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May 15, 2013 • HOW POEMS WORK KEN BABSTOCK Hay By Paul Muldoon This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn off Province Line Road I meet another beat-up Volvo carrying a load of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne on the roof rack, a bale of lucerne or fescue...
Click on poem to advance. Monday — From The Weather, New Star Books (2001) And poetry can also be sculpture, or at least more like sculpture than it’s like conversation. Lisa Robertson’s Monday , from her collection The Weather, is a poem that defies immediate analysis, although even the most perplexed reader will still be able to state a...
The Provisions BY PETER CULLEY Between the storms of October And the storms of March the deep, wide trench Of this afternoon, one of a series making up This temporal lapse, this interregnum In which we are involved. Ignorant as I am I hardly dare to speak of it, But the fabric of its projection...
the last time I saw you I was so angry at the most unnegotiable parts of yourself that I thought “black hole lobbed around twice‟. my thoughts were distorted, this is how angry I was. it felt like I meant the anger and was afraid to lose the anger. now I miss the anger. my...
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May 7, 2013 • PORTOBELLO by Glyn Maxwell When you were the one reading My palm, in the second hour of our one life, And I, sitting back for good and noticing white stuff Suddenly falling on Portobello and staying, You couldn’t for all the books in the world have learned More than one watching us, Who buttered his...
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May 6, 2013 • Installation BY HELEN HUMPHREYS What we make doesn’t recover from us. Twisted scaffold, trellis of rust. This is how we will be gone. The steel hull grinning with rivets. Shiny notes of chrome swinging from the stave of the wrecker’s wall. Those we loved and nothing for that. The moon a chalk circle over dark...
Bad Faith Denial of Agency Pollution of Agency The Double Standard of Content False Categorizing Isolation Anomalousness Lack of Models Response Aesthetics I have been gathering found poems such as the one above for several years now. They are, in a sense, too easy and I’m wary of actually doing anything with them, but...
With Love, Jan but to go there the mind endlessly is singing – Sappho The poems we haven’t read must be her fiercest: imperfect, extreme. – Jane Hirschfield [These are not propositions, but several halves of several potential metaphors.] Like wind turns a strand of exhaled smoke in a helical twist like a skipping rope,...
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Apr 26, 2013 • UNEQUAL TO ME* Much of the novel seems held together with a kind of teary hormonal paste. There’s been much recent parley about “men’s fiction” and the vaginal shadow it has been condemned to live in. I can sniff out the ink of the men. But has the author made his parents proud? What do...
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Apr 24, 2013 • From “Introduction: No Archive is Neutral,” Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (edited by Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl). You can read one of the chapters, by Daphne Marlatt, that we posted earlier this week. Buy the book. It’s really great. Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace is,...
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Apr 23, 2013 • Field-Crossing by DAVID O’MEARA The clover’s razed; the ground is autumn-hard. The land bristles in a ragged frame. I’m on the far end, watching weightless clouds hastened by wind, the day dark but huge with a muscled rustling. A hydro pole impales the midriff of the field — a world-tree ripe with announcements; a pivot staking...
The general aim of this “reportage” is to begin to put in relief some of the ongoing conversations put forth by the experimental writing community regarding the perceived lack of “a more ambitious critical environment as it pertains to interpretation of contemporary literature” (Carla Harryman “Reading Difficult Writing” panel). This professed lack of critical reception,...
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Apr 20, 2013 • While reading Pain, Porn and Complicity my mind kept returning to that bizarre Stephen Marche interview of Megan Fox in Esquire. It was mysteriously bad. It was doesn’t-make-sense bad. At the time I thought Marche had played his hand early on in the piece, when he wrote “the symmetry of her face, up close, is...
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Apr 18, 2013 • Propagation Laura Elrick Kenningeditions.com, 2012 For better or for worse, there’s been a great deal of handwringing over stolen language – appropriation, collage, the overheard, the copied, the received. But perhaps it is not the stealing that is the big deal – or whatever verbs that mask that primary trauma (a trauma for some; not...
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Apr 18, 2013 • [Vancouver writer Andrew Zuliani interviewed Stephen Collis in early March 2013, ahead of the publication of Collis’s novel, The Red Album, by Toronto publisher BookThug] AZ: Writing prose fiction—or, at least, publishing prose fiction—is something of a watershed change for you. Your output until this point has been decidedly centralized on poetry and non-fiction (maybe...
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Apr 17, 2013 • Review by Sarah Bernstein As I read and reread Croak by Jenny Sampirisi, endeavoring to find a point of entry, I thought at last: yes, that’s it. Thresholds. The bodies in Croak spill over their own bounds; they have extra digits or limbs or else they have too few or else those they do have...
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Apr 17, 2013 • To think about women’s archives is to think about how recently (say, in the last century and a half) women’s lives in the Western world have moved from the private and domestic sphere to the public cultural-political one, becoming “collectable.” This transit from private to public is embedded in the origin (or at least as...
