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?

He has published a whack of books and chapbooks, almost all of which I have.

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 breathless Runaway. 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,

PP: Thanks for your time. Monty and for sharing what’s on your plate these days. Looking forward to what comes next from you.

.

Rona Shaffran was a key organizer at Tree reading Series back when it was in Arts Court, Ottawa. She was in Chromatic Beliefs, and A Wall’s Sharp White, two outcomes of the Tree Masterclasses, and Barely Their in 2010, also a phafours press chapbook, and of course, her poetry collection.

PP: I remember that we tried to connect for an interview when your first poetry collection came out. Can you tell us now about it? 

Ignite, published in 2013 by Signature Editions, examines the life of one couple, but, at the same time, evokes universal experiences that we can all share. It’s a book length series of poems that tell a story in four voices – the woman’s, the man’s, an omniscient observer, and ‘we’ or ‘us’. Ignite was consistently well-reviewed. Here are excerpts from two of the reviews. The others are on my website http://www.ronashaffran.ca

“For Rona Shaffran, the ground beneath her feet is important. The linked poems in this collection present some of the most honest and true poetry I have read recently. Ignite opens with a sequence of poems bathed in mid-winter light. The heat in a relationship between a man and woman has gone cold, emotionally and sexually. Its dying embers are described clearly… While reading these lines, just for a moment, I thought I heard echoes of Sexton talking to Roethke.

But the voice here is Shaffran’s own, speaking the naked truth… This is daring, high-wire poetry that requires perfect balance between the female and male personas. This balance and credibility in a dialogue between two voices is difficult to achieve convincingly, yet in Shaffran’s hands, it appears to be easy— it isn’t.

The third and final section of Ignite is the shortest and one of the strongest in this noteworthy collection of poems. The epigraphs in Ignite quote the mid-20th century poets Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, and Wallace Stevens. Sexton’s work was deeply personal and sometimes troubled. Roethke’s distinctive poetry, such as “In a Dark Time,” was also troubled. And Stevens’ was brilliant and often cool. The best of these influences and a number of others are apparent in the sometimes cool and hot bursts in Ignite.”

—Review in Vallum Magazine, 10:2, Reflections, by James Edward Reid, who publishes in The Sarmatian Review, Vallum, the Pacific Rim Review of Books, Prairie Fire, Highgrader Magazine, Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, and The Guardian.

“In her debut collection, Ignite, Rona Shaffran explores the subject of marital alienation with spare, muscular lines and startlingly original imagery. Heartache and despair are nothing new to poetry; indeed, poets Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy have both recently written major works charting the end of a great love. What Shaffran writes, though, is something new and unexpected, something I have not seen in any collection. Without giving away the mysterious transformation in Ignite, let me simply say that this is a profoundly hopeful book for all who have stood on the abyss of a love affair and looked down. I would have liked to see a poetic investigation of such passionate transformations that extended beyond the personal, the mysterious and the miraculous (as finely wrought as these poems are). I wanted the author’s insight; is this something that all great loves must pass through, either surviving it or being shattered by it? But perhaps the author’s refusal is her own answer; Shaffran insists on an unflinching examination of a particular life, and it is up to her readers to draw their own conclusions about the universal. Shaffran’s is a passionate and powerful new voice in Canadian poetry.”

—Review by Rachel Rose, author of three collections of poetry, as well as essays and short stories, has been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United States. She has won the Bronwen Wallace Award for fiction, the Quebec Writers Federation A.M. Klein Award for Poetry, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for poetry. She is poetry and lyric prose mentor in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

PP: Can you tell us a little about yourself?

RS: I was born and raised in Montreal and have lived in beautiful Ottawa since 1974.  I co-directed two Ottawa poetry reading series, Tree and RailRoad, organized Tree’s Master Poetry Workshops at the time, and helped run VERSeFest in its early days. In my working years, I was a Director at the Auditor General of Canada, investigating government’s effectiveness.

PP: How could I forget Railroad. What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

RS: On the literary front, I’m still writing poetry,  but on very different subjects than in Ignite, including poems about loss and healing, spiritual connection and ties to the land. And, I’m writing a novel., which has given me a whole new appreciation of the intensity of poetry’s compression. At the same time, I’m fascinated by the expansion of ideas in fiction. 

Other than writing, I’m driving around the countryside with Brian in our red convertible on gorgeous little-known back roads. Like floating through space on a magic carpet. 

I love to travel, but COVID stomped on that. I hope soon we can travel feely again, with no worries. 

PP: What is in the works?

RS: Writing this novel is interesting and tough, because it deals at a deep level with a woman’s psychogical transformation.  The challenge is to show that internal journey while also moving forward the external action of the plot. 

