Tangerine Tree Press and The Tangerine Tree Review

Review of 'Dodging Traffic' and Interview With Poet Jesse Bradley

2011-03-08T22:16:00.005-05:00

Jason Cook, at Ampersand Press, seems to like backing readers up against the walls of their own comfort zones and giving them a good solid push. I suspect he’s always curious about whether the wall or the reader will give way first. Dodging Traffic, by Jesse Bradley, is another of his offerings, and here I am, definitely in a space I wouldn’t have entered on my own.

Dodging Traffic is a story of love turned ugly. It’s the bitter dregs of what might have been a sweet drink – you can taste bits of the sweetness in the sticky residue on the sides of the glass – imbibed in the sort of establishment you wouldn’t admit to frequenting. Lines like “Who made your hands stammer/ the first time they cradled a waist/ on the last day of summer?” give us glimpses into a past that has given way to sexual encounters made sordid by language and insults and pain. Many of the poems reek of disappointment and resentment – “You should know I kiss/like a fistful of mistakes” - and they don’t mince words. In “What Makes a Man a Man” he gives us a frank appraisal of his approach –

Chasing butterflies
With automatic weapons.

There are lighter pieces, even some whimsies – The Bride of Dracula’s Gynaecologist on Career Day – but Bradley’s main theme is bitter experience with the death of love. There are several poems in the collections that give (perhaps questionable) advice about love and sex to the young, often to the narrator’s son, but the poetry itself acknowledges the pointlessness of such advice. In ‘Another Poem About China’ he says;

When I finally go to China
I will pollute the Yangtze
With the ghosts of my
unborn children.

I hope a fish swallows
A daughter
So she can teach
all my sons

how to commit
to something
other than suicide.

The wisdom he passes on has the feel, at times, of religious instruction from a priest who’s lost his faith but can’t quite manage to give up hope, in the clear awareness that “the entity known as Hope/ feloniously spread[s] the infection/ known as optimism. It is his ambivalent relationship with hope, I suspect, that lies at the core of the collection. He addresses the problem directly.

Dear Hope...
Thank you for showing
that sometimes you need a lie
to float above the truth.

Love may be dead - “that’s why,” as he says in 'Why There are no more Unicorns, My Child,' “you can’t quite wipe out the aftertaste of extinction,” – but he lives, probably in spite of his better judgement, with a belief in its perpetual resurrection.

An Interview With Jesse Bradley

T.T. The collection as a whole reads like the diary of a very intense relationship on the edge. One side of a love story. Dodging Traffic veers between tremendous physical/sexual/verbal tenderness and violence on all those levels, sometimes in the same poem. It operates outside my comfort zone, which I take to be the point of the exercise. It’s combative. It plays with the old trope ‘the battle of the sexes’ and pushes it in all directions. What do you feel is gained, poetically, by the pushing? Any comments on your philosophy of love? Any other comments?

J.B. Congratulations, you are the first person who gets how I put together Dodging Traffic. It was a love story about my ex-wife and I, the dating and adventures I had before and then while with her. We had a very intense relationship and the poems show that. Now, it's a time capsule of my relationship with her.
The battle of the sexes is an old trope and with old tropes, the challenge is to address them differently. What is gained by pushing poetically is a new pair of eyes that lets you see everything, address everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I love incredibly hard and I also let go incredibly hard, like cutting the limb off before the gangrene spreads. I just had my first amicable break up ever, and it was nice not to have to cut off my arm, for once.

T.T. Many of the poems in Dodging Traffic present bits of a slagging match, perhaps like the African American “playing the dozens” or “signifying,” an artistic hurling of insults with the reader as audience. They share some of the formulaic patterns, the use of rhyme (often subtle in your case), and the shift in speech rhythms away from the natural, of that form. This sort of exchange – assuming it’s meant to be seen as part of an exchange and not just as an assault - is supposed to be a way of harnessing aggression with the constraints of form and language. How do you see your use of it? What is it doing, in the context of relationship story presented in the book?

J.B. I'm not someone who is into saying 'fuck you' directly. There are better ways to say it and, when I want to write a punch, I write it to where you are misdirected and distracted enough until it is too late and you can't dodge the hand coming for your stomach. I only write these sort of poems when provoked. I'm not into starting but I will finish.

In the context of the relationship story, they are kiss-offs to various lovers, people in my life, roadblocks on the way to the destination.

T.T. Simile is the rhetorical device of choice here, often used to add punch to an insult. You look worn, like a youth hostel mattress. Your face looks like a swine flu outbreak in a small town. Like a necrophile the day after Katrina hit New Orleans... He wore his skin like a strop... But they are almost always implicit, leaving the reader to worry about what, exactly, you intended. In a slagging match the poor sod on the receiving end of some of these lines would have to stop and figure out just how offended he/she ought to be. In other words, the poems feel immediate, but are not. They suggest something tossed off, but can’t be taken in as quickly as they’re thrown out, which is part of the point of the contests I mentioned earlier, but in the context of poetry they leave the reader a little unsure of his footing. Comment?

J.B. They aren't all insults. They are different ways of saying things without being explicit because saying you want to ejaculate on someone's face is too obvious and dirty. The context of the poem determines whether the simile is insulting or jaw dropping in its own way. You have to read all of the poem to get the flavor.

T.T. There’s a sub category of poems in Dodging traffic – a group of poems not called “Advice to the young on conducting themselves in life.” “Son, scrotal sweat makes a poor calendar...” “But honest to blog, you’re keeping the baby?” Poems as explicit as “Lesson Plan,” “One day, you will wear hickeys like a varsity jacket.” Obviously they’re all taking the mickey, but perhaps you could comment further.

J.B. The "But honest to blog" line comes from "Juno MacGuff to Bristol Palin", where the main character from Juno addressed an at-the-time pregnant Bristol Palin. The two were very similar and it was appropriate at that time for Juno to address Bristol's pregnancy.
Other than that, there is an advice section and yes, these are things I wish I knew, that my mother and stepfather would have told me.

T.T. You do a lot of performance work. How has that affected the way you write? And has it affected what you write about? The immediacy of your audience and critics must make a difference, the lack of barriers between the poem and the minds receiving it.

J.B. Performance work helps give a better attention to how the poem or story sounds aloud. Originally, when I was neck deep in slam, it affected what I wrote about, trying to write what could win now and again. Now, I write what I want. My flash fiction chapbook The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot shows an evolution in my style. I think I'm only going to get more interesting.

T.T. In Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of New York City Poetry Slam, by Cristen O’Keefe Aptowicz, poet John S. Hall comments on his first experience with slam poetry. “ ...I hated it. And it made me really uncomfortable and... it was very much like a sport, and I was interested in poetry in large part because it was like the antithesis of sports.... [I]t seemed to me like a very macho, masculine form of poetry and not at all what I was interested in.” There’s something in his observation that relates to the narrator’s attitude in Dodging Traffic. What do you think about what Hall is saying here?

J.B. Slam is a gimmick that uses competition to get people to listen to poetry. It is a feast or famine sport and if you stick with it for awhile, you get better. It's not for everyone because of that and that's ok. I recommend to everyone to try slam a little. It will make you sharper, more human, more aware on how to interact with an audience.

T.T. In her book Ms O’Keefe says of slam, “One of the more interesting end products (to me, at least) of this constant shifting is that poets in the slam always worry that something -- a style, a project, a poet -- will become so dominant that it will kill the scene, but it never does. Ranting hipsters, freestyle rappers, bohemian drifters, proto-comedians, mystical shamans and gothy punks have all had their time at the top of the slam food chain, but in the end, something different always comes along and challenges the poets to try something new.” Do you agree with her on the challenge aspect of slam, and maybe of writing poetry in general? Dodging Traffic is no longer a new book. What are you working on now? What directions have the challenges moved you in?

J.B. Aptowicz is absolutely right. Slam is a constantly evolving game. I remember watching in 2007 a two time Individual National Poetry Slam champion sacrifice at a bout with a poem he used in his run to the championship. It got one of the lowest scores of the entire night.
I'm working on a lot. From a book perspective, I'm shopping around a flash fiction/poetry hybrid called We Will Live Like Our Ghosts Will Live, which is a sequel to Dodging Traffic. I'm also writing new stories for a chapbook called The Internet Is A Dangerous Place To Live, my second chapbook coming out through Safety Third Enterprises (http://safetythirdenterprises.com). I'm also working on my first short story collection called We Will Celebrate Our Failures, a linked short story collection about people who use Craigslist to break up their engagements, in a messed up pay-it-forward set up. From an events perspective, I have a new fiction reading series starting here in Orlando in May called There Will Be Words in conjunction with Burrow Press. This last year has pushed me into new and interesting directions that I will continue exploring.

T.T. In Poem seeking Poem for NSA Encounter you wrote “I’ve been very bad and I need a poem that knows how to edit me?” Have you written one you feel manages it?

J.B. Yes. Some of the work I've written post-divorce has made me pause and look deep at myself and it has changed the way I deal with relationships.
This poem was just featured in The Scrambler.

The Astrology of Running Into Your Exes

Cigarette ashes grow
from tongues, curl around
gums and gullets.
As the beer bottle empties,
it will remind you of her hand,
his stare.
When the beer bottle smacks
the wall adjacent to a trash can,
do not study the constellation
of brown glass, do not say
‘It sounds just like you.’

Dodging Traffic by Jesse Bradley is available, with his novel The serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Rapist, from Ampersand Press.

Wordsmithonia Review of The Alchemy of Chance

2011-02-18T00:56:00.005-05:00

A lovely review of The Alchemy of Chance.

"I fell in love with them and by the end of the book as I was ecstatic for them and the future that awaited them..."

"I felt as if I was partaking in every meal, exploring every vista and piece of scenery described, and getting to know every little hamlet that our sojourners visited. I rarely ever get lost in the "setting" of a book, but this is one time that I did..."

Review of The French Exit, by Elisa Gabbert

2011-02-01T20:00:00.014-05:00

Several times during her adventures in Wonderland, and through the looking glass, Alice is forced to deal with poetry. Once the question is as simple and as complex as “Do you like poetry,” but at least twice the treacherous question of meaning arises. Confronted with ‘Jabberwocky’ she says, “It seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand... Somehow, it fills my head with ideas, only I don’t know what they are.” On hearing the verses read out by the White Rabbit in evidence against the Knave of Hearts, she announces she will give sixpence to any juror who can explain the poem and declares, “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.” The King, reasonably enough, answers, “If theres’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.” All well and good, except that on examination, he decides: “I seem to see some meaning in them after all.”

We must bear all of this in mind, as we begin our examination of Elisa Gabbert’s new poetry collection. The French Exit opens with a prelude of sorts called ‘Commisssioned,’ or, as Gabbert puts it,
“It starts here, where you begin
remembering. (How else could it begin?)”

You – by which she means you, the reader – find a notebook with pages of your own writing.
“You must know what it says,
But in the dream you can’t read it.”
So the stage is set. You’re in a dream, and in the dream, you’re in a landscape “Supersaturated with meanings. With meaningness,” and because you’re dreaming, everything is at one remove.
You kick a car, and it crumples apart
like a death-hollowed tree.
“Pain” ripples out in a wave.
Pay attention to those quotation marks. Remember your situation.

The French Exit is divided into three parts. Part one opens with a poem called ‘What Happened.’ No punctuation, so it’s unclear whether we’re being asked to assess the situation presented, or just being informed of the facts. That something happened is plain. It involved blood, concussion, “sleeves of glass.” It happened to someone who watches her body wake up, rise, stand ‘in her outline,’ look in a mirror to try and figure it out.
Nobody sees this.
She doesn’t know.
Broke. Or syncope.
Or glow.

It’s a mystery, and the mystery, its dissociation, scars, closeness to death, informs all of part one.
‘Poem With A Threshold’ gives us a few more clues.

In the grip of the NYC sublime
I fell in love out of boredom.

I left the party, through the French exit
to the smaller one inside

where the cake said
I HAVE NO CONCEPT OF TIME.

Look into my image
distortion disorder and tell me

what you really feel now
that you’re incomprehensible, Mr. –

tell me “what for.” I love you
but my arms are full.

I opened my face with the door.

Here we have the stories of two young females weaving in and out of each other, not randomly, but with the disorienting logic of a dream. I know, from a wonderful interview with Gabbert, by Elizabeth Hildred on Bookslut, that the accident alluded to in some of these poems involved a moment of unconsciousness – the syncope, mentioned earlier - which resulted in a fall through a French door and a bad cut caused by the breaking glass, so it doesn’t seem a stretch to associate the narrator, on some level, with the poet.

The facts presented in the poem – and I don’t think the reader would need advance knowledge to notice them – are that during a party in NYC the narrator, on passing through a French door, “opened her face” with it. Once inside, the world is a different place, a place with much in common with the world Alice finds when she falls into Wonderland. That Elisa is a near anagram for Alice, we probably have to put down to a parental whim, but it’s a nice connection anyway.

Both young ladies begin in boredom - Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. – both have “not a moment to think about stopping” themselves before they find themselves falling, and both find themselves in a strange and incomprehensible place. Alice’s cake says,”Eat me,” and doing so makes her grow very tall – part of her serial distortion disorder. The narrator’s cake, however, seems to be stuck in the conversation between Alice and the Hatter, about Time, what he is like, and how little Alice knows of him, and the distortions she, the narrator, suffers from are as much of meaning and reality as of her physical self.

“She’s under sentence of execution,” the rabbit tells Alice, speaking of the Duchess. “What for?” said Alice, but he never quite manages to tell her “what for,” just as the poem never quite manages to tell us. The next time she sees her, the Duchess tells Alice “O, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round.” And round and round till you’re so dizzy you fall in a faint and find yourself in an incomprehensible place. One of the most common occurrences of syncope is the coup de foudre, a violent falling in love. So the poem goes, weaving in and out of the rabbit hole, till we’re brought up short in the real world by the odd inversion of that violent final line, the opening of the narrator’s face by the door, instead of what we might have expected when someone falls face first into a hinged object.

The Alice in Wonderland imagery reappears in several poems, both directly and indirectly. In ‘Camera Obscura’ we find the narrator confined in a “tiny room,” with just a “pinprick of light,” an image very like Tenniel’s drawing of Alice squashed into a tiny room with one window. In ‘Day Trip With Spires’ we find her inside a space so capacious all of her largest emotions are “made small,: and in ‘Must See Movie’ she is “tumbling up the rabbit hole.”

The title of ‘I Even Feel Tired in my Dreams’ picks up the fatigue Alice suffers from throughout her long Wonderland dream, from the moment of sitting by her sister on the bank, through the physical fatigue of trying to reach the key to the garden and swimming in the pool of tears, and the emotional fatigue of being small and all alone. The first three lines -
I have to finish the tennis match but just want to sleep.
Small dogs leap up and latch onto my arms.
I want to lie down, let them have me.
- seem to particularly refer to, and almost invert, the odd scene in which a very small Alice finds herself playing fetch with an enormous puppy, and worrying about whether or not it was likely to eat her up.

We are diverted from the significance of these lines when the idea that the narrator can’t indulge her fatigue as her mother will never forgive her if she dies first, intrudes in the next line. A haunting possibility, every parent’s worst nightmare, and the annihilation of all the dreams that grow with and around a child. The narrator is distracted by the evidence of her heart pounding – presumably because of the tennis match – and by a series of stream of consciousness associations about dreaming and death by heart attack, triggered by the sight of her pulse.

In a further association she notices the duplication of the phrase “right through,” - I can see my pulse pounding right through my skin” and “Can you have one (a heart attack) in your sleep and not die or even start? Just sleep right through.” That observation leads to the line –
Concordance: “right through.” As in trapdoor.

I’m not as observant as the narrator is, and I confess I didn’t notice the repetition, so the phrase, a nice little puzzle, puzzled me. It didn’t stop me, which would have been counterproductive, but it made me go back and wonder, something that happens often in The French Exit. What did she mean? One of the hazards of dealing with poems that play with meaning as effectively as Gabbert’s, is that you begin to see possibilities the writer probably never dreamed of, some legitimate, as cultural connections, and maybe even as subconscious connections, but not necessarily part of the poet's intention. I had all the meanings of concordance in my head; genetic, linguistic, etymological - it's such a great word, the way the meaning is shifted slightly in its various uses - but I wasn't getting a satisfactory result. So I cheated, and asked the poet. She said – “A concordance, in linguistics, can refer to a series of words that commonly appear together (especially in a certain text). in writing the poem, I noticed that I had used the phrase "right through" twice -- "right through the skin" and "sleep right through it" -- and instead of revising it out, I put it in again -- because "right through" then struck me as an important phrase. (now I'm picturing Alice falling right through the rabbit hole, since you've put me in mind of her!) and it's a French exit again! "Right through" sounds so casual, an easy slipping ...”

We don’t all have the benefit of the poet’s elucidations when we come to a line we’re not sure of, so it’s a lucky thing that it doesn’t matter. The line works in its vagueness, in the way it suggests harmony and the concordance of genetic material and the passing on of disease, especially when the trapdoor – further echoes of the original falling into something unexpected, and of Alice’s fall – opens onto a return to her mother’s death.
My mom is going to die.

Of course, all of our mothers are going to die, so we have that one heartbeat between the stress on “die” and the remainder of the line – the word lupus means “wolf.” – to form the comforting thought that it’s a general statement. “Lupus” flattens us immediately. We’re overhearing thoughts about an impending personal disaster, not a general statement about the human condition. The fact that the “wolf” tends to stalk victims in family clusters adds resonance to the earlier “concordance” line, and to the fatigue running through the work, whether the poet had that meaning in mind or not. You never know, when you write, what the reader will bring to the poem. The final line - “Most commonly named wish that is also a fear: to die in one’s sleep.” – turns the whole thing neatly back to the cause of the fall through the door.

Catherine Clement, in her book The Philosophy of Rapture says, “Syncope. Suddenly time falters. First, the head spins, overcome with a slight vertigo. It is nothing; but the spinning world goes wild, the ears start to ring, the earth gives way and disappears, one sinks back, goes away...Where does one go?
Syncope: an absence of self. A “cerebral eclipse,” so similar to death that it is also called “apparent death”; it resembles it model so closely that there is a risk of never recovering from it...When she comes to, her first words will be, :”Where am I?” and because she has come to, “come back,” no one thinks to ask where she has been. The real question would be, rather, “Where was I?” But no, when one returns from syncope it is the real world that suddenly looks strange.”

It is this strangeness that informs The French Exit. The strangeness, and to a certain extent, the connected idea of rapture – the state of being transported by emotion, or a transporting of a person from one place to another, especially (but not necessarily in this case) to heaven. Obsolete French, abduction, carrying off, from rapt, carried away, from Old French rat, from Latin raptus. Another French exit, in other words.

Section two of the book presents a series of blogpoems, a term coined by Gabbert for a “tossed off” poem, one written “quickly, with minimal revision, in a burst of energy, and ...appropriate to the blog format/setting -- pretty short, and relatively light and digestible.” (For more on her use of the word see her interview, below.) There is much wit, and a chattiness to the tone of many of these pieces, a lightness, as she says, but it often masks, or sugar coats serious material. The title of one of the poems is ‘Blogpoems Are Ideas,’ and that’s as good a definition as “tossed off.” The two are probably related. The poems are ideas - explorations of, play with, but not necessarily the final word on.
In ‘Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin’ the speaker addresses someone (you) about the reproduction of works of art.
Every time you reproduce a piece of art
you remove some of its aura and that’s why
your mix tape didn’t impress me much,
it was so fucking aura-less
but in the film
version of the novelization of this poem
I play myself but have fantastic breasts
and there are probably some blood baths

and also when my fangy tooth catches
on my lip men everywhere crumple
w/ the ecstasy and agony of it and really

who need aura in your movie when
you’re so hot it breaks people’s knees.

Benjamin takes the distinctive, invisible, intangible emanation or radiation around a thing or person we ordinarily think of as ‘aura’ and uses it as a way of seeing he calls the ‘auratic gaze,’ “a mystical interplay of closeness and distance, contemplation and identification” which articulates “forgotten bonds between the realms of civilisation and nature, between the unanimated and the animated. Grounded in circular rather than chronological time, auratic gazes remind us of the human in nature and the natural in humanity.” Reading even that much of Benjamin’s idea of aura makes the connection between his thinking and Gabbert’s poetry plain, and provides enough background to appreciate the verbal and imaginative fireworks going off here. Specifically, Gabbert is flirting with Benjamin’s ideas about mechanical reproduction: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” That she does so with such flippancy and humour is impressive.

The humour in The French Exit is pervasive, but not always obvious. In the Benjamin blogpoem it comes from a deliberate flouting of expectation, the dry statement opening what seems to be a discussion of aesthetics, giving way, first to a mix tape, and then degenerating, very suddenly, into that lovely fricative F word. Not ‘film,’ The one before that. After which it moves into a fairly juvenile fantasy about the film based on the novelisation of the poem, that returns to the idea of ‘art’ with a brief and backwards allusion to Michelangelo via a film made of the novelisation of the great artist’s conflict with Pope Julius II over the painting of the Sistine Chapel. I’ve never seen ‘The Agony and the Ecstacy’ but based on the stills I’d venture to say there’ isn’t anyone in it “so hot it breaks people’s knees,” a line I found particularly funny. But maybe that’s just me.

Often the element of surprise is compounded, one following another so closely the reader has no time to regain his footing in between. In ‘Blogpoems are Ideas’ for instance, the portentous “And yet, as far as we’ve come, technology still lags behind our desires,” is followed by the unexpected “for instance, science hasn’t solved the problem of weather.” You could make the adjustment, given a moment to consider the number of ruined outings and spoiled vacations you’d had because of the weather, failures of the world to fall in with your desires, but you’re confronted too quickly with the end of the thought: “how much of it there is, and how it is literally everywhere.”

Here’s a problem for the Humour Theorists. Aristotle claimed humour was the result of surprise. Peter Marteinson says it’s “a reaction to a cognitive impasse, a momentary epistemological difficulty.” He goes on to say other things, probably irrelevant and possibly wrong, but that little bit seems like a fine starting point, and in agreement, more or less, with Aristotle. Consider ‘Ornithological Blogpoem,’ in which Gabbert gives us a short prose passage about, obviously, birds. “You will be woken by the chirping of the birds, which is the sound of their egos escaping from their bodies in loud and irregular streams... The birds have PhDs. They chirp out chapters from their dissertations. The birds do not agree that irony is dead...The birds are control freaks...One of the birds has assumed a leadership role. Another bird is plotting to assassinate it...If you are lucky one morning the birds may chirp selections from your favourite opera. The birds are especially fond of Wagner. What would you like to hear? They have a very long waiting list and are nepotistic. Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” That’s just part of it. The humour works on many levels, on the absurdity of the personification, on the details chosen, on the mental images of the sorts of people described and the bird caricatures that best capture them, and so on. However, if the reader is observant, he will have noticed the book was published by Birds LLC, giving the humour a new dimension. He will know, at that point, just what sort of people the poem is having fun with, and will bring his own ideas of publishers to the page. Some of his less friendly suspicions will be confirmed, and some of the pain caused by their rejection eased. Cathartic humour. The poor reader has no way of knowing the poem was written some years before the poet ever heard of Birds LLC, and indeed, before such an organisation existed. A cognitive impasse, for us, the informed few, a momentary epistemological difficulty. Which should certainly make us laugh. Where it leaves the poor bloke who doesn’t know any better I haven’t figured out.

