FEATURING

THE INDEPENDENTS
ed. Patricia Boushel
Caroline Desilets
Sean Michaels
Michael Feuerstack
Anna Leventhal
Elizabeth Powell
Dan Beirne & Janice Wong
David McGimpsey
& LitPop Award Winners
Jonathan Ball — Poetry
Ian Roy — Fiction

COLUMNS:
Billy Fong Parade by Ian Orti & Sophie Caird
Milo & Sam by Joe Ollmann & Andy Brown
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Movie Mythos by Taien Ng-Chan
Dubious Toasts by Evan Munday & Jon Paul Fiorentino

REVIEWS:
The Cult of Quick Repair by Dede Crane
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy by Tao Lin
O Cadoiro by Erin Moure
The Jealousy Bone by Julie Paul
Living Things by Matt Rader
8×8x7 by Colin Smith
Woodshedding by S.E. Venart
Families are Formed Through Copulation by Jacob Wren

Read by Nick McArthur

In the acknowledgements page of his newest collection, Colin Smith describes his poem “Hoot,” as “a sculpting of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’” Perhaps more specifically, the poem appears as a minimalist re-imagination of the Beat original; a distillation of Ginsberg’s epic into two or three word noun clauses, scattered across four pages, and seemingly unlinked by any form or grammar. The end result is a thematically and ideationally faithful homage that is nonetheless unique in both shape and tone: whereas “Howl” appears breathless, continuous, and bombastic, “Hoot” is quiet, fragmented and concise; and while “Howl” most resembles a single tireless rant, “Hoot” takes the shape of intermittent mutters.

Despite these apparent differences, Ginsberg’s influence can be felt throughout the entirety of 8×8x7.  Smith adopts many of the older poet’s signature obsessions and shapes them to fit his own poetic vision. The two share, among other things: a fascination with the human body, in all its beauty and repulsiveness; concern over the relationship of the individual to the state and of the state to the individual; a penchant for satiric humour that borders on the absurd; and, most notably, a fierce distrust of American corporate and consumer culture.

Smith’s radical politics are an integral part of 8×8x7, and even the most intimate poems bear some trace of dogmatic social commentary. More than once, the dogma becomes troublesome, even difficult to read. At his absolute worst, the speaker resembles a white-knuckled teenager, teetering on his soapbox, indicting everyone but himself. For the most part, however, Smith tempers the didactic moments with pitch black humour, and a talent for sharp one-liners. More importantly, the speaker’s rants are often followed by bouts of self-awareness — brief stanzas that both disarm the reader and return the poem to the realm of the personal. In the middle of one particularly heated and far-reaching tirade, the speaker stops himself short, taking account of his frustrations: “And now my sincerest apology if this poem sounds too much like sending the bourgeoisie to the principal’s office.”

More than anything else, 8×8x7 explores the intersection of the personal and the political, the private and the public, and it does so with considerable originality and insight. Though some readers are sure to find the vitriol off-putting, others will welcome the surety with which it’s rendered. Fans of Ginsberg, in particular, should be delighted to find a talent working from the same tradition — a poet who’s bringing his wit and outrage to bear on new absurdities.

Read by Jakub Stachurski

The term ‘woodshedding’ is archaic slang for sound parental thrashings, later adopted by musicians to denote arduous and solitary rehearsal or spontaneous singing. All three definitions are applicable to the poems in S.E. Venart’s first collection, as she contemplates parental folly and isolation, often in a confessional mode. Cigarettes, tea kettles, and domestic animals populate these poems, as the speaker contemplates “this need to scuttle in, clamp down, become / a dark edge in a house.”

This form of domestic lyric is evocative of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s A Breakfast for Barbarians, in which the eponymous meal and domestic backdrop serve to illuminate issues of isolation and the double-edged sword of memory. Though MacEwen’s home was a starting point for her “fight against familiarity,” Venart has, for the most part, accepted her simple abode and stays put.

