ottawater edited by: rob mclennan | January 2015 design by: tanya sprowl I I

STEVEN ARTELLEThree poems ............................ 3

JENNIFER BAKERPhantom Limb .......................... 4

SELINA BOANExhale ....................................... 6

FRANCES BOYLEPursuit ...................................... 7The Music Holds You ............... 8Cringe ....................................... 8Land line ................................... 8

JAMIE BRADLEYMunicipal Song ........................ 9

RONNIE R. BROWNDREAM #7 ................................ 12

CATHERINE BRUNETRequiem for the Train ............... 13

JASON CHRISTIELa Morte d’Artur ...................... 14

FAIZAL DEENMOM & BOB: Matinees ........... 16

DALTON DERKSONbissett onna bus ....................... 18

AMANDA EARLThree from Saint. Ursula’s

Commonplace Book ............... 19

PHIL HALLCarnivale .................................. 20Little Fiddle .............................. 20

CHRIS JOHNSONEchoes and Other Repetitions . 21This poem as your dream ........ 21

MATT JONESCaptain ..................................... 22Burn a Koran Day ..................... 22

A.M. KOZAKSPINOZA’S RACECAR ............... 23

BRENDA LIEFSOIn the small hours .................... 24Anniversary Poem .................... 24Clay Bowl ................................. 24Unexplained Phenomena ......... 24words on the birth of a

daughter ................................. 25What It All Comes Down To,

Part I ....................................... 25Calgary Father Kills Tenant,

Three Children, Wife, Before Killing Self .............................. 25

On Worship............................... 25The Hard Facts Are .................. 25

ROB MCLENNANCorporation of snow: ............... 26

CATH MORRISDrawn ....................................... 29

COLIN MORTONLast Rites ................................. 30

ALCOFRIBAS NASIER II(32)............................................ 31

PEARL PIRIEhow to express a different

point of view ......................... 32tied ........................................... 32

NICHOLAS POWERExcerpts from a series called

Tin Dittoes .............................. 33[the following are edited

centos] .................................... 34[excerpts from wild

uncertainties] ......................... 36

RYAN PRATTMontreal express, 6:40 ........... 38

MONTY REIDfrom INTELLIGENCE ................. 39

SONIA SAIKALEYBasho’s Haiku Goes to

the Frogs ................................ 40The Red Bridge ......................... 40

DEAN STEADMANMorning at the Museum

with Mr. Rux ........................... 41

ROB THOMASdon’t get cute with me ............. 42

DENNIS TOURBINCanoe Lake ............................... 43What do I know about

the landscape ......................... 44

LAUREN TURNERFaulty introductions ................. 45

VIVIAN VAVASSISidentity, era and echo .............. 46

WAR POET: An Interview with Matt Jones ............................... 47

GOING BACK INTO THE TANGLE: An interview with Brecken Hancock, by Lesley Strutt ............................. 50

CONFESSION & FETISHES: Jennifer Baker in conversation with Phil Hall ........................... 53

Cover Art by DIANE LEMIREDoll. felted with wool and fond objectsWWW.TOURCW.COWWW.PAF-FAS.ORGL. A. PAI GALLERY

Contents

ottawater: 10 - 3

one rabbit imagined an inverted historyin which the permanent gods delivered a tributeof weeping disease to all the kings of doomed Europein the holds of their plundered ships, in the enslaved bloodof the Defeatadors who staggered back onto theirreceding shores, nameless and unchronicled, with wordof an invulnerable multitude that armouredthe earth like volcanic glass, lacerating the solesof every alien who dared to press the pure soilwhere the Triple Alliance Empire ruled in glory

and with their own language between their teeth, the righteousAztec nations pursued them over the jade oceanwith Quetzalcoatl’s devout armada, bringingshields and axes and cane arrows, and dreaming of spoilin return: amber and turquoise and the skins of birdsbut who beheld without wonder and without mercythe meagre cities of the new world—then four hundrednights of sorrows began, as sickness and warriorsoverwhelmed the courts of Lisbon, of Madrid, of Romeand in their holy wake crashed the blasphemous idols from every dome and installed Ometeotland the Hummingbird and the Lord of the Place of Deathand the great inebriated rabbit pantheon

then for centuries on the pyramids of Parisand forever in the glyphs of London’s great temple another modernity called the Pax Aztecacarved the trajectory of culture through sacrifice

then suddenly her boarding call, and the reverievanished in the frantic search for her buried passport

Steven ArtelleThree poems

when the salt rabbit melted in the mouth of the rainthey say that’s when the war of the wallflowers began

for sugar, a bottle of bridesmaids came licking, shamedin seafoam, and went away thirsty with stinging hands

into an ambush of trophy wives, their blackjacks aimedat last to tie the precious metal grudge in ribbons and turn the world wateryeyed in the meangirl wind who knows what the rabbit did all the while, maybe yawnedor maybe mercuried all the way to the oceanwith winter shitsoup and rivulets of gasoline

under manila sunsets and nostalgic kitchenspill light, into the pitchblack of childhood terrain

the untalkedabout downhill, between the nonstop stemsof mazegrass, disappeared, never to be seen again

the last of the desiccated men finally stoodface to face beyond alkali civilizationwhere homesteader Death staked its claim with petrified treesand the loose end of the railroad and unrequitedcruelty, where nothing moved except prehistoricmemory with a harmonica fixed in its teethand a rabbit shaped like a tumbleweed, who cartwheeledpast the archetypes—black hat of evil incarnatebleached hat of righteous vengeance—immobilized in theirextinction speed until the gunslinger end of time

ottawater: 10 - 4

Jennifer BakerPhantom Limb in his review of Reaney’sA Suit of Nettles Northrop Frye declaressouthern Ontario surely one of the most inarticulate communitiesin human culture

*

speak/cannibalize

practicality: click/lock engine spits & shuffles

its parietal praxis convention understanding need

in the amygdalalanguage branches arbourtrary:

body of evidence/post-traumatic/letting go

corpus/brains/sepulchre

*

he grins a PTO amputation

our rotationseems static/but a hum

one unbuttoned cuff & tendons recoila cautionary nub offered to a semicircleof seven-year-olds

you can feel it

he says

I can still feel itsometimes it aches

grasp the ghost hand

*

field bindweed

morning glory running rootstocks

every portion will produce new plantsif broken

hydra-like/gorgon-hairedsome days an oathto go completely

feral

noticeable localities: Usborne Hay Stephen Tuckersmith Montreal Ottawa

produces few seedsthere

no need

multiplesthrough injury impostor

has everywhere a most persistent habitof growth

each wound trumpets invitation: expand

ottawater: 10 - 5

*I want my lexicon to rip organic through concrete

branch new grief tributaries

echo hymns sung to barn catssheltered under a pine tree in the snow

litanies to the abandoned lilting in the scrawlache alwaysa barren landscape

familiar & banal & tender

gut-punch *

shout openings sever the homeplace

nerves reach out & clutch—inarticulate

snap & tether

a snare I / un / knot

Gayle Kellsuntitled, Meandering seriesink on paper

ottawater: 10 - 6

Selina BoanExhale

we arrive blinking lullabies, breathing toothbrush stories, sinking yarn bodies to pews. hesitate chatter.

patter of hands to backs, we can’t help but fragment. trace ephemeral bone towards amnesia. what we want is your button holes and sandpaper fingers, thirteen backyard fences of youth and impersonation of oscar wilde, bending cartwheels and lexicons. we gulp up clattered amalgamation, clutter diction against inhale of lavender oatmeal, marmalade raspberry patch. self to ghost-hum. make into you allegory breath.

Allen EganThe Declaration 36X48 oil on canvaswww.eganacci.wix.com/allen-egan-paintings

ottawater: 10 - 7

kneeling beside the prayer bench with holy hush betweenits rising notes, the song sidesteps the crushing engine,the forward movement. The song evades, the song evokes, the song shades in variations of rainbow grey. How the song squeaks itself outhigh and – what’s that sound? – cricket creak, frog croak, peal of tinny tiny electric bell. Spoke on a wheel, flap of playing card, engine can’t catch the high pitched song. How so song? Where is the reckoning? What a wayto move, shadow sideways on top of the motionthe force, the hum.

Frances BoylePursuit

How song evades the engines Pearl Pirie “Mammals of Hoarfrost”

Engine hums since it doesn’t know the words, rhythm up and downand rhythm fast and slow. Thrum hum, beedlepop and ping, the song skirts the turning internalcombustion piston pumping, spark plug arcingacross the leads, the song dancing, bip bippinga sprite teasing out of the way, engine hard and greasywith its effort, puts its head down and runs,runs into the future. And the song half-envious

hangs behind, skirls over and around, evading the rhythm but losing its yowl, its impetus. Worst news ever, cat and mouse empty coconut shells, ball beneath rattling choice.Instinctive shuffle and bounce, nothingup your sleeve, show the forearms. It’s allabout the evasive song and the engine’s relentlessone-sided pursuit, how the song bounces effortlesslyon the surface away from the churning pig-headedengine, the containment, the compression,invades the momentum, gives voice to the rhythm

ottawater: 10 - 8

Land line

Sub(vocal) texts, cassis flavoured cocktailsare zipped sotto voce, new afflictionsabound: tendonitis of the thumb, ringing in the ear. On the bus, choruses of he said I said she went. Dinner partnerspalm their own jaws, carry onseparate discussions at restaurant tableswhile the food cools. Drivers sproutblue teeth the better to speak to you, my dear.24/7 now. Connected.

What does it do to plot linestrite and true? Long evenings crazy-waiting by the phone. The stranded motoriston the dark highway in the rain, taillightssmears of red as she makes for the isolated booth where water blurs its glass wallsdrops stand dark in shadow.A heavy breather or kidnapper on the line, notpinpointable. Line stretched taut through treetopsbetween tin cans held to children’s ears.The unanswered call, and chidingor frantic voice recording I know you’re there, pick uppick up!

The Music Holds You The music holds you in its thin white arms,emptying silence of its false alarms.Caught by the intricate leitmotif, you won’t hear the rustle of a brittle leafor the sound of a cry from the shore, from the farms.

A deep chord promises to fend off all harms.The counterpoint undertone soon disarmsguards who would keep you from its sweet relief.The music holds you.

The beguiling theme with its sinuous charmswraps around you. It soothes and it warmsCan you ever quite trust it, can you hold to belief?Or will you always fret about the jagged reefyou could fall upon in the height of storms?The music holds you.

Cringe

The windows conspirewith the dying light,make themselves intowraparound riot shields,send back glare

as silver-edged bruises.The neighbourhood knowsjust enough to be afraid,to hide behind the bristling backsof the sentinel firs.

The crescents close in,ever tighter loops,and the windows unblinkinglink arms againstwhat the air wafts in.

ottawater: 10 - 9

Jamie BradleyMunicipal Song

The city pulls buildings down,puts others up, worries.

To wake up beside you & think orangesin another poem.

The intimate world can be mistakenfor fading.

If you took oil to my shouldersthey would still be my shoulders.

I am trying to do something without harm:to count hours without a watch.

***

Whiskey-struck talk: urgent newsof foreign minds.

I am grown too impossible for children,as a category.

The whole foments:a hot kiln, appreciable.

Ice distends from nude branches, formsa hanged man. A brassiere of noise.

***

silt-pale, depth is conjecture rock bass drunk as hummingbirds plunge, a theory if you understood

to anchor disturbance, devotion to blood a shade darker, a bruise is a broken advance the city: a shape you pour

***

it motion detectors

hums with appearance

photographs undo your old blond road your own part of the problem where do you think of when you think of your

the debt of your activation

the appeal against brute force

***

a child remembers inside a Chinese restaurant:

the beansprouts dark & woody dis-immediate space

whiskey-kiss voices another room

invisible cares distance

the way we talkabout power

***

where does refractionstake its quill

if you were the other nightas if conducting with your palmscould make it so

the television assumptionof ex-wifery

a spirit of dislocation

the ocean far from land lightening daily the ply of

ottawater: 10 - 10

something to do withcool pyrite

an unscheduled distresswhere income goes

***

ghost boxes drown lifelike: the city underpins its own form

where old record shops go austere sandy-mottle print

a poltergeist is a live happening:

you are still here your awful body a frequency

embedded in a room

it’s time for us to talk aboutwhere the stars go

***

a steaming mare in her stall& you call her river

each mouth un-coinsagain

to refuse in sound to measureto narrow expansive:

the cutlery hum–our fingers

why say naturalwhen we mean dying?

***

An anonymous consensualgrope. Seasonal activity.

I have designs on the finerhouses. I design the alphabet.

Having to discover difficultventricles. Ghost box habits.

How to keep outsides inside.Constitutional tactics. Love.

***

As if wandering midnightthrough town, throat-sore.

The night’s final oriental arc.Shadows cast across.

The city heaps its ordinarydisquiet.

The expectorate value. My.Hand. This dumb lyric boat.

***

I.distances you refuse to cross

:to canvas for a spellrecede & take order

where does the city enter into it?

the human material piggy rotundcurvature

to transpireto develop ephemeral needs

the kinky access: the interlocutor

luck of being

I develop the concept of dispossessionfirmly

***

II.go into order your city’s mouthmy body

is at least conceptual & thereforegenerated by a process

I have my life I can draw cold sweatsthe mechanics of shopping in many storesunder fewer roofs, something to saythis thing happened;

***

III.the tune embroidersdraws up mal-factions

moderate rocks:

I would like to own a summer homegreen with the river

but not a regular home, rentis not really local,

but it is immediate

the city is usually speaking

***

ottawater: 10 - 11

IV.the providential generationof metaphysical actionablerelease

this one replete, that one generativethe paradox of restraint

the transgendered necessity of an augur:

strange bright winsome news:we are still local & okay

***

cadence & slow coronas of siltthe steam-soaped petrol in the weed’s rug

the geological wrist of most demarcationsthe secret life of tents & errant storms

points of tenure & recessionthe bright head of limestone polices

the eye notes a scar a scar notes

the imperial rivergoes down by low & impassable degrees

***

here, serpentine:

a need for rain & a capacity for dust

a regular hold this citybarnacles meteoric

the city is the spirethe spire is

***

the up-turned clay escapes: we studycommitment, paste

shop for romantic mealsat all-night grocers

our fingers determine uswhen we have fingers

as ice turns to tap-water, whiskey:the word, bees

***

The partitions are full: a historyunfolds like a congress.

Your will gets steered awhileto immediate griefs.

You can do odd things involving angles& the sun.

A thick beard of frost.The collapsing of slow doors.