There are puns – the ability to “defenestrate anything except for the window” - sexual innuendos, ambiguous little throwaways– “I’m this close to deforestation porn – the trees aground, all around my hole self”, for instance, with a French wax and a couple of French exits in the same poem, word plays, visual jokes. I won’t go on. It’s all in the mind of the beholder. You have to read it to get it.

To return to Alice for a moment, I’m afraid the Duchess would have made a poor poet. At one point she says, “take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves,” advice Gabbert has plainly disregarded. However clever and multifarious her meanings, however quick, or sly or surprising her humour, the sound of the poems has never been overlooked. Her control over the aural experience provided by her poetry is impressive.

The French Exit closes with a poem called “The Word Fuseki,” a piece that drives home the incredible range of emotion in the collection. It’s a poignant, heartbreaking poem, and it manages to be that without ever letting the reader know exactly what’s going on, either in the narrator’s mind or in the situation.
In that I think of my brother,
his serious face while gaming –

the serious frown, crook between
his caterpillar eyebrows –

and then Allen, the counterintuitive
move – “It’s not ‘interesting’!” –

getting up to fuck around
on the marimba,

Charlie Brown and Debussy.
I now hate the word interesting.

The structure of the poem is complex and interesting. We’re presented with a series of open ended premises, in the form of “in that” statements, in some cases with a group of observations that may or may not offer support for a conclusion the poem may or may not deliver.
In that I once tied my brother at chess;
In that it’s not called a tie. The word

Endgame. In that I almost won
at ping pong, then Robinson asked him

why he was playing left handed.
The word cannot, in that my brother,

Asked to use the word cannot in a sentence,
Wrote; “I don’t like cannots.’

The form is familiar enough. There’s an example of it nagging around the edges of my brain that I can’t put my finger on, but the ones that come to mind will do. The writer of the book of Ezekiel uses it, sometimes inverting statement and conclusion. I’ve changed the order of clauses, to make the parallel clear.

Ezekiel 39 – 28 In that I caused them to go into captivity among the nations, and have gathered them unto their own land; and I will leave none of them any more there; they shall know that I am Jehovah their God.

Thomas Watson uses it to wonderful effect in part of The Ekatompathia.
In that I thirst for such a Goddesse grace
As wantes remorse, like Tantalus I die...
In that I ryse through hope, and fall againe
By feare, like Sisyphus I labour still.

It is perhaps helpful to think of the statements in terms of inductive reasoning. The premises suggest the truth but do not ensure it.

Also involved in the structure are three games. The word “fuseki,” refers to the whole board opening or pattern of play in the Chinese game called “Go.” We also have the calculations and strategies of chess, specifically the closing moves, or the endgame, and a reference to a tied result. Around these careful manoeuvres we have the radical element of the ping pong ball, bouncing off this and that at angles difficult to calculate or control. The mind of the narrator as she moves around thoughts of her brother is at least attempting to be rational, but something, perhaps her emotional state, insists on throwing up more difficult material. The final lines, another open “in that” statement, include a bracketed observation that changes our experience and understanding of everything that has come before.
In that
I always say my brother.

(If he’s mine,
Why can’t I keep him?)

‘The Word Fuseki’ could easily stand in for The French Exit as a whole. Between the statement and the conclusion, the world throws up any number of free radicals. It is the syncope we began with – an eclipse, interval, absence, followed by a new departure.

The French Exit is available from Birds, LLC

The Alchemy of Chance, - Review by John Hayes at Robert Frost's Banjo

2011-01-30T13:17:00.007-05:00

A short quote from a really wonderful review of The Alchemy of Chance, over at Robert Frost's Banjo. John Hayes is a formidable poet and a musician and does the sensuality of Peter's book justice. Do your winter reading list a favour and check it out.

"Aurélie stood up and stepped forward, discarding the bow, which she thrust down her waistband, and the dark glasses, which she stuffed down her white Indian shirt inside her bra. Her legs slightly apart, her knees slightly bent, a towering six-footer on the edge of the stage in a flowing white gypsy skirt, plucking a four-foot bright white cello strapped around her neck like a guitar, she led the band into a spine-tingling intermediate cadence, minor to major….She moved her left foot forward to tease up the pedals and slowed her playing right down, this time bending the notes like a jazz sax-player. Long and high, they soared across the room above the audience’s heads, echoed round ceiling corners and wall joints, returning to pierce the backs of their necks and shiver their spines. Then she made a quarter-turn in the direction of the bass-player, with a silent invitation to fill some empty spaces."

I quoted this at length not only because I believe it’s a fine example of Mr Brooks’ descriptive abilities, but also because it shows his belief in the power of transformation; not only does Aurélie’s improvisation transform the audience, it transforms her & the very space they all inhabit. But—& this is a crucial point in the novel—this transformation isn’t effected by Aurélie alone, but by her working in concert with the other band members. In the same way, the disparate lives come together in the narrative as a whole with transformative power.

John Hayes Robert Frost's Banjo.

Happy Birthday Lewis Carroll - Lines from Elisa Gabbert's Poem With A Theshold

2011-01-27T17:52:00.005-05:00

In honour of Lewis Carroll's birthday - January 27th, 1832 - and in anticipation of my upcoming review of Elisa Gabbert's 'The French Exit' - a few lines playing with Alice in Wonderland, from her "Poem With A Threshold."

I left the party through the French exit
to the smaller one inside

where the cake said
I HAVE NO CONCEPT OF TIME.

Look into my image
distortion disorder and tell me

what you really feel...

I'll be thinking aloud about Elisa's poems in a few days, and will even provide the rest of the words to this one. In the meantime, check out the interview below, for some insight into the way she thinks about her work.

The French Exit - An Interview with Elisa Gabbert

2011-01-26T23:05:00.010-05:00

TT - The editing process at Birds sounds really interesting. Can you talk a little about the practicalities of it, as far as French Exit was concerned?

E.G. - Birds assigns a lead editor to each book they accept for publication. My editor was Sampson Starkweather. We've been friends and mutual fans for a long time, and he always had lots of free-floating ideas about my poetry and nothing to do with them. This was a chance for us to funnel those ideas into something, namely, making my book better. I was having a really hard time editing the manuscript on my own – I didn't know how to order it, I didn't know which poems to take out and which to put in. I desperately wanted someone who knew my work to step in and tell me what to do. Sam was that person! It was a great working relationship because I trusted his judgment completely, but he always made it clear that every decision was ultimately up to me. I took almost all of his suggestions. We had long phone calls every few weeks over the course of several months, during which time we finalized cuts and settled on the sections. I also did major revisions of a few key poems. All the editors had good suggestions for the manuscript, but they were mostly filtered through Sam so I never felt too overwhelmed. We were all pretty invested in it, since it's my first book and one of their first books too.

TT - Many of the pieces in the book are called “blogpoems,” a new word to me. Can you give us a definition?

E.G - The "blogpoem" concept grew out of NaPoWriMo, which is the poetry version of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month); my friend Maureen Thorson is generally credited with "inventing" NaPoWriMo. This was back around 2006; I knew a number of poets who were writing a poem a day that April and posting the drafts to their blogs. At the time, I didn't have a blog, but my good friend Chris Tonelli did. I semi-joked that I should send him tossed off, throwaway poems to post on his blog, and he challenged me to do it. The first one I wrote was "Blogpoem for April" – like I said, it was originally kind of a joke; I was making fun of the idea that you would write a poem so quickly. The trouble was, it turned out to be a good poem! So then I decided to take the project seriously – I wrote each poem quickly, with minimal revision, in a burst of energy, and I tried to make them all appropriate to the blog format/setting – pretty short, and relatively light and digestible. Suitable for Internet reading. It turned to be a lot of fun, and because I had to write one every day, they are often built out of trivial or inane ideas, because you can't write about something profound every single day. Turning those little thoughts and lines into decent poems was part of the challenge.

TT - Many of your poems are funny, on one or several levels. Aristotle claimed humour was a matter of surprise, and that’s often the case here, although which bit of which poem will surprise any given reader may be a surprise in itself. How do you think of humour in relation to your poetry? What is its place? What are you using it for?

E.G. - Humor is so important to me – my conversational style revolves around banter and jokes, and I gravitate toward people who are always joking, to the point that it's kind of hard for me to connect with people who aren't that way. That filter of wit, sarcasm, levity, it just colors my whole worldview. Similarly I gravitate toward poetry with a sense of humor, though I'm not really satisfied with poems that are content to be simply funny. My favorite poems (songs, people) are usually wry, funny-sad, funny but vulnerable. I like a kind of intelligence that knows the world is tawdry but carries on anyway, making the most of it. That's how I want humor to function in my poems, as comedy brushing against tragedy. And that may be where the surprise comes from – not expecting the two to bump up together.

TT - These are poems of ideas, and you play with various philosophical positions in the texts. Which philosophers have been an influence? Any ideas that have had more impact than others?

E.G. - Great question. The philosopher with the most influence has probably been Daniel Dennett (who, like Benjamin, gets his own blogpoem). I'm drawn to a kind of bullet-biting, hyperrational philosophy of mind/science (Eliezer Yudkowsky would be another example of this): no souls, no free will, no one, coherent world – that kind of thing. The trick is to accept this lack of magic or "spirituality" in the world and still find room for happiness, which is entirely possible. I don't cotton at all to the theory that if you have no sense of God or some great unknowable unknown, there's no reason to live. A lot of what I'm doing in my poetry, I think, is playing with that space where we forget we have no control over anything and that nothing ultimately matters – that's where we live our lives, in that forgetting. However smart or rational we are, it's our nature to forget it.

TT - In my review, I’ve written about “Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin.” In that poem you mention aura – and allude to Benjamin’s belief that the acceleration of life in the modern city is responsible for its disintegration. You also play with the problem of mechanical reproductions and the way they cut our connection to the uniqueness of reality. The blogpoem is a clever, compressed discussion of auratic perception. Do you believe modern urban life has fundamentally changed the way we see reality? If yes – and the answer, based on your poems, seems to be yes – in what way? What does the change mean to art, which, if nothing else, is bound up in “aural perception’s” interplay of closeness and distance and in the uniqueness of existence.

E.G. - I think yes, our perception of reality is fundamentally different, though it's been different my whole life, so it's hard for me to compare my perception to that of a frontier woman or a caveman. In regards to art, I was thinking specifically of this tendency for things not to feel "special" – which says nothing about how good or bad they are as art. When we read a book of poems, what we appreciate is the information, not the actual instance of the book. (OK, design wonks go on and on about the physical object of a book, but that's really beside the point to the poetry. It's a copy. The book is not THE BOOK, the pure idea. If all extant copies were burned, we could print more books, etc.) And this is kind of the norm now, what with everything being digitized, to receive things as information, wherein the form/format is pretty incidental. The medium is not the message. Because people want to be able to choose their own medium (like, hey, from now on I will receive all messages via my iPhone; you, as the messenger, can no longer control the medium).

This is not to say that I think everything was better in the past, or anything like that. Though I do wish Hollywood would stop with the remakes already.

TT - Walter Benjamin plays with time, Lewis Carroll plays with time in Alice in Wonderland, syncopes play with time, you play with the way they play with time, and you play with time on your own terms. What’s going on with that?

E.G. - Time is the great enemy. On the micro scale it moves too slowly, on the macro scale it moves too fast. Days are long, years are short. I don't see how anyone can be alive and aware and not obsess about time, all the time. Who said all poems are about death? All poems are also about time, since death is ultimately about time.

TT - Syncope is a fascinating and frightening thing/concept/occurrence, in all its various meanings and permutations. I talk about some of them and the way you use them as a connecting metaphor, in my review, but I wonder if you have anything you’d like to say about your use of it.

E.G. - I'm not sure I could add anything to your present understanding of it. I think you see how it's working in the book at least as well as I do! Certainly I was exploring the scariness of a brush with death as a reminder that anyone could die at any time. In a way I think it's weird that we fear our own deaths. So what if I die – I won't be around to miss me. What's really scary is the thought of everyone else dying.

TT - The French Exit – It’s a syncope, it’s a party left without notice, it’s a French window, it’s coitus interruptus, happiness, interest, brothers, lovers gone awol, life ended abruptly and without warning. How did you arrive at such a wide ranging metaphor?

E.G. - You've nailed it, it's all those things. It wasn't at first; first it was just a phrase I liked, which I learned from a guy I had a crush on, who was particularly adept at it. So I put it in a poem. Later on, unrelatedly, I had a syncopal episode and fell into a French door. The "French exit" ended up in another poem. The phrase just bloomed for me somehow; I realized slowly how it was functioning on all these different levels in my poems, and it ended up governing the structure of the book. The phrase has taken on new weight and I can't just use it in casual conversation anymore. It feels almost mystical now, like some portal to another dimension.

TT - “The Word Fuseki” is a terribly poignant, painful poem. I talk about it at some length in my review but I wonder if you would address the two lines in brackets halfway through – (I wanted to keep that. Why did I give it away?) There’s always a giving away in poetry, and it’s often a giving away of something the poet might have preferred to keep. What can you tell us about that tendency/necessity/compulsion/gift?

E.G. - I think every writer has things they need to write about – and they're the very subjects we tend to avoid, because people tell us to, because it's so hard to get it right. I tried to write that particular poem several times over the course of a couple of years. I couldn't get it right. Even a successful poem is a failure in some way – you feel you've spent that subject, that's it, you'll never write another good poem again. But again, we have to. For me, the poetry that really tears me up and stays with me has to take that huge risk of showing the reader its weakness. It has to play its hand.

The French Exit is available from BirdsLLC

On Choosing Poetry - Birds LLC

2011-01-20T18:11:00.004-05:00

A very interesting interview with the editors of Birds LLC on their unconventional but obviously effective editorial process. How do you put a poetry collection together? What about unity and/or diverity in the aesthetics of the editors? One voice or many? It's all here.

Winter Poem with Tangerines

2011-01-16T20:39:00.004-05:00

With all this snow everywhere, two feet deep on either side of the pavement and plowed up in nine foot heaps on the street, I thought we might need a tangerine poem to keep things in perspective. I'm quite sure that when Mr. MacNeice sectioned his tangerine he noticed the little white tree spreading its bare branches up the centre.

Louis MacNeice - Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

On Cooking With Your Dead Grandmother

2011-01-15T16:36:00.001-05:00

Within minutes, Rosa had two pans going. One contained roundels of already-cooked potato stolen from the next day’s roast, which were stewing slowly in olive oil. The other was sizzling sliced onions, on a much higher heat. She beat half a dozen eggs and slid the bowl to one side. She’d have tortilla in fifteen minutes.
More onions, finely chopped this time, went into a big pan and as soon as they were soft she covered them with ladlefuls of Doris’s chicken stock. As she started to portion the chickens, she paused. Something else was needed here. She pictured her grandmother Mercedes in their kitchen back home and spoke out loud:
‘Abuelita. I’m stuck in this terrible English kitchen with no chorizo, no tocino, no judias blancas, no garbanzos, no… garbanzos… garbanzos…’ She’d seen a few tins of chick-peas somewhere that Gladys occasionally used to make her own hummus.. ‘OK, that’s one. I need more ideas. Come on Abuelita. Help me!’
‘Stop thinking about what you want, girl. See what you’ve got. And then use that.’
Rosa rushed into the walk-in fridge and lunged around, looking for ingredients and inspiration at the same time. Nothing resonated with her culinary experience, until she landed on the trays of tourist fare. Of course. She grabbed some plaice fillets and two slices of the gammon bacon. Back at the chopping board, she skinned the fishes, trimmed and diced the bacon. She’d make them as sweet as merluza and chorizo. She even remembered to throw the pieces of bacon-rind into her stew.
By the time Doris returned, Rosa was flying, although she was still talking to herself intermittently. Doris found this disconcerting, until it was explained to her, whereupon she offered to stand in for Mercedes, for the sake of both their sanities. She put her pinnie on and offered to help.
Rosa piled garlic into the simmering stew-pot and thrust a couple of red peppers on to an open flame to burn off the skins. In went the saffron, bay leaves and paprika, and finally the chicken portions. Lid on, she left it to simmer away gently.
The stewed potatoes and brown onions were amalgamated in one pan and on went the eggs, to bubble and colour. As soon as the egg mixture pulled away from the sides of the pan, she rammed it under the grill to brown the top, and then turned it over on to a plate. Doris sliced it up and out went the first dish with a basket of crusty bread.
Rosa flash-fried the pieces of plaice and bacon with fresh red chilli and garlic. Placing them on some lettuce leaves, she dressed them with olive oil and lemon and a sprinkling of parsley, while Doris set about heating up the chick-peas.
“What are we doing with these?”
“Warm salad. Erm… fresh tomatoes, chopped, garlic, parsley and spring onion, French-style dressing with mustard… There’s still something missing… I know…”
She opened a jar of German Bockwurst, split the chubby sausages in two lengthways, and made a few slashes across the tops. Into one of the vacant frying pans and they were done in a few minutes. Village sausage, she called it, topping off the chick-pea salad. Out went the next two dishes. Rosa cleaned up her peppers and put them in the stew with the spinach and pine-nuts. Doris took the whole pot out and placed it centre-table with a ladle, before they’d even started on the middle course.

Glenn Haybittle - Letter To My Editor

2011-01-14T17:42:00.003-05:00

Check out Glenn Haybittle's "Letter To My Editor" post at Errands Into The Maze Yes, that's me he's talking to. No, we don't have a difference of opinion. It's always interesting when you can provoke a clear statement of intent, which this certainly is.

Review Comment - The Alchemy of Chance

2011-01-11T23:46:00.001-05:00

The Alchemy of Chance is a foodie’s dream. I loved the descriptions of the meals and wanted the food right out of Antoinette's kitchen - soft eggs in cream, simply grilled fillet of sole with lemon, and roast leg of lamb - so I cooked everything in the book, using local, seasonal ingredients, just as Peter's characters did. Fabulous. A great read.

Janet Beck, Victoria, B.C. Canada

Reading Glenn Haybittle's - That Time Is Past

2011-01-04T21:08:00.006-05:00

I'm reading Glenn Haybittle's revisons of That Time is Past. Ivan, who has abandoned his wife and children to write a biography of Shelley and live in Italy with the appropriate Romantic intensity, is taking the beautiful, if distant, Isabella on a tour through the Villa Cenci, the centre of a lurid family tragedy involving incest and murder in 16th century Rome, that inspired Shelley to write a verse drama. Instead of imaginatively entering the passion and atmosphere of the place in search of what Shelley saw or thought, he's analysing his non-relationship with Isabella.

"He thought of something Shelley had written in relation to Epipsychidion: “I think one is always in love with something or the other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is eternal.”

The quote holds a core truth of the novel. Almost everyone in the book is avoiding anything like a meaninful relationship while busy imposing some ideal of their own on someone else, and finding they fall short, and the revisions are strengthening that point.

The Romantics touted strong emotion as the 'real' source of aesthetic experience, but these neo Romantics, who, as Lady Lydia points out, seem to be "at rather a loss," make a career out of completely avoiding anything that smacks of actual emotional involvement. There is much here on the modern engagement/disengagement question but it's well coated with wit and fun and a good helping of Italian light.

Review - The Alchemy of Chance

2011-01-02T15:35:00.003-05:00

“I don’t read much Francophile literature - soft-focused Frenchness makes me mutter - but Peter Brooks writes a France that I recognize. His Paris is noisily Parisian. His Brittany is blown through with sharp, salty air and the smells of seafood. His Loire is all liquid light and the still, strange atmosphere of that river.... 'Alchemy' is full of light, life and heart. There’s also a small sprinkling of magic in there. It's one of those novels that leave me smiling at the world a little more.

Caroline Scott, Lot, France

Image - Detail of "Carlotta on the Loire" by Sir William Russell Flint

Review - Etienne's Alphabet by James King

2010-12-29T00:13:00.007-05:00

The phrase “two solitudes,” referring to the perceived lack of communication between English and French speakers in Canada, and also to the lack of interest in redressing the situation, is well known in Canadian political discourse. The term was popularised by Hugh MacLennan’s novel Two Solitudes, but probably originated in a 1904 letter written by Rilke to a friend, about the changing nature of love between men and women, love born out of their individual solitudes. “This advance ... will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another... And this more human love... will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”

Rilke’s optimistic view seldom crosses over to the political use of the term, but in Etienne’s Alphabet, by James King, both meanings come into play.

Etienne is half Anglo, half Francophone, and a complicated character. He objects with good reason, to the labels his doctor’s pin on him – OCD and schizoid – as the truth is much less tidy. He makes lists of the physical characteristics of the people he meets and would otherwise fail to recognise them, suggesting he suffers from face blindness. Letters speak to him, have colours and personalities– c and s are arrogant, d has humility, e attracts the colour green, F is the Hamlet of the alphabet, very indecisive, G is a fretful letter, h is a wallflower, I the letter of loneliness - words form pictures of their meaning, he can see smells, all of which suggests a complex synaesthesia at work. He has no interpersonal skills, makes no emotional connections to other people. Another character points out “you understand numbers but have not the slightest idea about people.” He is reticent, detached, brash, melancholic. He talks like a robot and never fits in with his confreres. He seems to be a high functioning autistic and is the embodiment of the two solitudes. Etienne’s Alphabet is his story, told through a series of dictionary entries that make his identification with the schism in the Canadian identity plain, at the same time as they reveal something of his extraordinary view of the world around him.

In an entry on Kaspar Hauser Etienne says “I am a riddle to myself. I have never been subjected to the inhumane regime inflicted upon Hauser. But like him, I do not know how I became the person I am. What is the mystery ailment in my soul that keeps me so desperately apart from others? His notes on Jean-Paul Riopelle point out that the artist wrote to Premier Duplessis in 1948”telling him that both Canada and Quebec were too isolated from the rest of the world. ‘You must open up,’ he had demanded. Of course, his plea was ignored.” The advice Riopelle gives Duplessis is the same advice Etienne’s colleagues and superiors at the bank give him, and it has the same result.

Etienne seldom speaks directly about his feelings, except when he finds himself in a rant about English Canada’s prejudices against French Canadians, We are left to infer, to piece together his life from what he chooses to tell us about what he chooses to talk about.

Aardvark: Charming looking little creatures with built-in suits of armour...

Alphabet: Letters obviously hold the entire world together. Otherwise, there is no order, no language, no significance...

Appearances: They are not really deceiving...

Weasel: Weasels are synonymous with deceit, trickery and false promises. When I began my drawings ten years ago, I promised myself no portraits of any kind because the genre is subject to those awful vices.... People are vainglorious, unduly complicated and, ultimately, beyond understanding. Why should I subject myself to such a dubious enterprise as putting them on paper?

Zigag: Life is a series of abrupt right and left turns. There is no clear path, as Dante informs us...

After his death, Etienne’s landlady, who has taken care of him all his adult life, finds boxes of brightly coloured drawings in his rooms, a remarkable body of work as refractive, brilliant, suggestive and teasing as his autobiographical notes.

The oddly chosen entries in his idiosyncratic dictionary reveal a fascinating mind grappling with an often incomprehensible world, and eventually imposing, as all artists do, some sort of order on it. His story is carefully, hopefully, tenderly presented. An opaque character grows translucent, we begin to understand a little of what makes someone very unlike ourselves tick, and by the time Zodiac – a complete circuit, the compass of eternity – comes round we face Etienne in the way Rilke dreamed we would, as two solitudes greeting each other.