The constancy of setting (the speaker’s adult and childhood homes) evokes a kind of agoraphobia within the reader as the collection progresses. This sympathetic, physical reaction that Venart creates is impressive, though the homogeneity does, at times, become grating. The personification of animals and unabashed emotional ‘breakthroughs’ border on self-indulgence. For example, after a speaker’s interaction with a moth during a storm, she concludes “and shafts of light / will always be inserted / between the dark pulls of downpour.” The problem is that the poem in question, “Hawthornden Journal”, does not prepare the reader for such a conclusion; and while I value an intuitive, lyrical voice, such insight, when sprung on the reader haphazardly, is ineffectual. This points to an imbalance in the collection, as Venart is capable of conclusive, emotional insight in the final stanza of other poems and saves them from falling into similar obscurity. In “Distraction”, a day holed up in the home does not so much end, as amble to a close with “the wearing down of want.”

While she is not “fighting against familiarity” as MacEwen does, the speaker in Venart’s poems is not a passive bystander. Hidden conflicts are brought to light with thoughtful, unadorned verse. Obtuse imagery and raw emotion do not always satisfy, but are in keeping with the tone of the collection: “this is solitude. There’s no one here to please.”

read by Melissa Bull

“I think… this might sound crazy… I think, in the van, they have a machine: radio waves or microwaves. They have a machine that’s making me feel ill.”

“Families are Formed Through Copulation” is concisely written theatre that churns out accounts of guilt, fear, disengagement and despair without the self-indulgence of mellow-drama. “Families” is quite unlike Montreal’s damp winters. It’s cold, but it’s a dry cold.

“Sometimes at school I would mention a few ideas (…) something about the American government or about the CIA or the wars. And the response would almost always be the same. (…) Basically every single time, after a short, sad pause, they would gently change the topic, saying only: ‘I can’t talk about that. It makes me too depressed’.”

The play – that can easily be read as a series of short stories – is told from a tilting cups and saucers kind of point of view. It spins from first-person to third to a different first. A structure that focuses the reader into empathy for each character and objectivity for the narratives.

Wren’s work expresses to what extent the ties of love and lust are what make us hoard into capitalism, close our eyes, try to cotton-batten our existence and recycle idealism into unblinking bourgeoisie. They are meditations on the harm we inflict, on the way our very individuation wrenches us into more violence. For an antidote to what’s been done to us, for distraction from the pain we cause, for a way of being in nothingness.

“But every time someone says that to me – that I’m cynical – I experience this really visceral thing: an unpleasant little jolt, almost like an electrical shock, right at the centre of my being. (…) I have such an achingly lucid sense of idealism, real idealism. It’s clear to me that things could be so much better than they are, so much better than they will ever be.”

Wait: “Families” is about a couple of kids who hitch a ride to a show but don’t get there. “Families” is about a Jewish guy who makes out with the daughter of a former Nazi. “Families” is about a person paranoid he is being followed by a white van. “Families” is about someone who isn’t born yet. Sometimes it even goes a little screwy with the sci-fi. A rich document. Wren’s stories are solitudes strung up like worry beads, or an unlikely rosary.

read by Carrie Schmidt

Julie Paul’s first collection of 14 short stories, though well-written, has its share of problems. There is repetition throughout the collection, and consistently unlikable characters. It is clear that Paul is a talented writer; dialogue flows naturally and she sets a scene well, whether in Mexico with a woman exploring new sexual territory in “Chicory”, or taking a speculative look at the future of baby-making in “Instant Family”.

It is not a surprise to learn that Paul considers her work influenced by Alice Munro: heterosexual relationships, monogamy, adultery, and motherhood are consistent themes in Munro, and so it is with The Jealousy Bone.

The repetition that plagues this collection begins early: the first two stories mention red wine as the cause of headaches, leaving the reader concerned that red wine and headaches will appear in all of the stories. (They don’t). Coats made of velvet and infidelity are prominent in “Staking the Delphiniums” and “False Spring”, while yoga makes regular guest appearances throughout. There is also a particular clothing removal technique that is described in detail at least three times in the collection: a lover hooking his or her thumbs under nylons or underwear and peeling or ripping the garment away from the body. This repetition causes the reader to wonder how much of the author’s life is appearing in the stories, or whether the collection was edited as a whole or individually.