PP: That’s important to balance.

RS: I’m also in the early stages of putting together a new poetry collection, but probably won’t get too much further on it till I finish this draft of the novel, hopefully in a few months. 

PP: I’m the reverse and the same. Trying to finish collections before I get dug back into my novel. Glad the poetry bug is still biting you. Anything upcoming or recent that I missed?

RS: I’ve had a couple of on-line readings this year. You can find one of them at https://limmudottawa.ca/limmud-ottawa-2021/shira-tzefonit/

And the other was for the National Capital Region Writing Contest, where I won Honourable Mention for a pantoum called The Question. What a brain teaser that pantoum was to write – an obsession till I got the words right!

PP: Congratulations. Look forward to seeing more.

RS: Pearl, thanks so much for this chat. I really enjoyed it. 

PP: Hi Jeremy, it’s been a while. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me here.

 JC: It’s always lovely to hear from you, and yes I’d be very happy to do an interview. If I remember correctly, that In/Air chapbook was the first time I’d ever published a poem professionally. 

PP: That is cool. Thanks for starting a beautiful connection by pitching a poem.

You had been super-busy with presenting at a Joyce conference for a while and a book, Joyce Writing Disability, came out of that in which you had a paper. Congrats.

What have you read lately that lit you up? Why or how? 

JC: David Huebert’s story collection Chemical Valley is really good. David and I actually shared an office for a while when we were both graduate students at Western, so it’s great to see him coming out with such great work. On the non-fiction side, I recently stumbled on Ato Quayson’s Oxford St., Accra, which is a study of the history of one of the main streets in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, talking about everything from its emergence as a center of capital and global trade, to the slogans people paint on their cars.  

PP: Ooh, might have to check out the latter. What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise? 

JC: I’m actually caught between two projects right now, and not for the first time. I’m writing another novel right now with the working title of Nostos. It’s a sort of metaphysical, science fiction, stream of consciousness . . . thing. Like most truly interesting books, it’s much better than it sounds.

PP: 🙂 I hear that.

JC: The other project is an academic book about literature and pain, called Agony for Others. I find having multiple things on the go at once helps keep me agile, and if nothing else it means that when I have trouble with one thing, I can cog it out while working on the other thing.  

PP: Nod, good way to run it. What have you got underway or forthcoming? 

JC: At the moment I have a story called “Consolation of the Cat Sitter” forthcoming in PRISM International and a poem called “i is another” forthcoming in Geist. I also came out with a story called “Hearth” in The New Quarterly earlier this year. Lastly, I have a story called “The Man who was God for a Minute” that I’ve been shopping around. Keep an eye out for it!  

PP: Will do. What else do you have out?  

JC: If anyone wants to read my fiction, the easiest way to do that is in my short story collection Beneath the Statue, which came out in 2020. It’s clearly the most important and significant thing to have happened that year, so you’ve probably already heard of it. It’s made up of stories I wrote over the span of about ten years and is, in my opinion, pretty darn alright.  

PP: Awesome. And on Kindle, it’s under $5. You can’t buy a coffee for that I understand. Any author site or social media urls you’d like to drop? 

JC: I don’t really use Twitter so much anymore since I find it a bit too soul-corroding for my taste, but my account there is @JRColangelo. I also keep my Goodreads page updated, so if you want to follow my work that place is as good as any.

PP: Super. Thanks for your time. Keep adding your voice to the world.  

Stephen Bett, back in 2018, published with me the chapbook Though we are incredibly small, a minimalist linked poem.

PP: What have you read lately that lit you up? Add a why or how for the shoutout.

SB: I’ll try to be brief & to the point: I’ve just finished reading an interesting book of Donato Mancini’s, as well as the real treasure-trove chapbook rob mclennan’s just done for one of my very favourite poets, Monty Reid. In fact, to rejig Ginsberg’s line, I’d say “the best Canadian poets of my generation” are Monty, Sharon Thesen, Patrick Friesen & Guy Birchard. I’m also currently reading a totally fascinating bio of Marcel Duchamp, & two A’murican friends’ new poetry books, just released—Hank Lazer’s & Michael Rothenberg’s.

PP: I enjoy Mancini and Reid’s poetry as well. I haven’t read enough Sharon Thesen. I should get back to her. What’s your life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

SB: Lots of reading (as always), writing, & trying to avoid getting Covid a second time (boosted, so only mild symptoms, fortunately), & wanting to travel!

PP: Oy, yeh yoy. Sorry to hear Covid caught you. You have brave travel dreams. I’m happy to stay holed up forever to avoid it. Mailbox is a major expedition.

What have you got underway or forthcoming? Anything you can tell?