Published by Cormorant Books - ISBN 9781897151877 | 5.5" x 8.5" | TPB with French Flaps | $21 Cdn.

You can read a preview or download an exerpt of Etienne's Alphabet at Cormorant Books

The Alchemy of Chance Recipes - Potato Gratin

2010-12-26T21:50:00.004-05:00

There is something wonderfully simple about potatoes. It takes almost nothing to take them from everyday to extraordinary with only basic ingredients. When Didier and Maria started their meal with a potato gratin I could almost imagine the incredible smell that permeated the kitchen. The best part is it comes together so quickly that there is time to relax with that glass of wine Marie was pouring. I make potato gratin often, sometimes in a large dish that is placed on the table for everybody to pass carefully around or when I want something a bit more formal I make individual dishes, which I turn out on the plate. As with everything in Pete's book the recipe is pretty simple and you just adjust amounts to fit the size of the dish you need. I have used ramekins as small as a 3 1/2"creme brulee dish to a 4 1/2" ramekins for individual servings; it all depends on what else is for dinner. The important thing when make small servings is to line the dish with parchment paper on the bottom and the sides. It is a bit of work but it makes the end results much better as the potatoes slide easily from the dish to the plate; I have also lined a large casserole dish for serving 10 to 12 people; I still like to use parchment on the bottom of the dish because the potatoes take on a beautiful golden colour. I have even turned the large dish out on a serving tray and arranged other roasted vegetables around it.

The important thing to remember is that the first row of potatoes will become the top of your dish, if you are turning it out, so take the time to make it look good. I generally place a couple of small sprigs of thyme on the bottom and then start to place the potatoes in concentric circles around the dish overlapping just a bit. The great thing about cooking like this is that you can adjust the dish as you like, sometimes I alternate layers with sauteed mushrooms or with other root vegetables such as turnips, sweet potatoes or parsnips; no matter what else I put in it I always use onions. I tried a recipe in a magazine recently where you alternated layers of potatoes with oven dried yellow and red tomatoes;it was delicious and gorgeous on the plate.

Potato Gratin

2 cups whipping cream
3 pounds potatoes, Yukon Gold work well but you can use any good potato. Try to get them roughly the same size.
1 small onion
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
enough soft butter to coat the dish

Thinly slice potatoes and onion using either a mandolin or a good sharp knife. If you are making individual servings line the bottom and sides of your dish with parchment paper and butter the paper; or, alternatively, butter the bottom and sides of a 9" x 13" casserole dish. Arrange three layers of potatoes around the bottom of the dish, overlapping each potato slightly then add a small layer of onion. Top the third layer with onions and some of the salt, pepper and thyme. Continue layering potatoes and onion, sprinkling the onion layer with salt, pepper and thyme until complete.

Place dish on a cookie sheet, to catch any of the liquid that may boil over. Gently add the cream, pushing down on the potatoes to almost cover them. Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for 30 minutes then reduce temperature to 350 degrees and continue to bake until potatoes are tender. If you are using individual ramekins reduce temperature after 20 minutes and continue to cook until potatoes are tender, about 25 minutes more. The cream will be almost completely absorbed. Let the gratin rest for 15 minutes before serving.

This dish can be made ahead of time and reheated in a 350 degree oven until heated through, making it a great dish for taking to friends or to get a head start for a dinner party. Enjoy
Janet Beck

Alchemy of Chance - Facebook Page

2010-12-24T16:51:00.002-05:00

You can now become a fan of The Alchemy of Chance on Facebook! So you should all head over there and hit the 'Like' button. Thanks!

That Time Is Past - Snakey Sex, Take One - Glenn Haybittle

2010-12-24T01:43:00.004-05:00

The girl entering the olive grove had a shaved head and was dressed in a ragged red ball gown from another century. She carried very attentively a woollen bag of bright colour, swollen with coins that made a heavy fidgeting noise. She stopped suddenly on noting a flicker of movement in the parched grass up ahead. There was a black snake that seemed to be having an epileptic fit. On closer inspection she realised it was two black snakes, entwined, and moving slowly, sometimes in unison, sometimes in conflict, undulating together with sudden whiplash jerkings and leaps off the ground. She saw the open fangs of the snake that seemed to be the aggressor; it made several attempts to bite into its adversary’s sleek black skin just beneath the head. Then she understood that they weren’t fighting; they were copulating. She watched spellbound, following them at a distance as, coiled and lashing together in a fluid double helix, they slithered and gyrated over the bracken and crisp dry grass. There were quiet moments when they were aligned into an almost inseparable writhing unity of wave motion, as if swimming together with their tails gently touching. Then there would be another a sudden thrashing of violent outcry when an electrical charge seemed to bolt through the length of them and toss them up into air, like a rope trick. The girl in the frock spent ten minutes watching them.

Image - snakes mating - www.riverdalefarm.com/
Copyright 1997, COBB Publishing

Glenn Haybittle's Review of The Alchemy of Chance

2010-12-22T15:07:00.003-05:00

The Alchemy of Chance is about maps, the guides we use to make headway in life. These maps aren’t always visible configurations of roads and rivers: often they consist of tides, star pulses behind the appearance of things, magnetic forces that are not available to the human eye. The heart too is a map; and perhaps the most fateful map of all.

When Aurelie Pêguissoux loses her sight in a car accident she has to map out a new set of coordinates for herself. She sets out on a journey of rediscovery. Meanwhile, in Wales, Dafydd Williams is given a mission by his father – to find his missing brother. The only clues to his whereabouts are a sequence of postcards all sent from various parts of France.

The Alchemy of Chance impresses with the creativity and lively courageous intelligence that has gone into its design. The prose is consistently as crisp and confident as the footprints of a fox in virgin snow. This novel, about map making, is also a map in itself, a complex intricately drawn map. That chance has a design to it is of course the premise of pretty much every novel ever written: we make order from shavings and rinds, from stains and litter, from what is strewn and overlooked as much as from what is photographed and cherished, Peter Brooks though is drawing up a map of the map so to speak which is a fascinating and exciting idea. Once we have this idea of the map every detail has the eye-catching pull of a landmark, a pathway, a clue. We see what he describes in a conventional context but we also see it shifted into a poetic realm where its significance, its consequence is still buried, is accumulating meaning and force before it’s eventually unearthed and integrated into the overall pattern, becomes another part of the map. We participate in the drawing up of this map with the excitement of an archaeologist taking off the top soil of an ancient burial mound. We know this is a treasure map.

The Alchemy of Chance is a life-affirming romantic adventure into a world where the secret poetry of synchronicity is a constant guide and companion.

Glenn Haybittle, Florence, Italy

The Alchemy of Chance - Author Interview

2010-12-18T00:14:00.005-05:00

An Interview with Peter S. Brooks, by Dan Holloway

DH: Can you explain what synchronicity means to you? The word makes me think of the hippy teacher in ‘Heathers’. And the introduction to the film ‘Magnolia’.

PB: I haven’t seen ‘Heathers’ but yes, I suppose ‘Magnolia’ is dealing in that currency, though in a very particular Hollywood style. The opening of the film has a lot in common with one of those bathroom booklets, which I’m not averse to reading now and then. Lots of little anecdotes founded on a single notion: ‘… at the precise moment that…’ One of my favourites is the true story about the guy whose life was a bit of a mess and he threw himself off the roof of the Empire State Building shortly after it opened. He hadn’t gone far when some kind of updraught sucked him through an open window on the RCA Radio floor while a live news programme was going out. So the newsreader stuck a mike in his face. You can imagine it: ‘Tell me, what’s it like…’

I simply take synchronicity at its root, ‘same time’, and apply it to the broader weave of my storytelling. Most would agree it’s an inherently compelling topic and capable of being treated in many different ways. My own version in The Alchemy of Chance is built on the thesis that apparently random cosmic urges do in fact have a pulse, although I consider it my job merely to try and describe them, no more. I make a point of resisting any sense of predetermination, or a label. I mean fate, or destiny or god forbid, God. As Aurélie says: ‘Things just are.’

DH: It's a fascinating concept. But as an author how did you avoid falling into contrivance? Were you conscious of this as a potential danger?

PB: In one sense, all plot-design is contrivance, but I guess you’re refering to that moment when it creeps up to the edge of artifice. I was aware of the dangers and I became pretty obsessed with avoiding implausibility. In order to do that, I had to distinguish between the implausible and the unlikely. Unless you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, where perhaps anything goes, it’s an incredibly important aspect of our craft, even down to small matters of ‘staging’, narrating a character’s progress from A to B without unwittingly breaking a limb of theirs in the process. You don’t want an expert witness coming at you post-print with: ‘That simply could not have happened.’

On another level, I wanted to make sure that each encounter, each coincidence in time and space generated an echo of collective experience, an affirmative connection. ‘Yes. That’s just what happened to me.’ Or my cousin. Whoever. On their own, these kinds of coincidence are of limited utility, a part of the stock of material that we refer to for our stories. But I am drawn to the more complex notion of massed synchronicity and this is what the book is about. In my preface, I take a pretty serious mathematical stance on this and use the example of roulette. Forgetting the House, first time, there’s a 50:50 chance of throwing a red. Second time, there’s a 50:50 chance of throwing another red. And another, ad infinitum. All that we can say about the chances of throwing ten reds in a row is that it’s 50:50 each time (which is an axiom) and highly unlikely (which is an anecdote, though equally true). I happen to believe the universe works in the same way. I even thought about calling the book ‘Ten Consecutive Reds’.

DH: Does having a large ensemble cast make writing harder (keeping tabs of narrative arcs and the like) or easier (because you have to give up on graphs and trajectories and just get on with It)? To be filmic again, I can't help thinking of Robert Altman's The Player.

PB: That’s interesting. I loved ‘The Player’, but the film that influenced me the most as I was coughing up this tale, was ‘Short Cuts’, where Altman uses originally unconnected Carver short stories as a springboard for a number of overlapping vignettes which all share a dénouement, a minor earthquake in Southern California.

As for the design, I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the process; so I guess it was easy. But I certainly couldn’t abandon ‘narrative arcs … graphs and trajectories’, as you put it. It’s essential to keep a handle on both the separate and the interlinked elements or else you never gain full control. Film-makers use storyboards of course, but this is writing as choreography, moving your main players around in relation to each other and to the broader scene. My way was to get myself a poster-sized artists’ sketchpad and a few pencils, and plot everything with boxes and bubbles, lines and arrows, dots and dashes. The result – to anyone else – was a mess, but I had to do that before I typed a word. Even then, I also had to set up a timeline spreadsheet, covering the main characters over the six months of the story, to the day, even down to the (real for that year) phases of the moon. Again, it’s down to plausibility. Perhaps I’m unnecessarily obsessed with it, but if I’m going to enter the world of Aurélie’s lunar cycles, for example, then I really should get it right. I can’t have her ovulating when she should be menstruating.

DH: How easy was it to write a blind character? Did you find yourself editing as you went, did you get into character before you started then stay there? Or did you let yourself get it all out and then edit for consistency? Did you find yourself "looking" at the world in different ways?

PN: Well I had to do some homework, that’s for sure. I interviewed a few blind people (though very informally, I must add), just to get a take on their take on their world. That was fascinating and instructive, but once I started, I was navigating by my own imagination, with the odd tip and anecdote thrown in subliminally.

One of the great things about writing a non-linear narrative with a multi-character cast is that when you’ve finished writing you can shift your chapters around with ease. I wrote all the Aurélie chapters in one sequence; so yes, I got fired up in character and let it all flow. Editing came later, when I’d completed the whole work. However, like many a writer before me, I allowed myself to get smitten by one of my characters. I think it shows; many have commented on it anyway. Aurélie would come to me, often in the car, usually late at night, and I’d look across at the empty seat and she’d be there with me as I drove through France. Many scenes came out of those moments, especially the ones where she sets off with Dafydd. It’s a form of madness, of course, but at least it’s only temporary.

Writing from the PoV of a blind person, with only non-visual predicates to hand, was a joy. It really stretched me and my outlook too. I found myself totally immersed in the senses for a while. And I’ll never go back. Whatever my next work is about – and it almost certainly won’t feature a blind person – I’ll be giving the non-visual senses much more say in the narration. I’m sure it was responsible for reinvigorating my lifelong love of food. And, looking back now, it corresponded to a point in my life when I took on new interests in horticulture and floriculture. I’d still hate to be blind though, that much I know. The other transformational thing for me was a reaffirmation of my attraction to people with handicaps. So often, their combination of vulnerability and openness seems to sum up the best of the human spirit.

DH: For someone of, er, my age, the 70s is a fascinating time, right at the edge of what I can remember. Do you see any aspects of historical fiction in the book, or is it just literary fiction set in the past?

Absolutely not. Rightly or wrongly, for me the term ‘historical fiction’ me doesn’t kick in until, say, World War 2. I regard the 70s as a while ago. I decided to set the book in that decade for two reasons: firstly, it was a time of great change for me, the arrival of adulthood I suppose. Above all, I was happy. I first went to France when I was 14 and I wanted to capture that intensely aromatic moment of being in another quite alien land. I decided to situate my wide-eyed innocence in the character of Hannah. I found I was able to plunder my memory bank with ease.

The second reason is to do with the modernisation of France. By setting this piece in the 70s, I found I’d created something of a requiem for a fast-dying culture, one whose time-distance co-ordinates would soon be ripped apart by TGVs, miles more autoroutes and cheap flights; whose metropolitan drains would finally be fixed, and – above all – whose momentary personal isolations would be removed, almost at a stroke, by the advent of the mobile phone and the internet. None of these stories could be the same today. Imagine Aurélie standing alone on that station platform. She’d have her mobie out like a shot

DH: Having grown up near the Mapa Mundi, mapmaking has always fascinated me, but did you ever feel you were treading a fine line between a great central metaphor for a "web of synchronicity" and hitting the reader over the head with the authorial preachy stick?

PB: When I started out on this, Aurélie came to me almost all in one go. She was blind of course, slightly eccentric and adventurous, a crazy astrologer with an odd byline in twinning. But the mapmaking came later. It just slipped in through the back door. And I think that’s because it’s one of my own ‘trainspotting’ quirks, which I’m a little hesitant to admit to. By including it as Aurélie’s original trade, her reason for getting up in the morning, it struck me as yet another loss from which I could have her recover.

There’s a clue in the story, when she’s playing tactile Scrabble with Dafydd, and she refers to the ancient power of graphic representation and analogues. I love them! They’re so quintessentially human. No animal could invent the clock or make a map.

Although, as I have said, the structure of the piece was carefully plotted, any idea of mapmaking as ‘a great central metaphor’ must have been subconcious. I simply didn’t plan it that way. It’s interesting that you posit this, because shortly after arriving on Authonomy, Radek – one of the finest reviewers up there – said about Alchemy:

‘This novel, about map making, is also a map in itself, a complex intricately drawn map. That chance has a design to it is of course the premise of pretty much every novel ever written.You though are drawing up a map of the map so to speak which is a fascinating and exciting idea.’

So it’s a meta-map. Which I like. But I honestly didn’t realise until it was pointed out.

Dan Holloway is author of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall; a spoken word performer, a founder member of Year Zero Writers; and curator of eight cuts gallery.
http://danholloway.wordpress.com/work-in-progress/songs-from-the-other-side-of-the-wall/
http://yearzerowriters.wordpress.com
http://eightcuts.wordpress.com

Lost - The Alchemy of Chance with Technology

2010-12-16T22:16:00.007-05:00

Lost

You put my postcode
Into your Sat Nav
So you can find me.

But how we get
From where we are now
To where we want to be
Is a mystery.

Lost was written by Libby, at Poems4people and has been quoted with permission.

The Alchemy of Chance - UK Launch

2010-12-13T19:05:00.002-05:00

The Alchemy of Chance was launched in the UK on Saturday with a party in Cardiff. My spies tell me it was a good time and ended with the author dancing in the kitchen. I'll have an official report in a few days, hopefully with photographs and details of the dance step involved. I'm hoping for a tango, and a picture of Peter with a rose between his teeth, but I deal with disappointment fairly well.

Sunshine Girl and the space time story fracture.

2010-12-09T15:43:00.008-05:00

“So, sunshine girl, what's your name?” I asked.

She was sunshine girl because it was pouring cats and dogs and she was smiling and the metaphor was apt. Her smile is like that. It just floods you with warmth and light.

“Abigail,” sunshine girl said. “And you're...” she frowned, “Andy?”

“Andalucia,” I told her. “Not Andy in a very long time. Luce usually, or Luci.”

“Andalucia,” she repeated.

“It's a place in Spain. My parents fucked there. I was conceived.”

She frowned for a moment.

“Oh,” she said, “I just am. I sprang, fully formed from the earth. In my nice shoes.”

I sort of believed her, too.

I’m reading an extraordinary manuscript, involving, among many others, a child called “sunshine girl.” In her world things don’t behave as you expect. Narrative time isn’t linear, but it isn’t a series of nice comfortable flashbacks or a “wibbly-wobbly ball of timey-wimey... stuff,” either. Nothing you could conveniently traverse in a blue police call box.

It’s more like a hall of funfair mirrors – fractured, fragmented, reflecting, refracting, folding in on itself. Splintered time. Origami time. The world is warped in ways that haven’t been explained. It’s a trial by immersion, like baptism in a very quickly moving river, when you can’t trust the person holding you, and also like the way one celestial body obscures another, then reveals it again. It’s a place full of love and death and sex and recreational pain and absolute moral judgements, full of beautiful, slightly unreal characters who have done a lot of damage to themselves and each other. There’s a luminous white haired girl who keeps head severing throwing stars in her leather corset, a rhino guy with infinite eyes, a monk with no eyes at all, a perfectly ordinary absent minded professor with half eaten biscuits on his desk. There are monsters, and not just under sunshine girl’s bed. In some of her strange moments of clarity she’s become aware of them. They’re getting to Luci. They sit on her eyelids, and cast shadows under her eyes.

Not really my cup of tea, except there’s tea everywhere. It’s the number one drink of choice, which makes it all seem so civilised, in spite of the blood and single malt running neck to neck for second place. According to sunshine girl there are also teacups that feel neglected if they aren’t used in their proper turn, which I can definitely identify with. All in all, there are story worlds you might be wise to avoid, but somehow find yourself inextricably involved in. One thing there doesn’t seem to be is a title. I’ll have to get back to you with that.

The Alchemy of Chance - Proof Copy

2010-11-29T19:44:00.005-05:00

In the really exciting news department, the proof copy of The Alchemy of Chance arrived today, with Marianne Pfeiffer's glorious enamel zodiac signs glowing on the front cover, and Peter's story just waiting for the turn of a page. Our first real, actual book. It will go into production later this week. I apologise for the terrible pictures. The only available light was a stark overhead.

Cosmic Love and The Alchemy of Chance

2010-11-24T12:17:00.002-05:00

Cosmic Love

I took the stars from my eyes, and then I made a map
And knew that somehow I could find my way back
Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
So I stayed in the darkness with you**

My daughter and my husband are very keen on a song called Cosmic Love, by Florence and the Machine. It’s on both their ipods so I hear it in the kitchen while my husband is cooking, and in the car. In the song the narrator has been blinded by a star falling from an un-named someone’s heart, and left in the dark, so he or she makes a map, all of which reminds me, on more than one level, of The Alchemy of Chance. Aurelie, who is actually blind, meets Dafydd, who is symbolically blind, at least where love is concerned. You might think I’d be comparing Aurelie to the narrator of Cosmic Love, but Dafydd is a closer match. When he meets Aurelie he’s immediately struck by her and the book is much more about his long journey, sharing her darkness, than it is about any issues she has with finding her way around. She was once a mapmaker but blindness has reduced her, bizarrely enough, to the position of navigator, and it’s Dafyyd who makes the literal maps of their journey.

... she needed the whole picture, and preferably one with a frame. She needed relief and spatial accuracy, signs and symbols that spoke to her of landscapes natural and man-made, rivers hills and towns, the odd church and burial mound, the relationship of one place to another, accurate to the kilometre… well maybe ten, at this scale…
“You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You’ll need another Michelin, a piece of board, some fuse-wires, drawing pins…”
“I’ll make you a map, OK.”

Early in the book Aurelie’s father, Didier sticks pins into a map of the London Underground, so she can visualise the route through it, and then makes her a map of sorts, of the stars - a book of blank astrological charts with each segment lined with fuse wire. “Some jewellery-maker friends fashioned a brooch for each of the star signs. He made a tactile protractor himself. A small toolbox housed more lengths of fuse wire, locating-pins and lumps of plasticine to help keep the delicate operations stable.” All of this made it possible for Aurelie to find her way amongst the stars, and to do astrological readings. But Didier too is caught in the darkness, in “a sombre dusk” that “fell on his soul” after the death of his wife and Aurelie’s loss of sight.

His eye was taken by a box of pins, the kind with multi-coloured plastic heads like little chess pieces, and he suddenly saw them, these commonplace trivia, in a different light. He bought a few boxes and, while Aurélie was out, dashed up to her old apartment for the London Undergound Map they’d left behind. He re-mounted it on corkboard, hung it in the hallway and stuck a pin in every station. On her return, he took her arm and led the middle finger of her left hand to the Western edge.
“I’ve brought your map back. Here.”
She boarded at Uxbridge on the Metropolitan Line, appearing perplexed at first. But she soon got the hang of it. She headed for Hillingdon. Bump… Ickenham. Ruislip. Bump… Bump… “Faster!” Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. By the time she hit the Circle Line, she was whizzing along. She went all the way round and then again. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack… Then she shot off up the Central Line... Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack… and alighted at Epping.

The plot of The Alchemy of Chance is structured around Aurelie’s and Dafydd’s search for Dafydd’s brother, Sean, who has been out of touch for years, and the search itself follows a cryptic set of directions Sean wrote on the backs of a few postcards. More maps, of sorts. Sean is another man wandering in darkness. When Aurelie reads his star charts she discovers he’s prone to “moments of darkness, where he is best left alone,” but those moments seem to have spread to cover too much territory.

So The Alchemy of Chance is a book about, among other things, the literally blind attempting to lead the figuratively blind out of the darkness, and one of the questions it raises is whether this is a possibility. Florence’s narrator, when he discovers that the mysterious someone who blinded him is also trapped in darkness, decides to stay there and keep her company. That’s one option.

**Cosmic Love, by Florence and the Machine
The London Tube in Darkness is by S. Mairi Graham-Shaw

The Mountie at Niagara Falls by Salvatore Difalco

2010-11-20T22:20:00.002-05:00

Anvil Press is pleased to announce the release of:

The Mountie at Niagara Falls and other brief stories
by
Salvatore Difalco

The Mountie at Niagara Falls is an astonishingly absurd and humorous collection of brief stories from Toronto author Salvatore Difalco. Ranging in length from fifty to seven hundred words, these vital and sudden fictional forays transport the reader to worlds both big and small: a land where green goats roam, voodoo dolls inflict crushing migraine headaches, a typographer from South Porcupine kills a potential love affair with a discussion of sans serif type, a benevolent judge imparts clemency on an admittedly violent man, and the road of experience turns this way and that for a truffle-snuffing boar and a talking cat.

These brief tales are alternately fantastic, humorous, menacing, contemplative, absurd, hallucinatory, violent, confessional, and always provocative.