Many of the characters do not inspire sympathy or interest; they are often vain and have romanticized notions of their privileged lives, as in “Backstory”: “We look good together, I’ll admit it, strolling along Bank Street with coffees, buying raspberries in the Byward Market, throwing extravagantly coloured leaves into one another’s faces every fall.” A yoga therapist breaches all sorts of confidentiality rules when gossiping to a client in “False Spring”, and the need to breed churns out maniacal caricatures in “Instant Family” and freaky, overly cautious parents in ”Feeding on Demand” and “Boring Baby”.

Individually, many of the stories are enjoyable: “The Jealousy Bone”, “Instant Family”, “Frozen Shoulder” and “Boring Baby” are particular stand-outs, but as a collection, the obnoxious, unlikable characters are overwhelming in their self-reverent vanities and internal woes. In the words of the narrator of “Boring Baby”: “Aw, shit. You don’t really need to know this either, all right? I already know it, and telling you again is making me yawn.”

Read by Aaron Giovannone

Over the last few years, Tao Lin’s blog (readerofdepressingbooks.blogspot.com) has cultivated a large following of fans, or as he has called them in one of his self-promotional web stunts, “Tao Lin Interns”. Lin’s transparent, funny, confessional style is well-suited to the online environment’s demand for immediate gratification, and judging by the blog postings of some of his avid ‘Interns’, this style is highly contagious.

One of the most appealing things about Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Lin’s second book of poetry, is how it skillfully navigates the poles between irony and earnestness. We can see this in Lin’s use of what we might consider staples of poetic writing: metaphor and prosody. There is, in fact, barely a metaphor in the book, besides the extended anthropomorphisms where Lin becomes a hamster:

In florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future
The hamster has bad eyesight
And many other problems
Later that night the hamster drives its car around
Listening to sad music; the hamster lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel
The hamster is alone
But not for long: at home three waffle friends wait
Cooling inside a countertop oven in the kitchen

While the hamster metaphor is obviously ironic, a purposefully transparent veil for Lin’s confessionalism, it’s also serious because the figure adds something at face value: the writer really does feel trapped and powerless like a hamster. Lin’s best prosody works in a similar way, both earnestly and ironically:

‘in the distance a sarcastic man walks around
I don’t know if he’s sarcastic or not
I don’t know anything about him
I don’t know anything’ is an irrational
and melodramatic pattern of thought.

Through repetition and self-quotation, Lin crafts a solipsistic music that undercuts the pretension of rhythmic or rhyming poetry while simultaneously providing the pleasures of such writing.

While Lin’s self-examinations often cross the line into self-indulgence, the overall impression made by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is of a young man trying to find a morally responsible position in the world. In one poem Lin describes straight-forwardly and persuasively why independent businesses are more ethical than publicly-traded ones.  This is not inconsistent with the funny poems in the book; after all, isn’t making people laugh – making them happy – an ethical thing to do? Tao Lin is very good at it, which is perhaps why so many bloggers like him (and want to write like him).

Read by Erin Gray

“All in all, we must confess that the cantigas present difficulties: problems with interpretation, ambiguities, confusing passages and points of obscurity.”
- Marques Braga, 1945

Erin Moure did not write O Cadoiro. Rather, she read it into being, gathered its contents from a wandering and a fall.
Moure has a peculiar standing in the experimental Canlit canon; she is one of the most critically lauded and successful Canadian language-poets, and has received a series of coveted awards for her collections of poetry. Yet, Moure is often criticized for her opaque, unabashedly intellectualized poetic renderings. Her writing has been dubbed “inaccessible,” “baffling,” “masturbatory,” “offensive,” “egregious,” and, perhaps my favourite, “minimalist English poetry with the texture of pre-solidified concrete.” [1]

Her most recent work, O Cadoiro, is undoubtedly hermetic in its seemingly random accrual of pedestrian images and wanton wordplay. Many a reviewer (Lily Gontard in Geist, for example) has noted his or her bored and bitter slog through the book’s meditations on “falling” (o cadoiro means “the place where falling is made,” which Moure, in her postface, describes as “the place of poetry”). Moure is a challenging writer, and much of her work is unpleasant to read.