How far would you like to go?

ottawater: 10 - 12

Ronnie R. BrownDREAM #7

Geographically challenged,even in dreams, she’s trying to find his street, his housewhen the down pourhits. Jumpcut and sheis with him, soaked tothe skin. Another jump--she’s in his bed. Thunder booms(in her mind, in reality) and shewakens with a gasp; closesthe window; tries to dismissthe tingling, the possibilities.

Guillermo TrejoUntitledwww.trejoguillermo.com

ottawater: 10 - 13

Catherine BrunetRequiem for the Train

A small-townevening strollthese daysincludesthe smell ofrail bedsand ballastdisturbedfrom itsrhythm

creosoterecalls the train museumswe played in as kidsmuseums are becomingour only homes for trains

sixty kilometres of standard gaugeripped up this summer alonethe reversal of birth

the timber sleepers piled upslumberous and whiskeredtaller than us both

and we pick up the pandrol clipstrack joints and spikesthat paint rust on our fingers andon the lines of our palms

not because we want thembut because we cannot bear to losecorroding scraps of motion

Herman Ruhland'Modernism' Found Objectswww.lapetitemortgallery.com/herman-ruhland/

ottawater: 10 - 14

Jason ChristieLa Morte d’Artur

“On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.”– Monty Python

Crumbling from disuse or the blue balls of Uther

when Uther last look’d ‘ponmicrowaves and VCRs andthe piles of digital devicesheaped around fields of vict’ryweep did he to thinkpon leaving the realmunheired plastic of spirithe sought parley with Tintagilwho’d harried him o’ermany a day and beseech’dthe man to bring his wifefor in the manner of allshiny objects andsubjectivity esp. concerningan individual’s idea of a wholly complete andpowerful self, sayin this case, sovereignty,well, he wanted to bone her as all teens can relate

Uther was so wrothonly one remedy suffic’dhe gathered a great hostand laid siege to Terrabil castleall so he could lay Tintagil’s lady

for her part, she says:it’s my honour he wantsto besmirch more than my loins anyway, Uther got allbuthurt and one of his knightstexted him and was like:y u :( brah? so Uther told himhis nuts were bluerthan a dove frozenall winter and thenpainted bluehis knight said:i got this such importanceas getting laid demandedthe knight undertakemany adventures to findthe one man to remedyUther’s blue ball sitch the knightfinally found the manhe sought in a ragtagband of homeless peopleoutside of a Cronut’sin Toronto

Merlinthe knight shoutedwhy didn’t you replyto my texts and emailsfor his part, the magiciansimply declaredhe would assist Utherin his noble questof getting laid, ifUther would grantMerlin the smallreasonable matterof his every desire the knightsaid, should those desiresbe reasonable, thenwe have a deal, yoand so Merlin the magusrode to aid Uther andend the epic warknown throughoutthe land and historyas the war to get the king laid

ottawater: 10 - 15

erlin’s every desire

morals and values beinglinked as they are to socialcircumstances and specifictimes and places it makessense that everyonewould want the kingto sleep with a married woman Merlinrode with great hastesince the personal stakeswere great and also the sexthe lack of which kept Utherso vexed the knight was likeUther, chillMerlin is on his wayto which Uther replied:great! where the fuck is he?for devastating was Uther’s dismaythe knight reiterated:Uther, chill for Merlin is at your door portents filled the skyravens and clouds and thunderas the magus swept off his riding hoodshook out his grey hair and declaimed:Uther, I know your heart’s desire andhow awful it is to have blue balls, soI will get you laid pending you followmy guidance and grant me all my desiresUther immediately said yessuch was his distress and badeMerlin to speak his desires plainly Sir, said Merlin, this is my desire:the first night that ye shall lie by Igraineye shall get a child on her, and whenthat is born, that it shall be deliveredto me for to nourish there as I will have it;for it shall be your worship, and the child’s avail,as mickle as the child is worth Uther thought about Merlin’s requestand muttered to his knight:

always the fine print with these wizards, eh?I will well and all that other stuff, the king said. the deal was struck like a bell set to ringthroughout the land and history, let all knowthe empire shall be founded uponsecrecy, sorcery, conceit, deception, adulteryand all for the blue balls of a king, hear ye, hear ye

Classic capers ensue

so Merlin’s plan was simple:Step 1: disguise ourselves as two of the enemy’s knights and the king as the enemy himselfStep 2: don’t talk to anyone, say you are diseased and go to bedStep 3: have all of the sex you can with IgraineStep 4: get a good restStep 5: Merlin will saunter in to wake you in the morningall of this was mademuch easier forthe king’s rival espiedhim leaving his siegeand rode out to meethim and somehow died a tidy conceitthe king, in disguise, laidIgraine who didn’t muchmind that he wouldn’tspeak to her and hadsome disease later when she learned that her hubbywas dead, privatelyshe wondered with whomshe had gotten all hotbut kept it to herselfbecause she respectedthe marvel of the ruse

In the vein of such rulers, and with the good grace of karma, Uther kicks it

But two years passedduring which timeUther mainly playedvideo games anddrank beer, enjoyingbeing king-like, livingin ignorance and sloth despite his debilitated stateUther sought to meethis own people on the field of battle fromhis La-z-boy and usinghis new gamepad andwith the counsel of Merlinhe won every Call of Dutygame that week, historicallydespite his success, Uthercontinued to waste awayas a result of his churlishnessand after consulting withhis guild made it clearto all and sundry thathe had bequeathedhis login and passwordto Arthur, his perfectlylegit son who was notsired under duress orduring an act of deceit

ottawater: 10 - 16

when the Liberty opens in Old Spice, Mom & Bob in balcony all alone no chaperone & no Asha Boshle

flickers let’s misbehave

Brando & pit erupts “scunt!” bottles flung

at the screen: poomb!

Mom & Bob eyes shut in this derniere tango Paris derriere

wish they could throw the Parigi story at the screen get married move to Ottawa

but dead Brando hurts the eyes to read this English in Anchor butter

bend the pirouettes at the end

this right wrong show that flickers, hold on!

fellatio fedoras the film because!

*

Faizal DeenMOM & BOB: Matinees

*

Pink man turkey neck & Mom never brings home doggie bags.

that’s Demico chicken in a basket, take away twinkle eyes, Mom don’t forget

no negro Indian whiteman in the veins. or how Funk Wagnalls

does Caucasian cha cha cha. So: Mom brings Bob home in the dark.

*

Bob from Manitoba, somewhere near Brandon; he’n Bartica made snake eyes together.

“73, 732 sq. m. in W. Canada,” the Assiniboine speaks & when Mom comes back she doesn’t bring

scraps; but she has plenty of left-over bones from the mooneye she kill.

*

“Manitoba,” Funk Wagnalls says, “not Magyar. Aryan Anglo-Saxon. not Breton race-stocks.”

& when Bob asks, “who is she?” who is Mom? Uncle Sultan says,

“my sister will never any whiteman capital Winnipeg touch. she fancy Mr. Rochester country

where the animals have faces so many damn right!”

*

ottawater: 10 - 17

a high-noon, bug-out unhappy endings kids we don’t know,

Guyana izzan island Gary Cooper must win? no?

listen kids Uncle Sultan yells, “& does piss & white rum coming up on you?”

cutaway Sacred Heart me behind Sister Brian nodding off at 11am.

Mom at Palm Court Main Street with Uncle Sultan.

Georgetown to Timehri to Madiwini trucking shots & no anaconda passing traffic.

*

Cheddi Jagan next door squeezing a post-stroke rubber ball on the terrace is a boom shot &

The Merrymen in from Barbados & the rule of nouns I’ve learned from Mom & Bob

& Bob smells Lucky Luke-like.

*

Mom: “I don’t want another white rum coolieman, ‘Another one, bhai! Another one!’ pissing his pants.”

of course, this is only a matinee.

no late shows, pictures without sound. “How do they go? The songs?” I ask.

*

a kiss made the red man red, I think Mom has jugs like all the men will one day look at me.

I sing “Chaiyya Re Chaiyya Re” through recess, through lunch room

scholar me

too much world cinema, that radio there, a ceiling fan, hooves running in the yard

next door, hear?

when 20,000 leagues dissolves into the flickers.

Manon LabrosseLes billots dispersés V48" x 48" Acrylic on round wood panel 2014Gallery : Galerie St-Laurent + Hillwww.manon-labrosse.com

ottawater: 10 - 18

he was not allright with that

nd tes yeuxtold me yuwudn’t beeither later

grey shalloe shale th colour uv warn warm seement uv luv s t r e c h d hiway wyde thinnr than thin

Dalton Derksonbissett onna bus

eye saw yucryingat th bus depoin fred-rick-ton but by monkton

yu were allright

tu parlay fransay avek ton homme

he was not allright

jy prl fransay he sd tu compran? fraaaaaaaan saaaaaaaaay sti kuh sey con

too f a r easttoo f a r west nd its like anothr world ( or contry at least )

ottawater: 10 - 19

Amanda EarlThree from Saint. Ursula’s Commonplace Bookbeevian (n)She prefers products made from the labour of bees

Drinks mead. Lights up her abode with beeswax candles

When she is not waxing poetic, she sits alone in a room watching

the shadows dip in & out of her honeycombed walls

She is fragrant, sweetly scented, made of murmur of innumerable bees

her words can sting or seduce, depending on whether

her mood is black or yellowor the red nagging aura slips

over her eyes after the locusts,her enemies, owing to their penchant

for pilfering pollen,have crawled out of the miasma

of a summer’s hot morningto scrape across brutal-husked

terrain to leap onto delicate petalsgorging themselves on rich floral powders

the dolcevistwears a pearl grey morning suitdrags a bow

over a cow bellin the frost of a winter dawn

enjoys the thud of snow against ashvelvet windows

covers the gramophone in blankets before playingDebussy’s Nocturnes

prefers colours that are neutral and mutedexcept for dots of pale

rose on accent pillowshas made a recording of the sound of silk

uses a fog machine with regularityavoids jalapenos

has a penchant for patternless fabricscuts well done meat

with sharp matte steelin a basket keeps a skein of undyed wool

on sunday dons a worsted waistcoat snores beneath a swan white and carbon black duvet

Recipe for a Shard Garden

the vessel is willfulit tumbles

in its fallthere is something of the light

shatteringtiny glinting electric fish

slivers of pain for a gatheringhand

ottawater: 10 - 20

Little Fiddle

Phil HallCarnivale

ottawater: 10 - 21

This poem as your dream ends with a slow realization of what is sleep and what is reality at the exact instant when you hope to see how this finishes, like, when the sexual tension is at its highest, but you still have your clothes on, or when the burning house in front of you is seconds from collapse. Those two moments are the same moment for you and the me-who-is-not-me, the two figures in your dream.

Your dream-me might sit voicelessly, but I would never idle as you undressed; I would never throw dream-you off the dream-bridge; real-me would notice a new tattoo that shifts from a lotus flower to a cloud-formed dragon to a symbol you can’t quite explain or recreate.

Just picture it as the letter grade that you received on your last high school essay and your subconscious can take the fall for the vague opening paragraph, the tendency to use run-on sentences, the underlined thesis you imagined, at the time, to be so clear.

Chris JohnsonEchoes and Other Repetitions

Speak again and again and again and again and againlike the chatterbox explaining the origin of the term chatterbox.

You lost soul, you searching soul, you narcissist, do what is best for you and let the world know.

What weight do those words wear?Could you carry them around with you? A whole load? Are you weary?

Speak words that give wide breadth to your short breath,of the space between rock wall and rock wall.

Hello? Sounds low? Sounds, oh,like you were certain that no one was there all along.

Repeat something until the repetition no longer sounds like the original.When the echo comes back to you, know that it was heard by no one.

When air fills up between your cheeks, expel it; wordy wind will hear the echoing again and again.

ottawater: 10 - 22

Burn a Koran Day

I watch it all through my rifle scope:thousands of Afghans spill to the streetshurl bricks through the windows of shabby shops trample a child in the hard-packed dustblood bubbles burst from his mouth like streams of mothsthe fire kindles in squalid tents, crackling fingers ram the throats of chimneysvirus-spreads to the bookstores and mosquesentire shelves of goldgilt Korans crack and charthe smoke lifts like burkhas on wedding nightspools at the base of my guard towerhaunts the edges of the rifle’s sights

The Afghan police arrive and form in rankstheir AK muzzles bark rounds into the crowd:split a man’s face so his cheek hangs over his beardcatch a woman in her belly so it spat gutsnakesinto a pool where the scrambling rioters slipglance off cars and lampposts, ricochet back into the crowd,a man shrieks, kneecap blasted inside-outhe crawls to an alley where he rocks and rocksbuildings collapse in great groans, the fire tentaclesgrope a young woman who burns slow like a witch

but she’s too far for my bullet

Matt JonesCaptainI knew Jack before he turned into a ship;first met him eight years ago when my fist rasped on his barrack’s doora year after my Dad passed.

He saw my bag of withered limes,grew glassy-eyed with me over plastic cupsspilled over with gin.We got so plastered our muscles meltedheads lolled like sea-tossed scarecrows.I wondered if he was there with mefor my grief or his thirst?

Either way I paid him back in St Johnswhere we stopped to fuel en route to the Arctic.Got so tequila-drunk that when I asked if he wanted another shotI took his “twist my arm” literallybent his forearm and wrist togethertill the bones cracked like melting icebergs.Jack even lied to the doc to protect me,claimed he slammed his hand in a hatch.

Eight years later and Jack is chained to the Halifax dock by four strong nooses.He says the transformation from man to ship started subtle as his skin gave way to a metal hullsnout stretched into a grey bowvoice deepened to a fog horn.

The crew never see the kindness I glimpsed;he works them so hard they’ve grown leanlike galley slaves. Jack delightsin tongue-lashing one junior officerwho shakes with sobs in the rack above.

Now when I hear Jack proclaimhe needs to get his sides painted before the next sailor, he wants to drop anchor in Mortier Bayyou’d never guess he’d been flesh.

ottawater: 10 - 23

a.m. kozakSPINOZA’S RACECAR

racecar chases itself round a track in primordial left turns. a button pressed, but where’s the kid who found it under a christmas tree one early 90s morning? heat builds a mix of metal scraps and cement, a smash of quarks and orbits explode. ocean drifts to oblivion on clearest of mornings. where are manufacturers and what do they mean? birthed in driver’s seat, instinctively manoeuvre obstacles, compete with other cars. plan mundane activities to obsess over, the position of a leg, the angle of a mirror. develop favourite songs and remember all the words, an imitation of an imitation of an. but where are the start gates and chequered flags—how does the racecar originate?