SALVATORE DIFALCO currently resides in Toronto. He is the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil). His short stories, essays, book reviews, and poker columns have appeared in publications across Canada and the USA.

ILLUSTRATED BY FRANCESCO GALLÉ. Gallé is an established painter in Toronto and Italy. He was born in southern Italy in 1966 and like many Italians made his way over the ocean with his family in 1972 at the age of six. His work has been featured internationally from New York to Germany and Italy. He created several wine labels for Viticcio, Greppi and Fattoria La Loggia Wineries in the Chianti Region of Tuscany. He is represented in private collections throughout Canada, Italy, Germany and England.

Lives of the Saints - Nino Ricci

2010-11-19T23:10:00.003-05:00

Lives of the Saints
20th Anniversary Edition
Nino Ricci
illustrated by Tony Urquhart

Cormorant Books is thrilled to announce the release of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Governor
General’s Literary Award-winning novel Lives of the Saints. This hardcover commemorative edition features an introduction by Steven Hayward, paintings by renowned Canadian artist Tony Urquhart, and chapters not included in the original story. Nino Ricci also offers a brand new afterword examining the novel’s place in his own life and work.
Since its publication in 1990, Lives of the Saints has garnered ardent critical acclaim and become a Canadian classic. In addition to winning the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 1990, the novel spent 75 weeks on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list and won the Smithbooks/Books In Canada First Novel Award and the Bressani Prize. The novel has been published in 14 countries and interpreted into a four-hour mini-series starring Sophia Loren.
Lives of the Saints is set is the fictional Italian town of Valle De Sole, in which six-year-old Vittorio Innocente’s life is transformed when his mother is bitten on the ankle by a snake. Though she survives the venom, she suffers a strange swelling and the disdain of the scandalized villagers.The mysterious thing taking shape in Vittorio’s mother’s
belly could change everything.
§
Nino Ricci is the author of the Lives of the Saints trilogy, which includes the novels Lives of the Saints, In a Glass House, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Where She
has Gone. He is also the author of Testament (2002), winner of the Trillium Prize, and The Origin of Species (2008), winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Nino Ricci lives in Toronto with his wife Erika de Vasconcelos and their children.”

“An extraordinary story.” - The New York Times Book Review

“I cannot praise [Nino Ricci] too highly.” - Timothy Findley

“A gem of a novel.” - The Globe and Mail

Ravenna Gets by Tony Burgess

2010-11-16T20:52:00.003-05:00

Anvil Press is pleased to announce the release of:
Ravenna Gets
by
Tony Burgess

From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna
Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the
author’s exploration of “apocalypse fiction.”
In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna
tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent,
standing in their living rooms, cooking in their kitchens, and
playing in their yards, are simply checked off by hunting rifles or
crossed out by farmers' tools.
There is one thing missing, however, as the bodies fall from
what might have been better stories, better novels, and it’s this:
everything.

Tony Burgess is the author of The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything, Caesarea, and Fiction For Lovers. His writing has been featured in numerous anthologies and magazines across the country. Most recently, Tony was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Pontypool. He lives in Stayner, Ontario.

Anvil Press

The Alchemy of Chance - Didier's Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

2010-11-16T01:42:00.005-05:00

A guest post from our intrepid chef. In lieu of an eating tour of France, Janet is cooking her way through The Alchemy of Chance. We'll feature her recipes here on the blog and they'll be included in the enhanced digital version of the book.

"This meal, Sunday lunch, was a celebration of nothing more or less than the end of winter. All morning, Didier had been preparing the last of the season’s fare. His Jerusalem artichoke soup was kicked into life by the gratings of an earthy black truffle sent up from Périgord."

Besides a great read “The Alchemy of Chance” is a foodie’s dream of eating his or her way through France. I love the descriptions of the meals; everything is as it should be - wonderful food made simply with local, seasonal food. When I decided to attempt the recipes in the book I was committed to following Peter’s notion of using whatever ingredients were freshest and at hand so sometimes I have had to change a recipe because the ingredients he describes are not in season. Such was the case with the Jerusalem artichoke soup. He describes a wonderful soup resplendent with earthy black truffles; unfortunately truffles are not in season for another month here so I opted to use truffle butter instead. For a garnish I sautéed some wonderful small yellow foot chanterelles that are in season. The flavours were incredible. I think the idea is to change one’s recipes to suit the season so making changes to a recipe to suit what is available locally makes great sense. Of course if fresh truffles are available and you want to splurge the soup will be all the better for it, but this soup still has a wonderful truffle flavour and it won't hurt your pocket book.

Jerusalem artichoke Soup with truffles

4 Tablespoons butter (2 for the garlic and onions and 2 for the mushrooms)

1 clove of garlic chopped

1 small onion chopped

Approximately 1 pound of Jerusalem artichokes washed and cut into 1 inch pieces

2 1/2 cups of good chicken stock (homemade is best)

1/2 cup cream or use more chicken stock

Salt and pepper to taste

½ teaspoon truffle butter

½ cup of fresh wild mushrooms (whatever is in season) or ½ cup dried wild mushrooms such as chanterelles or small morels reconstituted in hot water

¼ cup sour cream

2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley or chives

Melt the butter in a pan and sauté the garlic and onion until translucent. Add them to a medium pot with the Jerusalem artichokes and chicken stock and cook until the Jerusalem artichokes are soft (about 10 minutes).

While the soup is cooking add the 2 remaining tablespoons of butter to the pan and sauté the mushrooms.

When Jerusalem artichokes are tender, pour mixture into blender and process until smooth. Be careful when processing the hot liquid. When mixture is smooth strain it back into the pot to remove any lumps. Reheat soup adding cream if you are using it or additional stock. Add salt and pepper to taste and the truffle butter. Stir to combine.

To serve ladle soup into bowls. Add a tablespoon of sour cream to each bowl, and then place the mushrooms around the cream. Sprinkle bowl with finely chopped parsley or chives.

Bon Appétit
Janet

Vs. by Kerry Ryan

2010-11-15T20:40:00.002-05:00

Anvil Press is pleased to announce the release of:
Vs.
by
Kerry Ryan
Vs. is a collection of poems chronicling a foray into the world of amateur boxing by a shy, bookish woman you’d never expect could hit someone in the face. Throughout these poems the author
reflects on what it means to be a woman and a boxer, as well as a poet and a boxer. Part instruction manual, part rationalization Vs. is ultimately about the fights, both mental and physical, we all must confront.
Kerry Ryan is a Winnipeg-based poet whose work has been published in literary journals across the country. Her first collection, The Sleeping Life, was published by The Muses’ Company in 2008 and nominated for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry in 2009. In March 2009, she competed in, and won, a white collar boxing match.
Poetry • 5 x 7 IN • $16 can / us • 96 pp • 13-ISBN 978-1-897535-34-9
Publication date (on sale date): November 4, 2010
Anvil Press gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council, and the Canada Book Fund for their support of our publishing program. Anvil Press is represented by the Literary Press Group and distributed by the University of Toronto Press.
CONTACT: Karen Green, Marketing Director
T: 604 876-8710 _ F: 604 879-2667 _ E: info@anvilpress.com _ www.anvilpress.com
ANVIL PRESS: 278 EAST 1st AVENUE, VANCOUVER BC V5T 1A6

The Spring Ghazals - Review

2010-11-15T02:13:00.003-05:00

I’ve been reading The Spring Ghazals as they have appeared on John Hayes’ blog, Robert Frost’s Banjo, but the experience of reading them in one place, at one sitting, has been very different.

A traditional ghazal, before we get into the particulars of John’s version, is a strict form composed of five or more couplets. The second line of each couplet ends with a repetition of one or a more words, immediately preceded by a rhyme. There can be no enjambment across the couplets of a ghazal and although every couplet may be a short poem in itself, there should be some continuity of thought or theme across them, often related to the overall theme of the ghazal tradition, which is lost or unrequited love.

The Spring Ghazals are not traditional examples of the form. Although composed of a series of couplets they don’t repeat at the end of every couplet, nor do they rhyme, the lines frequently run across couplets, and the couplets themselves, instead of maintaining a dignified independence, are linked by a forward rush of association and feeling. What they do share with the traditional ghazal, besides their basic format, is continuity of thought and theme, and that continuity is what gives the work its very distinctive tone.

Both the individual poems, and the section of the book featuring them, are riff driven. The poems are threaded with a series of motifs or phrases repeated throughout the work, as in a musical ostinato, always with the same weight and stress. The opening image of the willow -‘the willow’s limbs fidget’ - for instance, recurs in the same poem as ‘the breeze agitating the willow,’ then moves through the ghazal section of the book in variations - ‘blackbirds busy in the willow’s supple gesticulating branches.’ blackbirds trilling from willow limb to willow limb, sparrows’ staccato outcry in willows’ arms, the weeping willow’s yellow empty arms, a breeze shifting the willow‘s delicate boughs, the willow limbs’ gray resignation, the mourning dove’s coo in the beb willows.

When the book shifts from the ghazals into the kitchen poems the willow follows. In Macaroni and Cheese we find -
Yellow marimba mallets bouncing down a chromatic bass line the willow
tree you showed me where to plant is grown into goldfinches chirping
all May -
6 tablespoons of butter melting in a copper pot with
flour black pepper paprika
the willow’s leaves the china jade & honey agate rosary beads the
tree of life—time is moving chromatic & crisp & hollow
along the wooden keys...”

It reappears in some of the Grace poems, and in the Helix and Cloudland sections of the book, each time adding shape and unity to the work, in much the same way ostinati and riffs add unity to music that has departed from the structure provided by traditional forms.

January Morning is a good example of Hayes’ technique at work.

January Morning
the cow pond exhaling smoke at 6 degrees the blue gray fog an aquarium
miasma filled with sagebrush & emptiness
a face staring backwards & forwards in the blue gray frozen fog thru the
willow thru the cloud of juncos & sparrows & the sagebrush breaking thru
the snow on the round hill eastward
the rocks white the willow’s long hair black the poplars skeletal
a face staring backwards & forwards in a cloudy mirror & the mule deer
outside the window leaping the barbed wire without any effort the dazzling
flight of a magpie subdued in the freezing mist & white air
the chill is a teardrop mandolin tremoloed in its icy throat on a high octave E
& the crow’s bitter snow is a chill in the heart muscle a contraction
tho the air is blue & gray & opaque & the ridge to the east has sunk below
this sea of fog with its frosty water droplets distributing chill to the lungs
the cowpond exhaling smoke at 6 degrees the owl on the wing over the
skeletal grape vines the owl appearing to me each night its face a white fog
of feathers its wings knifing silently thru the white air soaring south
& the road is white with ice a frozen current swerving south without moving
a face staring in every cardinal direction seeing the white air the willow’s
long black hair streaked white with hoarfrost
a rheumatic shoulder the lungs an aquarium miasma filled with sagebrush &
emptiness the heart contracting its owls wings in the white white air
a face staring into a blue gray frozen ocean stitched with barbed wire
without a horizon
is it a new day

The poem circles like an accompanied canon in 5, a melody followed by imitations after a more or less given duration, as if a new voice enters each time the face reappears, to echo and augment the emotional bleakness, and the contrasting teem of life in the surrounding physical winter. It begins simply enough, with a pond exhaling smoke and fog, until a face emerges from the miasma, staring backwards and forwards, through time, it seems, as much as through space. Significantly the face looks ‘thru’ the world around it, through the fog, the birds, the sagebrush “breaking thru the snow on the round hill eastward,” the rocks, the willow, the poplar, iterating the landscape, and building momentum through the repetition.

In its second appearance, we learn the face sees the world in a cloudy mirror, and as if to heighten the contrast between its passive unreal view and the actual world, things suddenly move, in spite of impediment, with ease and grace. The mule deer leaps the barbed wire, the magpie takes flight into the freezing mist, and from somewhere a mandolin brings the latent music of the piece into focus, cutting, with its bright clarity, through the cloudiness, the miasma, the fog, and the white air with a sustained high octave E. Words, phrases, and images move in and out, and through the lines, changing slightly in look and intent. The face stares, by its third appearance, not thru the world, backwards and forwards in memory, but at it, and ‘sees’ for the first time “the white air the willow’s long black hair streaked white with hoarfrost” and everything else, including the emptiness of things and the contraction of its own heart.

In its final appearance, the face stares not into an obscuring fog but into the wide open emptiness of an ocean without horizon, “stitched with barbed wire.” This last image is a telling one. The mule deer leapt the wire earlier in the poem, without effort, and here it reappears like a form of embroidery on the water, like the wire spread over no man’s land, making an impassable barrier. The word “stitched” however, indicates that the face sees something ‘made,’ something worked, or wrought, and leaves us to draw our own conclusions about the nature of the emptiness and the impediments it sees.

There are echoes of the Genesis story woven into the last two lines of the poem, subtly reinforcig the idea of something made from emptiness - “without form and void,” as it were. “Without a horizon,” evokes the view of the world before the division of the waters and the question posed in the final line – is it a new day – recalls the refrain after each act of creation -“And the evening and the morning were the first (second third and so on) day.” The poem does not, I believe, intend to be ‘religious.’ It only alludes to the Genesis text to make an immediately recognisable point about how our ways of looking and seeing create the world we occupy, and to suggest an answer to the questions posed in another poem in the collection – “Is poetry living in memory or is it fetching memory into a present moment? Is it making a moment where past & present & future coalesce?”

January Morning is as romantic, in its own way as that most romantic poem, The Lady of Shalott. Baudelaire claimed “ Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling,” and the two poems, both dealing with a mind looking at the world as if “in a cloudy mirror,” have at least that in common. They also share a focus on the natural world as a foil for the outlook of the onlooker, tree imagery, repeated willow images, and a noticeable emphasis on looking and seeing, and on snow, cold, whiteness and cloudiness.

Once the Lady has taken the radical step of looking at the real world instead of its shadowy reflection she is undone. Tennyson describes her looking “like some bold seer in a trance, seeing all his own mischance,” which is the impression we have of the face in January Morning as it looks backwards and forwards. Both poems are, of course, about impossible love. The Lady of Shalott is destroyed by a glimpse of Lancelot and a world she cannot be part of, and we know the narrator of Hayes’ poem is looking at the same thing simply because he speaks to us out of the pages of a collection called Spring Ghazals, which is by definition about lost or impossible love.

The last thing the poems share is the created work. The Lady of Shalott spent her life weaving a tapestry of the world as she saw it, before she ventured to look out on the real world, whereas the face looking, first thru and then at a January morning, ends by seeing the embroidery of barbed wire he has stitched on the world. I am by no means suggesting that January Morning is a modern retelling of Tennyson’s poem, only that it is uses a romantic idiom to address the way we construct and address the world and it shares that aim, often to brilliant effect, with the collection as a whole.

The Spring Ghazals is available at Lulu.

An Interview with John Hayes, Author of The Spring Ghazals

2010-11-12T14:29:00.004-05:00

T.T. - You’re playing with the ghazal form here, adapting it, rather than adhering to its fairly strict traditional rules. What attracted you to it? Formal considerations? Thematic resonances?

J.H. - I suppose the only claim the poems in the “Spring Ghazals” section have to being ghazals at all—other than the fact they’re written in couplets—would be along the lines of thematic resonances. According to the Poets.org definition of the form, ghazals (in addition to their strict formal construction) treat “melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions,” & in that sense, the poems certainly fit the definition.

Adrienne Rich wrote two ghazal sequences in the 1960s & 1970s: “Homage to Ghalib” & “The Blue Ghazals.” These poems, & especially “The Blue Ghazals” sequence, were an inspiration. In my reading, Rich is able to move fluidly thru time & space in her ghazals, & this appealed to me a great deal, as it has so much to do with the book’s central themes.

In formal terms, there seems a lot of potential for “space” in a poem composed of couplets. In a way, a couplet may seem more of a distinct unit than a longer stanza—the difference between a pithy quote & a paragraph. So in that sense, there seems to be more potential disjuncture & movement, both of which were important formal considerations.

T.T. - The landscape is everywhere in these poems, as is the wildlife. It pushes its way into the imagery of the pieces and also into the voice. Would you comment on the omnipresence of the natural world in your work? Is it as important in your non-writing life?

J.H. - W.D. Snodgrass has a line in his poem “Heart’s Needle” that states, “We need the landscape to repeat us.” This has always been true in my poetry. When I lived in Charlottesville, VA, I wrote a good deal of formal poetry in the midst of the formal gardens & brick walkways & trim dogwoods—& the landscape invoked in those poems was very much that of my surroundings. In San Francisco, my poems became distinctly urban—filled with cityscapes & on the whole quite gritty. Now I live in a rural location with almost shockingly picturesque scenery. The natural world is all around us in a sense that was not true in Charlottesville or San Francisco. In addition, my wife Eberle is a talented gardener, & so there’s a profusion of flowers on our property in the spring thru early autumn.

I love flowers & I love songbirds; we enjoy a diversity of birds in our location & I’m always fascinated to observe them. Temperamentally, however, I think I’m much more a town or city dweller than a country person. I’m always fascinated by juxtapositions, & I like to place the natural world alongside man-made objects—I think this is most evident in the “Helix Poems” section of the book.

T.T. - In my review I claim The Spring Ghazals is riff driven. The language and feel of music moves the verse in obvious and not so obvious ways. How would you describe the overlap between music and poetry in your work? What effect does one form have on the other?

J.H. - The “riff driven” comment is perceptive. There are of course the obvious references to musical instruments, to certain musical chords & tones. But I look at poetry as a highly improvisational art, & in that sense I often feel as tho I start with a theme & explore its permutations thru riffing. I’m also incredibly drawn to repetition both in my own work & in the work of other poets, especially when the repetition morphs into different shapes throughout the poem.

I do believe I have a good “ear” for verse—a good sense of verbal rhythm, which is connected to music. & I like verse that “sings” in some way—“verbal music” as it were. When I first read Robert Creeley as an undergraduate, I followed the path from his highly lyrical poems (in many senses of the word “lyrical,” including of course the idea of “song lyrics”) to Thomas Campion. Perhaps this was a logical conclusion for a child of the 1960s & 70s who listened to a lot of popular music at a time when all songwriters seemed to be Romantic poets. I also remember being quite taken by Pound’s writings on poetry & music when I was in graduate school, tho I now believe that Pound’s spin on how poetry is inextricably linked with music is ultimately just more of his reactionary politics couched in some otherwise interesting ideas.

Meanwhile, there has been talk of literally setting at least some of the poems in the book to music, & I’m open to that idea. Eberle is a talented composer & musical improviser & I’m pretty adept at the guitar. Eberle has a harmonium that I think might provide a wonderful background for some of the material, & of course a bass or bass guitar can always be interesting behind a voice.

T.T. - Some of your work, or perhaps most of your work to a greater or lesser extent, presents itself as an onslaught of sensory information, often an almost involuntary seeming synaesthetic tumble of information. “The past didn’t go anywhere’ is a good example. Sound triggers colour, triggers smell, triggers memory. You don’t necessarily mention all of this specifically, it’s as if the piling on of colour and sound make a brain connection that automatically evokes the smell, of grapefruit, of oranges, of iris or lilac, or dusty road, or horse manure. And often taste gets involved, as in the Kitchen poems in this collection, to mouthwatering effect. Would you comment on this tendency? Do you experience the world in this heightened way? You couldn’t possibly. You’d go a little mad. So what’s behind the device, if I can use do calculated a word?

J.H. - Yes, my poetry, for better or worse, does have its “onslaught” aspect! I believe some of this comes from formal considerations—I don’t like the way most punctuation looks in my poetry; I’ve long been obsessed with Charles Simic’s lines from his poem “errata”: “Remove all periods/They are scars made by words.” So there’s a breathless quality & a sense of fluidity—I hope! One has to sacrifice a bit to write with minimal punctuation, but at this point it’s the way my mind works when I’m in a poetic mode.

So, yes, if you have these very fluid & rarely ever end-stopped lines & you rely a great deal on sensory data (as opposed to abstract concept or pure language) to construct a poem, that sensory data may seem overwhelming. I also think this point goes back to the idea of poetic writing as improvisation; I try to start at a point & develop the idea in different directions.

As far as experiencing the world in this heightened way—no, in my day-to-day life I don’t. When I wrote poetry more frequently than I do now, there was perhaps one segment of my mind that did on an almost constant basis, but it was never as if my whole consciousness was processing sensory data this way. Another thing I believe is that when I do write poetry, in the actual time of composition, I am in a heightened or “distracted” state & there is some sort of tug between the internal & external “worlds.” As I look over the poem “the past didn’t go anywhere” that’s the tension I see—the tension between memory & the sounds & colors I’d absorbed thru observation (both active & passive) in the time around when I wrote the poem.

Your observation about going a “little mad” may explain why I don’t write poetry on any sort of regular schedule!

T.T. - “In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.” Would you speak to the issue of poetry as a way, for both reader and writer, to deal with emotion? Poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, or as a spur, as the Wharton quote suggests, to writing. A kind of muse.

J.H. - I write from inspiration, it’s true. It’s not a fact I’m “proud of”—I can see that it might be much more effective to write in a workman-like, craftsman-like fashion. But the fact is, I’ve been writing in this way for a number of years & I’m now in my 50s; I don’t foresee this changing.

& I do believe in “the muse,” tho I also see that this belief has often been damaging to my life & relationships. When I say “believe,” I don’t say this in any apostolic way—I’m not like Robert Graves trying to convince everyone that “muse poetry” is the only “true poetry.” I think I mean it more in the sense of “accept the fact.”

At any rate, The Spring Ghazals as a series of poems written over time deal with sorrow, & they were written in a time of emotional turmoil, with sorrow being a major component. But I worry about sorrow as a muse because I do think Plato was onto something with his notion that poetry waters the passions. At a certain point, does sorrow—or whatever powerful emotion you’re dealing with in poetry—become an end in itself, necessary to keep composing? At what point is the poetry a release from this emotion? & do we sometimes artistically try to create an endpoint, an artificial moment in which the creation says, now there’s resolution? I mean, the prose poem “Grace #4” that ends the collection—& which was the final poem written—does that spell an end to sorrow? No. The sorrow continues. That’s the truth of Wharton’s quote. Such a sorrow is a well that can’t be drunk dry.

T.T. - If I remember correctly, you did a degree in creative writing at UVA. I can’t find my source for that, but I’ll proceed on the assumption that it’s true. What did a formal education in writing do for you as a poet, and for your work? Any downsides?

J.H. - Yes, I attended the University of Virginia in 1984 thru 1986, & received a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry writing. I studied with Charles Wright & Greg Orr, & while I don’t feel a great affinity for their work, I respect both men as poets, & found them helpful & congenial. I certainly feel as tho I learned from them, tho whatever lessons I absorbed have been absorbed thoroughly enough at this point that I’d be hard pressed to articulate them. Perhaps what was most important to me was the MFA setting outside the actual classes & workshops—I actually have mixed feelings about the whole “workshop” process, truth be told. But I met some remarkably talented peers during my time in Charlottesville—perhaps a half dozen or more—whose work & whose relationship to poetry was inspiring & formative. I still maintain a few of those friendships, & wish I maintained them all—in fact, I’m married to one of those people! I also believe that my work inspired them some too.