As I toiled through O Cadoiro, confused by the confluence of playful paratextuality and self-referential lyricism, I found myself wondering what was on Moure’s mind as she composed such lines as “for by them yo9 do mewell. 7God” (from “Befallen II,” 95). Ultimately, O Cadoiro contains enough intellectual intrigue – and, at times, charm – to have inspired this reviewer to read, and reread, and reread yet again. And it is reading that Moure seeks to trouble; the time of reading, the place of reading, the how of reading, the why. In O Cadoiro, Moure dons the mask of the troubadour as she turns her attention to the medieval Galician cantiga, an Iberian archive of love, lyric, and error.

As Moure explains in the book’s postface[2]  there are three types of cantiga: the cantiga of courtly love (de amor), of longing for an absent lover (de amigo), and of scorn and slander (de escarnio e maldizer). It is perhaps the cantiga de amigo that exerts the most influence over O Cadoiro’s telepoetic verse. Moure seems most attuned here to subjectivity’s lack, to moments of yearning and quiet restraint; and this concern slips into, or perhaps from, her postmodern concern with language’s defects. Take a poem from “Befallen I,” for example:

What if I talked to you again?
Could the street sing any wider?
The raisonnement of my cancion s
ever been lacking

Where lyric foils me, the poem
the poem
the poem
[the transcription is excelente and mui limpa]
[the excriptora has at last been paid]

the foil” (36)

In O Cadoiro Moure embraces failure, seeing in loss a pregnant silence worthy of contemporary cantigaic vitality. Here, we have Moure interpreting a largely outmoded style of poetry in order to comment on the Derridean problematic of the origin and archive of writing. Waterfalls, snow, sheaves of paper, sleep, absent mothers; O Cadoiro, as both document and act, is marked by the syncope of “empty” changes, and, with these cantigas’ recurring focus on absence – on sexless tension and withholding – Moure is having another go at the author issue.

As Moure notes in the postface, the main question that drives this collection forward is What does it mean to “trobar” today? To trobar is to invent song, to compose in verse. Curiously, it also means to find, to disturb, to turn up. In the cantigas’ sonority, Moure senses the feverish shiver of language’s insufficiency, its near-constant deferral of meaning. Hence the incoherent footnotes, references to writerly failure, and Moure’s discomforting co-habitation with language as bedfellow and spawn:

Please waken. I am suffering from so many
consonants, consoants, and I am
not a good sufferer.
My modem       and god awakens me
light over Lisbon.
There should be rhymes…” (44)

Much of this book is a mapping of Moure’s process, of her unsettling insertion into the labyrinthine aphasia of poiesis: “variations on a word, then its opposite. the languages mixed up in my head.” But within this effacement, she finds in the renewed Galician lyric a humanist gesture of perseverance. Fundamentally, the cantigas offer Moure another chance to investigate the ethics and erotics of transelation: Quebecois language feminist Nicole Brossard’s refiguration of translation as a procreative act rather than a mimetic retelling. O Cadoiro does indeed contain translations, as well as poems written in Galician, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. These romantic languages seem to hold sway over Moure; but her adaptations are far from direct transcriptions. More like “(shallow r ripples),” they occur through a sonic, rather than representative, exchange.

This is, ultimately, a book of strange markings, of foreign words connected by arrows and gaffe. Writing into the echoic aura of error, Moure allows us to experience some of what she encountered when she read Galician poetry – in order to study the sixteenth-century poems, Moure had to engage with a copy of a copy of a copy: a lithographed reproduction of a photographic facsimile of a sixteenth-century manuscript. And it is to Moure’s credit that she is able to re-create this contradictory, and thoroughly unsettling, experience for her readers; in its disjunction and incomprehension, O Cadoiro writes beyond signification, nudging us into language’s phatic sway, where “perplexity and silence” give way to suture.

Footnotes:

[1]  Shane. “Dealing With Erin Moure.” http://www.goodreports.net/essays/jury24.htm.
Accessed March 18, 2008.

[2] Available in full at http://www.anansi.ca/ocadoiro/postface.

read by Darren Bifford

Living Things is Matt Rader’s second book of poetry. The good poems in this book are very good—with the lesser poems standing as just good. They are technically accomplished and gritty, displaying something of a debt to Babstock and early Lowell. More than this, Rader’s book is the result of a great deal of intense reading in mid-20th century English and American poetry. I suppose this kind of background should be assumed with any contemporary poetry; with Rader, however, the indebtedness of influence and effort to write poems that can compete with the best is especially evident and painfully admirable.