Meaghan HaughianPathwayhttp://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/meaghan-haughian/

ottawater: 10 - 24

Clay Bowl

How absentmindedly we lift it from the shelfday after day from its curved earthbring spoonsto our mouths

Unexplained Phenomena

Why is peeing on a stick the stepthat cracks the ice, causes unasked for advice,birth stories avalanching down, knockingall breathable air from around you?

Why do childbirth shelves in bookstores exhibita new gravitational lure, promise moon rocks of fact,white weightlessness you can’t stop devouringthough what you really crave is grittier, dirtier,grub-filled earth beneath an alpine rock?

You want someone who’ll really tell you whyor how the quickening elbows and knees inside youare filling your pockets with stones. Why your heartis grief-thick and cold. Why no one will speak with youbeyond sentimental memory.

You want someone to pull your body – blue with loneliness – out from the snow, the glacier-fed river,sit with you for a while.

Brenda LiefsoIn the small hours

While it’s true I tendto inspect chicken for pinknessavoid buffets,turn door handles with my sleeve,Anja, it’s also true when you are sick,my grinchy heart is blessed, allowedtenderness, at last, unreservedas I hold your tiny body over the toiletcarry you back to fresh pajamas, clean sheets.Gather you up so as to ferry youthrough the small hoursuntil your fever breaks and the dark river of sky becomes light.

Anniversary Poem

In your garden at night,green gathers up darknessand cools itself. Unwatched, the cucumber vine tendrilsthrough the lattice. Our many ritualsgrow shoots. In the morning, we will not failto argue over who gets the red coffee mug, butlet’s be quietjust for now. Our children are dreaming,climbing the bean stalks, harvesting eggplants,the tomato’s yellow flowers.

ottawater: 10 - 25

words on the birth of a daughter

Ammonite.

Fierce river.

Source.

What It All Comes Down To, Part I

Placenta capsules.

Freeze-dried.

Calgary Father Kills Tenant, Three Children, Wife, Before Killing Self

not the extra weight on my hipsthe achy breasts sleepless nights day cares halloween costumes the mini-vanoh god the mini-vannot the how did I get herethe vomit in my hairthe lost art of peeing alone hot cup of coffeegood job short skirt visibility sex – but the way they say rainins for raisinsbanamana for bananathe way they run across a field,naked, their big bellies and little bums,the good night moon’s,small arms that wrap around me unreservedly the mummy I love you this much’s –and this the knife in his hand whose blood on his shirtbelly dark rising to throat familiar stranger familiar whose bloodalways knew it could come to this all of usalways know it could come to this nightmare’s just the training groundkicking clawing gougingfighting tooth and nail for them I will kill I will kill I will kill you if you touch one hair on their heads

On Worship

What’s missing is liveablemyth, plain old Gaia squatting. A responseto your shout at the blue-fisted sky. A motheryou love. Round arms full of fruit baskets, sheaves of grain. Cool lemon pressedto your lips.

The Hard Facts Are

Women in Congo walk for daysto the only doctor that will treat them,bleeding and shitting out of vaginasripped through to their rectums by gang rapesand sodomies with shovel handles.

While my children sleep upstairsin a warm room, their bellies fed, I don’t knowif I write to shelter them, or to show them suffering can or cannot fit inside a poem. Is injustice a word I have a right to?Is poetry meant only to be beautiful?

Through Sudan’s mine and slaughter field,women walk for days, weeks,babies strapped to their backs, pulling older children by the hand,in uncertain hope they will reach a refugee camp,in uncertain hope there will be enough food,enough medicine,for each one of them.

ottawater: 10 - 26

or unstuck, gather sticks.

A loose informant, drifts. Excavate, thick flakes,

a restless discourse. Black Peter, Santa’s elves,largesse of dwarfish minions.

Needlessly mapped. Consider, subject.

Thirty-second word for snow: perceptic.

Primary, for these times. Thin, creature noise.

Force swallow, heat. Restraint: a fortune. Storethe winter pledges. Speak.

Eighty-fourth word for snow: elastic.

Absolute, a park. On any given day, the dogsembrace the stuff of ground.

Empty, full of speech. Double-sided blush,a resonance. Malls, decorate November.

Inflammatory. Desire, further explicated.Origin: the sock-drawer. Something suitable.

Air, a texture. Slushy-thick.

It howls, like a hammer. Freezing rain. Paratactic.Will not be held responsible.

Constituted from a search. Wetness, gentrifies,the atmospheric layer. Shopping.

Statistic, of the sentence-length. Glazed,a mist that forms, a freezing-shape.

rob mclennanCorporation of snow:

The snowstorm begins at five past the hour,always late always late,like some huge harried white rabbitclutching at its cuffs and moaning softlyinto the wind. Méira Cook, A Walker in the City

The “Eskimo words for snow” claim is a widespread, though disputed, idea that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. In fact, the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but the structure of these languages tends to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word. Wikipedia

Particles, we designate. A show of hands. More sentimentthan sediment. Christmas, once at mid-point. Burns.

Scans indicate. Introductory. These sparkle, shelves.

A surplus meaning is performed. We aim to climbToy Mountain.

I wasn’t ready for critique. This nature. Messy liquid,jargon-class.

Fifty-seventh word for snow: asphodel. Livesin a linguistic cube.

Claims, pastoral. Bullshit. We live in houses.

Spellbound, nested. Show of hands. Know notwhere the boundaries.

Archive, of a task. This falling snow. We stuck

ottawater: 10 - 27

Broken rarely bounces. Informal gesture, wave of the hand. Parse, a pause.

Full speech, starvation text. We squirrel.

Sixteenth word for snow: buttery.

Held in terror, words. Permission: too largefor the barn. First blizzard, pads.

These airy dispositions. Pick up, navigate

the proper, means. Frightened, and, perpetual.

I understand: I don’t exist, and neither,wet percentage. Rooftops sparkle, peak.

Heard, without a doubt. White owls, mistookfor namesake, batter.

Forty-ninth word for snow: irrationality. Somesmall nation. Rhetoric, deploys. We all, are citizens.

Sheila’s blush, or brush. A hoofprint, guiding snoutto sweetgrass, savoured. This crystal palace, shines

as close to naked, writing. Restless, jag. Citations.

Looped, a bodice-ripper. Speech of same, reflectingon this marvel. Spools, of thus unwinding: clouds.

I hardly speak. A show of hands.

One hundred and ninety-eighth word for snow: agenda.Satisfaction, damp and crowded. Stead.

An ontological commonplace. The first fall, drifts

and banks. Wet, noisy punch. A light dust, sugar.

Show, of hands. The question is, abated. Flurries,chance astonished wings. Undone, we weather.

Ditched, the city buses. Some assembly. Knowledge,citing technocrats. These portraits, drift.

One hundred and forty-first word for snow: capacious.

Precisely, jolts. Sky mottles, cloud. Engrays. Fades,emblematic-dark. Let’s pretend. The sorrow,

shallows-deep. Disappeared, a child’s boot.

We would sound like Alice, through the snowy brambles.

White linen, screen noise. Frame, a later character. Disgorged, this gap. Desire, useless

on exposed tongue. Undressed. The sun, reflected tarnish.Silver, in relation. The coming weeks.

One hundred and fiftieth word for snow: unprintable.

Silence, sentence, swarms: stands in for the whole.

Cabin fever, trapped. Meringue peaks of shopping mallshost parking, underground. We save,

we stay. A slang, citation. Fiberglass. Clay-shapedlike a question mark.

Made suitable, for men. An ally, pivot. Walletsand a human face. Rich, coal for eyes.

One hundred and eleventh word for snow: fetish.Another blind example. How do they, sleek, provide

such fur. Saddle-stitch or staple, default.

Submerged: a broom, a batch, a violent snap. What air melts solid, heavy. Follow. One step would no longer. Repetition. Disavows, a phrase.

Tenderness: a row of plows, attached to tractors. They thicken, turn. Ice-pellets, pelt. Tsunami.

Eiderfalls, a blizzard. Forecast: all this nature. Sloganof disjunction, glassware. Energy, a restless credit.

Fundament: a material archive of soft displacement,flight, the rational sense of sticky powder.

Wendigo, mid-flesh. We retail, solidarities.

Authority, ephemeral air. The luxury of analysis,extracting sense like spring sap, syrup-thick. Boiled,

sweet, illusion. Late, in the dream.

First word for snow: snow. The complicated namingof such simple matter.

ottawater: 10 - 28

Charlene Lau AhierIf the Wind Were Coloured IIwww.lau-ahier.com

Charlene Lau AhierIf the Wind Were Coloured Iwww.lau-ahier.com

ottawater: 10 - 29

Cath MorrisDrawn

I have always been drawn to the oldor the very youngmore than those in between;I’m not quite sure why this should beexcept that they seem more swiftly ableto let their imaginationsleap into the cosmosat the drop of a peato imagine anything you ask them to(and some you haven’t)and run with itlike a child-kite or balloon-blossom,give it wings,explore with ittake journeys to other worldsfall in and out of lovetalk to the animals, birds, trees, as I do,imagine the bestof all worlds with you

take your ideas, eat them, chew on them, like dreams, transform them into delicious mental mealsyou can share together

most middle peopleor certain Milwaukean typesseem to find this difficultor unappetizing

Allen EganThe Decision 30 X 48 Oil On Canvaswww.eganacci.wix.com/allen-egan-paintings

ottawater: 10 - 30

and someone has to rummage for the coffee makerdiscarded in haste, for now her last apartment is barewe can’t just lock the door and go the way shedeparted, too suddenly. So we stand, door open,for last goodbyes, one more story. We have been too hasty, impatient to finish the unwanted job.The coffee is stale; she long ago lost the taste for it. But we linger at the kitchen counter, nowhere left to sit,and wonder which one of us will be next to imposethis burden on the others. A story that always made us laugh has a hollow echo now. We look into one another’s eyesa bit longer than is our custom, hesitating over whoshould take her keys and lock the door.

Colin MortonLast Rites

With the albums of snapshots pretty as a postcardgo the half-spent rolls of wrapping paper, old Timeand People magazines, half jars of relish, the dried pensshe meant to buy refills for, and my mother’s button jarI used to sort – coloured and clear ones, navy buttonswith anchor insignia – beach pebbles picked up on travels,jars of sand from three continents, all the memoriesthat once adhered to these things like coral to stone.All go because our own memories weigh on us alreadyand we want to travel light when we too go.The snaps we once made fun of, these we keep,if only to bury later in closets of our own: Mom in front of a mountain or cathedral, smilingwith friends none of us ever knew, or knew she knew,on field trips we were no part of, with X and Y,without Z, who must have been behind the lens.Furniture went first, to family or friends in town,the Sally Ann, or just as far as the curb; hazardouslamps with hanging heads and scruffy cords;the toaster that either scorched or left the bread limp;unreadable diskettes with copies of letterswe discarded soon after they arrived at our doors.The walker and oxygen tanks go back to the clinicwhere someone has been desperately waiting for them.Garbage bags of unsorted debris pile up at the door,

ottawater: 10 - 31

Alcofibras Nasier II(32)

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, am fucking sick of all yr eyes

watching me so full of yrself what do you think about

I the guy you avoid on the street me with my mewly mouthed snarls

some mangy dog but you have your eyes I’m the crow who’ll pluck ‘em for ya

not that I have the wings to fly no more not without the booze

& the powder my nose itches still from the need ya see

but you have yr ayes you kiss your own ass

bobbing on your knees to agree with yourself yr memories

so precious stitched & folded into yr fine wool suits

a forget me not hankie where you’ve wiped all yr tears away

Herman Ruhland'Untitled' Found Objectswww.lapetitemortgallery.com/herman-ruhland/

ottawater: 10 - 32

Pearl Piriehow to express a different point of view

start cold. make sure never to expose the pov to rapid temperature shifts. never put a distinct pov in a hot oven, as it can shatter due to thermal shock.placing a frozen point on a pov is almost as likely to result in a shattered view as placing a cold view in a hot spot.

it can take a little finesse to get used to, but a point paddle is a useful instrument, especially for transferring the raw point onto the view. leave the pov in the hot spot — at least until it is entirely cool. you do not have to ever remove it. put other thinkingright on top. it won’t do any harm.

never use dish soap on your pov. your pov can be cleaned and rinsed entirely with water. don’t let your pov soak for too long. you don’t need to drown it. a simple once-over is probably more than enough. if your pov happens to absorb too much it may crack the next time it is exposed to heat.

with a clean sponge, wipe away any grime. do not try to remove any residue that that builds up in use— it is fully unnecessary. leaving that to accumulate will help season your pov, turning it into a slicker, more easy-to-use item.

don’t worry about your views getting stained. stains are normal, almost unavoidable. moreover, they’re a badge of honor, or experience points — you can point to them as vindicationsof your skills.

tied

to a rope to a car in the driveway is my hiccup.parked, and parked and parked in the diagonalsnow. hiccuping and hip downing, it sits, hics.

