The press release is out. The Nelson Ball Poetry Prize longlist has been announced. From about 100 submissions, my little chapbook made this cut with some very fine chapbooks and books,
Lines – Cameron Anstee (St. Andrew Books)
Undoing Hours – Selina Boan (Nightwood Editions)
wind – Guy Ewing (Puddles of Sky Press)
a grain of sand – Helen Hajnoczky (above/ground press)
Zero Dawn – Shelly Harder (above/ground press)
A Number of Stunning Attacks – Jessi MacEachern (Invisible Publishing)
Gone South – Barry McKinnon (above/ground press)
Rain’s Small Gestures – Pearl Pirie (Apt. 9 Press)
Ghosthawk – Matt Rader (Nightwood Editions)
So/I – Andy Weaver (above/ground press)
Hat tip to rob mclennan’s blog for posting all the details and hyperlinks to works.
Grant Wilkins may be familiar to you through sound poetry performance. [“A very small bunny!” or duotones.] Or through book making places where he sells handmade paper and letterpress things. He avowed a couple decades ago that he was a poetry appreciator, not a poet. The sandstone of observation gradually crumbled into being a maker as well. The siren song of making is hard to resist over the jingles and melodies of consuming.
He describes himself as “an occasional printer, papermaker and poet from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.”
PP: You have a new book and I haven’t interviewed you about that in particular…
Before that, Literary Type, my first solo publication (aside from the few things I’ve printed myself over the years), came out with nOIR:Z in 2020.
PP: Oh right. I have yet to read that as it arrived during my concussion. I should be capable now.Speaking of reading,what have you read lately that lit you up? Add a why or how for the shoutout.
GW:The Black Debt (Nightwood Editions, 1989) is one of those brilliant pieces by Steve McCaffrey that manages to be really interesting to read (though possibly best approached in small doses) and really hard to penetrate. There are two texts in the book – one of which is structured by the use of commas, while the other by the complete absence of any punctuation at all. I doubt I’ll ever figure out exactly what he did here – or what he did it to – but I’m going to enjoy trying.
Leslie Scalapino’s Crowd and not evening or light (O Books, 2010) (thanks, Chris Turnbull!) is a production of fragments (which seems to be a recurring theme in my literary interests these days) in which the author has managed to create a really interesting long poem out a series of short, shattered, almost inarticulate stanzas that are themselves constructed out of very short, broken, fugitive phrases & words – accompanied by a series of equally fugitive vacation photos. It took me a while to get into this one, but once I did it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (this edition from New Directions, 2017, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro & translated by Margaret Jull Costa): I’ve been recently getting into Fernando Pessoa – he of the 70+ heteronyms – and am currently working my way through his Book of Disquiet. It’s a fascinating collection of very short, often fragmentary (!) prose pieces that feel like a combination of autobiography (if that notion even works with Pessoa), meditation, diary and essay. They remind me – unexpectedly, at least to me – of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”.
PP: I love Meditations. I read it first as a teen and am reading for a third time at the moment. What else ya got?
GW: But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Anvil Press, 2022) is Conyer Clayton’s latest book, and it’s the best book of surrealist poetry by a contemporary writer that I’ve read in a long time. There are a few writers who do a good job of throwing together a wild scatter of images, emotions & ideas in a way that creates a crazy, oppositional borderline-incoherent text that’s still engaging & entertaining to read – Stuart Ross, for instance, is a master of this sort of thing. Clayton does all of this expertly – while managing to leave just enough cracks around the edges of the text that you can see the shadows of real life in behind the kaleidoscope of images. It’s great.
PP: Wow, that sounds fabulous. And she has another book underway too.
GW: Ken Norris’ Vishyun (Ekstasis Editions, 2022): I started reading Norris a few years ago – I think maybe Bob Hogg suggested him – and I’ve really liked his “Report on The Second Half of The Twentieth Century” series, with his great ability to pop back and forth between lyricism and almost essayistic prose poetry and travelogue. Inspired by bill bissett, Vishyn is more focused on the lyric than his earlier work, while retaining his time-zone spanning capaciousness, as he looks at notions of landscape, travel and the movement of (or through) culture.
I’m also most of the way through re-reading Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World (Norton, 2008) (thanks, Marije Bijl!), a dissection of the often unseen and really fairly absurd workings of the contemporary art world. The author manages to do a good job of getting into the details of the way this world works, while managing to avoid the tendency to overcook, overstate and oversell that the denizens of the art world are so prone to doing themselves. An interesting read, for anyone who’s interested in the art world.
Lisa Robertson’s Boat (Coach House Books, 2022) has been right at the top of my “To Read” list for a little while now. I’m a huge fan of Robertson’s work – she’s one of a small number of contemporary writers who I will happily follow over any literary cliff. I kind of feel like I should have my poetic decks at least mostly cleared before I jump into the book though, so I can give it the proper attention.