So the overall artistic climate was nourishing, but the lion’s share of that took place in diners & restaurants & bars & peoples’ apartments. As far as the MFA itself, I see it (& came to see it at the time as well) as ultimately conservative & fostering a certain sameness of voice & perspective. The MFA is of course, the de facto college creative writing teaching credential, & with so few real professorships available, there’s a drive to write what will be published in the right journals & what will win the right prizes. I found myself incapable of doing that, & as a result, wasn’t cut-out for the academic career I’d expected when I decided to purse an MFA. I don’t have any real regrets on that front, tho I believe my poetry, however idiosyncratic, is actually quite good & deserves a readership; & I realize more & more that I sacrificed some opportunities by following the path I did.

T.T. - Influences? Favourite poets?

J.H. - Many & varied: I love Apollinaire, & I continue to work on translating Alcools, which I hope to publish at some point. Ted Berrigan & Frank O’Hara are both big influences—Berrigan for his emotional directness & his amazing sense of movement in lines & O’Hara for his humor & vividness. I love Mina Loy’s poetry—I believe Love Song to Johannes is one of the great 20th century poems. Kenneth Patchen also has been a inspiration to me—I love the fact that Patchen was his own man, & I love the way he wrote. He, of course, also was interested in poetry & music—after all, he performed with Charles Mingus! Among the Modernists (besides Loy, who is somewhat of a special case), I like Stevens, especially when he’s having fun & not so much when he’s being sententious; & I actually do like Frost’s poetry! As far as more recent poets go, I’d probably mention Robert Creeley as well. & I certainly have been influenced by songwriter/poets like Patti Smith, Tom Waits & of course Bob Dylan. But I also believe music (apart from song lyrics) & film have been formative & influential on the way I write.

The Spring Ghazals is available at Lulu.

The Alchemy of Chance - Aurelie and Oliver Sacks

2010-11-10T19:40:00.004-05:00

“There’s one other possibility: visual conversion disorder. Used to be called hysterical blindness. This is where the brain, confronted by an overwhelming trauma, unconsciously disables optical functioning. If a victim witnesses events that she cannot process psychologically, the ensuing attacks of acute anxiety can trigger the brain into converting intolerable stress into a real physical state, effectively eliminating the stressor: sight.”
...“It’s a bit like amnesia then?”
“Think of it this way. Her eyes are in a coma.”

I ordered Oliver Sacks’ new book, “The Mind’s Eye” today, and was struck, while I was reading about it, by the neurological complications and challenges Aurelie faced in coming to terms with her blindness. In his book, Dr Sacks raises many questions about the nature of both seeing and not seeing. He discusses things directly relevant to Aurelie’s condition, and her coping methods - visual imagery and memory, the relationship between direct visual experience and remembered visual experience, the incredible enhancement of touch and the mental landscapes of blindness. I thought of Aurelie, lying in the grass with her eyes closed, listening to the world –
“Big birds squawked and flapped around in the trees; small mammals and birds stirred the undergrowth and fishes plopped the surface of the water, all against an orchestral backdrop of clicking insects. She wondered what it would be like to be on a mountain top. Would she hear the snow melt, the ice crack, the glaciers slide, the wind caress her face? Is wind noisy or does it make other things noisy? Is there a place on earth that’s truly silent? Not unless you’re dead. All that breathing and pumping and cellular movement, even when you think you’re still. “

In an interview with Steve Silberman, Sacks gives the example of a man who had lost his sight as a young adult, who said that when he read Braille, he didn’t feel it in his fingers, he saw it, reminding me of the game of scrabble Aurelie plays with Dafydd, on a tactile board. – Her fingers skipped lightly over the board, processing tactile information while her mind reached out to another tongue.
“It’s a bit like map-reading,” she said. “Graphic representation. It’s more than a quarter of a million years old. We’re hard-wired for it, for analogue information. With one of my hands on the hands of a clock, I can tell the time quicker than you can read one of those silly new digital things. And beat you at Scrabble while I’m doing it.”

I’ve been conducting an experiment since I first read The Alchemy of Chance, closing my eyes and trying to feel the Braille on the outside of hotel room doors, or on ATM machines, or trying to figure out what denomination the bill in my hand was. American and Canadian paper currency is all the same size but a customs officer pointed out that the numerals on the bills are raised, at least if the bill hasn’t been worn smooth. Try it. I wasn’t able to figure out the simplest arrangement of dots by touch, or tell a five from a twenty. The brain, it turns out, rewires itself to cope.

Sacks also talks about the way blind people deal with their disabilities, mentally, not practically, and mentions a religion professor who describes his blindness as “an authentic, autonomous world, one of the concentrated human conditions,” a close approximation of what Aurelie describes when asked if she thinks differently -
“Yes, I do have an expanded abstract realm and, if I’m not careful, I end up living in it much of the time... It’s cool and clear, a bit like I imagine outer space to be. But I’m not on my own. I guess some heavy-duty philosophers live out there most of the time.”
“Isn’t it depressing?”
“Not at all. It just is.”

Of course, a reader has no real need to know the scientific implications behind Aurelie’s condition, but the confluence of fiction and neurology does add another layer of interest and I look forward to learning more about it.

An interview with Oliver Sacks - http://www.berfrois.com/2010/09/oliver-sacks-if-i-smoke-a-little-pot-my-hallucinations-sometimes-become-words/

"The only thing I seem to learn from women is how little I have grown up..."

2010-11-08T00:06:00.003-05:00

That Time Is Past - Work in Progress

"Perhaps Magnus has the right idea," shouted Felix through cupped hands.
"Get thee to a nunnery?"

Errands Into The Maze

Étienne’s Alphabet by James King

2010-11-06T19:33:00.003-04:00

Étienne’s Alphabetby James King
“King’s elegant prose reflects perfectly the restraint of the age, and his obvious passion for the details.”
The Globe and Mail

Life and art constantly imitate each other. Étienne’s Alphabet offers a true melding of the two. It is the fictional memoir of the late Étienne Morneau, a reclusive man so unremarkable that his death went unnoticed. In his room are discovered journals and boxes of drawings which show that Morneau was not the man many thought he was: instead of being cold and distant, he is eager and perceptive; far from being uninteresting, he is an artistic genius.

Morneau’s journal entries take readers on his transformative journey from orphanage child to bank-teller to artist. Arranged like a dictionary, yet written in a kaleidoscope of thought, Morneau’s memoir reveals the depth of his humanity and the uniqueness of his perception.

Étienne’s Alphabet is a celebration of life and of living, with an unforgettable protagonist who sees every moment as a miracle worth committing to canvas.

Few are as qualified to write on the subject of art and the study of life as James King, who has already received much recognition in both areas. He is the author of eight works of biography, the subjects of which include William Blake, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland and Farley Mowat. His biography of Herbert Read, The Last Modern,was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Interior Landscapes: A Life of Paul Nash was given The Yorkshire Post Arts Award for “the finest book
devoted to art history. King has delivered a book that is at once, thought-provoking, uninhibited, entertaining, and uplifting.”
James King has published two previous novels with Cormorant Books: Transformations and Pure Inventions.

Cormorant Books
Étienne’s Alphabet • James King
ISBN 9781897151877 • 5.5” x 8.5”
TPB w/ French Flaps • 320 pp • $21.00

George Elliott Clarke Nominated for Acorn-Plantos Award

2010-11-03T16:03:00.003-04:00

Goose Lane Editions is honoured to announce that George Elliott Clarke’s acclaimed verse novel I & I has been nominated for the 2010 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.

The Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry is awarded annually to a Canadian poet, based on a book published in the previous calendar year. The work is expected to follow in the tradition of Acorn, Livesay, Purdy, Plantos and others by being accessible to all people in its use of language and image. Past winners include Christine Smart, Ronnie R. Brown, Laisha Resnau, and Erin Noteboom, and Goose Lane authors Sharon McCartney and Brian Bartlett.

In the "Boogie Nights" era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back - meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, lust, violence, and the excruciating repercussions of racism, sexism, and disgust. Rastafarian for "you and me," "I & I” expresses the oneness of God and man, the oneness of two people, or the distinction between body and spirit. In George Elliott Clarke's hands, this existential aesthetic crystallizes in a love story of Gothic grit. The narrative gives this verse novel shape; the poetry makes it sing, straddling folk ballad, soul, and pop music, all the while moaning the blues. True to form, Clarke’s poetry throbs with musicality, echoing the rhythms of blues, jazz, and contemporary rock. The imagery is visceral at times, but this baseline is balanced by riffs of loveliness, eloquence, and glimmering light.

The winner of the 2010 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry will be announced on November 15, 2010. For further information on the Acorn-Plantos Award, please contact Jeff Seffinga at jeffseff@allstream.net.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor , Nova Scotia , a seventh-generation Canadian of African-American and Mi’kmaq Amerindian heritage. He holds three degrees in English: a B.A. Honours from the University of Waterloo , an M.A. from Dalhousie University , and a Ph.D. from Queen’s University. In addition to being a poet, playwright, and literary critic, Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto . As a writer, George Elliott Clarke has published in a variety of genres: verse collections, verse-novels, verse-dramas, verse-operas, screenplays, and fiction. He has received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award among numerous other national and international awards and accolades. His poetry has been translated into Chinese, Turkish, and Romanian.

'New England Travels' Reviews 'The Spring Ghazals'

2010-11-02T23:32:00.003-04:00

Another great review of John Hayes new poetry collection, this one on New England Travels, written by Jaqueline T. Lynch.

The Poetry in Synchronicities

2010-11-01T21:55:00.003-04:00

"These bizarre coincidences, these uncanny sequences of correlated images occur to everyone but what do they mean? What sustenance can we take from them? The poetry in synchronicities is a mystical and probably unknowable secret. It’s like the sign language of ghosts."
Glenn Haybittle, from The Sign Language of Ghosts

Review - Complete Physical, by Shane Neilson

2010-10-31T23:21:00.006-04:00

Reading Complete Physical is something like following your family doctor around for a week, looking over his shoulder at his notes, peering into patient’s records, eavesdropping on both his conversations and his thoughts, following him on his rounds. How much distance can he manage as he tells you you’re’re dying? What moves him to a more personal involvement? What’s going on in his mind as he pokes and prods and hands you the bad news, or when he receives it himself?

Some of the pieces in this collection are as cursory as notes on the human condition as it checks into a casualty ward – ‘bowel habits and missed meds,’ ‘blood, vomit, shit.’ Some are whimsies, the Grinch stealing health from the little whos, or Dr. Gear sitting in his office advising his patients to ‘take the train, take the train’ through the intercom. Some are extended metaphors that evolve into short meditations on life, death, meaning and/or the lack thereof.

‘Reading Electrocardiograms,’ for example, begins by telling us ‘Metaphors are easy,’ and goes on to say what reading electrocardiograms isn’t – fingerprint examination, crystal ball gazing, dowsing, things the police wouldn’t be interested in. From there it shifts to what reading electrocardiograms is, and what they gesture at, moving from a terse, factual account rich with allusion, to a moment of quiet, plain spoken insight that turns from itself as soon as it’s uttered, toward a glimpse of a deeper, less reassuring awareness. An electrocardiogram, the poem declares, is a detective story.
“The private dicks are a part of it. There is a gravedigger
shovelling the Q wave’s six feet, the long plot of a pause. . .
Bedside, I peer at the tracing
and think lifestyle modification
lifestyle modification, what every heart needs
is the amplitude of truth.’

There is certain amount of play going on – ‘and what of the exploring heart, the intrepid muscle with a wandering baseline?’ – but the play serves to move things between levels of interpretation and intention. “But I’m not looking for truth,” the poem ends,
“I’m looking for closed mouth moments and the wave
Of goodbye, goodbye, which the police would be interested in.
There is an order to stay within the city,
But it is unenforceable.”

Lines present themselves and shift their position as you become aware of the possibility of multiple interpretations, as if they were symptoms, teasing you toward a diagnosis. For instance - “I have no handbook, if you are sick, I will marshal what I have, repetitions and one worn stethoscope, love like a stave.” A straightforward enough account of what a doctor who works more with intuitions about the human situation than with textbook approaches might offer, until you think about that last phrase. What does he mean, ‘love like a stave?’

A stave is a narrow strip of wood that forms part of the sides of a barrel, one part of a whole, a group effort, that manages to contain what needs containing, or it’s a cudgel, to beat some sense into you, or it’s a stanza in a poem, perhaps one that will point you toward a new way of looking at what ails you. Any or all of these definitions work, but each offers a slight twist to what the poem is saying, and together they form a pretty comprehensive remedy for most things.

Some of poems are as personal as love letters or thoughts on one’s own mortality. In ‘My Illness,’ the doctor looks inward, without the benefit of modern technology. Just some good old fashioned introspection. Throughout Complete Physical the narrator has seen himself as Isaiah did, sent to bring good news – or aid in the case of bad news - to the afflicted, and to bind up the broken hearted as much as the broken in body. ‘My Illness’ presents him with the New Testament injunction, ‘Physician, Heal Thyself.”

The beginning of the poem is opposite to the beginning of 'Reading Electrocardiograms' – what it is we’re talking about, not what it is not.
My illness is Antarctic, is brittle absolute zero,
Is the highness of high places, is a frosted four-leaf clover
Wished upon: is it over, is it over?

There are three metaphors for the narrator’s illness in these opening lines. It is cold. It is ‘the highness of high places.’ Not the high places themselves, but the thing that particularly characterises them. The ‘high places,’ in both the Judeo Christian tradition and in earlier traditions, are the places where one meets divinity. So something in his illness partakes of the divine. It is also a talisman of sorts, something with magical powers.

In 'Fairygodmother, MD,' the doctor complains about his patients wishing for everything from antibiotics to a celebratory sick leave.
“I am aloft on wish power, I am borne on the shoulders
Of a sweaty wishing public, and Wishes are for the wishing,
I want to tell them, not for the coming true."

It’s plain then, that he knows the relative futility of wishing. He has laid out his illness, It is a temperature, it is a space, whether physical or mental, or both, remains to be seen, it is something that has driven him to grasping at straws.
Fear, and it is fear,
Is left to shiver in the cold: I grow old and awake,
Rash and final. I have crashed and come to ground,
I have outlasted pain to feel, my body hovers
About what’s real and flits to what’s ahead.

There’s something interesting going on her. His illness, the doctor says, has caused him to abandon fear, to leave it shivering in the Antarctic cold, and as a result he has grown old and awake, That illness ages us is one of the terrible things about it, but here the poet claims he has grown ‘awake’ because of it, as if his pre-illness state was a kind of walking sleep. And indeed it may have been. He may suddenly have found himself awake to his own mortality, and the repercussions that awareness has on the way you think about your life, what you’ve done with it, what you plan to do with what remains of it. That it has also made him ‘rash and final,’ suggests that extreme solutions are in order.

The phrase ‘to ground,’ usually carries the implication of hiding or avoidance. A fox goes to ground, to elude the dogs. Here the poet says he has crashed and come to ground. That is, his illness has brought him down, and caused him to hide out while he comes to terms with it, and in the process, something has come over him. He has risen above his pain, outlasted it, to come to some understanding about the nature of things.
But in this fantastic, this hybrid world
Where asterisks attend perception,
When paranoia becomes a kind of love
I frisk with gloves to protect from cold.

Bundle up: up here is a trick of the light,
And I sight what is far, but never near.
Gather hurt like clothes, and grow heady from air;
on a train, it’s the landscape that’s slow.
I will go, or rather I will flee,
and you can’t catch me. . .

Asterisks are used to indicate an omission, or doubtful matter. In historical linguistics they mark a hypothetical or reconstructed form that isn’t attested in a text . In other words, what you see in the place illness creates, is not necessarily to be trusted. Even so, the poet is willing to explore the terrain, given a little protection, and he invites us, with the same proviso, to explore it with him. There’s a suggestion that if we don’t, we won’t be able to keep up, to see what he sees. He returns here, to the earlier claim that he’s fleeing, going to ground, and we won’t catch him. But where is it he’s going?

"I have forsaken care for Hibernia."

Hibernia - hiberna , winter or wintry - the root of hibernate, and also the name, taken from Greek geographical accounts, for Irealnd. The narrator is already in a place about as wintry as they come, so we can assume he’s fleeing to Ireland. Why Ireland? I’ll make a leap of faith here, and say he’s fleeing to Ireland to speak to someone who will know exactly where he’s coming from and give him the support he needs to deal with it. Many poems, as I’ve said elsewhere, are part of a conversation, not just with the reader, but with other poems, or poets. ‘My Illness’ is part of conversation with W.B. Yeats, a master of the backward and forward look attendant on illness and old age, and much of the imagery in IT is answering points raised by Yeats.

In 1934 Yeats wrote the introduction to The Holy Mountain: Being the story of a Pilgrimage to Lake Manas and of Initiation on Mount Kailas in Tibet, by Bhagwan Shri Hamsa. The book tells the story of Shri Purohit Swami, who translated the book from the Marathi, and Bhagwan Shri Hamsa, as they leave the comforts of the material world in search of the Absolute. At some point in their journey, they are boarding a train. Shri Purohit Swami goes in search of third class carriage but can find no space. Yeats relates the rest of the incident – “He decided to return to his Master but found an empty carriage. His Master had left the train and was sitting upon a bench, naked but for a loin cloth. A Europeanised Indian had denounced him for wearing silk and travelling first class, and all monks and pilgrims for bringing discredit upon India by their superstitions and idleness. So he stripped of his silk clothes, saying that though they seemed to have come with his destiny, they were of no importance. Then, because the stranger was still unsatisfied, had given him his luggage and his ticket. They were able, however, to continue their journey, for just when the train was about to start, the Europeanised Indian returned and threw clothes, luggage and ticket into the carriage. He had been attacked by remorse.’

The passage throws a new light on Neilson’s lines telling us to “gather hurt like clothes,” and that “on a train, it’s the landscape that’s slow.” They don’t necessarily refer specifically to this small incident on the road to enlightenment, but they use the imagery of the insult, as if Bhagwan Shri Hamsa is answering the Europeanised man, admonishing him, giving him advice on beginning his own search for enlightenment. You may think that on a speeding train you are moving faster towards your destination, but in fact it is only that the landscape has slowed down. The train is irrelevant, in the end, to when you will arrive. The pain is also irrelevant. Gather it to yourself as you would your clothes. Though it may seem to have come with your destiny it is of no importance.

Yeats relates the end of the quest as follows – “At last, after a climb of 5,000 feet Bhagwan Shri Hamsa sat by a frozen lake, awaiting initiation: My ideal was to have a sight of the physical form of the Lord Dattatreya Himself, and to get myself initiated into the realisation of the Self. I was determined either to realise this or to die in meditation. . . The first night I experienced terrible hardships. Bitter cold, piercing winds, incessant snow, inordinate hunger and deadly solitude combined to harass the mind the body became numb and unable to bear the pangs. Snow covered me up to my breast . . .” at the end of which Bhagwan Shri Hamsa sees the Dattatreya, who initiates him into the realisation of the Self.

Yeats explainS that this realisation of the self was something, “not as it appears in dreamless sleep but as it appears . . . to conscious man,” the man awake to the “unbroken consciousness of the Self, the self that never sleeps,” returning us to Neilson’s claim that his illness has made him grow “old and awake.”The awareness of the significance of things gleaned from the illness is arrived at after the same exploration of extremes as Bhagwan Shri Hamsa suffered in his search. Yeats wrote a poem himself, called Meru, after reading Bhagwn Shri Hamsa’s book, and came to a bleak conclusion.
“. . .but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.”

The cold, the fear, the solitude, the high place, and the vision vouchsafed are shared in all three texts, but Yeats and Neilson come to an altogether bleaker conclusion.

At this point, in Hibernia, Neilson’s imagery shifts’ –
The gleaming birds there are few,
Just a few crows to curse, a tern or two,
But I see what they see: a man with asthenia,
Who steals from himself, whose one cry is elegy.

Yeats remains in the conversation here. The ‘gleaming birds’ are perhaps related to Yeats’ immortal painted birds who sing of the old man who “bends to the fire and shakes with the cold,” and whose “heart still dreams of battle and love,” or the golden bird in Sailing to Byzantium, who sings of what is past, or passing, or to come. The birds he sees are more ordinary, a few crows (omens of death, so cursing at them may be understandable in the circumstances) and a tern or two. The narrator sees himself as the birds see him, a man with asthenia - a medical term denoting symptoms of physical weakness and loss of strength. Yeats warned against the man whose one cry was a sad, mournful song –
‘And things that have grown sad are wicked,
And things that fear the dawn of the morrow
Or the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.'

My Illness ends with a summary of what the doctor has learned.

And it is always about love, warm my porotic bones,
About what is given up against what is given against,
About the poor old soul who leaks out light,
That tattered trick, and my illness is a cold chest of drawers,
My rags inside.

The lines return to the theme of the aging body. The narrator is not just weak, he is porotic, brittle. He is looking for heat. Whatever wisdom he has gained has to do with love – it is always about love, with what is given up, that is, what is given with no expectation of return, and what is given against, or what is given in pledge for some return. It is about that poor old soul who leaks out light. An odd image. Is it literally the ‘illumination’ gained that is leaking out?Yeats spoke, in 'The Cold Heaven,' of being “riddled with light,” after coming to some insight about love crossed long ago. To riddle is to pierce full of holes, so whatever illumination he had gained would certainly leak out, and something of the sort seems to be happening here. “That tattered trick” is the old man himself – “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick,” to take another image from ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ and also the physical, mortal body – “every tatter in its mortal dress.”

The final image is something of a jolt. We are out of the high cold places, the fantastic hybrid world of the visionary, the rich allusive territory of Hibernia. We are confronted with a chest of drawers. “My illness is a cold chest of drawers, my rags inside.” I propose that the narrator has left Hibernia and returned to ordinary life. His illness has given him a vision of the future of his mortal coil and it isn’t pretty. It’s not that he didn’t know what was coming, at some level; it’s just that he knows now at every level. He understands. The image of the chest of drawers is a twist on ‘from the cradle to the grave,’ playing on the child put to bed in a dresser drawer, and the tatters that make up the old man returned to it. It also plays with Wallace Stevens’ notable use of that particular item of furniture in 'The Emperor of Ice Cream.'
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Stevens’ narrator instructs someone to take an embroidered cloth from the chest of drawers and cover the corpse with it but Neilson’s drawers hold only the rags that are the remains of his mortal self, not even sufficient to cover his mortal remains. However surrounded one is by illness and death the spectre of one’s own aged self, revealing its vulnerabilities, and its inevitable end, doesn’t necessarily haunt the edges of every dealing with a patient. It takes some betrayal by one’s own body to drive the point home.

If Complete Physical comes across as a little uneven it is perhaps because it’s like a Doctor Who version of an old-fashioned black medical bag, bigger on the inside than on the outside, a catch all for whatever the doctor thinks might come in useful, holding everything from a thermometer to an MRI machine. A rummage through it is likely to turn up just the thing you need to help you think about the issue at hand. “I am priestly,” the doctor tells us, in ‘Curing Blindness,’ “leveraging hope and faith and that grand panacea, love, against death. . . What I tell you is like connecting dots: there are points of light, and if you cannot see them, I will heal your blindness.”

an Interview with Shane Neilson

2010-10-31T23:19:00.001-04:00

T.T. One of your reviewers claimed poets and doctors share an obsession with death. Would you comment on that?