Manon LabrosseLes billots se regroupent60" x 60" Acrylic on wood panel 2014www.manon-labrosse.com

ottawater: 10 - 33

Nicholas PowerExcerpts from a series called Tin Dittoes

a sort of lattice

she tries to be the best of priestessesthe concentration of a subjunctive acttries to shine without a shadowthe silent actress who knows how to singthough she’s not a birdnor her father’s dreamhe’s left her an epithet‘I’m at the extremities of your voice’

she’s reading in a separate cornerblind at her peripheryBasho’s blues lightly helddescribing a bird in such detailit almost lands on her bookshadows gather outsidelike curious strangersdeveloping a taste for light

Allen EganThe Architects Journey 24 X 36 oil on canvaswww.eganacci.wix.com/allen-egan-paintings

ottawater: 10 - 34

[the following are edited centos]

Yoshino’s Treetops

proffering songs from her kayakshe pulled up, with her right hand, to the oceanic shorealike, in some ways, to places where she can see Yoshino’s treetopsthe river is not confined to the townthe holy hush of ancient sacrificeruptured, monstrous, barbeda sort of totem pole, native in natureancient bird noise, here, therea machine in motionof the air

No More Second Hand Art

they have the advantage of beingnumerous selves in the femininea well-spoken choralepermitting themselves simplicitycarrying everything with themresting only occasionallypouring their broken existenceinto versethe juxtaposition of silk curtainsand utensilsa tolerance for being lostontologicallyfinding themselves on the frontiermaking a lean-to

ottawater: 10 - 35

ordinary space

stars constellate abovesomewhere between good and evilyesterday was the year of the cloudwhen my marriage faileda place where nothing was madenot even a Duchamp readymadethe cold water pipes quickly let me knowhow to remember this place of distressI strike the glasstry to remember the patternassigned to the placewhere she left itwe knew very little about the weatherwe knew it controlled usthe snow all down so stillwe couldn’t figure out which jokes workedneither ant nor grasshopperI await an auspicious signplucked from a feather duster

above a lake district

an egret flies over placid lakesas fine as a paper craneplacid lake mirroring the beginningcatching the wind absentlyno longer flatnothing like a mirrordividing infinity into fragmentswearing the woods like an accessorytrees crumbling into paperthin and hollow and wordsmaking imperfect sensethreads of motionbroken syllables

ottawater: 10 - 36

[excerpts from wild uncertainties]

the whole ephemeral poem takes place in an instant while photons light up red bricks on the wall above a bar on Bathurst street electrons jump to higher energy states wave pattern interference becomes tangent to widening spirals and defines particular moments points in time that haven’t happened yet not even noticed in dreams history changes in sudden glimpses of the future real events as memory traces a straight line of linked events broken by a concentrated awareness not a paradigm simply a pattern sharply seen written down gone

the metaphorical man now humbled to the state of a hologram knowing he’s no longer her lover not able to find her says her name over and over like an atomic number or a crystal he knows nothing of song or supplication* of literature or history of pilgrimage or hermitage of meditation or exercise or friendships of reason or patience or plans of alcohol sedation sex or sleep when she entered that room carrying flowers he forgot everything now there’s no yesterday or today or even a some day

*Robert Boates He’s down in the hole shovelling smoke that’s what they say about great-grandfather in Irish Montreal if we have only our fathers then there’s no ancient voice only rules of the game beside the Ottawa River we find a rock with the explorer’s mark what they teach of Champlain we explore on our own no give to the cement we walk on to school I want the smell of rotting trees and the pull of the swamp on my feet a country is something no one is expert in

The Weatherman

despite the rain that has fallen for days over the mountainsdisappearing the roadsthis is about you, slaking your thirst in a dry desertthe rich laughter of your imagined voiceattempting to yield to a blue scattering of lightin that country where your last thought sankamid a volcanic 4th of Julyhere the sun is costumed in cloudstraces of the garden recalledin a grainy quality of light

ottawater: 10 - 37

she walks the diagonal path down the steep hill along the edge of the park followed by swallows swooping into the wind in the vast

open field where everyone’s a solitary her slow meander languid syllables not in search of any subject not a performance but

a generosity not a tattoo or a trademark or a style or a soliloquy simply a woman walking in the late afternoon sunlight making

everything grander hand-written prismatic a registry of marvels in a public place immediate material pictorial

all her clothes on and nothing else inscribed on her body no frame at the periphery no shadowy corners no manufactured tropes no trace elements no evidence no apocrypha the breath line determined by the slope of the hill written down to slow down time

to make a grace note as she disappears beyond the trees by the river

Meaghan HaughianJulia's constellation, 2014http://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/meaghan-haughian/

ottawater: 10 - 38

Ryan PrattMontreal express, 6:40

Raise dawn in a turquoise slip.Dorchester Park is reeling.

Brittle beside the traffic pitchseagulls barter trash,

junkies rent unclipped curbs, u-turning at red lights.

Both sides argue the arrangement.“I don’t speak French,” greetings

confess, get pecked to the carcass “I have no change,”

but nonetheless pace delirious for one of fifty closed cafes

to light up! God-bless! My travel case girdles St Denis’ grayscale

barren with salt in its wheels, tongue-tickingseismic.

Guillermo TrejoUntitledwww.trejoguillermo.com

ottawater: 10 - 39

Monty Reidfrom INTELLIGENCE

Note: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has recently moved into new quarters in east-end Ottawa. Next door, an even larger and more striking facility for the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) is nearing completion. My less intelligent home is nearby.

Pray thou with a loving heart, and let thy words be hidden.- Maxims of Ani

A philosophy is never a house, it is a construction site.- George Bataille

I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone.- Rilke

I don’t know how to live in this transparency. The lies have been taken from me and all that’s left runs through the ribs in the clear. The machineis made of glass. The more people seethe less people care.

I don’t know what to do with the tunnel, the one that runsfrom my garage right under the CSIS building. I bricked up the entry, but I can still hear them talking down there. Bang the wall with a shovel. Even when I want toI can’t understand a word. Honest.

I don’t know why we would include the tellers of secretsthe lovers, the password keepers, all those who want to beheard beneath the din. Now that the din is gone.I am watching them remove the bricks at the exitand there has never been a silence like it.I don’t know for sure, but they’re probablyonto me by now. Not that I mind. I’ve been using all the code words and the acronyms. I like the alphabet.Here, under this roof of last translations

all languages track you.

I don’t know what that hooks up to. I don’t want to knoweither. Forgetting makes the fragments coherent.They come in and they need to see.They come in and connect me to the files.They come in and I go out.

I don’t know when I became a suspect. The algorithmssuspect me. The scope creep suspects me. I am regenerated and no longer need to be careful. It’s about time is all I can say.You can’t accomplish anything until you’re a suspect.

I don’t know yet. Just watch.Just watch me. In the waggleJust watch me. Til the screens go blank.And I’m not here.

I don’t know if there’s enough sheet metalin the entire world to carry all the air where you want itto go. I like the way it shines and bangsI like the unequal pressures. The way it closesdoors. On the way out.

I don’t know what they did with the Cyrville overpassbut some people say they broke it into chunks and buried itaround the perimeter as an anti-tunneling feature.Ruins always end up as a kind of protection.Everything you know, you owe to destruction.

ottawater: 10 - 40

The Red Bridge

On the lacquered archof the long red bridgein Matsushima, he thought about his mother, tracinghis fingers over the miniscule kokeshi doll in his pocket.Her limbless body made himstop and pray, while he weptthe colour of cherry and plumtrees bent from deepwithin the fields.

Sonia SaikaleyBasho’s Haiku Goes to the Frogs

Basho roams through Matsushima in a time when Samurai disembowel themselves in the name of honour.

Hot springs carry Basho’s haiku over lush rice fields, and the frogs receive these words.

They sing praise to the travelling poet who accepts rice and green tea from a villager who cannot read.

He prefers the song of frogs over Basho’s haiku.Basho does not mind, sipping the frothy green tea.

Bidding farewell, he walks through the field,careful not to crush his singing admirers.

ottawater: 10 - 41

Dean SteadmanMorning at the Museum with Mr. Rux(for Rose)

1.If a train is travelling at the speed of weather, and the weather is inclement,

how long will it take to reach the manwho broke the bank at Monte Carlo?

2.The abacus beads at the Science Museumare in coloured sets of ten. Red plus blue

plus green is. Green minus blue minus red is. Or, possibly, is not.

3. We are Mr. Rux’s “Daycare of Demi-Einsteins” or, as he proudly pronounces this morning,

“A Plethora of Pythagoreans!” preparing to depart the Museum after our morning visit.

Walking back, “peripatetic, à la Aristotle,” we cross a set of RR tracks in single file,

the tracks for the morning train from Paris to Lyon, en route to Monte Carlo.

4. While crossing the tracks, we hold tight to a knotted length of rope and, once across,

our line divides — “Toddlers toggle, if you please” requests Mr. Rux. Now we walk parallel, in pairs —

“A Coupling of Callippuses!” — our rope forming a happy-face U.

5.Xing at traffic intersections is red, yellow, green. Or red, orange, green.

Never cross on red because the word “cross”also means angry.

Walk on red and Mr. Rux will come across (!) very angry, because he cares for us :-)

6.We have dressed ourselves and only a few of us have matching rain boots.

“Conformity is the ruin of genius!” Mr. Rux exhorts, marvelling at us, his protégés.

7.Back at the daycare, Mr. Rux and his wife kiss“Hello!” — a convergence of parallel lines.

While we nap, Mrs. Rux prepares un petit repas, and Mr. Rux, on the telephone, listens attentively

to the Museum custodian’s recitation of articleslost but newly found: four yellow rain hats,

three woollen scarves, two odd mittens —rouge et noir — and one pocket calculator, kaput.

ottawater: 10 - 42

Rob Thomasdon’t get cute with me

at the coffee shopmy 4YO’s headcrests the countertoplevel with impulsedisplay of cookies

I order coffee

the gaping toiletcould swallow him wholeas he is aware – gulp – but he climbs up

at the liquor storehe pukes going inand I say we used to callguys like him champs

no one overhearsno one snickersno one judges

expectations are low yet elusive

I’ll cherish this timesomeday, I joke

daddy, you peed medaddy, she pushed medaddy, he says when he’s two he’ll be bigger but he’s three and he’ll be smallermake him stop

daddy, rememberwhat it’s like to be tired, hungry and powerless

this isn’t workingI tell my wifethe kids run wild

this isn’t workingI tell the playgroup momI’m so lucky to havethis time with my kids

this isn’t workingthis isn’t workingthis isn’t working

my joys consume me

Hulk on one sock is at warwith Hulk on the other

middle of the bathroom flooris where this happensneither titan budgesor requires pants

Ring of Fire drowns the screaming more, more, more

kids in the idling car

ottawater: 10 - 43

Dennis TourbinCanoe Lake

The north west shore, east of Huntsville,20 miles to the Parkgate, another 10miles to the turnand Canoe Lake.

Tom ThomsonTownship of PeckDistrict of NipissingAlgonguin Park.

West Lakespeckled trout.

The west shoreof Canoe Lake1917, a bodyrises to the surface, facedown, ripples gently brush theshore…

Two men in acanoe approachthe body thinkingit is a deadloon or animal.

Tom Thomson.

The body is secured witha rope andtaken to a coolresting place.

Tom Thomson.

The body is coveredby a blanket in the water.

All night thesound of a gentle wash.

Tom Thomson.

Copper fishing linearound his leg,a bruise on hishead and a trickle ofblood from this ear…

Tom Thomson.

He loved a storm,the wild skyas a backgroundto everythingthat was familiar…With a brushhe delivered where he was,the atmosphere chargedwith colour…

I know that it has beena long timesince you’ve walked thesestreets Tom…Visiting that young Trainor girlup the waymaybe 61, 62 yearsago…

Things have changed.

Music plays overthe loudspeakeron the main street now.

And the distant roar of transporttrucks silence throughthe trees. You haveto listen closely for the birds now Tom…

I try to break through thatmembrane ofpast experience,

imagine youface to facewith a mooseor a deer, paintbrushin your hand…

shattering the silencewith colour acrossa painted birchboard, like a slowmotion camera.

I try to imagine youTom, walkingthese streetsa half a centuryago… a fewpainted boards foryour intendedin your knapsack.

She remained quietall those yearsTom… holdingon that memoryand that mysterycontained deepwithin herheart,became bitter some say, with silencemoved flowers from your grave.

I wanted to drive allthe wayup to highway 60today, to lookat Canoe Lake.

I didn’t…

At Dorset I stopped,made up my mindthere that it wouldtake too long.

I only wanted to seethe lake,imagine yourcanoe slippingacross the deep water.

See where you fished, catchglimpses of what you painted years ago, seethose trees and tangled forests,the dense swampyou inhabited.

I guess it wasthe rain, theway that sportscar spun outof control onthe sharp corner,came flying sideways at meand almost rolled.

It scared meand the fogthrough the hills.

I wanted a clearlook at the lake, the lakethat held your bodyfor thoselast few days took the spiritfrom your soul.

Yesterday while atthe liquor storeI heard two meanmention that a a young manhad drowned in Kashagawigamog Lake just down the road,a canoeing accident. I thought of you…How did it happenTom? Is there truth to the rumorof murder?

And the welt onyour head?How did it happen Tom?

There were reportsin the paperabout a youngartist missingin Algonquin Park.

Tom Thomson missing;It couln’t be true.

And graduallyyour body appeared.

And your brothermade arrangementfor a grave…

And there were lettersback and forthamong the artists.

Thomson’s gone…Thomson’s gone…

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What do I know about the landscape

When I fish, the landscape Is always there…Circular and oblongand permanent. Thelandscape is always there.

I once thought. I rememberthis morning I had a thought,a thought about the landscape.But now I can’t remember the thought. The landscape disappeared.And the landscape is always there.

The trees.The earth.

Once, when the astronautstravelled on the dark sideof the moon the earthdisappeared…

A small capsule in orbit,a pressurised container formen all of suddenthe earth disappeared. The earth could not be seen.

And the landscape becamea memory. And the landscape became a memory again…

Whitney Lewis-SmithWhat Came In With The Flowers, Photographhttp://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/whitney-lewis-smith/

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Lauren TurnerFaulty introductions

On the 6 o’clock train she overhears one man say to another, I used to have the same dream. I was the strongest person on Earth until a woman cut off all my hair. It’s a good voice. The kind of voice she’d want to read her Hemingway over a tumbler of Still Waters. If she cared for whiskey or for restraint. Turning in her seat, Delilah asks: Do you fear female barbers?

* Samson can’t decide if she’s cold or trying to make herself look bigger like some perpetually affronted mongrel: all skinny legs, padded army jacket and boots that long to lay tread to kneecaps. Where did you come from? he asks, loud over the clattering metro car. You look like a space flamingo. If they were green.

She sets aside her dog-eared Ondaatje: You’ve been watching me since Jean Talon [recrosses her ankles] and that’s the best you’ve got? * Want a do-over? Delilah asks. One of the regulars has deviated from his usual allongé with foamed milk and is looking despairingly at a soy cappuccino. Please, Samson hands it back. My girlfriend thinks we should go off dairy. I feel like I’m cheating on her whenever I come here.

*

Are you seeing anyone? You don’t get to ask me that she replies, kissing him to keep their lips away from banality and sun exposure.

* Which ballerina is your girlfriend? she asks the man sitting alone with the pile of fur-collared coats. A gold clutch on his knees. He gestures, bourbon-handed, at a lanky prima blonde fawning over another. Her pas-de-deux partner he offers, sans prompting: Do you think they’re sleeping together? Delilah says: Maybe that’s a question you can only ask strangers. *I don’t dance. They’re leaning up against the cool bars of the fire escape, sharing a turquoise cigarillo from his girlfriend’s purse. Delilah, who has perfected smoking without inhaling like a Hollywood starlet, offers a Me neither in apology. She’d heard jazz falling from the loft’s open window, taken it as an informal invitation. Samson grins: Ah, a pair of wolves amongst the ballet-dancing sheep?