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Apr 17, 2013 • “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?” The women of the playboy mansion are not home. Not a single blonde lounges by the pool, or on the California King sized bed. It appears that the playmates have left for the day or are hiding somewhere within the cinematic frames of these “room shaped” poems. Though seemingly vacant,...
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Apr 17, 2013 • Anne Carson’s new “re/verse-novel” re-spins time, grief, thinking, psychoanalysis and the poem by Margaret Christakos Spin One: Time Anne Carson is a writer whose compulsion to understand time is bottomless. One of the few poets in North America obsessed with the ancients, Carson delivered in 2006 her intimate, profoundly contemporized translations of Euripedes under the...
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Apr 17, 2013 • Then, one Saturday, John came in to see me three times during my shift. Right before he left the last time, he leaned in really close. He smelled kind of weird, like my mother when she made meat. John said, ‘Do you like Chinese food? Have you ever gone out with your friends for Chinese...
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Apr 17, 2013 • “Tell me where we can go / to be alone and have some kind of communion” Aisha Sasha John asks in her debut poetry collection. The answer, which appears in the poem as a refrain, is “The Shining Material”—the title of the book as well as the poem. The poem is a call-and-response piece,...
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Apr 17, 2013 • Anselm Berrigan has just about finished tweeting in reverse chronological order most of the material from a long poem made of a spatially regulated succession of single floaty lines called Primitive State, which Edge Books will republish some time down the road. His long poem Notes from Irrelevance, published by Wave Books in 2011 seems...
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Apr 17, 2013 • Debaucher’s Trivia as Villanelle “What does it matter what you say about people? What’s the last word in A Touch of Evil?” — Jason Camlot, The Debaucher What does it matter what you say about people? If I’m up after hours, which bars should I know? What’s the last word in A Touch of Evil?...
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Apr 17, 2013 • In our mashup-mad era, we yearn for unpigeonholeability. We don’t want to be different. We want to be weird. We want to be total category-killers. As a result, it’s hard to find a poet – free-versifier and formalist alike – who doesn’t believe at heart that he or she is far too heterodox to be...
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Apr 17, 2013 • COCK TEASE She had a raw mouth for twelve, barely-there breasts and a name that made her reckless and surly by turns. She liked to be touched and could see it might be her undoing, she fended off advances with savage fatalism or shifted just out of reach like a sunbather avoiding a creeping block...
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Apr 17, 2013 • PIGS by Les Murray Us all on sore cement was we. Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush under that pole the lightning’s tied to. No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy. Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp. We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush. Us all fuckers then....
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Apr 17, 2013 • When on occasion I teach poetry, one of the main things I try to instill in my students is, to quote Spicer, “Poet, be like God.” To go from trying to write poetry to really writing poetry, there’s a leap that has to happen, and that leap is a realization that you are the god...
Robin Richardson is the author of Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press) and the forthcoming Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis (ECW Press). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in many journals including Tin House, Arc, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and The Cortland Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the ReLit...
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Apr 17, 2013 • “I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck, talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children, final semester college seniors, bloodshot, collars undone, gorgeously exhausted, return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky— the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet....
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Apr 17, 2013 • Novel or update? Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too is composed entirely of Facebook status updates from the 25 Things About Me meme that we all did a few years back. What does it take to turn a few status updates into a novel? Several things. You’ll find a few of them here in...
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Apr 17, 2013 • Matthew Tierney is the author of three books of poetry. Poems excerpted from Probably Inevitable. His previous book, The Hayflick Limit, was shortlisted for a Trillium Book Award. He is a former recipient of the K.M. Hunter Award, and has placed his poems in numerous journals and magazines across Canada. He lives in Toronto. Click...
I’ve written in several places about erasure texts (most recently in the latest issue of Evening will come) as typified by Jen Bervin’s nets. Berlin’s Natalie Czech creates uncanny limit-case poems that point to the end of erasure texts, each piece a seemingly impossible conjuring of texts within texts. Czech’s Je n’ai rien à dire....
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Apr 17, 2013 • Review by Alan Reed First, I must confess to not being entirely impartial when it comes to Eric Chevillard. He is already among my favourite writers, he has been for years. I discovered him by chance‚ I was a student living in Toronto when I came across one of his novels on a display table...
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Apr 16, 2013 • A sound installation from one of my excellent students from our OffThePage event featuring Chantal Neveu, Laura Broadbent and Jon Paul Fiorentino. Borders: Benjamin Spencer
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Apr 10, 2013 • Aside from having amazing production values, this little video includes the faces and voices of some of the most interesting writers huddled in Toronto at this moment…how many? Who are they? Who is watching who? I asked David Seymour how a poet came to make such a slick poetry trailer: I had two poems in...
Classical satire has two distinct streams. The first, following Horace, is gentle and urbane, with a soft, self-effacing mien. The second, derived from Juvenal, is nasty, vicious, and angry. Both take aim at what they see as the foibles and failings of society, but they employ very different tonal registers to do so. As Roger...