PP:Boat was easily in my favourite books of the year and it spurred a new manuscript. So, to change tack, and sail in a new direction, what’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
GW: I seem to be mostly focused on literary projects these days. I keep trying to talk myself into getting back into papermaking and letterpress work, but I’ve just been finding the literary stuff way more engaging and way more rewarding over the last couple of years. Way less messy, too, it has to be said.
I also spent a good chunk of time over the last year trying to get my French up to snuff… with limited, but positive, results.
PP: Excellent. I want to do the same. What is underway or forthcoming? Anything you can tell?
GW: As always, I have several poetry projects that are ongoing, in various states of disrepair. Most of what I write is just a matter of me coming upon an idea I like, and following it through ’til I decide that it’s done, or that I’ve had enough of it. At the moment I’m in the midst of what amounts to a recycling project, where I’m reworking the text and supporting material left over from my entry in CV2’s most recent “2 Day Poem” contest.
I do have a second chapbook from above/ground in the works too, wherein I do a read-through/mash-up of Archibald Lampman and Arthur Rimbaud.
PP:Fun.
GW: I’m also involved in a really interesting collaboration with a group of artists and poets. It’s been a slow-gestating thing, but these are interesting people to work with, and I’m really enjoying the process. I think it’s going to produce some really good work, when it comes together.
PP:What work can people read? (list of publications or mag places so I don’t miss any of your titles)
I have to say that the “Feral Gods” sequence in +doc.2 and the “Hummingbirds” thing on periodicities were the recent works that I most enjoyed writing.
EXILE Quarterly printed a selection of pieces from my Gwendolyn MacEwen prize winning entry last winter (issue # 44.3), but the issue hasn’t made it up onto their website yet: http://www.exilequarterly.com/
Nedjo Roger’s often politically engaged poetry and songwriting pursue glimpses of transcendence in the everyday. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature, SubTerrain, Contemporary Verse 2, and Class Collective, among others journals and online publications, and in various chapbooks including In Air/Air Out in 2011.
PP: It’s been a minute since we last connected. What are some artistic projects you’ve worked on in the past few years?
NR: In 2014 I wrote and performed a Chaucer-inspired solo mock epic in verse, “The Trois-Rivieres Tales,” for the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival and reprised it in 2016 in Vancouver and on Salt Spring Island. So much fun to be part of the Fringe.
In 2018 I was lucky enough to connect with a travelling musician JA Cockburn who arranged and recorded a bunch of my songs, which led to the 9-song album My Utopia Is DIY.
In 2019 with sponsorship from Salt Spring Arts I put together a two-day performance festival, Saltfest. I lined up a performance space and ten shows, supported the artists with their performance needs, hosted.
PP: Wow! That’s an amazing amount of productivity and lifting up other writers. What have you read lately that lit you up? Can you add a why or how for the shoutout.
NR: I’ve been intrigued by approaches to narrative. Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, how it freely weaves in myth, etymology, dream. In Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout I was fascinated by how explicitly the narrator sets out structure and even the mechanics of the story. How does this not interfere with the spell of the fiction? But it didn’t, at least not for me as a reader. I also recently read or reread most of Ivan Coyote’s back catalogue. Love their storytelling.
PP:Solid choice. Love Ivan’s books too. What’s your life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
NR: The highlights are of my week are two afternoons my partner and I spend with our two year old grandchild, plus a day a week I help out one of my kids on their farm. I fit in paid work and writing where I can around that.
PP:That sounds super-healthy and life-work balanced.What have you got underway or forthcoming? Anything you can speak about?
NR: I have a piece coming up in Canadian Literature’s special issue on poetics and extraction. I’m at work on and off on a history of mining in British Columbia inspired by the vignette style of narrative that Eduardo Galeano used in his Memory of Firetrilogy.
I’ve been dabbling recently at the intersection of poetry and code. A first experiment is “The Last Poem”, recently published at Technoculture.
PP:Cool. I’ll check that out. Any other work can people read?
NR: My chapbookA Country In Between with two pieces I wrote for performance is available as a PDF to download and print. The first piece is a sonnet cycle that begins from the question: how would the “fair youth” that most of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to to respond to the bard?
PP:Super. Thanks for taking your time to share all this! Any last notes?
NR: Just that I love what you’re doing here, checking in with the many writers you’ve published. It’s been fun reading on your blog what others have been up to. So much of the arts is this work of connecting. So thanks for this!
PP:Quite literally, my pleasure.It’s wondrous how much skilled creativity there is busting out all around.
Michael e. Casteels has been a regular at the Ottawa Small Press fair making small handmade wonders on site. I think/hope I have all his illiterature magazine issues put out over the decade. Seen eight, his rubber stamped edition of 100 copies? He has chapbooks and his The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses which I’ve read a few times, a mix of surreal and minimalist. (Daniel Haislet describes it). I had the good fortune to publish him twice, 6 poems in 2014 and the same year 3 Chapters Towards an Epic.
PP:What have you read lately, Michael, that lit you up? Why so?
