iron filings wagging like fingers, like palsied black lashes  (Crow, for the Time Being -Mean); metal-glint sparrows in flight  (Humber Trail Pastoral-Days); sheet/metals of gin --bottle aquamarine; an alchemical sky, its metallic purples melt,/diffuse, quartz splinters/smother, blink out, some other, warmer/less unending hue approach from the lake (Late Reading-Days); agriculture/ in the piddle running over ruts in this corrugated iron. (He Considers Nihilism from Inside a Culvert-Lord of the Little Gestures-Days); A face cast up where metal birds ignite. (Speed Blues Junket Into Harmonica-Days); The secondhand iron floor lamp you rewired/and scrounged up a hat for; tattered, slatting the light….from the polished convexity of a hip flask. (On Feeling Low, Housed and Grateful, Days).

The sun, the moon and the stars get colourful & painterly treatment as well as being part of Babstock's ongoing study of contrasts: the sun dimmed to crimson (Fighting Space-Mean); full flat sun a loonie on a busker's fez Drawing Skeletons-Mean; pumpkin sun (Angle-Mean). Sun-glint buttering the corrugated/lake (Unseasonable Warmth-Days); the moon, like the dinged/blade of a sickle hanging unused in the tar-dark/must of a shed. There and there, nail holes where the light tweeks/in. (Lines Toward A Strategy for Travel-Days); The sun's now/only half of one, will drown in minutes and take/the shape of things with it. […] the sun-stroke, ice-floe, mirror-calm page before page one. (A Master Narrative - Days).

The light and the dark are also infused with texture and colour:  In "To Willow" (Days) the dark is quilted. Clay/so clean, so reddened in/ the light (The Painting on the Cover of Otherwise, Days) The light silvers the edges,/darkens the centre (Prayer-Days); Kitchen light's woolly, weak. (Winter-Lord of the Little Gestures-Days); disappearing into the dark heaven of a silent/house,…the light nodes pinging off the Rideau Canal (Not Lonely, Ottawa-so, and Bent-Lord of the Little Gestures-Days); the crimped bracelets of light/on the water's/ wrists (It Unhands Him; and Sanderlings-Lord of the Little Gestures-Days); in the riven gleam that gave lampposts and post-/boxes their faces, their blackened/reverse-sides' crimped shadows rippling away over snow, (Pietà, with Breeze and a District-Days); that eye-splitting halogen light of the office (Lines Toward A Strategy for Travel-Days); Today, the pigeon-cacked sill outside sat battered/in autumn light, hard, aslant; specks in the lintel/glinting. (On Feeling Low, Housed and Grateful, Days); the indifferent dark (To See It for What It Is until We Have to Go-Days).

The final poem in Mean, A Leave-Taking, is full of colour and texture. And is a very painterly poem. 1. night …plum blue into pungent pine mat; all thickened to black; 2. bourbonhued carpet;  4. skin of black paint; tired russets; corroded red veined and blotched with lighter shades closer to gold. Northern Ontario Road Metal, it's called; bright orange field; colours made loud by the background; golds, reds and rot. It's as if Babstock is ending with fireworks: black, orange, red, gold.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this piece in April when I will discuss Airstream Land Yacht and Methodist Hatchet.

RECENT READS

Margento - Nomadosophy - (Max Blecher Press, 2012)

This book is a collection of poems by a multitude of poets/collaborators from all over the world. Margento is the performance troupe of poet and translator Chris Tanasescu, who is currently at the University of Ottawa as a researcher/visiting scholar. The book blurb by David Baker describes Margento as a "caravan, a circus, a symphony and a brawl. It is a global, multi-languaged, powerful performance troupe made up of more than fifty poets..."

The poems in Nomadosophy are guided by the ideas of mathematical graph theory and jam sessions. If this seems like an unusual juxtaposition to you, I agree. In a good way. Science and art are blended here.

"Graphs are ways to understand and (re)generate language, society, and biochemical structures or entities. They literally are ways, paths that connect vertices. Vortexes. Overt axes.

Every poem, that is, every person, is a graph – of instincts, beliefs, phrases, and so forth (news everybody knows but wants to receive proof of) – and yet they may be read and then involved as a (set of) point(s) to start networks from or to connect through." Chris Tanasescu, "The Graph Poem (Four Poems & a Note on the Poetics)" in Jerome Rothenberg's "Poems and Poetics" 

My own experience of the works in Nomadosophy is one of delight and surprise. There are poems originally written in Romanian, Vietnamese, Polish, Chinese & other languages & translated into English or poems written in English translated into Romanian. There are engagements with/translations of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Wislawa Szymborska, Randall Jarrell & Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. There are notes on some of the difficult aspects of translating concepts that exist in one language, but not necessarily another. This work is visceral, passionate, eccentric & freeing. Above all, these poems are acts of love, a demonstration of care, compassion & community. The duende is in full force here: "news everybody knows but wants to receive proof of."

"I step into the sea guided solely by my heartbeat:/this is the way so many others have tried to escape/but they died of thirst afloat/after devouring each other alive…" MARGENTO solo (A Temple Passage through Cambodia, part 1) The Wave Home

Daniel Scott Tysdal, The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Writing Poems (Oxford University Press, 2013)

For many years I have been an avid collector of how to write poetry books. They help me in a number of ways. Originally to answer many of the questions I had and still have about poetry & subsequently to use as a reference when I've had to edit other people's poems. I am happy to welcome another how to book by a writer I admire. I'm not that far into the book yet, but what I appreciate is that its philosophy is that of the moment, the idea that poetry arises out of a convergence of occasions. the first exercise asks poets to write a forbidden poem. I enjoy this already. Tysdal has an easy-going, conversational style that makes this book approachable for all budding poets. There are example poems with each exercise.

Robert Kroestch, The Hornbooks of Rita K (University of Alberta Press, 2001)

I come back to this book often. I love Kroetsch's poetry & this book in particular because of its playfulness, its play with personas & its wit. Currently I'm working on a commonplace book, which is not that different from a horn book, "a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, etc., mounted on a wooden tablet with a  handle, and protected by a thin plate of horn." The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998) as quoted in the front matter of this book. You'll think this is an odd & likely inappropriate comparison, but this book makes me think of Griffin & Sabine, the epistolary novel by Nick Bantock. The one-sided entreaties of a lover who misses the object of his affection. In this book, the speaker, Raymond, builds up a fragmented narrative for Rita Kleinhart, a poet who has gone missing, an eccentric woman & one, I would love to know: "as some of her neighbours put it, a  nut case." "She worshiped, in her own way, the peeling white paint, the smell of rotting wood, the worn pathways of ants…" At the same time, the book is a discussion of poetics; it is about not taking oneself too seriously.

Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest, Collected Poems, Revised and Expanded Edition (University of California Press, 2006)

Since September, I've been obsessed with "The MothPoem," one of the series in this book. It was written over the period of 1962 to 1964 and is dedicated to HD. I haven't been reading anything else from this voluminous collection, just this series. It is made up of 17 poems. The image of "A Literalist," the opening poem, of a moth inside a piano stays with me, even haunts me in some ways. Or perhaps tickles my synapses would be a better way of phrasing it. Again once more there is a theme of absence, of bereftment, I guess the right word is bereavement. I find myself also following along the path of this poem-series, reading HD, dwelling on Eurydice's story.

The next 5 x 5 entry on January 29 will be about colour in Ken Babstock's poetry...all being well...

ghazals & cheating at the game of convention

a wee note i wrote over at the Puritan's blog, the Town Crier, concerning some ghazals of mine they published in 2012.thanks to the TC/Puritan folk.