There are several poems — e.g., “You, Louis MacNeice” and On First Looking into Larkin’s “Aubade”” — that make explicit the exemplary models against which Rader has set his craft. The form of the poems mirror — or, better, plays against — the formal modes of MacNeice and Larkin respectively. E.g.,

“I get up each day in the dark and in the dark go / To sleep half drunk”

More impressive to my ear is Rader’s free translation of Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat. This poem is fantastic. One has only to compare it to the original or more recent translations (i.e, Stephen Heighton’s) to see how much this poem is Rader’s own. Here’s the first stanza:

“Comes the wayward waters of the coast
Bearing me on its unbroken back, chartless,
Without compass or sextant, no ghost
Or unseen hand guiding me by cutlass[…]”

And so the poem builds—regular quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme. But the rhythms are what really make it for me: less Romantic than they are Anglo-Saxon, sounding like a contemporary enactment of The Seafarer.

Rader is not, however, pursuing the emulation of the dead. The best poems here are invested with a disciplined and highly focused interest in formal innovation. My favorite poem is the opening poem, one that offers the best example of Rader’s originality. “The Great Leap Forward” is composed of seven stanzas of unequal length: 1-1-2-3-5-8-13. . This sequence isn’t arbitrary: it’s structured in terms of the Fibonacci sequence, according to which the value of each consecutive unit is the sum of the two preceding units. Some research will show that the sequence was discovered in Ancient Indian and apparently played an important role in Indian ritual — signifying “purity of utterance”. I suspect Rader is aware of this history; as such the poem announces both formally and thematically the larger ambition of the collection as a whole. The poem enviably unites intellectual rigor with linguistic density and is a pleasure to read.

When the poems are less successful, they’re still respectably good — that is, formally accomplished but with less emotional urgency. I’d put the two sonnet sequences scattered throughout the text in this category. They deal, respectively, with the imagined lives of North American trees and plants. Take, for instance, the first few lines of “Garry Oak”: “Warped, twisted, bent out of shape, cured I con- / form to no straight plane. Good for nothing. / Knock-kneed, knobby, in need of a cane, / I’m age encased in scaly skin[…]”. Evident linguistic dexterity is at work here but the final effect to my ear is that of a riddle.

Rader is best when shooting from his chest. I’m looking forward to—and somewhat terrified to receive—his next book.

Read by Drew Halfnight

There is something womblike about the stories in Dede Crane’s new collection The Cult of Quick Repair. The warm prose washes over the reader like a benign amniotic fluid, and one has the sense, especially in the opening story “Seers,” which evokes the deep heat and soothing gyrations of an ultrasound, that one could perhaps float effortlessly through life with no trouble at all. But for Crane, the ultrasound reveals babies and tumours alike. Visceral ruptures, including abortions, adultery and death, await the characters in this collection. The dowdy nurse who so lovingly applies the cool, bluish goo, for example, becomes the victim of spontaneous perversions.

Crane is at her best when dark, and she’s darkest when observing the wretchedness of men. In “Raising Blood,” the protagonist flays his own knee-cap with a vibrating turkey knife in order to establish an alibi for the crimson stains on his conjugal sheets — actually menstrual blood from an adulterous fling gone wrong. In “Sunday Bastard,” a hungover husband spills the contents of his wife’s purse on the counter at a grocery store, then, seeing that she’s carrying a used prophylactic, announces to a mortified clientele that she’s been cheating. He is exposed as a total bastard, but somehow we forgive the poor loser. Crane manages the same deft balance in “What Sort of Mother,” when a perfect father succumbs to the drink and drives his car into a telephone pole, nearly killing his two kids.

Though Crane is obviously a gifted storyteller, and while the earnestness of her desire to unearth new truths is felt, the stories rarely dig and stir to the extent they might. “Medium Security,” a brief story about a repressed inmate in a female prison, misses the mark. At times the author could be writing for her other genre of choice, teen fiction, if it weren’t for a minor plot turn to an adult subject.