* She wanted to be in love. He wouldn’t have guessed but the gin made her soft, ready to squeeze out confessions like juice from a lime wedge. Bar stools are as forsaken as pews. On certain Sundays, everyone looks like a sinner worth knowing. *

I can’t dance, her voice muffled by the cotton candy duvet. Samson rolls over onto his side, grins: You made that pretty clear last night. First mornings always feel like this. The trepidation sets in only once you’ve left the bedroom. Soon, she’ll be asking herself if there’s somewhere he’d rather be, if they’ve made a mistake. But this didn’t feel like a mistake, whispers Delilah. What are you doing under there? he asks. The mound of blankets shakes its head.

* Do you imagine yourself mysterious? –I imagine myself bored.

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Vivian Vavassisidentity, era and echo

what you set to drift self circa this era or thateventually cancers across waterpigeons back, carries your weight to crashin sandplay, levied against, mudwalledthe kids used to sing(muscledeep in the sleeplost ocean)whatever you do (a landlogged self-defence) don’t jump into the waves(your glasseyed questions)you’ll slice straight through(sheepheavy, atomic)and catch seven years of bad luck it all comes out in the wash

Whitney Lewis-SmithIndian Pipes, Photographhttp://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/whitney-lewis-smith/

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AE: I notice that many of your poems combine stark realism with supernatural elements. How do you think the supernatural fits in with the realism of your poems & where does the impetus to include such come from? And along the same lines, I’ve noticed that a lot of your writing is very visual & figurative. In “Intervention“(Arc Poetry Magazine’s North Issue) you talk about warships being “bearded with cloud wisps.” In another poem, “Gallow’s Humour” you write about a woman who has had her legs blown off by a bomb: “her blood turns the sand to mud/hangs in the air like a shroud.” Or in “Burn A Koran Day”: “blood bubbles burst from his mouth like streams of moths.” Why do you think such figurative language is useful or effective in discussing such gruesome subjects and what influences you to write so visually?

MJ: I think your observation is keen. The end of “Reading...” for example, is a scene of an IED emplacer’s severed body being reassembled in front of his grieving mother via a maelstrom of colourful butterflies. (Spoiler! Ha!). For that story, adding a fantastical element was a way of rewriting the experience into a less painful, more palatable version. It fails to comfort, ultimately, because the fantastical rewriting isn’t the truth. At the end of the day that woman who collected her son in a basket didn’t get her son back. In my more cynical moments I suspect art is, at its best, what Nabokov describes as a “local palliative,” incapable of providing true healing or true comfort.

Or to answer this question in another way, sometimes we need to lie to tell the truth. I find writing flourishes best when divorced from confines. That’s one edge that new poets have over more experienced ones, I think. As we get more experienced we start learning “the rules” of what will make a poem successful or worth publishing. It must have fresh, non-cliché language. It must be doing something interesting or thought-provoking with form. It will likely hinge on an image written from the senses. It will have a transformative moment in which a character, narrator, or even the reader sees something in a new light. Yet this little list is just a rulebook. And the better we learn the rules the more constrained we are as writers. Sometimes we need a fucking kraken bursting out of the bay with water streaming down its tentacles, the smell of seaweed stinging our nostrils, the clacking of his awful beak.

We write because we want people to feel something, no? For me that means staying with images and ideas that have power, or that speak to us on an unconscious level. I think to write evocatively is to write honestly; how can sincerity not wither when writing is so often posturing cleverness, or playing word association games? Writing from an ironical place is ultimately writing from a safe space. “But Matt!” I hear a skeptical voice, “how can you say writing about a mythic sea beast is honest?” Well, when I came home from my tour I went back to school for my MA. I was surrounded by soft-skinned and sensitive poets and scholars—there I was with my tentacles all bloody.I have more thoughts on this. I’m thinking of Rushdie and his images: snake-charmers, sister-fucking, giant-winged birds, murderous knees, paradisiacal brothels, cities of sand, a nude prophetess covered in butterflies, donkey-fucking, towns of immortals, systematic castrations, a disfigured old woman mid-coitus screaming “my hump! Grab my hump!” Why do we judge and condemn what titillates instead of embracing it? Rushdie has been accused by some critics of selling the West exoticised images of the East—a claim of irresponsibility, I suppose. As if a writer has signed up to champion a certain set of values or to be somehow above the market: as if writers subsist on ink alone. Perhaps a writer is better off standing on the earth with language streaming around, drenched in reclaimed clichés and colloquialisms and vernacular, writing for the world.

War Poet An Interview with Matt Jones by Amanda Earl

Matt Jones first came to my attention at VERSeFest a few years ago when he read as a feature as part of the In/Words Reading Series event. His poems were candid, brutally honest about his childhood and his work in the military while at the same time full of humour, and containing a demonstration of a creative imagination. I wanted to know more about his work and his life and I thought readers would too. From May to August, 2014, we engaged in the following e-mail interview.

Matt Jones grew up in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied English. As a serving member of the Canadian Navy, Matt’s travels have taken him to Greenland, Nunavut, Alaska, and Iceland. Freshly returned from a year of service in Afghanistan, Matt was a feature reader at VERSeFest; he currently works as an editor of in/words Magazine. His poems have been published in Scintilla and Arc where he also recently won the Readers’ Choice Award for their Poem of the Year Contest. He is currently finishing his MA at Carleton University.

Amanda Earl: Since many of your poems are about war & specifically about observations during your time in Afghanistan, would you please provide details about your role there & the time period you were there?

Matt Jones: The skinny on Afghanistan. I was in Kandahar from the summer of 2010 to 2011— eleven and a half months total. I lived in a barracks which consisted of a shitload of sea containers pushed together. There was a shower with a sagging floor and man-mess in the scuppers. I worked in an operation centre, which is like an Army’s brain stem. We received reports from the soldiers on the ground, and compiled that information into briefings and situational awareness for the higher levels. We controlled a lot of resources like tanks, jets, helicopters, bombers, artillery, wreckers, and drones.

Whenever a “significant incident” occurred in our area of operations my job was to deploy the right asset for the job. So we could have a drone strike going on at the same time as a medical evacuation via helicopter for a wounded local. I have two pseudo-polished prose pieces which could paint this picture better. The Fisherman was a story I wrote about watching a person die slowly from a stomach injury. Terrible memory. “Reading The Brothers Karamazov in Afghanistan” is a longer prose piece dealing with an assortment of grisly war memories and how art is/was pivotal to wrapping my head around them. “The truth is ugly,” as Nietzsche tells us, “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”

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One of the things my poetry is concerned with is showing that cost baldly, without subterfuge.

As for my Dad, I guess that’s not a communal wound at all, but a “private” one; I can’t ask anyone to take a share of it. He was beautiful in that way I talked about earlier. When I was going to school in Kingston I was living with my girlfriend and we were poor as balls. Dad took us both to the supermarket and pushed carts into our hands and told us to fill them up. Bought us 700$ of groceries and she was so touched she wept in the street. Dad was raucous and charming and dissolute and funny and cruel. (You would have loved him, Amanda!) He painted water colours, loved sunsets, sang in the car, and made bird noises at children. But he was a hard man—a proud man—and he never picked up the pieces after Mom left him. Never spoke to her again, just started drinking more and dying slow. For a long while it was like I was carrying that bar stool he died on around with me, slung over my shoulder, or nestled in the corner of the room just out of view.

Is there healing to be had from writing? I think so. I hope so? At the very least there’s a community where other people are in pain too, and willing to talk about it. Most writers and poets I’ve met were lonely people once who hid in books. Maybe even with the community many writers are lonely but at least they have the skill to turn their blood and tears into ink.

AE: While you are often writing about serious and traumatic experiences, you do include a lot of humour in your writing. How does humour help you as a writer to convey and articulate your experiences and how do readers/audience members react to the humour in your poetry?

MJ: When I first read at the in/words Reading Series open mic I read a poem called “My Junk is a Force for Good.” And so it is. But then I followed it with a gut-hammer about my experiences in Afghanistan and somehow the two emotions worked well together. The humour makes the rawness go down better. Plus, shocking or filthy writing is just incredibly fun to write. And then you have the pleasure of sharing it at a writers’ circle and watching the expressions on your friends’ faces and scandalizing a stranger so much she drops her coffee. Our lives are short, often meaningless, absurd, and trivial. What’s not to laugh about?

AE: Thanks for answering my questions so thoughtfully, Matt. The experience has been a moving one for me.

AE: Aside from contrasts between the real and the supernatural, your work also includes juxtapositions between stark reality and beauty, such as in a poem entitled “Bomb Lake” where you mention “white flowers and landmines.” In “Reading The Brothers Karamazov in Afghanistan,” you write about a woman who goes in search of her son’s body parts after he has been blown up: “They [the mother with her friends] spilled onto a field of blooming grasses and flowers, where an hour earlier we had fired missiles at Sahar; his blood burst in the sky like the afterimage of fireworks, then misted the field crimson.” Later on in the same piece, grief is juxtaposed with the beauty of the rainy season: “The rainy season in Afghanistan transformed a bleak wasteland into a temporary Eden.” What do you think is the role of beauty in such violent and bleak scenes/experiences?

MJ: Ah, here the answer is two-fold. On the one hand, I don’t think beauty and ugliness can necessarily be separated—our scars can be lovely; those who have lost greatly often have greater depth than those who’ve had an easy ride. And sometimes beautiful people can have the souls of snakes. As you can see, I am disillusioned by beauty and the way we’re all supposed to chase after it. I am disillusioned by beauty and the way it hides the landmines underneath. A pregnant woman with her legs blown off by an IED bleeding out in a marketplace while a huddle of men stop the paramedics from saving her is beautiful; think of the pathos. It was agony to see that woman suffer but agony can be so… exquisite. Beauty, when it is honest, is often cruel.

Cruelty might just be the answer. I write horrific scenes beautifully because I can imagine a reader enjoying the scene and feeling disgust at herself for having that pleasure. Our bodies and minds are always betraying our sensibilities like that. Frankly disgust is the emotion I’m going for with those violent scenes and beauty brings me there. There’s also something terribly self-flagellating about my war stories. I am proud of the things I endured, but I still carry a grief for being a part of, and a witness to, all that violence. So when I write about the experience and the description is lovely the hurt is just so.

AE: You mention in your prose piece, “Reading The Brothers Karamazov in Afghanistan” and elsewhere that the wounds of veterans “are not individual problems, but instead communal.” You say, “My wounds are your wounds too.” In addition, you’ve written and read aloud at VERSeFest, a series of poems about your childhood with an alcoholic and abusive father. You’ve written in your introductions to the poems that writing about the experiences has helped you come to terms with the past.

How does writing and sharing your work with others help in the healing process for you and how do you think it might help others to read about your experiences?

MJ: Veterans’ wounds I do think are communal. People vote for governments, right? These governments make the decision to deploy soldiers to war zones. Seems like we all enjoy the perks of living in our comfortable/wealthy society but want to wash our hands of the ugly bits pertaining to how we stay on top of the heap. Increasingly, now that the war is over, the veterans are the ones forgotten. The closure of veterans’ offices, the reduction of benefits for wounded soldiers, massive levels of alcoholism, suicide and mental illness: Our country has done veterans a disservice. In critical moments, I suspect that it is in the interest of governments and big business to neglect the needs of veterans because once we start properly supporting these people governments will have to admit that war is even more goddamn expensive than people thought.

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Sharon VanStarkenburgVirtuewww.sharonvanstarkenburg.ca

Sharon VanStarkenburgCapitulatewww.sharonvanstarkenburg.ca

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BH: I don’t really talk too much about what I do as a job, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that most writers have to find work outside their main interest, the main focus of their creative lives. Right now I’m a policy analyst for a department in the federal government. I’ve been doing that for two years. Before that, I worked at a variety of paying jobs—everything from sessional lecturing at the University of New Brunswick to retail. My life before my job in government was exciting but full of instability. I travelled a lot, lived off grants and intermittent employment. I was perpetually underemployed. Then I met my husband and we travelled and lived cheaply together, both working on books. Eventually we wanted to… [laughs] I hate to use the word “settle” because we’re not “settling” kind of people, but we wanted a bit more stability. The home and family life we have now are possible because of the 9 to 5. At times I’m conflicted about my job, there are times when I really hate it and wish I could focus on writing full time, but overall I enjoy it. I guess there needs to be a balance. My aunt would say a balance between the “have to” and the “want to.”

LS: How do you still find time to write now that you’re working full-time?

BH: There’s such a small amount in my day, in my week, so I think I’ve learned to cherish it more. I find ways to carve out mornings or weekend hours. I also think that when I finish a piece it’s even more important to me now. I remember finishing a small essay on Japan recently—I felt such a thrill. I biked to work that day and found myself filled with some kind of giddiness and passion. Finding that time to write meant so much to me. I know that sounds cheesy…

LS: That doesn’t sound cheesy to me. May I ask what prompted you to describe that experience as cheesy? Do you mean clichéd?

BH: I mean sentimental. When you asked me to do an oral interview, I was excited about the possibility. I’m extroverted and love to talk. But I was terrified too—in my writing life, I’m an editor. I never let my first thought out into the world. My first thought is the embarrassing thing that I keep locked away in my journal. The polished poem or essay or interview that I put out into the world is something that has rigour, to my mind. I’m referring to the hours of thinking, editing, re-thinking, sending the piece out to friends and responding to their reactions. I have a fear of speaking impulsively and too superficially about complex and nuanced things.

LS: This is bringing me to the emotional dimension of your poetry. There’s a love of words and humour. You play with words and have a love of sound. But more than that, I find there’s an innocence that I would hate to see swamped by too much inner critic or other people’s input, because I think that is the magic in your poetry—it’s like the candidness of children, how they’ll blat out just anything. So if I were to ask you a question, then—are you sensitive to having sentiment or joy leading a poem?

Going back into the tangle: An interview with Brecken Hancock, by Lesley Strutt

This interview was conducted in person at Hancock’s home, transcribed, and edited for clarity.

When I first heard Brecken Hancock read at an ottawater event, her voice made me sit up in my seat. She delivered her poems sonorously and deliberately, as if she cared that I hear every word. I wanted to meet the woman behind the poems and so I jumped at the chance to interview her for Ottawater#11. Brecken agreed to an oral interview and we allowed a certain adventurousness to lead us rather than following a pre-planned script. I discovered a generous woman whose delight in life and living full-out anchors her awareness that humans are communicators. Our words are to be paid attention to and offered as honestly as possible. She calls them precious material and talking to her, I felt that she considers us, her readers/listeners, a sacred pool into which she drops her poems, knowing there will be ripples.

Brecken’s first book of poems, Broom Broom, has been recently published by Coach House.