MeC: After a brief reprieve I’ve been diving deep into Westerns again. I’m currently in the midst of the Thalia trilogy, by Larry McMurtry, a Pulitzer prize winner and one of the greatest Western writers of all time. After reading a bunch of pulp/pocket westerns, it really me me up to read some literary westerns again.
I’ve also been reading through various issues of Industrial Sabotage by jwcurry. Each issue is incredibly different in terms of content and presentation. Some are rubber-stamped on used envelopes or soup can labels, some are full-colour publications, some are collage pieces housed in a card stock envelope. Each issue delightful, and, for me as a publisher, highly educational.
PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise? Baby, yes?
MeC: Yep. My primary focus in life right now is my 8-month old daughter, Etta. Most of my time is spent engaging with, and learning from her. We spend lots of time reading, and exploring the outside world. She’s a brilliant human being.
This year I’ve also set a goal of getting at least one camping trip in per month. It’s been a good challenge that has really pushed my capabilities and expanded my outdoor confidence. I’ve slept outside at -28 and +28 so far this year. I’m excited to see what other trips will come up.
PP:Oh my. Camping at -14 is where I bottom out. What is underway or forthcoming? Anything you can tell?
MeC: I’ve just finished my largest collage project to date. It’s a prose equivalent to visual poetry, so I’m calling it a vispro project. I’ve basically taken an entire pocket western, Hondo, by Louis L’Amour and, through various collage techniques, have rewritten it and titled it ondo. It’s 44 pages long. I thought it would take me a month or so to complete, and I spent nearly 6 months working on it. I’ve finally scanned it all and will begin sending it out to potential presses soon.
PP:Congrats on making that stage! What work out there of yours can people read at the moment?
MeC: My most recent book is minimalist metawestern titled “The Man with the Spider Scar”. I published it through Puddles of Sky Press. It was printed and bound at Coach House Printing, and it’s a really lovely little book. Other recent titles are: Flotsam, from Timglaset &Jetsam, from Simulacrum Press, All We’ve Learned, Which Isn’t Much (With Nick Papaxanthos), from above/ground press.
PP: I missed seeing Flotsam & Jetsam somehow. This is why we ask questions. Any author site, social media urls or things you’d like to plug?
Monty Reid is “former Director at VerseFest, former Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, former guitar/mandolin at Call Me Katie, what now?” Which sounds like he’s fielding suggestions. Intelligence agency poems? Small biology poems? New Covid poems? What do you want to see, folks?
Monty Reid had Kissing Bug out with phafours in 2014. He was also in the 2011 Air Out/In Air, a chapbook anthology for the Guatamala Stove Project . (The GSP made 7,600 family cookstoves, 22 backpacks with school supplies this year and over $31,000 in microloans for Maya farmers. Wonderful when people work together.)
PP:So Monty, what have you read lately that’s lit you up?
MR: There’s always something lighting me up. I really liked Jorie Graham’s breathlessRunaway. I liked her early work, but after a while everything she wrote just became so routinely portentous its power faded. But Runaway, urgent with climate change and so many failures of meaning, is inspired work.
PP: (Let me interject: her opening poem about rainstorm is particularly apt at time of writing.)
MR: For the past few years I’ve been making a point of reading poets from non-anglo languages (mostly in translation) in part just to get away from our overwhelming self-regard. One of my recent favorites is Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold. A Spanish poet, who grew up in (and resisted) the Franco era, taught himself how to read by studying a book of his father’s poetry, worked in a bank for some 25 years and went on to win most of the literary prizes in the Spanish speaking world, his Book of the Cold has only recently been translated (by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez Nunez). A chilly hell, full of remarkable imagery, it charts the instability of post-Franco Spain, and more broadly. A snowball earth, as opposed to an overheated one.
I’ve also been dipping into Dionne Brand’s new Nomenclature, New and Collected Poems. I wasn’t familiar with some of her early work, so I’m grateful to have it all in a single volume. A particular pleasure to read the epigrams from 1983. And it’s intriguing to trace some of her language from the early books to the new incantatory long poem – ‘Nomenclature’.
PP: Wonderful to see someone stretching past English poetry and Canada’s poetry. What’s your general focus these days?
MR: I no longer work with VerseFest or with Arc but I’m writing a lot, about hospitals and medical procedures most recently, since both my wife and I have been dealing with some health issues, altho we seem to have gotten past the worst of it now. I can’t play music for the time being, and that’s a real loss, but I can still garden, and it looks like it’s going to be a pretty good year.
PP: Excellent to hear you’re writing, and got past the worst of the health hurdels. Do you have things forthcoming?
MR: Three different mss hunting for publishers at the moment, but none accepted yet. Poems forthcoming in a few magazines (online and in print), and probably a new chapbook from above/ground in the fall.
PP: Wise publishers should snap them up. What can people read now/soon?
MR: Some poems recent/soon at @FillingStation, @TrainJournal, @talking_time, @IcefloeP, etc. My books are slowly disappearing from publisher websites (and a few are long gone) but many can still be found online and I still have copies of most of them, should anyone be looking. I’m still pretty happy with this one,