S.N. Poets have their own individual obsessions, but I'd have to say that love and its corollary sex, and also death, are the big three for most of us. We're always dying in thine eyes. There is an idea that poetry can and should be about anything, and I think that's true, I'd hate to limit poetry, but I must confess that I get bored by poems about butterflies (though I've written my share) and I need the big subjects to validate the depth of what poetry aspires to achieve. But doctors... in a sense, we deal in death. All illness are a prelude to it, are intimations of mortality, are threats to the mortal coil. It'd be an overstatement to say that all my patients are afraid of death when they come in with their undiagnosed symptoms, but looming over my title as physician is the power to deliver terrible, terrible news. I palliate several patients a year, and derive poems from that process.

T.T. In one of your ‘How Poems Work’ articles for Arc Magazine you say “Poems themselves, through their own control over experience, can also give the poet/patient control not over the ailment but over the experience.” Your poems work hard on that distinction between ailment and experience, and also on the issue of control. Can you expand on your comment

S.N. There is the idea that poems are exercises in control. (I certainly believe it- the wild poem is much more likely to be a failure.) That the poem is, as Yeats says, something "intended, complete." So the poet, when writing about personal calamity, imposes order on the disorder of illness. Poetry can validate the experience of illness without imposing the identity of illness. Patients mostly refuse to be thought of as diseased, as being of or consisting of their illnesses. I remember a paranoid schizophrenic candidly discussing that the diagnosis he had received was just a "label"- something to make sense of his life, but not to define it. A tool but not a deed. So the illness experience recognizes pain and suffering, but it doesn't leak into selfhood. Many illnesses can be managed, but they can't be controlled. Most people don't choose to be sick. And choice is necessary for control. So the poem can only promise understanding, appreciation, and celebration, especially naming, but never control over a disease. Poems just aren't that powerful... they are limited in that way.

T.T. In your essay ‘The Pre-Poem Moment’ you asked "The origin of poetry is presumed to be song; but what is the origin of the poem? Can you answer for your own poems?

S.N. I specifically didn't answer this question for my own poems in the Pre-Poem Moment essay because I felt, as an anthologist, that I shouldn't inject myself into the anthology in that way. I felt for that project that I should give the stage over to my contributors, and write about them, about what they were collectively trying to do, as opposed to dramatizing myself. But of course in the writing of that introductory essay I necessarily mined some personal convictions. And those convictions can be further distilled into a single thought: that each poem has its own genesis if it is to be a true poem, that each individual poem needs its own history to survive. So every poem of mine has a necessarily distinct process. This may sound precious, but every poem for me is a feeling out, a bungling sortie, a reconnaissance into something unknown and somehow unknowable. There is occasionally a trick to be pulled- poems based on personal biography, or historical biographies, and these are more obviously derivative from incident... but ultimately, with me, the poem boils down to emotion, and it must not be sentimental or manipulative, but honest and in the honesty hopefully resilient.

T.T. In your work on Alden Nowlan you quote him saying “Ever since I got sick I've become less and less hypocritical and more and more honest. Since we're all of us going to be out of the world so soon it seems silly not to tell one another what we really think and feel.” That seems to about sum up your approach. Anything you’d like to add to that?

S.N. I chose this Nowlan quote because it does summarize my own philosophy. Though in my poetry there's usually very little about what I think ( an exception could be made for Complete Physical, which involves my professional life). I'm usually writing about what I myself feel, or empathizing with what another feels in the case of dramatic monologues. Nowlan really changed what he wrote when he became ill; it was revolutionary, illness and the reprieve, for him. For myself, I just learned from this change, from this demonstrable, obvious change. Nowlan did the suffering for me. Then I did my own share of suffering later, but that's another history.

T.T. What about Nowlan as an influence? Or anyone else?

S.N. Influences? This could go on and on. Nowlan first, for the emotional power and how not to write sentimentally. I'd have to say Lowell, because of the bipolar disorder I suppose, but mostly the poetry- sublime, glittering poetry. Milton Acorn, for the lyric impulse, and for the lesson that political poetry is mostly unsuccessful. Illness too. Al Moritz, because I envy his intellectual heft. I just can't write that way, and so I covet him. To pick a generational contemporary, Ken Babstock for the glorious sound. Mandelstam for the music of pure metaphor. I won't name drop any more.

T.T. Would you comment on the two versions of ‘My Illness? Although they share an amount of material the first one is obviously not just a draught of the second. ’ What do you believe the second does that the first didn’t? What else was going on?

S.N. I'm not sure what happened with "My Illness." I think that I had something important to say, metaphorically, about myself. I felt I had to get that poem right. And I still feel that both are approximations. Both versions share some lines, lines I felt were central. But both head out in their directions. I shared the versions with Steven Heighton, who felt that both had their own integrity and that I should include them both. So I went with that advice. I felt that with these poems I had to disclose my own perspective, my own diagnosis, with my readers. My own sadness and infirmity. And so these poems had the most riding on them. I guess I decided to split the difference. As for what the second does that the first doesn't, I'd just say that the incompleteness, or the emotional weight of trying to say something, and failing, caused me to revisit what I'll call pain and resulted in a formulation. As I've said, the objective with each poem was the same, though the methods were different.

T.T. Many of the poems in this collection deal, either directly or indirectly, with pain. In ‘My Illness, Revisited’ you write “There is no pain, because there is no choice.” On first consideration that seems like an odd remark, but there is an issue of choice in pain. Would you expand on that, and on how the problem of pain colours your work? Your attempts, as you put it, to map it. Its attempts to map you.

S.N. My comment "There is no pain, because there is no choice" was meant to be very, very specific to this -my- individual situation. Some people clearly choose pain. You don't have to be a sadist to do so. In this case, I meant that there wasn't any pain, or I wasn't feeling pain, because I didn't ultimately choose where I ended up, what I was reduced to. I had no complicity. There was no compounding, no "insult to injury." I was suffering, and forced by my illness to that position. If there was an element of choice, then I was oblivious to it, and remain so. Some people sink so low that the very idea of choice becomes inapplicable. But as for your general comment on pain, I think that's perceptive- pain is clearly one of my predilections. I'm writing a suite of pain poems for Arc magazine, which they may or may not use in their Science issue. In fact I think I have two sacred words in all my poetry -all poets have a sacred word or two- and to these words I've devoted my life and afford them the proper respect. Those two interrelated words are pain and love. I feel this so strongly that I get angry when I see these words superfluously used in others' poetry. As for maps, pain possesses us. I wrote "All Pain can be Controlled" out of anger at a religious television show host, who purported that all pain can indeed be controlled. He was against euthanasia, and so am I, if I had to choose a binary, but I'm here to tell you, as a physician with some amount of experience, that most of it can't be controlled. But in poems I say its name.

T.T. Illness provides potent metaphors for the human condition. Some of your poems – The death of Josie’ comes to mind immediately – seem to play with what Susan Sontag characterised as “the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character.” She went on to talk about the way that idea is extended to “assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself.” I had a much older friend once who told me “We get the diseases we need,” which seems related. Anything you’d like to say on either part of her observation, or on the wider idea of illness as a metaphor?

S.N. I'm hesitant to say that illness develops character. I think it harnesses character, or dramatizes character. We are who we are. And illness can never be allowed to usurp our true identity, which usually resists the state of being ill. Some people deny; some people accept. And on the ground, it's hard to convince people that their illnesses can be expressed poetically. Some people are emphatic in their suffering. But poems can be their best expression, and in "The Death of Josie" I tried to capture a personality who was very tough, and who I tried to honour. The key is in capturing the personality. Or the character.

Errands into the maze: Work in Progress (3)

2010-10-30T13:32:00.000-04:00

Glenn's latest. Perhaps NSFW. Errands into the maze: Work in Progress (3): “I’m not going to hit you with this,” Evie said and laid the sleek, strangely compelling instrument down on the bed. Hugh looked up..."

The Spring Ghazals

2010-10-29T19:45:00.005-04:00

The Spring Ghazals is a collection of poems about loss & love, & memory & time. The poems in this book were written between the spring of 2008 & winter 2010 by poet Jack Hayes.
Jack Hayes lives in Idaho with his wife, writer & composer Eberle Umbach.
In addition to his poetic vocation, Jack Hayes is a blues musician who has an active performance schedule. Mr Hayes studied with David Huddle & Alan Broughton at the University of Vermont & with Charles Wright & Gregory Orr at the University of Virginia.

"If you don't know the poetry of Jack Hayes, you should." Aaron M. Wilson
Soulless Machine

"Hayes book is a testimony to the power of poetry to distil and reexamine experience." Jessica Fox-Wilson Everything Feeds Process

The Alchemy of Chance - Cover

2010-10-27T14:20:00.002-04:00

We finally have a cover we feel lives up to the tone and the themes of Peter's book. My thanks to our design team, to Marianne and Andrew Pfeiffer for permission to use the cloisonne zodiac signs from their magnificent dodecahedron, and to Pearse Saines Pinch for the beautiful job he did photographing them. And yes, Peter's novel really does manage to contain that much energy, and that much lush colour.

Tactile Map 2

2010-10-26T23:35:00.005-04:00

A/N: This was copied from my blog, thus the lack of appropriate punctuation. My personal grammatical ideologies and or failings are in no way representative of the views or practices of Tangerine Tree Press.

people are complaining that my last posts on the alchemy map didn't really demonstrate where i'm going with it. which is fair enough. it probably has something to do with the fact that i'm all little fuzzy on the point myself.

i have these fabulous period zodiac symbols that marianne and andrew pfeiffer are kindly allowing us to use and which i'm hoping to incorporate into a decorative border for the map. they're very vividly coloured and very vibrant and i'm hoping to bring a lot of that visual energy to the map, although i've no hope of doing anything half as nice as the pfeiffer's cloisonne (which is just mind-blowingly gorgeous as you can see).

beyond that my inspiration is coming from the braille/tactile maps used by aurelie in the alchemy of chance and from those lovely but hideously inaccurate historical maps like the munster map. see, history was good for something.

so while the tactile element is most relevant to the story and most interesting to me (i'm really fascinated with multi-sensory experiences) i'm trying to make this map as visually exciting as possible too (mostly because i expect to use a photo of it more than the original, sadface).

and here's one of the zodiac signs, leo of course. image © marianne and andrew pfeiffer, photograph © pearse saines.

The Alchemy Of Chance - Reader's Reviews

2010-10-25T21:04:00.004-04:00

“As clever as a soufflé, as satisfying as a cassoulet and as characterful as a just-so Roquefort. Délicieux! (May I propose that the publisher packages it with a postprandial cigar?)”

Caroline Scott - SW France

"Lives, feeling their way around a screen which hides as it reveals, passing with pinpoint tenderness from blinkeredness to double vision to seeing and looking both ways."

Nigel Watson - Swansea, Wales

That Time is Past - Work in progress

2010-10-25T20:52:00.003-04:00

“It was Hugh and he’s buried her here in the bloody garden,” he said.
They discussed this possibility for a while. Then they spotted an open upstairs window and, below, a trellis over which spumed an orgasm of wisteria.
When the back door opened and a blaze of light violated the composed shadow patterns of the garden, Felix was about six feet up the fragile wooden scaffolding while Ivan stood below, smoking. Felix, alarmed by the sudden uproarious glare of publicity, lost his footing and tumbled back down to earth.
“It’s only a game,” Ivan explained in Italian to the two watching carabinieri.

http://glennhaybittle.blogspot.com/

Photograph © Andrew Dunn, 8 May 2005.
Website: http://www.andrewdunnphoto.com/

Work in Progress

2010-10-24T16:11:00.001-04:00

Check out the extract from Glenn's revisions of That Time Is Past - http://glennhaybittle.blogspot.com/

Tactile/Collage Map of France

2010-10-21T18:05:00.003-04:00

The beginnings of a tactile collage map to go along with Peter S. Brooks' The Alchemy of Chance. With tea. I'm just beginning to map out the lay of the land, coastlines and the like. France won't know what happened to it. The little coloured squares you can see on it now just denote what goes in each grid square. Ultimately... it will look really cool, that's the plan. What the precise mechanism I'll use to achieve that end I'm not sure. But it will be colourful and touchy-feely. I went to DeSerres yesterday to look at supplies but I'm wobbling between a variety of different ideas. I'll keep you posted.

Coming Soon - An Interiew with Shane Neilson

2010-10-17T22:33:00.003-04:00

Coming Soon - an interview with Shane Neilson, family physician and poet, about his new collection called 'Complete Physical,' to be followed by a review and a discussion of two versions of a poem called 'My Illness.'

The Alchemy of Chance - Introducing Dafydd Williams

2010-10-16T22:54:00.002-04:00

A navy and cream Citroën DS flashed down the outside lane of the M4, the outskirts of Cardiff through the rear windscreen, Portsmouth and the night-ferry to St. Malo over the bonnet. Dafydd Williams had covered this stretch of road a thousand times before, growing up in Cardiff, studying in Newport, working in London. Now he had a month off and he was going to France for most of it. But that was about the only reference point he had for this journey, apart from a ten year-old postcard from Nantes and three recent ones from places he’d barely heard of.

Two weekends previously, he’d been summoned from London by his father Emlyn to the parental home up on Caerphilly Mountain, just beyond the northern outskirts of Cardiff. Father wanted to ‘have a chat’. And he got straight down to it, standing in the kitchen over a whisky on the Friday night as soon as Mother had gone to bed.

“I want you to go to France and find Sean.”
“Dad. It’s been more than ten years. He could be anywhere.”
“He sent us three more postcards. Last Summer.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I’m telling you now. It’s not as if you come and see us much. Or call. You didn’t even come home for Christmas.”
“It’s not home any more. Anyway, I’ve been busy… Why now?”
“Your mother needs to know he’s all right.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“You know what I mean. And she’s certainly his mother. I’ll pay your expenses.”
“I’m really not up for this. Can’t you hire someone?”
“For goodness sake, he’s your brother.”
“Half brother. And that’s the last time I let you know I’ve got a couple of months off. I’m thirty six. Too old for emotional blackmail.”
“Well I’m disappointed in you, is all I can say.”

Dafydd was in-between projects, the last one wrapped, the next one – a new move into drama - tightly planned. A moderately successful film-maker, with a reputation for quirky TV documentaries on arcane connections between the Celtic lands of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia, all he intended to do, during this his favourite time of the year, was read in the garden and maybe spend a few days on the coast.

He pulled a chair from under the kitchen table.

“OK. What have we got to go on? This is not a yes, by the way.”

That Time is Past - Those Romantic Young Boys

2010-10-13T22:24:00.005-04:00

We're in the process of negotiating for a novel called That Time is Past, by Glenn Haybittle - a comedy about a group of young men hanging out in Italy and fancying themselves the incarnations of Shelley, Byron et al. Glenn says its a novel about men and their deadly romantic projections on the female image. Lady Lydia thinks "Young men seem to be at rather a loss nowadays," and the book is somehow about that. I think it's about love in an age of ennui. Whatever it's about, it's sharp, funny, and devastatingly astute.
Glenn is still revising, and over the next few months we'll be dishing up bits of the process for your consideration. When you form an opinion about what it's about, let us know.

"Are you one of the yacht people?" the man asked in a grave accusatory voice....
"Yacht people? Who are the yacht people?" said Jake, fingering the coral beads on his neck.
"You don't know Isabella?"
"I've only just arrived here."
"You're not a suspect then?" ...
"A suspect?" asked Jake.
"The police think there may be a murderer on the loose."
"I've got no blood on my hands. I've just been sitting here reading about the death of Shelley..."

Swimming Ginger by Gary Geddes

2010-10-12T20:28:00.007-04:00

Swimming Ginger

Artists have never been as guilty as historians, of turning the destiny of mankind over to sociological or environmental forces, but Gary Geddes goes further than most in redressing the historical tendency to downgrade the “nature and scope of individual agency.”(1) War and Other Measures personalised one of Canada’s perennial political issues by giving voice to an individual Quebecois living in a language not his own, The Terracotta Army conjured up the comments and opinions of individual soldiers in a vast pottery army, designed to protect the emperor Quin Shi Huang in the afterlife, and in ‘Sandra Lee Scheuer’, Geddes managed to distil the political conscience of an era into a brief poem about the life and death of one girl.

Swimming Ginger takes an early 12th century Chinese scroll depicting life in the capital city of Bianliang just before it was sacked by invading Jin Tartars as a starting point. The scroll, thought to be the work of Zhang Zeduan, depicts the celebration of the Quingming Festival on the banks of Bian River, beginning in quiet countryside and ending somewhere in the city centre. Chye Kiang Heng, in his analysis of the scroll, notes that every detail is studied separately with equal attention as if seen through a telescope and then pieced together again to form a composite whole. “Rather than an objective study of the physical world, Zhang Zeduan has composed a subjective understanding of the capital, one laden with his own values and worldview. In it the artist went beyond crafting a narrative, beyond the description of an urban setting and its multifarious activities; he seemed to be seeking and probing the order of things. Social and economic orders were woven into the formal structure of his composition.”(2)

Geddes obviously shares the artist’s interest in the order of things but believes the best way to elucidate it is to focus on the individuals that constitute it - the mass of people getting and spending, and the crowd flowing over Shuncheng Granary Bridge. It is easy, as you range over the big picture, either of history or of a society, for the individual to be reduced to a tiny figure moving across the parchment, and for his few lines to be lost in the larger, anonymous story, but Geddes has managed to bring those lines into sharp focus. An apothecary, a girl who works in the ginger guild, a woodcutter, a young man about to enter the civil service, a pickle seller, a storyteller and the artist who painted the scroll, among others, all have their say about the major and minor concerns of their small lives.

The poems in Swimming Ginger share something of the style and concerns of Song Dynasty poetry– the frank first person narration, the colloquialisms and use of the vernacular, the inclusion of erotic material, the concern with the ordinary and the mundane, and with the particularities of the world, and not least, a tendency to social critique. Mei Yaochen’s theme, for instance, in lines like - “The potter uses all the clay before his door/ yet has not one tile for his own house. Those whose ten fingers never touched clay/live in tall houses with fish-scale tiles” – echo throughout Geddes’ collection, in the voices of his narrators.

Sedan chairs, parasols, fancy
eateries. Rights and privileges
of the well-to-do mean nothing

as I bend beneath the weight
of history and firewood.

In his introduction to The Terracotta Army Geddes says of the sculptor who made the figures, “Lao Bi was a strange mixture of artist and anarchist, wit and iconoclast, as capable of understanding the psychology of his subjects as he was of capturing their appearance and essence in clay. Bi’s iconoclasm – a peculiar term to apply to a sculptor, who is a maker rather than a breaker of images – lay in his determination to insist on the individual characteristics of the men he sculpted, in his resistance to the pressures to mass-produce an army of clones or look-alikes.” He might have been speaking of his own approach to the residents of Bianliang. The poems in this collection preserve what he calls “the sanctity of the idiosyncratic self,” insisting that the individual, as historian D.G. Shaw has put it, is “where meaning gets made and unmade, and where history is waged and witnessed.” (3)

The eponymous poem, Swimming Ginger, tells the story of a young woman employed at the ginger guild, beginning as she sets off for work in the third watch of the night – around eleven. She begins with an observation about her job –

Three weeks at the ginger guild
marks a girl for life.

- but she doesn’t say how or why this is. She only comments on the effect the mark has.

Heads
turn when you pass by, smiles
or expressions of distaste.

Whatever the nature of the mark, it’s discernable by casual passers-by. Something visible or able to be smelled, but she doesn’t specify. Instead, she tells us she goes out of her way to avoid the attention it draws, and, as if to deflect even the reader’s attention she diverts us with a description of her route, what she sees and what she would see if she passed by a little later.

I take

the back streets on my way
to work. Third Watch, no one’s
out this early on Jieshen Alley
sorting gold, gems, coloured

silk. Only hawkers of tripe, lung,
sheep’s head, clams, udder,
dove, quail, rabbit. Several wave.
Others try to sell me produce.

She’s moving through the night market, where men up to their olfactory nerves in blood and offal don’t seem to notice whatever is amiss. Her comfort amongst the butchers suggests she smells of something noticeable, and since she’s told us it’s her work at the guild that has marked her we can assume she smells of ginger.

In spite of her own attempt to change the subject, the narrator suddenly reverts to her opening comment for one cryptic sentence, almost as if the thought of it had intruded on the market scene in spite of her efforts. It’s not the job that pops up though. It’s the commodity she works with. The ginger guild, like all other Chinese guilds of the time, was set up to protect the merchants from exploitation by the government, but it presumably exercised control over the product they sold as well, perhaps sorting and grading the roots, and parcelling them for distribution. The narrator doesn’t bother to tell us what, exactly, she does. Her thoughts run to the uses of the root, without sharing them with the reader either, before veering back to the things she’s passing, the wine merchants, the Calabash Mutton Stew Shop, and then the bird dealers.

Fourteen things done with ginger,
two unspeakable. I can’t afford
wine on Crossroads Street or
Xu’s infamous mutton stew,

but I like to watch the merchants
trading hawks and falcons, claws
slicing into leather wrist straps,
What don’t they know, these birds

of prey, fierce eyes that miss nothing?

So far the ginger girl’s story has raised some not very significant seeming questions about her work and her scent and piqued our curiosity about all the things done with ginger, but her awareness of the watchfulness of the birds suggests perhaps something more is going on.

They note my peregrinations
on the weekend, slipping from town
on my lover’s wupan, hidden

under sacks, head and shoulders
nestled among unsold cabbages;
They watch us bathe in back eddies,
couple like mink beside the river.

You taste like ginger crab, my lover
says.

There was a re-emergence of Confucian ideals in the Song dynasty, which included ideals about women. A woman was subject to the three obediences – – to her father when young, to her husband when married, to her sons when widowed, and sexual purity was to be preserved at all costs. Women of social standing went out only if accompanied by chaperones or servants. In this context the ginger girl slips away with her lover. She specifies his boat is a wupan is a smallish craft with a shallow draught that can slide easily into the backwaters. She indicates that he sells produce in the city, that he carries it in sacks and has left over cabbages. She lets us know the smell and taste of ginger has permeated her body. These details are somehow more important than those about her work in the guild. She hides herself as they leave the city, passing, with the rest of the water traffic on the scroll, through the East Water Gate, but once beyond the city she loses herself, for a brief period, in other possibilities.

Though I dress like a man
and learn to hold the steering oar
hard to starboard for hauling

upriver,

One of the less obvious aspects of the poem, is its play with history. Our heroine ‘perambulates,’ as she puts it, through the city, following almost exactly the route taken by her contemporary Meng Yuanlao, a well off young civil servant in his late teens, who recorded his walk in a memoir called Record of a Dream of Splendour in the Eastern Capital, after the city had fallen to the Jin and he had fled south. Her footsteps follow in his. She walks down the same streets, through the same markets, past the same vendors, selling the same goods. Her restrictions shadow his freedom, the things she risks everything for are his to take for granted. When catastrophe strikes, he picks up and moves elsewhere. She doesn’t have the same option. She dresses like a man and steers her own course knowing this is the case.

I know the time is brief
before my belly starts to swell
and the merciless raptors single
me out, pick up the scent.