Lesley Strutt: Well, here we are. [Laughter]. I wanted to ask you what it is you think we’re doing.

Brecken Hancock: I find it refreshing that we’re chatting rather than doing a written interview. I really appreciate talking, that we’re doing this orally. When you came at it from that angle I was quite energized.

LS: Do you mind my asking what kind of a job you do? And what jobs you’ve done to support yourself as a writer?

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BH: I think it can be valuable to imagine a future version of yourself—what that future self would think, looking back. It helps to contextualize the present in a fantastical kind of way that I find fruitful. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I don’t have regrets, but it’s a policy of mine to try everything I want to try. Which has made me somewhat impulsive, and which can be a flaw, for sure, but I’d rather err on that side of the fence than the too-cautious side. What would I tell a young writer? In terms of advice, I would have to apply the same amount of rigour as I give to writing a poem. I would have to think about it and let it gestate… LS: I like that—the way you say you would apply the same amount of rigour to advice-giving as you would to writing a poem. As much as you live abundantly and throw yourself down mysterious pathways, suddenly you are intensely tender and attentive. What you’re saying is that your poetry is written with a very different energy from which you live your life.

BH: Yes, that’s true, I never thought about it before—the dichotomy between my recklessness and the careful work of writing poems. I’m very kinetic, but there’s definitely a contrast when it comes to my work—a slowing down—because I think about it for a long time, and I sit on it and chip away at it before putting it out in the world. And to go back to what you said earlier about the childlike quality, how candid the poems are—for me, that is the nub of what I would try to capture in a poem. But that very impulsiveness, that very stab at honesty, requires contemplation before it can be spoken of in a meaningful way. So for me to be out in the world and to experience life fully is a moment-to-moment, ephemeral, ever-unravelling, ever-visceral experience. Yet the poem is concretized and solidified—the word, the paragraph, the images. So there’s a balance there.

LS: And could you end with any advice?

BH: It’s funny, I just thought of something else my aunt says: never give unsolicited advice. [Laughter]. But you asked, so… Thinking back on what I said earlier about the fear of speaking too simply about complex and nuanced things—I have to believe that persistence and the hard work of thinking and writing can lead out of the fog of superficiality, the elation of simple “reaction.” Writing offers this to me, the chance to have another chance. I would say that it’s okay to be humbled, even humiliated. I don’t believe in a narrative of self-improvement, so I don’t really think we get better over time. But I do think that attentiveness and, well, kindness, can keep growing in us. That’s not a remedy for being mortal or deeply flawed or mistaken about the world, but maybe there’s a chance, fleetingly, in moments, for wisdom.

BH: I’m grateful that you felt the humour in my work. There is a worry for me that the humour is buried under the darkness. I think the voice in the book is quite angry, quite jaded actually.But for me it is also funny. Take for example a poem like “Evil Brecken.” I hope people feel comfortable laughing at times in it. Just the fact that someone would spend four pages rhyming their name is meant to be humorous in its over-indulgence. But I find myself wanting to challenge the idea that the poems are innocent. Rather than just springing into existence, the finished form is a deliberate object. The trick, the thing that I’m looking for, is to hit a place where a piece reads as effortless, even though the word choice, the rhyme… all of these things are the product of… what’s the opposite of innocence? I’m not talking about knowledge, exactly. But there’s some kind of adult “knowing” that’s necessary.

LS: I’m going to tell you that, for me, the magnificence of this piece is your complete arms-open, throwing yourself into a subject matter, which is so difficult. It’s embodied in the poem “Evil Brecken,” where I get a picture of this kid who has a sense of self, strong enough to say, “There I am, there are those toes and that nose, there’s that part of me that’s kind of strange.”

BH: I appreciate everything you’re saying about the book. I get a real thrill from people interacting with the poems. It’s magical because as much as I love writing, I can’t imagine doing it without the hope that it will eventually enter into a conversation. I like that you saw a kid with self-acceptance and frankness in the book and in that poem. For me, though, the poems “play” with child-like rhythms and rhymes, but there’s a distortion of those tropes that’s necessary to get at the fall from naiveté that’s at the book’s core—take the sort of warped nursery-rhyme aspect of a poem like “Husha.” I was interested in documenting the loss of innocence—a polluted kind of view of the child’s world. The book isn’t only the end result of a daughter grieving her mother, it accounts for the process of grieving. I don’t mean in a therapeutic way, my goal with the book was to document the horror of grief and to render that into language—not to use the book or the writing of poems to feel better. I found it challenging to re-live the pain again and again, but going back into the tangle was necessary to really translate feeling into language.

LS: If you were to describe the real focus, the subject matter, the flesh and blood of your poetry, what might that be?

BR: Hmm. My initial instinct is to say words, but that seems like a very linear answer. Of course there’s humans and animals and history and relationships and love—the world that I want to be attentive to. But, if I think about poetry, I think about words, the way they feel, the sense of the tongue in the mouth, the sounds, what you can do with them, how you can connect them to family and life and pain and regret, all those things that are happening every day. How do you communicate that? How do you connect with an audience? So, what is the flesh and blood of my poetry? I would say words. Then, what are they made into? Well, I would say, more and more I’m getting comfortable with the idea that I’m interested in confession.

LS: I’d like you to imagine that you are speaking from twenty years in the future to a young, wide-eyed writer who has come to see you, what advice would you give this person?

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Diane Lemirewww.dianelemire.comwww.tourcw.cowww.paf-fas.orgL. A. Pai Gallery

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I find myself hungry for critical thought. Perhaps it’s self-justifying, reading someone who’s taking the only thing I really care about—taking it seriously—reading that is self-justifying. It helps me feel less ashamed of what I do.

JB: Why are you so drawn to American criticism? In Killdeer, you take some shots at American cultur-al imperialism. So where’s the tension between being drawn to American criticism, but trying to keep a nationalist distance?

PH: I hate Americans. [JB laughs.] But I think of the term as—not a nationality, but a character type. I connect being an “American” with the business-brained, capitalistic, aggressive, imperialist-towards-Canada, insensitive to populist causes, like that. The criticism and the poets that I read from the U S—are really good. And humane. They are better than we are. If you were to only read Canadian, you’d mostly be reading—in poetry and criticism—imitations of what someone else had originally done. Somebody has read the original, and is telling you about it, as if it were their own. I got this idea early on that I should go to the source. Why should I think somebody’s new Canadian book of poems is so wonderful only because I haven’t read the Japanese poet it is imitating? It means you have to read everything. I know it’s a conflict, the American reaction: my knee-jerk.

JB: It reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, when the main character mistakes the guys in the boat for Americans, but they’re really just Mets fans from Toronto.

PH: Wherever the largest evils are, the best poetry has always come from. [Laughs]

JB: Yeah, that’s true. [Laughs]

PH: Maybe. Rome, London, New York, that’s where—Moscow—these places where you’re getting hit over the head every time you open your mouth—the threat of that makes for good writing. Sadly. In that sense, Canada hasn’t got a hope in hell... [Laughs].

JB: [Laughs]

PH: … of writing any good poems because we’ve never defended our country. My friend, John Wing, the comedian, and poet, says, “We’re not so bad. We’re just America’s little helper.” [Laughs]

JB [Laughs] True. Especially right now.

PH: Yeah. Another woman in Surfacing: she’s in the bush, but she won’t be seen without her make-up! A good Canadian. Our poetic line is too often like that: make-up on it, presentable. A mask.

JB: You mentioned you liked the 2-line / 1-line / 2-line loose form that Frank Bidart uses in Desire because it gives you more flexibility. Could you elaborate on that? What kind of freedom are you look-ing for in a form?

Confession & Fetishes: Jennifer Baker in conversation with Phil Hall Jennifer Baker: What is the relation between writing poetry and poetic criticism in Canada, where poets are often writing both criticism and poetry?

Phil Hall: Critical writing is a way to say: what we’re doing is serious. Critical writing about poetry—to engage in that as well as making it—is a way of saying: serious—and what other people are doing is serious—to look at it, to take it seriously that way.

For a poet to write criticism, or to read plenty of criticism, as I do, it’s to say: it’s not off my head this comes, but from a long tradition I am doing my best to be aware of; each time I write a poem I’m engaging with that whole tradition, even the parts of it that I’m not smart about yet. I’m taking on all of that, the same way people do when they paint oil paintings, or when they write novels. It’s a full-fledged endeavor, like prayer.

JB: Whose criticism has influenced your writing the most?

PH: I’ve learned much from reading Marjorie Perloff. Her books have helped me gain access to writers. I’ve been reading, the last couple of years, Peter Quartermain’s books of criticism—Stubborn Poetics and Disjointed Poetics—those two books are very good. I like to read—the critical writings of Alexander Pope, the critical writings of Shelley, and so on—because the same things are being debated there, then, as now. And some forgotten matters. So I read those. When I was at university—I liked the University of Michigan series, Writers on Writing. Galway Kinnell (who has just died, bless his sinewy poems), and Philip Levine—his critical book in that series is called Don’t Ask—and William Stafford, etc. so I read those. In more recent years, I like the series out of Red Deer College at the University of Edmonton. The Writer as Critic. I really liked Fred Wah’s book, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity; and Stan Dragland’s book, Apocrypha.

Mostly, though, it has been Americans—their critical writing—some Brits. D.H. Lawrence on American literature. Hugh Kenner’s Pound’s Era is a great book, and Kenner is one of the sharpest sentencers. Guy Davenport as well, his Geography of the Imagination, terrific. Richard Ellmann onJoyce and Yeats. Richard Holmes on Shelley & Coleridge…

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PH: What is a poem if it keeps its secrets? At the simplest version of secret—we teach kids that a poem is, “I am big and round / and I’m orange / and I sit in the garden. / What am I?” It’s a baseline of poems: secret. But—the poetic tradition has always been based on saying what no one else was saying, too. When we look back at the major writing of any generation—one hundred years, or so—in each country we see that someone was saying that the emperor didn’t have any clothes on. And that has survived. To say—to name names—that’s one of our powers, right out of Adam. The lyric impulse is not only to sing about who you are, and to tell those secrets, but to say what other things are. To blow the wider secrets. Who’s who. Who’s No One. Say. The long memory. Say.

In Liberation Theology, in Central America, that Ivan Illich brought there and taught—the writing is who killed who when—let’s not forget this. To keep memory alive is to fight silence, fight secret. One of the reasons to read criticism is because—the best people writing literary criticism can delineate between integrity and bullshit. Very important. Even in my own revision process, it’s a process of moving down through initial impulses—to get to something that has integrity beyond the ego. If I get to it—or if you get to it—it isn’t only owned by us. Integrity is always shared. (Bullshit is patented.)

JB: There’s a significant work that your risk with language is doing, as opposed to say, humor, or anecdote.

I hope so. For all of these reasons—I’ve tried to compose wider. But when I wrote, for instance, Old Enemy Juice, I have a line in there that says “Fiction is an insult to our life stories.” I didn’t even like people making up stories, because so many good and real stories were here. The basic seed of mendacity is metaphor. It says, “This and this are alike.” That’s a lie. They’re the same. This thing & this other thing are the same. The sooner we admit it, the better a line can be. Though it may not be parochially fashioned any more.

I used to look after old people. This one old guy—he snuck out of the house on me—he was in his bathrobe, and heading to the freeway. I caught up to him, was walking him back home, and a dog goes across the road, and he says, “Nice cat?” I said, “That’s a dog.” He said, “Well, one or the other.”

I’m more like that old guy than I used to be. In my poems, I mean. [Laughs.] People want us to eat TV dinners. We don’t have to.

JB: Yeah, that really makes sense.

PH: My attraction to experimental writing is, “I’m not going to use those trays anymore, guys.” JB: That’s an interesting movement, because your poems build in sequences—but they’ll be opening too. At the same time, there is this breakdown of compartments—between things, between people. There’s this movement that’s causing friction.

PH: Bidart’s 2 / 1 / 2 pattern appears unpoetic. I like that. It has a big power—in that it isn’t saying “I am a poem.” Bidart saw that what he wanted to tell—the poetry he was after—was in a tradition that wasn’t the British form, but in that Roman and Greek tradition of...epistles. They don’t look like poems. They look like complaints or addresses or letters. And also, it’s very popular to write 2-line poems. Ghazal-esque. Once something trickles down to the workshops, it’s dead. It trickled down—the ghazal. And now almost everything’s in two-line stanzas in the journals because people who are conservative have seen the ghazal as a loose enough form—the first line and the second line are a little different—so they think they’re being a tad experimental. I found that if I followed Bidart and did singles and doubles, singles and doubles, it lost that tag, visually. Just as something to look at, Bidart’s long poems don’t announce: form! By not leading with form, they become more able to talk of unpoetic matters, such as murder. They become more intensely poems by absorbing their techniques: they become engaged, and of more use as carriers of what is both subtle and immense…Also, when I began to use the alternating 1 / 2 / 1, I was absorbing the patterns of old fiddle tunes, or trying to, and the alternation seemed fiddle-like to me. [Fiddling motions]

JB: I’ve seen this in Amanuensis, and it appears in your other work, this idea that you want language to do something—and I get the sense that you mean something material—in the world. It seems tied to this emphasis on process, and this resistance to closure, and with the disclosure of personal trauma.

PH: The unspoken word there, in your question, is shame. My writing comes out of an inherited shame. I have transferred my body shame to my relationship with poetry, so I’m ashamed to make it. And so—but I do it—so how do I justify my work? How do I make it worthy? I want to be able to write something that sits so solidly in the world that it’s—I used to say useful—I want it to belong—as legitimate. Not legal, but substantial. Not big, but intuitively—worthy. Yep. I’m suspicious of metaphor because metaphor is associated with secret, and to overcome shame—to turn shame into pride—you need to avoid secrets, line by line. Plain-saying—coming to realize that there’s more poetry in saying—like Rilke does—“you must change your life”—there’s more poetry in arriving at that as a last line than there is in “a red, red rose”—in metaphor. The secret blown—is what Blake tells us: “Rose thou art sick.” No metaphor. (OK, allegory.) Or sometimes, even a joke is better than metaphor: “my love is like a red, red nose!”

I like a poem to be a useful thing. I mean to speak my dilemmas to yours. Will that help? I am still innocent or stupid enough to think so. For a while, I was very attracted to concrete poems, just for the name of them! No metaphor, just picture. Ian Hamilton Findlay’s poetry garden in Scotland. I’m doing something solid, it just isn’t honored. Almost everyone who writes poetry—especially in the early years—carries an embarrassment about it. I wrote Killdeer to invite people away from that embarrassment—to say, “Look. I tripped over myself like a goon,” [JB laughs], “over and over.” Sure, the poems stink that you’re writing! Keep writing them. Sure, you hate your parents, but wait ten years.