1. Matérialité : Comment pensez-vous que la permanence ou l’impermanence de votre travail éclaire son sujet? Vous sentez-vous que vos œuvres moins tangibles ou de nature moins permanente vous permettent de prendre plus de risques? Éprouvez-vous de la nostalgie envers l’imprimé? Each work has its own issues, but materiality is always one.Take LOVE FROM NEW...
Reading: Tanis MacDonald. “The pilgrim and the riddle: Father-daughter kinship in Anne Carson’s “The Anthropology of Water.” Canadian Literature 176 (Spring 2003): 67-81. “When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right.” (Anne Carson, “The Anthropology of Water” 170) One of the earmarks of a wonderful essay...
John Wentworth, Governor of Nova Scotia: Libertine I. My Lady’s Champagne sex— bubbly, prickly, toasts a garden-party orgy. Madame sports cake-frosting lace, but she’s just perfumed pork. Dark, greasy vermin rapture her flesh. They hold her; cuckold me. Don’t she love to pivot upon a bull-headed, bull-thighed, bull-cock...
An Atlas of the Atlas Moth Now I am an adult & I will never eat again. All the weight & elaboration that ever took in a morsel of anything save air & sex have fallen away & remain in my soft cocoon, whose lost array of silk will last longer than I do....
Misfortune after Nerval’s “El Desdichado” My morning star’s dead and my disconsolate lute Smashes in the blackened sun of torn alibi. In the tomb of every night, memories of Venetian reveries raw rub the inconsolable Pitch of the dark, where over and again I love you. __________________________ Charles Bernstein lives in New York and is...
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Feb 15, 2013 • Custom We maintain a critical distance from the sad spaniel gentlemen in cravats on the plaid duvet at the Custom Hotel, Los Angeles. We are so over it. We fly from terminal to terminal almost endlessly. We are almost money. We can wait at high speed. In the Rae Armantrout poem “Custom,” language is used...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Kleptomaniacs As long as you keep an open mind about the thing you seek, it’s always in the first place you look. Gabe Foreman, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People “The rich have kleptomania, while the poor are taken down with larceny.” Superintendent of a second-hand department store, New York, 1878 (Segrave...
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Feb 14, 2013 • More than We Can Bear Where you going? To CHURCH? Our upstairs neighbour, Clarice, liked to hang off her balcony and scream this at me and Lafitte, if we happened to be walking together, wearing black. I would soon learn this was her only endearing quality. When he and I moved into the house in...
Welcome to “On Beauty,” a series of interviews with poets about their relationship to beauty. (For a complete introduction to the project, see ‘Poets on Beauty.’) I’m kicking off volume III of Lemon Hound with an interview with Sachiko Murakami, poet and editor, whose online interactive projects are experiments in collective authorship. I hope you enjoy...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in their best order,” which I have long misremembered as “the right words in the right order,” one of those double-positives that seems to fall apart upon examination. I’ve never been sure in what way “the wrong place at the wrong time” is worse than the...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Reviewed by Fenn Stewart not for lack of wolves or inside of wolves or besides the point of wolves Liz Howard’s Skullambient makes tracks across the landscapes of anti-Ontari-ari-ario; it meditates on the bleak & vivid spaces of a Canada that’s been built & nourished on appropriated land, trees, water, art. Howard’s scene is...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Review by Aimee Wall It’s such a cliché to speak of someone having been “ahead of their time.” And a little frustrating. We can only really ever say that in hindsight; it feels like the kind of praise that’s too little, too late. I started writing this review trying to avoid that sentiment, but in...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Review by Allison LaSorda Late last year, Russell Smith of The Globe and Mail wrote an article on Canada’s unlikely poetry renaissance; in it, he suggests an increasing interest in poems that are “just on the line between the lyrical and the full-on experimental,” recalling a bygone era wherein there was “a lot of nature...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Review by Jacob Wren I am Facebook friends with Matias Viegener but have never met him. I have many Facebook friends I’ve never met (in fact, most of them.) I am told this is called being a ‘collector’ but I certainly don’t think of it in this way. I suppose what I think is that...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Review by Karl Fenske Cosmo is impossible to tear away from without gushing embarrassing mawkishness. From a galaxy of personalities, a character is plucked and presented to the reader straight. One is led by a benevolent narrator through celebrity and nobody, helium pop and deficient art, all given equivalent currency. For all the presence of...
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Feb 14, 2013 • Review by Heather Cromarty A little less then ten years after her first video, where she played the perfect conception of a virgin-whore, Britney Spears seemingly lost her mind. By then a divorced mother of two, Britney was for a short time uncontrollable, too wild, and unredeemable. She lived as a construction of our society,...
We asked writers for the cheeky, the surprising, the twist in the V-Day poem. All for love or knot for love. JAN ZWICKY If I’m allowed to suggest a poem about love, I’d like to recommend Sue Sinclair’s “Passion”, from Breaker (Brick 2008). It’s a philosophical meditation on love in the widest sense — not for a human being, or even some other...
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