It is the final lines that bring the meaning of the entire piece into focus. The narrator, we have discovered, smells of ginger. What is it about the scent – invigorating, fiery and spicy, used in the perfume trade to give a warm top note to a blend - that makes some people smile, perhaps knowingly, and others to express their distaste? The smell is a pleasant one, and ginger was an indispensible part of life, for both medicinal and culinary reasons, so we can only assume it was something it was used for, not the smell itself, that caused the reaction. Fourteen things done with ginger, she says, almost as an aside. Two of them unspeakable. These are the things she has learned at the Ginger Guild, the things that have marked her, as surely as the smell of the root has. Ginger reputedly brings women “into season,” and was taken as a sexual stimulant and as an aid to conception. It was also used to encourage late or delayed menstruation. Any of these options would be common knowledge and likely to provoke one or the other response from a knowing audience. Perhaps the title “Swimming Ginger” provides a further clue to the narrator’s situation. That she’s pregnant she freely admits. That there is ginger oozing out of her pores is definitely implied, suggesting we’re to understand that ‘swimming’ here, is used, at least in part, in the sense of ‘abundant, copious, overflowing.’ To induce a miscarriage, one takes a large quantity of ginger over several days. She doesn’t ever come right out and say any of this. To the very end, she is both telling and not telling her story.

The girl who works in the Ginger Guild – we never do learn her name. For all the intimacy of her story she is completely guarded in the way she shares it - has somehow managed to slip, temporarily, out of the constraints imposed by her gender and the expectations of society. She is living in what the narrator of ‘A Recipe for Change,’ a later poem in the collection, calls

A pause. A brief interregnum
when freedom, when anything,
seems possible...

but when catastrophe strikes there will be no possibility of real escape for her. If the ginger doesn’t do its job, the raptors are gathering, and she’ll pay a steep price for her freedom. That the Ginger Guild girl and her story work as metaphors for the change the narrator of the later poem predicts is perhaps obvious, but she’s no less real for that.

(1) David Gary Shaw. Happy In Our Chains? Agency And Language In The Postmodern Age – History and Theory, Volume 40, Issue 4, Pages 1-9
(2) Heng Chye Kiang. Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats:The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes. NUS Press. 1999
(3) David Gary Shaw

Fourteen Things Done with Ginger
Although the narrator of ‘Swimming Ginger’ shared many things with Professor Geddes, I suspect the fourteen things one can do with ginger (two of them unspeakable) were not among them. Fortunately, we were able to ferret out the secret.

1.Brew it with sugar as a remedy for a cold or dice it with an egg to stop coughing.
2.Give it to infants to soothe their colic and their mother’s nerves.
3.Hang it on the front door to ward off evil spirits.
4.Give it to pregnant women for relief of morning sickness.
5.Give it to the elderly to relieve pain in their joints.
6.Grind it to a paste and apply to the temples to relieve headache.
7.Eat it while travelling, to prevent motion sickness or seasickness.
8.Give it to those prone to fouling the air with their wind to prevent the formation of gases, and to those who haven’t taken this precaution to facilitate the expulsion of their gases.
9.Give it to those with retentive bowels, to facilitate clearing.
10.Give it to your husband to improve his dyspepsia and his disposition.
11.Give it to your lover to increase lustful yearnings and guarantee success in love.
12.Stuff the body cavities of a corpse after its organs have been removed with powdered ginger and wadding, to forestall putrefaction.
13.Brew it into a strong tea and drink four cups a day for two days to bring on menses.
14.Take it in even larger quantities to induce a miscarriage.

An Interview With Gary Geddes

2010-10-12T19:44:00.008-04:00

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 35 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including Letter of the Master of Horse, War & Other Measures, The Terracotta Army, No Easy Exit, The Celebrated Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, and his most recent collection, Swimming Ginger. He has been awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, The Lieutenant Governor's award for Literary Excellence. the Gabriella Mistral Prize, The National Poetry Prize, and The E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize for Poetry, among many others.

TT - In the forward to Swimming Ginger you mention that a copy of the Quingming Shanghe Tu scroll came into your possession on the banks of the Yangtze River, just after September 11th 2001. What was your initial response to it? Was that response coloured by current events? If so, in what way?

Gary Geddes - I was quite speechless when I opened that scroll alongside the Lesser Gorges in China. The history of Chinese art, as I knew it, was all misty landscapes and distant mountain peaks. Nature, mostly. So a highly detailed urban realism seemed to me rather miraculous.
Having heard of the attacks on New York the day I was riding on a donkey cart through Gaocheng, the ruins of an ancient Muslim city in western China that was covered and rendered uninhabitable by desert sand, I was particularly sensitive to images of destruction; so, the Qingming scroll had a double impact on me, especially when I learned that the city of Bianliang, which it is sometimes said to represent, was trashed shortly after by the invading Jin. And, of course, time, the great ravager, and fire, would have done their thorough work regardless.

TT- ‘Silk River’ begins with the artist tending his carrots when news of the Emperor’s commission arrives, and ‘Another Nine for Qu Yuan’ passes on Voltaire’s advice to “cultivate your garden.” All the poems in this collection share a disillusionment in the face of knowledge about the world, and something of the loss of an ideal place. How much of your own world view is reflected here?

Gary Geddes - I think my awareness of injustice, the imbalance between poor and rich, those who represent privilege and power, has always played a role in my poetry, doubtless a product of growing up rather poor and dysfunctional in the working-class world of Commercial Drive in Vancouver.

TT - The narrator of ‘Marginalia’ says, “I stalk the margins.” Swimming Ginger as a whole does the same, dealing, for the most part, with marginalised characters, the rogues and rascals of the picaresque tradition, commenting as they do, on a less than ideal society, in humorous detail. Do you believe in the power of satire, or of literature in general, as an instrument for political change?

Gary Geddes - I like the idea of micro- rather than macro-history, focussing on those who have fallen between the cracks. I think this is reflected throughout Swimming Ginger, though my aim was to write good poems, not political tracts. Who knows how much impact poetry has these days on the shape of history. I believe, as Frank Kermode suggests, that the function of poetry is "to make history strange." I also believe that all writing is persuasive at some level, that it's a branch of rhetoric. I have just published a book of essays called Out of the Ordinary: Politics, Poetry & Narrative (Kalamalka Press in Vernon), where these ideas are given more coherent and expanded form. James Scully has said that the term "political poetry" is not a contradiction in terms, but an "instructive redundancy." which is similar to what I've said above. On the other hand Yeats argued that he used rhetoric for his argument with the world; and poetry, for his argument with himself. The debate goes on. Meanwhile, there is the dimension of language, technique. A poet must have more than content driving his work; and I hope that I have invented a few original tropes and turned some memorable phrases along the way.

TT - You refer to Samuel Johnson’s poem on the 10th satire of Juvenal – The Vanity of Human Wishes - in your comments about the figures of the terracotta army. What struck me was the way you share Johnson’s apparent sympathy with his subjects. Such a vast army buried underground has to stand as the ultimate comment on human futility and the quest for greatness but you look at the soldiers as individuals with stories to tell. The same is true in Swimming Ginger. You choose a few characters out of the great crowd swarming across the scroll, and let them tell their stories. Johnson’s work had a moral. What were you aiming at when you picked the individuals out of the mass and let them speak?

Gary Geddes - I had no single aim in writing Swimming Ginger. I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the scroll, so I waited and let the figures come to me when they were ready. Meanwhile, I read more about Chinese history during the Sung and later periods, which gave me both information and ideas of how to proceed. The artist's long spiel came first, then the other sections. I also became aware of my own age and narrowing options, which are perhaps reflected in "Nine More for Qu Yuan." If you read The Terracotta Army alongside SG, you will see how the two books complement each other, playing with the links between art and politics.

TT - You’re known as a political poet but much of your work doesn’t seem particularly political. Is it the case that in some situations simply focusing on the individual makes a political statement?

Gary Geddes - I never thought of myself as a political poet, only someone concerned about social inequities and injustice. Wordsworth's "Daffodils" sounds like a manifesto now in the face of environmental degradation. And the love poems of Kahil Gibran seem to me the only answer to problems in the Middle East. How do we begin to love and respect one another. I just spent parts of a year in sub-Saharan Africa interviewing victims traumatized by war, rape and violence, wondering how they dealt with the pain and anger, how they managed to heal themselves. This journey will come out as non-fiction, but it is all part and parcel of my particular way of relating to the world. So, yes, I do see poetry as a healing art. We are all wounded, broken at some level; poetry speaks to the wound in us, and in society.

TT – Any final words about the poetic enterprise? At least your part in it.

Gary Geddes - We all write what is given to us to write. I wander the world, including the little watery world I now inhabit on Thetis Island, looking, paying attention to people, objects, places. Some of them demand my attention more than others. A few even take me by the throat and demand to have their stories told. I am a compliant fellow; sometimes I do what I'm told.
Art touches me as much as anything. Its beauty, its forms. That it survives seems to me both astonishing and magical. I hope one or two of my own creations will suffer the same fate. If not, I hope they will make someone else's passage more meaningful. I'm too close to these poems to say anything very valuable about them; they happened to me, but I am only beginning to feel where they work and where they feel too thin. Now and then I'm surprised and delighted by what I find.

The Alchemy Of Chance

2010-10-12T17:22:00.001-04:00

One
Northern France March 1975

Legs astride, long skirt tucked into her knickers, Aurélie Pêguissoux spat on her hands and swung an old Gilpin axe. It struck the waiting log dead centre. As the two halves fell aside, and the blade embedded itself in the supporting roundel, a satisfying clonk echoed across the woods and the quiet wintry meadows of the lower Seine valley.

Minutes later, she emerged from a woodshed with her arms full of splits and walked towards the terrace of a riverside cottage where her parents sat playing Scrabble.

The Alchemy of Chance

2010-10-07T23:20:00.005-04:00

This has been a banner day. We have a signed contract from our first author and a manuscript ready to go to the copy editor. The Alchemy of Chance, by Peter S. Brooks, is a wonderful tale, a literary and culinary mystery of the heart, starring a blind map-maker at the centre of a web of synchronicity.

In the Spring of 1977, 28 year-old Aurélie Pêguissoux sets off on the train from Paris to Brittany, with her braille books, tactile Scrabble kit and cello, to rediscover the places and loved-ones of her childhood summers, and come to terms with her recent loss of sight.

Starting out in Brest, she visits her extended family in towns dotted along the North Brittany coast. She terminates her journey in Dinard, unaware that her lifelong fascinations with twins and the stars are about to come to an unlikely climax, tangled up with a group of strangers converging on Newquay, Dinard's twin town.

Dafydd, a Welsh film-maker sent to France by his father to find his brother Sean, who went missing there ten years before, is also in Dinard, his only lead, a trail of cryptic postcards.

Aurélie and Dafydd bump into each other, and set out together on the search for Sean. By cracking the clues on the cards they manage to find his house, but not him. On the way back to Paris something in the stars prompts Aurélie to suggest a change of direction.

The Alchemy of Chance is a Romance - in the literary sense of a quest story - about the beautiful, messy, impossible coincidences that shape our lives and make the results of even our simplest actions and decisions unknowable. We're thrilled to be a part of its journey from Peter's imagination to yours.

Review - No Space for Further Burials by Feryal Ali Gauhar

2010-08-30T14:50:00.004-04:00

No Space for Further Burials by Feryal Ali Gauhar, published by Akashic Press

No Space for Further Burials is a successful novel, in great part because of its disciplined approach to pace and prose. I could replace the word prose with poetry in that sentence, for the control that Feryal Ali Gauhar exerts over diction and cadence consistently yields the effects of verse, and her book, which is from a certain perspective the unfolding of the stories that are not the narrator’s own, is a persuasive scaffold, an elegant cage, for a menagerie of souls driven mad by war.

The story of sanity and madness confused is not a new one but it remains a good one. Here the key is that the first person narrator, an American medic, taken prisoner by some ambiguous group of Afghan soldiers-marauders, is held in a dilapidated and distressed asylum. Slowly, his physical bonds are loosed and the American Firangi comes to play his role in trying to sustain the good work of the place. That good work is simple survival for all who are there. This includes keeping bandits out by repairing the wall, coping with the lack of medical and basic supplies, especially through the Afghan winter, and increasingly dealing with the sickness and disease threatening them from the front as well as the tragedies following behind them.

Those tragedies arise from the stories told by most of the characters, mainly inmates of the asylum. Over time these stories--set in italics that generally indicate we hear their own words—teaach the narrator and reader what “these people” were and what they suffered and lost, generally body parts, family members, self respect or honour in the time of war. Insanity is the least of it, so it often seems. Like most serious novels, the book is about understanding people. So here, each character emerges from the murk and grime of the insane asylum--which means from the label mad--to become a person, a story, sometimes a friend, even as the captured medic loses a proper grip on himself. We are all interchangeable, yet uniquely worth a tale, a cup of the weak tea or thin gruel that sustains life.

Insanity is merely the compulsion of suffering when the reasons for war have been lost or never existed. People are safest in the asylum that the war drove them into--some deep into the dark of the asylum’s dungeon, some into silence or blindness. The meaning of sanity is called into question, at least that is the novel’s architecture, as the narrator doubts his ability to survive, to come out of there, to get home. Over time, each of the inmates, even some of those stirred out of the dark, comes to seem less insane than fatally beleaguered. Psychologists might doubt this, but the fiction is triumphant, marching towards its disturbing but not surprising conclusion.

Shocking but not surprising could be a summary for the book. To fill the pages with so many alarming stories without jading or wholly terrifying the reader requires the rather stately, controlled, prose in which Gauhar writes. It is like reading with the handbrake on a little, for safety, providing a place for the reader to exist separate from the madness on display. The narrator, who eventually admits that he wanted to be a writer, is given the genius for such language, revealed in these journal entries. Nothing we learn about him quite allows us to believe his education or cultivation would make such writing natural for him, so if we think it plausible it’s because the force of war has linked with the American’s natural gift, his poetic nature, as it were. But either way, the novel needed this slightly chaste voice to encompass all the horrors as well as the subtleties of love that are in the path. No Space for Burials’ language is in that limited sense, in the mode of a detached traveller, flexible but only rarely coarse, always slightly elevated and therefore drenching all it sees, however mundane or vicious or mad, with human significance; but something is held back, alien, careful. On the other hand, the novel has a distinct inward turn, away from knowledge, away for the most part from philosophy or history—one character aside--and towards experience and the more recent trauma. It is not always a pleasant book, so grim are its tales, but it is a profoundly good book about bad things and lives rendered not quite futile.

By Dagar

Received - Attention Please Now by Matthew Pitt

2010-08-13T17:35:00.002-04:00

Attention Please Now by Matthew Pitt - Autumn House Press

"The world in these taut, finely wrought stories is and is not the world we know. Pitt pushes his characters to the edge of the possible with a fabulist's eye for the strange, potent detail and the realist's sure grasp of human emotion. A piquant, funny, original debut." Rachel Pastan

"The central characters of these remarkable stories are oddly ordinary and inordinately odd: that is to say, they are each uniquely qualified to speak for life outside of fiction. Pitt allows them to build the worlds they inhabit from their very particular understandings of what life is, thus endowing their narratives with unpredictable outcomes, and startlingly unexpected revelations along the way." Chuck Wachtel

"A remarkable debut by a brilliant young writer." Brian Morston

Matthew Pitt was born in St Louis. He is a graduate of Hampshire College and NYU, where he was a New York Times fellow. His work has appeared in Oxford American, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, New Letters, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. Stories of his were cited in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and have earned awards from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the St Louis Post-Dispatch. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, and has taught at NYU, Penn State Altoona, and the Bronx Writers' Center. He lives with his wife Kimberly and their two young daughters.

Received - Dodging Traffic by J Bradley

2010-08-11T15:45:00.005-04:00

Dodging Traffic by J Bradley - Ampersand Books

"J Bradley is the Veruca Salt of the literary chocolate factory, writing with a satirical brazenness that leaves cavities among the reader's eyes. There is a sugary darkness to his work and lackadaisical charm; that of a black-market dental hygienist. J delivers new audacity, important romance, and certainty. He acknowledges the sensational ugly without apprehension. His ideas are of an entirely different species and his wit laughs at postmodern... stunned today, laughing tomorrow. Dodging Traffic is the classic, the sequel will forever envy. - Sarah Morgan

"Reading J Bradley's Dodging Traffic is a lot like actually dodging traffic - both are unpredictable, thrilling, surprising. Prepare yourself because these are poems that hit hard." - Jason Jordan

"J Bradley has a pen attached to his heart. His heart has its own brain. His brain has its own heart as well, but we are unsure if there's a pen hooked up to that." Robbie Q Telfer

J Bradley is the slammaster of Broken Speech, Florida's longest running poetry slam. His work has appeared in over 40 journals in 2009 alone, earning him credit as one of the most prolific and creative talents at work today. This is his first collection.

Preacher's Blues by Ben Lowenkron

2010-08-10T13:20:00.007-04:00

Preacher's Blues - by Ben Lowenkron, published by Ampersand Books

Augustine claimed, “when what is said figuratively is taken as if it were said literally, it is understood in a carnal manner. And nothing is more fittingly called the death of the soul than when that in it which raises it above the brutes, the intelligence namely, is put in subjection to the flesh by a blind adherence to the letter.” * He would have had an interesting time reading Preacher’s Blues,’ as most of what is said figuratively can be instructively taken on a literal level, and whichever way you choose to look at it, can be appropriately understood in a carnal manner that circles back into the literal/figurative discussion. That the process is akin to the death of the soul would come as no surprise to Lowenkron, as death is always the pre-requisite for rebirth, and the possibility for rebirth looms large in the landscape of his work..
The book opens, for instance, with a short piece called ‘Bone River.’
As much as we are
love death
cling to each
move through the river

‘Move through the river’ is meant, metaphorically, to refer to our movement through the river of life into death but it also reflects a literal concern with a literal body of water, with its rising and falling water levels, with the way it effects the lives lived in its proximity. The river is also expressly a ‘carnal’ metaphor, and a ‘carnal’ reality. Centred in a Louisiana landscape devastated by hurricane the poems provide a visceral glimpse into that reality. The levees that hold back the river also keep back the rot and corruption it carries. ‘Bone River Hymnal’ asks:

Down by the levee how many graves

Apple Pie Moan’ makes the carnal – (relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites; of or relating to the body or flesh; bodily; worldly or earthly; temporal) connection even clearer –

I climb the levee’s crust
rise above bubbling rot
I need to sink my teeth in to what simmers beneath
the drooling sun

‘My River,’ on the other hand, makes explicit the sexual connotations of the river. It is both the ‘dwindling puddle’ of Preacher’s own bodily fluid – ‘how sickly I’ve been/ stagnant and receding/ since last rain’ - and the physical manifestation of his lover’s sexuality.

breach the levee
call your waters home

feed your currents
swallow me in your tide
I kneel on the shore become your waves
spread muddy legs
and I wade in

The Preacher himself is a questionable guide through a spiritual wasteland, a thoroughly unreliable Virgil arranging our passage through, not over the river. “naked he wades/bony waves…/ curses drip/ the tide blisters/ night rises from the deep.” We first meet him in ‘Terminal Three.’ “Preacher’s got the gin/ second linin’ down the moving walkway.” He’s a denizen of darkness who will teach his parish ‘to fear first light,’ a man who equates the ‘bloated dawn’ with the death of dreams and with death in general – “sun rise the end of days.” The rising sun is a ‘rising tombstone/that heaves and heaves/ and will not let go,’ and a sky spider that sucks him ‘to a brittle crop.’ He believes “everyday the levee lies and would see us drown,” yet he sits there “and plays his harp to the river/ calling each wave closer to shore.” Bone river, he warns or promises, “takes us/ as Bone River does.” His so called ‘sermons,’ a rambling stream-of-consciousness collection of impressions drowned, at times, in alcohol and despair, have much to do with ‘The Fire Sermon’ in ‘The Waste Land.’ In Eliot’s version of desolation “the river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/ or other testimony of summer nights.” Lowenkron’s river carries all of that and more, the detritus, not just of summer nights, but of all the nights the preacher is so keen to have us follow him into. Eliot’s narrator claims that “at my back in a cold blast I hear/the rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.” The Preacher has heard the same rattle and understood it as a message. ‘The Fire Sermon’ takes it’s title from the fire sermon of the Buddha, where he preached that ‘all things are on fire, with the fire of passion, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation, with birth, old age, death and sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair are they on fire,” and that “the disciple must conceive an aversion for the eye, for all the senses, “for impressions received by the mind, and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind,” so that he may become divested of passion and hence be free and know that he is free and that “he is no more of this world.” **
Preacher’s ninth sermon, ‘Gravesinger,’ acknowledges the Buddha’s metaphor and the truth behind it.

every dream turned against you
every wing stitched to earth

nothing from over the tree-line but fire

Preacher’s Blues ends with an afterword sub-titled ‘Upanisad.’

“Together a pyre.
pleading for a spark,
our tongues a song of fire.

Harmony’s tinder,
we are smoke rising
in-between words,
thunderheads
over our ashes.

In the beginning
there was nothing here at all.

Eliot’s ‘What the Thunder Said’ ends with ‘Shantih shantih shantih,’ a formal ending to an Upanisad. He claimed in a note that ‘the peace that passeth understanding’ is our nearest equivalent to the word.’ If you reach the end of Lowenkron’s chapbook still looking for an explanation for Preacher’s ambivalent attitude towards us, his readers and spiritual charges, Upanisad, provides this one – You are the day placed in front of the word/ I am the night placed behind. By extension, the poem is the thing between us, the river he would have us wade through to get to some freer, more peaceful place. Or, as he put it in ‘The Recoil’ -
the river goes nowhere I cannot
believe
these shackles are free

*On Christian Doctrine
**Notes on The Waste Land

A Conversation with Ben Lowenkron

T.T. - The river plays a key role here, showing up everywhere – in nightmares, in sexual exchanges, in ordinary observations. It’s a metaphor, a speaking entity that taunts him with his weaknesses and a body of water responding to rain and the moon, held back, or not, by the levees. Tell me about it. Is there an actual Bone River behind the poetic representation? River memories? Rivers play a large role in the mythology and literature of the country. What about in your own mythology?

Ben - Bone River does and does not exist. How's that for a non-answer? As far as I know there is no physical river named for our hardened cores. Bone River is a spin on the metaphor of the river of
life, but one that blends death into the mix, while expressing the flow and churn of a physical river, a powerful body that brings life and death equally.
In many ways Preacher's Blues is itself a river, a confluence of tributaries. One of those tributaries is Louisiana herself, a land where everything looks like it is back from the dead. I moved to Louisiana in the summer of 2005, just in time for Katrina and Rita. Timing was never my strong suit, I guess. I split my time between an apartment in uptown New Orleans off St. Charles, and a ghetto shanty in Baton Rouge, in the bottoms by the Mississippi River. The experience of living through those hurricanes (and later, Gustav) and their aftermath greatly influenced my voice, and the voices of my peers in the MFA program at LSU. One of those friends was the poet, Eric Elliott, who was also my roommate in Baton Rouge. He and I spent many nights on the levee, watching the Mississippi - it is such a powerful and important heart of our country. Goods are shipped up it, while the river itself is a second line, a funeral parade carrying America's body, the land and waste itself, out to sea.
On one of our nights on the levee, Eric and I discussed this magnetic hold that Louisiana has on the artistic and on those who see death's sickle and hang shiny plastic beads from it. Not only does everything and everyone in Louisiana look as if back from the dead, but there is a feeling in the land, in the air, in the burgeoning swamp that there is a conversation going on that is thousands of years old. This
conversation is about death and life on the most serious and the most light-hearted terms. It is a conversation that begs participation, one that is felt in the history of the region and heard in the blues. It
was a conversation calling our names.