JB: Those ideas all seem to fit together, and work together, in interesting ways. Can you talk about the language of disclosure, specifically—what does it do in your poems?

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And poems are like that. You say: I’m thinking about that dead horse, I’m thinking about my favou-rite food, and I’m thinking about what Harper’s doing to the country. If I bind those together, what do I have? If the intensity with which I’m relating to all three can be harnessed as a team of inten-sities, that’s 3 X focus, woven. And maybe something extra, a fourth bit. To me, that’s primitive. I’m drawn to that. JB: It’s related: your books have your drawings in them, and you’ve talked about music elsewhere. How would you describe the interplay between all of those things in the books Amanuensis and Hearthedral, where they all work together?

PH: I’m drawing and making collages—I play the banjo—I started drawing people I was working with. The poems I write and the drawings I make are coming out of the same impulse. They look pretty dozy. But heck. [Laughs]

I work inside poems to understand myself and language. I don’t know what I am any better than anybody does. And the only way I get hints is by setting around me, and on the walls and shelves, things I sense power in. I sense an affinity between myself and things. If I can keep them nearby, I feel safer. In the overview, that trickles down into language—there are words I’m cherishing. “Take a moment to love the word ample.” I think that’s a fine word. An aspen is ample. What kind of tree is that? Oh, that’s an ample tree!

JB: [Laughs] That’s a good word.

PH: Yesterday, I was telling my students that we want to keep—a mystery—in our poem—we don’t want to forget that we are making music with language. In lyric poetry, your subject is yourself; music + mystery = self.

JB: So then, how would you describe the evolution of the confessional and the lyric through your work? Why I Haven’t Written—is very lyrical but it’s also built of neatly structured stanzas, and they’re structured much differently than your later work.

PH: I don’t know too much from inside it about the evolution of all that in myself. But confessional poetry attracted me early on, and it wasn’t for the religious reason. Robert Lowell became a Catholic, early, when he was the most precocious young poet in the 50s in the U S—and his conversion to Catholicism was a big part of his early great poems, “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” etc. So when critics started to identify—look what Lowell is writing about his blueblood family and his bouts of lithium—look at Berryman and Sexton—they called it confessional, as in Catholic—you were going into a confessional. I would prefer to call it—an impulse toward the non-secret in poetry.

Sometimes I have thought that John Berryman and Anne Sexton would be my parents. [Laughs]

I’ve always known, as a writer, that the poem will avoid anything it can unless you don’t let it. We are inundated and taught ways to avoid confessing. Admitting. Owning-up. Even admitting that we don’t know—opens a poem. “Stop mansplaining!” says my wife, Ann!

PH: I’d like that to be true. Shame makes me want to be definite—I was praising Rilke’s line, “you must change your life.” But there’s also something wrong with definiteness, it is like a stamp on the forehead. That last line, we all know it, is a bit like “the doorknob statement” in psychiatry: chat about nothing for 45 minutes, and say the life changer as you go out the door! Every time someone says, “You must change your life,” up should rear that rebel voice, “No I don’t! That’s so social worky! That’s so middle class! I can’t. I’m dirt poor. I’m untouchable…”

Especially in my most recent book, The Small Nouns Crying Faith, there’s a knee-jerk reaction—the poet rears up and says, “Why do I always write shitty little poems like this?” I find that liberating, but I notice that it rears up in me—the emperor’s new clothes thing. You can just stop the poem anywhere. You don’t have to explain, or give advice, or point a lesson—you don’t even have to paint a full picture. You can get bored and just drop it, and there’s the poem. See Larry Eigner. That pleases me more than definiteness. More and more.

JB: This might be a good time to ask—and we’ve already talked about it—there’s this theme in your work, as you said, about the breakdown of compartments where animals, humans, and objects exist in a significant relation to each other—mice scratching away in the walls mirror you scratching away with your pencil.

PH: Well, I’m allergic to cats and dogs, and I’m really allergic to horses. [JB laughs] But I do feel an affinity with them from a distance. I like living in the country now, I feel like a fairly large creature among other creatures, am a bit more competent than I was in the city.

Animals—I’m interested in the way people write about them. I keep reading Ted Hughes. I like his poems about animals. But I don’t have a dog or a cat. Misdirected emotion, I call it. Besides, you can’t travel. [JB laughs].

JB: How would you describe your relationships with the other—beings—in the world—and objects?

In relation to my writing, it’s that creaturely thing. Fellow creatures. I get that, and it keeps—they remind me to stay primitive, if I can—which means proper grammar and syntax aren’t as important as they might be. They remind me that the head isn’t the main thing.

I don’t like a poem that tells you about thought, about the head. But I really like a poem that—I mean, how do you do it?—but a poem that seems to come from the body itself. I prefer that. And so sometimes I’m mucking around in a poem, and that’s what I’m looking for, is—I’m looking to find out what the donkey-me has as a reaction. I don’t know how to do touch-table very well. Noise, I guess.

But in relation to just things, just objects—I keep many books around me—I keep too many objects around me as talismans, fetish items—not for memory’s sake, or nostalgia, but because I like folk objects—little carved things—they seem to retain energy. Some items seem to vibrate, nothing you can do can take it out of them. I like poems that are like Zuni fetishes. They’ll carve a little creature, and then they’ll take a spearhead and some grass that has power, then they’ll put those on the back of the carving, then tie it all up. They put them together. I’m not projecting power; fetishes in hand are bestowing their power to me.

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PH: I don’t really like any of them.

JB: That’s fair.

PH: Oh, probably not. But I don’t. Who jumps out there? You can pick some and say, “Well, these are the best of that period.” You want to tell the history, so you’ve got to have somebody in that period. But really, they were imitators, and not really good at it, either. The only exceptional thing about them was that there were so few people doing it. That doesn’t make them good—it just makes them... precocious.

JB: What do you think is the relationship between work and poetry, coming out of the New Work Writing tradition?

PH: Early on, I identified myself and was identified that way—with work writing. I was ashamed to be a poet—I was ashamed to even be a reader, in my family—and so, it’s no accident that the first writer whose work I absorbed wholly—and read everything—was Hemingway. I thought, “Here’s a guy who hunts and fishes and fights bulls”—this is manly writing, and therefore, perhaps, I’m justified in—I know I’m a wimp—but if anybody challenges me—and “anybody” is my dad—what would my dad say if I was reading Oscar Wilde or Shelley? To read Hemingway seemed a little justified. (Away from home, at last, I read Wilde & Shelley. Decadence!)

This idea that you could write about your work—that seemed a life raft to me. It seemed liberating—a whole area that people didn’t write about. The embarrassing element for me, and for most of the people I knew who were writing about work, was that we didn’t want to work. We wanted to be writers, not wage slaves. So that fizzled out. You can’t base a poetics on subject. There’s nothing about form—it’s all content. This is a good poem because I work at the car plant, and this is a bad poem because I sit by the river all day? It doesn’t work.

Tom Wayman and Erin Moure were big influences on me. Friends. Erin and Tom were in the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union, as was I. Every month we would meet—to share poems about work—but gradually, Erin’s writing became extra-interesting to me—she was taking her line past the subject of work into language itself. That’s the way I went. I followed Erin. I think of my writing as the work, now. I don’t like to give my time to anybody else—even for a poem. [Laughs]

JB: I mean, I’m an academic, so neither do I. [Laughs].

PH: [Laughs] No, no.

JB: Do you see a relationship between poetry and the sacred, or the work of poetry and the sacred?

PH: Maybe I would just call it—the mystery—the spiritual is inside the sounds of the words—the vowel sounds—is probably where it retains—or passes into—poetry—as music. I’m a pantheist. I think there are little gods everywhere. If you think of what holds things together—then that’s where the power is. I think of the crosshatch—a sustaining concept—Xs & Os—it clothes us, it warms us, it protects us—and all it is—is the game board, a grid. It’s used in paintings for shade.

It’s not—what is missed, when confessional poetry is talked about in derogatory terms, is that if you keep a secret—if you don’t say the hard thing in the poem—then you own it alone—and it can destroy you. But once you say, “My cousin abused me, and here’s his name”—then it’s not yours anymore.

Confession, in a poem—is a putting back—into the communal circle—of what you’ve been carrying. Deleteriously. You say, could you help me with this? You share. That’s a gift to others. Too.

Confession, in a poem—is also to align yourself with ruin instead of success—which is always a good thing to do, for sure. We’re taught not to. The prize system says align yourself with success. But—I was getting at this earlier—what would I be if my secret were my own? Initially, I told the secret of child abuse over sixteen years to a psychiatrist—sometimes twice a week. Then, gradually the secret came into my poems. If the poems weren’t honest, how would that hurt them? How did it phony-up the early ones? For the health of the poet, and the poem, confession is a good thing. What would I be—what would my poetry be? JB: Yes. PH: Jay MillAr, in Toronto, wrote to me a week or so ago, he said, “I think there’s some fresh thing happening with the confessional poem and young women poets.” I was glad to hear that. I said to him, “Maybe we should start tracking something called The New Confession Poem. What would it be?”

JB: Also, do you think that there can be such a thing as specifically rural thought that’s free from nos-talgia? What would that look like?

PH: Nostalgia is inactive. It is memory’s zeitgeist. Once there’s no countryside, to write about it will be only nostalgia. But if you can live in the country—as I’m trying to do—then you should be able to respond to it directly, actively, as long as you don’t put blinkers on, as long as you don’t block everything else that’s happening. I admire Wendell Berry a great deal, but I’m not as excited about what he’s doing in poems anymore—to sustain his relationship to his generational farm, he has tended to write conservatively—as if, to honour the land, one had to speak from a formal tradition. That’s the wrong way to go. For me. A trap. To think that rural has to be nostalgic, nope. I would hope that we could write about not being urban in ways that are inclusive, and complicated. And at the same time, in ways that—if you also live in the country—you can appreciate & enjoy reading.

The English, of course, writing about the countryside, were often not in it. The English garden has been made into miniatures. That’s one of the few things that Canada has found as a power in its writing, people came from England with their miniature concepts and were faced with immensity and grunt hardship—so, wherever the poems were allowed to contain that, we have something approaching good—to whatever extent the poet shied back and imitated what he knew in Britain and kept the poems as miniatures, they don’t work.

JB: Are you thinking of the Confederation Poets at all when you say that?

PH: Yeah. JB: Who’s your favourite?

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language—and ends up as something else, something sub-linguistic, in another.

PH: The sacred, actually, too, adheres to affect, so that—take an old poem, stand up and read it—if it has retained its energy, you’ll feel it—what it’s saying still is true, still has its music, isn’t doing any imitation—it’s offering something. Corpus patterns.

JB: Yeah.

PH: People respond to that.

JB: The structure of a poem, too, can leave spaces for other people to create. When we read we cre-ate our own little spaces like that. I think about Hélène Cixous’s writing on the écriture feminin—a specifically bodily writing. And I’ve always wondered what that even—it always seemed like a beau-tiful theory to me, but I couldn’t—it’s not something that you can tell someone how to do. You have to find it yourself. It’s difficult, because in some ways you have to shut off part of your brain and get beneath logic.

PH: Clayton Eshleman, early on, wrote well from the body. He took Reichian therapy—which is physically based—he started writing these amazing books of poems published by Black Sparrow, they were a big influence on me because they were so primitive—Indiana, What She Means, etc.

He ended up writing poetry about the origin of the imagination—what he found was a double impulse: where you start drawing the horn of the animal there is also the impulse to draw the whole animal—so you start with your first line—he would write like this—but Eshleman said that there was also this diagonal impulse—as you write down the page, along the sentence or theme or logic—other thoughts keep coming in—other things, influencing these early cave artists—they kept knocking the image sideways.

This is what I find with Larry Eigner, too—the poem drifts across the page—so Eshleman wrote these poems in which the initial impulse knew where it was going—but then he incorporated all the diagonal slashes that came in—passing-thoughts while he was writing. Let it all in. What fascinates me is that this double impulse, if invited, is a complicating procedure: multi-voiced, unpredictable, more true to awareness than singular form. (Daphne Marlatt also knows this, and writes from here.) More real in the sense that life as it is experienced by us all is not one clean image or thought or line, it’s a cross-hatch. A jumble we pick threads out of, for sanity’s sake—but the poem can be the whole quilt: look at the walls of those caves, the overlapping herds!JB: That would be difficult—you’d have to catch every thought as it passed.

PH: Now, Eshleman takes people on summer tours in France to look at the caves.

JB: It’s also about discomfort—writing that way. PH: Yep. JB: There’s a theorist who writes about the Georgic—Kevis Goodman—in her book, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, she has a theory about—what’s embedded in that genre is this

Little connecty things like that I think of as hearth gods. The plant’s incentive toward bifurcation: that’s another hearth god. If a god can be a verb…

I have a friend from high school who has become a monk in Kentucky—I go down each year to see him—he lives where Thomas Merton used to live—they chant the psalms in a cycle over the full year. Repeatedly, this is their year—their work—tracking the psalms and The Book of Songs—they sing. As if doing that, round the year, they were a turbine—churning power—hope—and who’s to say they’re not? Who’s to say their song isn’t sustaining the world like a cross-hatch or bifurcation? I think of the poems we try—as vows. If those monks’ songs—in monasteries around the world—were killed—in swatches, like the bees—or if all the funding were slashed from arts programs, and nobody could get little books published anymore—we would still be writing—but if it were squashed, maybe universities are apiaries—we don’t know how much we need them. If the world turned prose on us—could the gods help us?

Look what happened to Germany in the 40s—all you could do was yodel in the mountains—it wasn’t good. [Laughs] It wasn’t good. Is poem-work sacred? Yes, I think so. In a way that I can’t explain or defend, because I don’t attach it to any orthodoxy. And it is primitive. You will get closer to it talking about Zunis, than you will talking about imagery in Hopkins.

JB: The reason I started writing poetry again was that I started reading yours. And so I think it’s—especially the rural thought—is what sparked it. I was coming from Huron Country to Western University, in London, Ontario in my late teens. I was always uncomfortable in the city, even though I had lived really close to a city my entire life. I was uncomfortable in the country, too—at least, I was uncomfortable with the things no one wanted to talk about, with the idea that rural life had to either be cute--lampoon-able--or entirely unhappy, or any one thing. I wanted to keep a part of it with me anyway. There were no voices that sounded familiar. Things didn’t sound familiar even 30 minutes from where I grew up.

PH: Like John Clare!