SB: I’m working on a new sequence that might possibly become another book length serial poem. Here’s the title & gist/blurb: SongBu®st: “Breaking into song, or breaking it apart? Maybe a bit of both. Simultaneously a celebration & a send up of iconic pop culture lyrics.”

PP: Cool. What work can people read?

SB: There are quite a few things if people want to scroll around my site, clicking on the various listed books: StephenBett.com

PP: Any other social media urls or projects you’d like to plug?

SB: Since 2018: A new book coming out later in 2022 with Chax Press (Broken Glosa), with 68 glosa poems riffing on 68 poets who have long been important to me; a book came out this past March (Lift Off, Blazevox Books, 2022); & in 2018, the book Back Principles (Blazevox Books), & also 2018, a chapbook, Shall We Dance That One Around Again? (Finishing Line Press); I have a 29 minute video reading from my upcoming book, Broken Glosa: an alphabet book of post avant glosa: Stephen Bett // Reading from Broken Glosa – YouTube (posted by Ragged Lion Press in London, UK); & of course my site: StephenBett.com

PP: Wow, super busy brainworks. Thanks for your time and for your patience of waiting for this to get posted.

Who’s this Mary Lee Bragg?

Mary Lee Bragg published the novel Shooting Angels in 2004, and has had poetry and short fiction in literary magazines and ezines in Canada and the United States. Her poetry chapbook Winter Music won the Tree Chapbook contest in 2013. Her first full collection of poetry, The Landscape That Isn’t There, was short-listed for the Archibald Lampman poetry award in 2019.

PP: So, Mary Lee, what’s lit you up in lit lately?

MLB: What have I read lately? Last year I read Emma Donoghue’s “The Pull of the Stars”. When I got to the end, I turned to the beginning and read the book through again. I often re-read books, but rarely do it immediately. In this case, I felt so drawn into a fictional world that I just couldn’t leave it. My feeling for this book may be because I read it during pandemic lockdown. The Pull of the Stars is about a nurse in a maternity hospital in Dublin in 1918, coping with the influenza epidemic and the aftershocks of the Easter Rebellion. I think I’m in love with Nurse Power.

PP: What’s life’s focus there, literary or otherwise?

MLB: I read a lot, mostly fiction, but also history and poetry. I spent many years on big writing projects, but now I’m trying to be more open and spontaneous, which means working in shorter forms. My poetry seems to be heading to creative non-fiction.

PP: What’s underway now?

MLB: A chaotic manuscript that doesn’t have a focus or theme, but which I am trying to justify by calling it open and spontaneous.

PP: Hah, I misread that as opera, not open. (Perhaps a new direction?)

Any links you could drop?

MLB: Facebook is where I hang out. When I googled myself I found that the Tree Reading Series has an archive of me reading, both as a featured reader and in open sets over the years.

The Google results were interesting: I had to get to page two before I hit the wedding of Mary Friend and Lee Hunter. The first page and a half were all me, and almost all about The Landscape That Isn’t There.

PP: My top hit for you is your reading from your book on the Eh Poetry Podcast. And for your book at GoodReads where it has a 4.5 star out of 5.

MLB: The centre of Landscape is the section titled “Problems of the Heart,” containing a series of poems that I wrote while I was diagnosed, treated, and operated on for congestive heart failure.

It’s certain that without open heart surgery in December 2017 I would not have lived past January 2018. So, every day and year since then has been overtime for me — I feel like I’m no longer playing the game in regular season any more. At the same time, I feel as if the events of the past few years — political chaos and war nested within a pandemic nested within climate change — make my experience irrelevant to everyone except me. Earth-shattering as it was to go to the edge of the abyss, put my toes over and look down, most people have bigger things on their minds. I feel I need to work hard to say anything useful to people who live in this world now.

So far the best I’ve come up with is: There is no reason for existence, but there are compensations. For me music and literature are two of the big compensations.

PP: That is an astute way to put it.

MLB: About music: I started taking music lessons ten years ago, to catch up to where I was as a teenager. Now I play every day (I must confess, I don’t write every day.) In March 2020 at the beginning of the first lockdown, I was learning the Gnossiennes by Eric Satie. I undertook to play the first five Gnossiennes every day that the pandemic lasted. I liked the dreamy, aimless music — what Satie called “musique d’ammeublement” — and thought it would be a suitable daily meditation for a few months of monkish contemplation. I kept it up for two years, and still play the Gnossiennes when I want to relax. My husband claims to like to hear me play.

PP: Wow, 5 in a day is a lot of playing. My husband also likes to play those Satie pieces on the piano. They are beautiful pieces.

Thanks for your time. May your music and your literature be amply rewarding for these next 10 years of Covid-life.