T.T. - Influences?
Ben - I owe Preacher's Blues in many ways to Rodger Kamenetz and Andrei Codrescu. In one of Rodger's poetry workshops, we were given the task of writing a research poem. The research could be done in any manner we wished, and we had two weeks to complete the poem. I chose to listen exclusively to blues music - Delta Blues and old Texas Blues mostly: Lightning Hopkins, Skip James, Son House, Big Joe Williams, R. L. Burnside, Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson and the comprehensive George Mitchell Collection (which I received from Vince, and consists of almost an obnoxious amount of old blues). The result of those two weeks (and, truthfully, I have kept most of the artists in my rotation since the research experiment) was "Apple Pie Moan." Rodger hated the poem (rightfully so, it was told from the point of view of a dog, and simply did not work), but the voice of Preacher's Blues was born from that poem and would be honed the following semester in Andrei's workshop.
Andrei's workshop was designed around the idea of oracles. He assigned each of us a poet, and we were to pick one as well. These were to be our poetic oracles. Each week we would ask our oracles questions and then open one of their books to a random page. The first one to three lines our eyes fell upon was our answer. We would then take our q and a and use it to inform our poem for the week. I was assigned the amazing Mina Loy and chose Frank Stanford (whom I regard as the best American poet this side of Walt Whitman. He also was passed along to me by Vince, who found a dusty copy of Stanford's, "Crib Death" in the stacks at LSU). As the class progressed, I picked up a third oracle, Jeffrey Miller, whose poems, as Andrei pointed out, are written as if from beyond the grave. The majority of the poems in Preacher's Blues came from my intense discussions with Mina, Frank, and Jeff. You can still find examples of the oracle correspondence on the Equisite Corpse website, corpse.org.

T.T. - I like the picked apart etymology of the word ‘Upanisad,’ as it relates to the collection as a whole, as well as to the poem that uses it for a title - upa- (nearby), ni- (at the proper place, down) and sad ("sitting down near", and the put together implication of sitting near a teacher to be enlightened.
Ben - As far as ‘Upanisad’ is concerned, it is almost Preacher's guide to the book. It is spiritual in nature and in existence, as it was written while I was reading The Upanisads. The words closely mimic the actions and set up of the beginning of The Upanisads, where the cosmic man sacrifices his body to create the universe. The notion of sacrifice to creation is the core of Preacher and the spirit of the book itself. Its expression is the bony hand.

T.T. - Death seems to be the other big player throughout the work – gestured at by the numerous tombstones, the rot, the skeletal bits, the frequent quest for oblivion on the part of the cast. More personal mythology or is it related to the devastation of the landscape? Or perhaps the devastation of the landscape has worked its way into the personal mythology.

Ben - The character of Death comes mostly from Frank, though it owes a lot to Louisiana herself - if Death had a vacation home, it would be somewhere down River Road. In reading and communing with my oracles and in listening to a mammoth amount of the blues, death became more and more prevalent (not to mention the first hand encounter with so much death in the aftermath of the hurricanes). I wanted to write a murder ballad and from this desire, Preacher was born. But as draft after draft piled up I realized that while Preacher may or may not have nefarious intentions, the real antagonist of the poems was the sun, the entity of responsibility to all that distracts from our dreams. In our dreams we are most alive, and the sun is God's flashlight, tapping at our window, demanding we pay or bill and move along.
The birth of the evil sun idea came out of my own battles with severe depression and with bipolar disorder. In my darkest times, I would literally lie in bed, shaking uncontrollably with the overwhelming
fear of the coming day. I have always been drawn to the freedom and possibility inherent to night, a time with no time markers besides the departure and reappearance of the sun. Even in mythology, I prefer
Bacchus to Apollo 150 times out of 100. Questioning the logistics of those numbers is exactly what the damn Sun would do.

T.T. - Formal Consideration? And what about the book as an object, with its occasional pages that appear to have been typed with a ribbon past its prime, and illustrated by someone armed with a stump of charcoal and a vision of the world that vacillates between hope and despair?

Ben - The Sun wants left-justified poems. The Sun wants articles. Fuck the Sun. My poems are a rebellion against this, but also a nod to the river, to waves. Each line or couplet takes the shape of a wave. The book itself is supposed to be an artifact, something that might have been found in an old box by the river. I owe an incredible debt to Jason Cook and Ampersand Press for making a book that is a perfect expression of the work within, and that is more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.

*** Second line is a tradition in brass band parades in New Orleans. The ‘main line’ is the main section of the parade, or the members of the actual club with the parading permit; those who follow the band just to enjoy the music are called the ‘second line.’ The second line’s style of traditional dance, in which participants walk and sometimes twirl a parasol or handkerchief in the air, is called ‘second lining.’ It has been called “the quintessential New Orleans form – a jazz funeral without a body.” (Nick Spitzer, "Rebuilding the 'Land of Dreams:' Expressive Culture and New Orleans' Authentic Future" Southern Spaces, 29 August ) - wikipedia

Received - You Know Who You Are by Ian Williams

2010-08-09T18:00:00.003-04:00

"Ian Williams writes challenging poetry. His poems address the crisis of young, black masculinity in cities, paint starkly urban portraits of life and break open stereotypes the way a student taught him to snap the back of a ramen noodle packet. Sly humour laces through this collection, and Williams is adept at playing with language to change meanings in unexpected ways. For him it's easy to turn the word go into gone."

"Ian Williams' You Know Who You Are x-rays our social masks, our deceitful, greeting-card and billboard and video slogans, to show us up as who we really are - still human despite all the technology that makes us sound like idiots and prods us to feel nothing. Williams don't care about bout e-mail poses or cellphone attitude; he tears away at out language of bleeps and downloads and broadcasts to show us vulnerable, full of hurt and desire. What's he like? Think Atwood, Coupland's Generation X, and Bök: avant-garde cool, intelligent saying. Pick it up, get hooked up, see you seeing you clearer." - George Elliot Clarke

"Reading Ian Williams' poems I am both shattered and revived. They conjure a dazzling concoction of loneliness and hope, a wild display of the endless sparks and twists that become our lives. You Know Who You Are is an electric addition to Canadian poetry. What a debut!" - Carolyn Smart

Ian Williams received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is currently a professor at Fitchburg State College. He has held multiple fellowships and residencies and his writing has been in many journal across Canada and the US. Williams has a collection of short stories forthcoming from Freehand Books in 2011. He divides his time between Ontario and Massachusetts.

Received - Wanderlust by Megan Speers

2010-08-08T14:47:00.003-04:00

Wanderlust by Megan Speers - The Porcupine's Quill

"In Wanderlust, Mega Speers introduces us to an unlikely heroine who embraces a decidedly perilous by fiercely independent life in the early 2000s among the punks of Sault Ste. Marie, the third largest city in northwestern Ontario.

Proponents of similar subcultures typically self-identify in any community, so these fifty panels of images could just as accurately represent events in any small city in almost any country in the world in the thirty years since the advent of the Clash, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, and the Sex Pistols. The images are wood engravings, carved on blocks made 'by scratch' (as it were, in the true spirit of the do-it-yourself ethos) by the artist and her family. The images themselves are then scratched into the surface of the wood, depicting the mostly happy lives that the punks eke out for themselves in the back alleys and the bush surround the Sault.

Bush parties on Whitefish Island, Dumpster-diving for pizza and the anarchist aesthetic, all rendered in the bold, crisp lines reminiscent of Frans Masareel's 1919 classic graphic novel Passionate Journey, which depicts a not dissimilar idealistic individual's struggle with destiny and fate in a life that has know its joys, its illusions, and its disappointments."

Megan Speers was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1986 and lives there in a subcultural mix of punks, modern-day hippies, travellers, and anarchists until she was seventeen. Her mother was a cabinetmaker and wood-worker, which led Megan to a profound appreciation of wood and handcrafted items - a big part of the reason she chose to 'write' her graphic novel Wanderlust in wood engraving rather than the less demanding linocut. Shortly before she turned eighteen, Megan moved to Toronto to enrol at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She graduated in June 2009, after studying English, printmaking, bookbinding, and book arts. In her final year at OCAD Megan received the Bill Poole Memorial Aware (for book arts) and the Diana Myers Book Award.

Received - Reticent Bodies by Moez Surani

2010-08-06T15:16:00.003-04:00

Reticent Bodies by Moez Surani - Wolsak and Wynn Publishers

"Here's a debut that roams wildly and richly in its tones and topics, from... erotica... to poems with punchlines and lyrics of quiet elation." Steven Heighton

"Reticent Bodies is a bountiful volume. Exquisite in language, and outrageously excellent in style, these lyrics echo the vivid pictorialism of Michael Ondaatje and the painstaking truth-telling of Nazim Hikmet. Surani's lines are as incisive as scripture and as persuasive as song." - George Elliot Clarke

"Moez Surani's Reticent Bodies may be what the future of poetry in Canada will look like. His poetry rings with the linguistic rhythms of the Urdi, Swahili, Gujarti and Kutchi that he was exposed to around the kitchen table of his childhood, and his vibrant, of colour-saturated imagery captures startling fragments of Canada."

Moez Surani's writing has been included in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Carousel, Prairie Fire, Vallum, and Arc Poetry Magazine. He has served as writer-in-residence for the Toronto Catholic District School Board and curator for the Strong Words Reading Series in Toronto. HE was the recipient of a 2008 Chalmers Arts Fellowship which supported a trip through India and East Africa.

Received - Farang by Peter Blair

2010-08-04T15:02:00.004-04:00

Farang poems by Peter Blair - Autumn House Press

"Peter Blair's Farang utilizes the best elements of the travelogue, memoir, and documentary. These poems are panoramic and introspective, foreign and intimate. Crossing genres and cultures, Blair writes lucidly from the crossroads where memory and empathy intersect." - Terrance Hayes

"Lyrics poetry knows little of the East beyond Pound's "River Merchant's Wife" or Yeat's "Asiatic vague immensities." Now we have the moody, fragrant, and luminous poems of Peter Blair's Farang. Like a path between broken temples, Farang shows us a Thailand losing its past in sex bars, the fractured dreams of women, the lonely, predatory men. Can the heart's affections reach across space and nation? Blair lived and taught in Thailand, was marked as the white and fleshy farang until he nearly forgot himself. Only death brings him back to the U.S., the foreign imperium. The songs of Farang move like dark clouds and flash lightning." - David Gewanter

"The raw and ethereal beauty of Thailand is laced through these lush, narrative poms where the speaker, a foreigner teaching there, lives both inside and outside the "dream of culture..." In the full circle of this book what Blair's world traveler brings home is an aching heart and travel's one true gift - memory..." - Lisa Zimmerman

Peter Blair's most recent book is The Divine Salt published by Autumn House Press. His earlier book, Last Heat won the Washington Prize in 1999. Born in Pittsburgh, he has worked in a psychiatric ward, a steel mill, and served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Currently he teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Received - do something! by Joseph Riippi

2010-08-03T17:21:00.004-04:00

DO SOMETHING! do something! DO SOMETHING! by Joseph Riippi - Ampersand Books

"Joseph Riippi accomplished no east tging to have so well-crafted pain inside the usual streetways and bar reflections of the places I thought I knew, and with so much beauty... I fear to touch, fear that my finger will come away surprised by red, by blood. Do something indeed, whether as Faust or an Eva. Hurry up and just eat the fruit! Riippi has great literary power." Professor Carolivia Herron

"In this fragmented, nontraditional narrative, Riippi explores the aftermath of stories rather than simply telling them: a critic chants Sontag in a mental hospital; a playwright flees human shrapnel; a starfish tattoo endows a woman with newfound strength. do something!... is a story of great literary power, one that "might just change the way you look at life." Jason Cook

Joseph Riippi's essays regularly appear in The Brooklyn Rail and stories have been published in PANK, The Bitter Oleander, Salamander, Everyday Genius, New Delta Review, FlatmanCROOKED, KNOCK, and others. He lives in NYC, where he writes ads and is finishing his MFA.

Received - Complete Physical by Shane Neilson

2010-07-31T14:06:00.001-04:00

Complete Physical by Shane Neilson – The Porcupine’s Quill

Shane Neilson’s accustomed fascination with the two great subjects, love and death, has taken a purely professional interest: he has written poetry that fuses his typical poetic concerns with those of his profession as a physician. The poems in Complete Physical are primarily lyrics, but there is the occasional villanelle and sestina amidst a squalid sea of punchy narrative; all the poems ponder what it means to be ill, and some celebrate what it means to recover. Some poems even consider the tragic point at which illness becomes identity. In every poem the poet’s patients’ come alive, but the main character is the observant doctor, chiding, cheerleading, and sometimes just drawing his pay.

“...Doctors share one important thing with poets: an obsession with death. Shane Neilson has turned that obsession – and the special deathwatching vantage of his medical trade – into a collection of poems as beguiling and as brave as any I have recently read. In a clinical universe where suffering is distanced by language, Complete Physical becomes a kind of extraordinary talking cure. The human predicament has rarely found itself in such good hands.” – Carmine Starnino

The poems in Complete Physical address the most important question that the physical begs; How are we to live in this world? Neilson writes. “The poems make that question tangential, they throw in details to make the poem fastenable... but they are always answering in earnest.” Neilson is a family physician. He has written numerous books of poetry, and all of his writing shows fealty to his rural New Brunswick origins. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

Received - Glimpse:Selected Aphorisms, by George Murray

2010-07-30T18:20:00.005-04:00

"Every aphorism calls out to us, like the last line from some beautiful, but imaginary poem." Christian Bok

"Murray is as philosophically as he is humourously exact: what more can one ask of a glimpse?" -- Paul Dorcan

"Glimpse :Selected Aphorisms (ECW Press, September 2010) is a book of 409 aphorisms, a form that straddles the line between poetry and philosophy, yet is more accessible to the general public than either. Each deceptively tiny aphorism allows the reader a glimpse at an original poetic moment. These are not simply distilled poems, pre-poems, or poems explained; rather, each of them represents a crystallized essence, the truth at the heart of a poem that requires it to be written. Murray captures first thoughts generated by the impulse to write, rather than those thoughts long held and worked and shaped."

"The only thing permanent enough to remain is the time after life, which comes and never ends, unlike that which came before and during." -- from Glimpse

George Murray's four books of poetry include The Rush to Here (Nightwood, 2007) and Hunter (McClelland and Stewart, 2003). He has been widely anthologized and has published poems and fiction in journals and magazines in Canada and the United Statres, Australia and Europe. He lives in St. John's Newfoundland and is the editor of the popular literary website Bookninja.com.

Glimpse will be reviewed on this site in September.

Jacqueline Berger - The Gift That Arrives Broken

2010-07-21T23:51:00.006-04:00

In The Gift That Arrives Broken, Jacqueline Berger’s third collection of poetry, the reader finds himself listening in on a conversation about the middle aged consciousness. The poems speak directly to him, to each other, and to the wider poetic community.
The ironically titled ‘The Failure of Language’, for instance, a poem about the many ways language actually succeeds in communicating important human truths, is representative of the themes of the book and speaks directly to Jack Gilbert’s ‘Finding Something.’ The poems share ideas and questions about the sufficiency or insufficiency of love, or utterances of love, an insistence on the omnipresence of death, and the value of both the love and the utterances in spite of that presence. Although the poem begins with a group of students considering whether language “is our best tool” or whether it “fails to express what we know and feel,” and deciding overwhelmingly that it fails, both poets share the belief that “language is what honors the vanishing,” perhaps “what slows the leaving,” and ‘deepens what we know of loss.”
“Is it because they’re young,
still find it hard to say what they mean?
Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body,
anything wordless as the best way in?
I think about the poet helping his wife to die,
calling his heart helpless as crushed birds
and the soles of her feet the voices of children
calling in the lemon grove, because the tool
must sometimes be bent to work.”
The poet speaks to her readers, asking them the same questions she asks her students, inviting all of them to consider the ways in which “the tool must sometime be bent to work.” When she turned her mind to the same problem, the answer that occurred to her was Gilbert’s poem, not because she’s interested in the sort of poetic allusion that amounts to name dropping but because the poem ‘lives deeply’ in her, and provides an answer in the way it speaks ‘very clearly, but not directly.’ “To me” she said, “those crushed birds couldn't be more emotionally accurate, but they are weird, and that's maybe the only way to get to it.” She speaks to Gilbert’s poem, then, as a way into the problem of making language deal with the important problems of love and death. Gilbert, in the meantime, is speaking to T.S. Eliot’s burnt Norton, evoking his children hiding in the leaves.
“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
The Eliot allusion closes a circle, bringing both Gilbert and Berger back to the fact that what is actually being discussed is that “one end” always present, especially in midlife as we watch the decline and death of our parents, the last line of defence between us and our own mortality..
The abstract discussion of the utility of language gives way to a story about a friend in hospital that speaks directly to the issue:
“She tells me she’s not going to make it,
doesn’t think she wants to,
all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in.”
When the narrator leaves she whispers “I love you,” words, she says “that maybe have lost their meaning, being asked to stand for so many unspoken particulars,” but which have, in this case, a peculiar potency based at least partly on those many unspoken particulars. The same holds true for the exchange at the end of the poem.
“It’s my friend herself who is fragile.
When I take her out to eat, each step is work.
The restaurant is loud and bright.
She wants to know if she looks normal.
I make my words soft. Fine,
which might be the most useless word in English,
everything is going to be fine.”
Now ‘fine’ is a very flexible word, capable of impressive contortions. It suggests, among other things, something of superior quality, something very thin or slender, something characterized by elegance or refinement, something satisfactory or acceptable, something in a state of reasonable health. It allows the anxious hearer to project all manner of reassuring things onto itself while allowing space for the unavoidable fact that things are less than optimal.
Gilbert’s “Finding Something” deals with the slow death of his wife, and with his own involvement in the intimacies and indignities of the process. “How strange and fine” he says, “to get so near to it,” and that nearness, that involvement looms large in ‘The Gift That Arrives Broken’, the title poem of the collection, a work that reads as a continuation of the stream of thought in ‘The Failure of Language.’ The breakdowns of the body in ‘The Failure of Language’ are closer to home and more explicitly dealt with in ‘The Gift That Arrives Broken’, the contact with the darkness more intimate. ‘Finding Something’ opens with the answer to an unheard question.
“I say moon is horses in the tempered dark,
Because horses is the closest I can get to it.”
It’s a strange opening, and a fairly unsatisfactory answer that refers back to our inability to put what we mean into words. Amy Lowell, in ‘Night Clouds’ uses the same image – “The white mares of the moon rush along the sky / Beating their golden hoofs upon the glass heavens;”- with no more elucidation than Gilbert provides. In fact Gilbert’s opening could easily be interpreted as Lowell’s non-answer to the ‘why’ that occurred to him, sitting on a terrace in Italy thinking about her poem and watching his wife die. “Fly, Mares!’ Lowell warns, “Strain your utmost/ Scatter the milky dust of stars,/ Or the tiger sun will leap upon you and destroy you.”
The narrator of ‘The Gift That Arrives Broken’ returns to the “tempered dark” of Gilbert’s poem but ventures right into it, at least in imagination, then anticipates the coming confrontation with Lowell’s ‘tiger sun.’
“I order something sweet and strong
and we talk about death.
We wander out into its moonless night,
stand in its dark field.
We are near enough to see how the end
might come and willing
to look into the eyes of the animal
that will tear us apart.”
The poem concludes with the same emphasis on acts of care-giving that ‘The Failure of Language’ and ‘Finding Something’ do, and the same insistence on the value of love and the sufficiency of language.
“I come close to telling my brother
I love him, something I have
never said before.
He likes to be the one
to wheel our dad in the chair
when we go out for dinner.
We are a family in our last years.
I hold my mother’s hand.
My brother gets the door.”
“There are no right words,” Berger says, in The Failure of Language, “if by right we mean perfect, if by perfect we mean able to save us,” but she returns here to the ones that will suffice. ‘I love you’ is not, perhaps, a perfect expression of what she feels for her brother, and it may not save them, but it will do.
The collection could have been called “Dayenu,” a Hebrew word that means “it would have been enough” or “t would have been sufficient.” If her father had survived his stroke but it hadn’t brought her family closer together, it would have been enough. If her family grew closer but it hadn’t given her these poems, it would have sufficed. “For a little while” she writes in ‘The Magic Show,’ “amazement is enough.” Life seems to amaze Jacqueline Berger and her poems are full of that amazement, full of appreciation, gratitude, compassion, empathy, and wisdom. Life is a gift, in these poems, and if a gift is given, she tells us, it is enough, whatever state it arrives in.

T.T. In ‘The Failure of Language’ you talk about the way your students answered your question about the ability of language to express “what we know and feel.” The negative response is perhaps surprising from a generation addicted to constant written communication. What do you make of it?

J. B. Ironically, young people who are so busy texting etc. are also very circumspect, very careful not to say anything too risky. I really do think it takes a level of emotional maturity or confidence to be awkward, to go out on a limb, to risk rejection, in life and in poetry. I love this about Robert Hass's work -- the conscious struggle or process as part of the poem. Not easy to pull off, but I really appreciate it.

T.T. Could you comment on the title “The Gift That Arrives Broken.

J.B. To begin with, The gift that arrives broken was a line in the poem, not the title. The line didn't work, but I was very happy that it found its job as title of the poem. I'm unbelievably bad at coming up with titles, so when that one arrived, I gave it not only the poem but the whole book! It really did seem right for the book as these last six years of family life (since my father's stroke and my mother's illnesses) have been our closest ones. As gift, yes, but not a shiny, new one. And don't we all need to be broken to get down to the core? Not that it always works that way, I know. Some breaks are about damage more than awareness or closeness, but for me that's not the case right now.

T.T Your narrators are in mid life, confronting the fact that death is getting closer, and the line of defence between them and it are crumbling, but your poems speak as much to the young as to the middle-aged, with a kind of reassurance that things aren’t as bad as they might seem from a distance.

J.B. I write from my life, and I'm not young anymore and don't feel young -- though I know we're always supposed to feel 21. It's mostly good being not young; I never really liked young. So my concerns are those of mid-life. I'm not sure how young readers respond to this -- I'm sure many of them have experienced far more loss than I have, in all kinds of ways. I'm not sure it's age as much as other factors of personality that draw us to what we love to read. I do think we "read" the same books very differently at different times in our lives. That's not to say our early readings are wrong; books just deepen over time.

Jacqueline Berger is the author of two previous books of poetry, Things That Burn, and The Mythologies of Danger. Her work has also appeared in numerous journals including The Iowa Review, River Styx, and New Millennium Writings. She teaches creative writing and directs the graduate program in English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. The Gift That arrives Broken is available from Autumn House Press at http://www.autumnhouse.org/.

Now On Facebook!

2010-07-06T16:40:00.003-04:00

The Tangerine Tree Press is now on Twitter and Facebook!

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Tangerine Tree Press

2010-07-05T18:37:00.006-04:00

We'd like to announce the existence of Tangerine Tree Press as a real entity in the real world. We're registered with the state of Connecticut, we have a website, and we have this wonderful new blog. Perhaps those last two also make us a virtual entity in the virtual world. Or maybe a real entity in the virtual world. Visit our website at http://www.tangerinetreepress.com/. Stay tuned for information about upcoming publications and the launch of our review of books published by independent presses.