JB: Yeah, uncomfortable in some of the same ways. So, to find your poetry, and Alice Munro, and Al Purdy—specifically rural Ontario writers—was a revelation to me. That in our rural spaces, people are making serious art. Good art. When I started writing again—you said something about poems that come from the body—I’ve been thinking along those lines as well. I think about the way that—affect—works between people, is carried in and underneath language. Said, and unsaid. The most basic forms of communication. PH: Can you explain that?JB: Emotion, I guess. Shared emotion—I see it acting materially—in other bodies, in fact. When you read something that really hits you, you physically feel it. That’s where of my questions about language, or disclosures—and the work that they do—come from. You can create something happening materially in the world, and that’s both really satisfying and also really—I think—important, to share that—affect.

PH: You mean by writing you can achieve affect?JB: Yeah. It also always starts from a feeling, and transfers something. Originates in one body—in

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JB: I’m seeing this return to the Georgic as well—and I don’t know if that’s because I’m writing about it now—but I’ve seen it pop up. It’s maybe having a moment. Now I’m thinking about the connection between confession & the Georgic. It might be our environmental moment that is returning them to us. Maybe we’re having some collective realization that it takes a lot of work & courage & reflection to build an existence that’s sustainable & ethical. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.

PH: Well, they’ll connect because those are two interests of yours—how you combine them will be interesting. It’s really women who have kept the confessional tradition going—not the men—I take inspiration from women, because guys don’t—

JB: [Laughs]

PH: A woman will sit and own something—even the worst things—ah but a guy just wants to impress you.

[Laughter]

PH: It’s true—just showing off.

[Laughter]

JB: I have thought a lot about the confessional poem since I started writing again—because I couldn’t write for a long time—it wouldn’t happen, for whatever reason—I’ve always been a little suspicious of it—it’s not that it’s a bad thing—but it can create an unstable space. I’m still not sure what I think about that.

PH: It can be aggressive—and I’m suspicious of that, too—an in-your-face kind of telling that is offensive—Wendell Berry would say it lacks “decorum”—but at its best I think confession can be libation—you’re pouring something out in honour of the gods—you’re pouring it into the public square, as I said.

JB: Which is a political act.

PH: Yes. And libation: the reason people make offerings to the gods is so that more food grows. Writers who kill themselves have often killed themselves already, earlier on—they’ve stopped growing—if they didn’t stop writing altogether, then they stopped growing in their poems—drink reinforces that—they shut themselves down completely—something has been blocked—I’m not saying they were all abused…

You have to fight to have a voice, keep a voice, encourage it to grow and widen—it will shut right down on you, otherwise.

University of Ottawa . October/November 2014

emphasis on discomfort. It comes up through talking about work—Virgil talks about the necessity of toil without end—there are many translations that are triumphant and celebratory about that. Virgil’s world is not one where work has a triumphal moment—where time is a straight line of progress (which is what the georgic becomes in eighteenth-century England)—it’s continual work in which things can always go wrong, and there’s no possible way of being able to control…

PH: That’s the concept of jazz dirt. People play solos, and will consciously throw in off-notes—to keep it from being pure or melodic—they call it “jazz dirt”—flub notes—[imitates a flub note].

JB: [Laughs]

PH: These odd sounds—so it doesn’t get too pretty.

JB: Yeah, I like that concept.

PH: I suppose—having something to confess—is an ongoing irritant. And everybody’s got something—elements of shame—but maybe—an irritant is good. A completely intellectual writing is not—there’s no irritant—if all it says—if all your book says is, “Am I ever smart!” That irritates me.

JB: [Laughs] With certain writers—just to be exposed to someone’s intellectual prowess is not the same as a poetics that invites.

PH: I find that, too. If the poem is flaunting—it’s like a kid who isn’t getting enough attention when the parents are talking to guests—so he’s hooting and dancing in the middle of people—showing off. Whatever it’s putting out in the world—the poem should be able to own it and take it in and say—yeah, that was funny, but let’s go for integrity, at last— past shame & hunger. This has to be said. I have to say this.

JB: I’m just remembering reading an interview that you did—I came across it when I was doing my research—one of the things you said at the end was about “hiding in open air”—I’ve always been interested in this idea of disclosing without exposure—because there’s a complex mechanism there.

PH: We do—we wouldn’t be able to disclose without some protection—and what that is I’m not sure—but there is a way in which, having confessed to being abused as a kid—I haven’t actually admitted that at all—the poem has. There’s a way in which it’s done and not done.

JB: It seems specific to the form, though. There’s a way the lyric can carry things outward.

PH: That poem—“Fletched”—I can give it to people hoping it will help them—as it helped me, making it—but a person stepping over that poem to address me directly about the issue will find me uncomfortable. That poem has carried my privacy like a boat on a boat—I am safe to speak on board its forms.

JB: That makes sense.PH: That’s important.

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Jason Christie is the author of i Robot, Canada Post, and Unknown Actor. His chapbook, Government, published by above/ground press, was shortlisted for the 2014 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Cursed Objects, a chapbook, was recently published by above/ground. Jason lives in Ottawa with his wife and their one-year old son.

Faizal Deen divides his time between Montreal and Ottawa. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. “Mom & Bob Matinees” is from a new collection of poems, The Greatest Films, coming soon (hopefully) to a theatre near you.

dalton derkson is a punk poet from the prairies, currently residing in Toronto. He runs Hurtin’ Crüe Press and writes poems for people. Recent he has appeared in (parenthetical), In/Words and bywords.ca.

Amanda Earl grew up in Mississauga, Ontario where she studied French. Her studies took her from the GTA to Waterloo where she completed an Honours BA and an MA in French Language, Literature and Translation and finally to Ottawa where she received an Honours BA in Translation. Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the fallen angel/chief troublemaker of AngelHousePress/DevilHouse. Her first poetry book, Kiki, was published in the autumn of 2014. Her poetry has appeared in print and online in various little magazines around the world. Her chapbooks have been published in Canada, England and the USA. She is grateful to the City of Ottawa for recent funding for Saint Ursula’s Commonplace Book. For more info, visit AmandaEarl.com or contact her on Twitter @KikiFolle.

Phil Hall holes-up near Perth Ontario where he banjos, tinkers, and draws small. His latest makings are: Essay on Legend (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2014) and Notes from Gethsemani (Nomados, 2013).

Chris Johnson is a has-been. He used to be an editor at In/Words Magazine & Press. He used to be a student at Carleton University. His poetry has previously appeared on bywords.ca, The Steel Chisel, The Peter F. Yacht Club and in a few nice little zines.

Author BiographiesSteven Artelle is a writer living in Ottawa, where he is training an army of crashrabbits to wield Machine Magic against the tyranny of the Governmagi. One day the people of Cult City will learn that the legendary City Limits are real. The answer was beneath us the whole time.

Jennifer Baker is a doctoral candidate and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa, where she spends most of her time thinking about the georgic mode and Canadian literature. She has recently published her first chapbook, Abject Lessons, available from above/ground press (2014).

Selina Boan is a recent English graduate of Carleton University. She has been previously published by In/Words Magazine and won The Claremont Review’s Annual Contest for short fiction in 2008. Her first chapbook entitled An Act of Distillation was released by In/Words Magazine and Press in 2013.

Frances Boyle is the author of Light-carved Passages (BushchekBooks 2014) and a chapbook, Portal Stones from Tree Press (2014). Her poetry and short stories appear in The New Quarterly, Vallum, Arc, Prairie Fire, CV2, Fiddlehead, Room, Freefall , CV2, Truck, Moonset and elsewhere, including the past several issues of Ottawater, and she has work in anthologies on form poetry, Hitchcock, love poetry, and daughters remembering their mothers. Prizes she’s received include This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, the Tree Reading Series chapbook contest, the Diana Brebner Prize, and 2nd place for the Banff Centre Bliss Carmen Award.

Jamie Bradley’s poetry has appeared in publications including CV 2, Descant, and Rattle. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

Ronnie R. Brown’s work has appeared in over one hundred magazines and anthologies. The 2006 winner of The People’s Poetry Award (for STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss Press), Brown’s sixth collection, ROCKING ON THE EDGE, was released in late 2010. Recently Brown was named the winner of The Golden Grassroots Chapbook competition for her long narrative poem, UN-Deferred.

Catherine Brunet was born and raised in Ottawa, and now lives upriver in Renfrew County. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Prairie Fire, Grain, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, Queen’s Quarterly and other literary journals.

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Alcofibras Nasier II always writes in red ink. is a graffiti artist. cleans grease traps for spare change and strong coffee. descends from satire. is a misanthrope and a recluse. is off the booze for good. and this time means it.

Pearl Pirie writes and broadcasts from Ottawa. She is a host of Literary Landscape on 93.1 CKCUfm.com. She has 11 previous chapbooks. Her 2 previous poetry collections will be joined by one forthcoming in spring 2015, the pet radish, shrunken (BookThug). Her micropress phafours is at www.pearlpirie.com/phafours

Nicholas Power is a founding member of the Meet the Presses literary collective, and has performed with the storytelling duo The Wordweavers and the sound poetry ensemble Alexander’s Dark Band. He works as a psychotherapist in private practice. He has been published by Teksteditions (Melancholy Scientist), Underwhich Editions (wells), The Writing Space (a modest device), and Battered Press (No Poems). He has been editing and publishing with his own Gesture Press for 30 years.

Ryan Pratt is a former Ottawan now living in Hamilton. A contributing writer for The Town Crier and Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, Ryan’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paper Street Journal, Quiddity, Contemporary Verse 2, Bywords Quarterly Journal and In/Words Magazine, among others.

Monty Reid is an Ottawa writer. His most recent book is Garden (Chaudiere Books). He is an admirer of Canada’s intelligence community.

Sonia Saikaley’s award-winning novella The Lebanese Dishwasher (Quattro Books) and poetry collection Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter (TSAR Publications) were both published in 2012. In the past, she has worked as an English teacher in Japan. She is currently working on a novel called Jasmine Season on Hamra Street.

Dean Steadman is a writer of poetry and prose.

Lesley Strutt’s roots in the Ottawa Valley are deep. She is the descendant of William Pittman Lett, a pre-confederation poet who was known as the Bard of Bytown before Bytown was named Ottawa in 1854. Her writing has appeared in literary journals, e-zines, and anthologies. She has a novel in circulation and she’s working on her first full-length poetry collection.

Rob Thomas lives in Ottawa. He won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2013. His work has appeared places such as Grain, subTerrain, Broken Pencil and the Feathertale Review. He has a chapbook called Brood inspired by fatherhood, fairytales and zombies. He’s working on another chapbook called Father Mocker inspired by fatherhood and Curious George.

Matt Jones grew up in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied English. As a serving member of the Canadian Navy, Matt’s travels have taken him to Greenland, Nunavut, Alaska, and Iceland. Freshly returned from a year of service in Afghanistan, Matt was a feature reader at VERSeFest; he currently works as an editor of in/words Magazine. His poems have been published in Scintilla and Arc where he also recently won the Readers’ Choice Award for their Poem of the Year Contest. He is currently finishing his MA at Carleton University.

a.m. kozak is a restaurant dishwasher on vancouver island and organizes the performance arts series unReal city. Other work has appeared/is upcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, carousel, and as an In/Words chapbook.

Brenda Leifso’s second book of poetry, Barren the Fury, is coming out with Pedlar Press in Spring, 2015.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa with his brilliantly talented wife, the poet, editor and bookbinder Christine McNair, and their daughter, Rose. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Touch the Donkey and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He also curates the weekly “Tuesday poem” series at the dusie blog, and the “On Writing” series at the ottawa poetry newsletter. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He currently spends his days full-time with toddler Rose, writing entirely at the whims of her nap-schedule.

Ottawa-born, long time Vancouver resident, member of the TADS poets group (George Bowering, George Stanley, Jamie Reid, Chris Turnbull, Renee Rodin, Ryan Knighton, Wayde Compton, and Reg Johansson), and associate of the Red Queen collective, Cath Morris has been writing stories and poetry since she was a child. Besides the release of a chapbook, Venus & Apollo (Pooka Press) in 2009), Cath’s poetry has been published in TADS, Urban Pie, and The Capilano Review, as well as online poetry journals, ottawater.com (3rd and 8th Issues), Poethia.com, and Bywords.ca. Her work was later published in Coach House Press’ special edition anthology for Poet Laureate George Bowering’s 70th birthday, 71(+) for GB, and Corporate Watch UK’s 10th Anniversary Anthology (2007) in Oxford, UK. In 1998, Russian-born director, Irina Trouchenko, staged the experimental one-act play, An Artist’s Dream, based on the eponymous poem and others by Cath Morris and Chris Turnbull for the UBC Summer Stock Festival at UBC’s Chan Centre. Cath has a new chapbook coming out soon from Pooka Press, entitled Fish, Ophelia, and Other Broken Dolls.

Colin Morton’s ten books of poetry include Winds and Strings (2013), The Hundred Cuts (2009), and the Archibald Lampman Award winners Coastlines of the Archipelago (2000) and This Won’t Last Forever (1985).

ottawater: 10 - 61

Dennis Tourbin was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1946 and died in Ottawa at the age of 51 in 1998. Poet, painter, performance and video artist, novelist and magazine publisher, Dennis Tourbin explored the area between painting and literature and moved the word beyond the printed page.Ten books of poetry and fiction were published during his life. To name a few, Thinking of America (above/ground press, 1995); The Port Dalhousie Stories (Coach House Press, 1987); and THE STREAM and other poems (above/ground press, 2014). His visual work can be found in the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, and in private and public collections throughout Canada. Dennis Tourbin exhibited in many cities in Canada and Europe. Since 2012, a retrospective of his works, The Language of Visual Poetry toured several cities in Ontario.

Lauren Turner is an Ottawa-raised poet, currently living in Montreal. She was a previous recipient of the Diana Brebner award. Her work has appeared in Arc Magazine, Geist, various campus publications, and the Lake Effect 5 anthology edited by Carolyn Smart. She holds a BA in English from Queen’s University, and is currently finishing up an MA in Creative Writing at Concordia.

Vivian Vavassis is a Montréal ex-pat who currently lives in Ottawa and calls both cities home. Her poems and essays have appeared in several issues of Arc, ottawater, Peter F. Yacht Club, Montage, A Crystal Through Which Love Passes: Glosas for P.K. Page, and Studies in Canadian Literature, among others. In November 2014, her work was featured as part of the Parliamentary Poet Laureate’s Poem of the Month Program (Canada). Once upon a time, she also co-founded and ran a little ‘zine called incunabula.

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