Lillian Nećakov : The Saddest Poem

for & after John Barlow

 

The saddest poem is an empty hospital bed in the middle of a parking lot at the corner of Dundas and Bathurst. Clouds hovering like giant floatation devices. Summertime - the spitting image of your face – nothing more than an oil stain. And I’m pulling on my tights against this strange and terrible wind. There is a giant hole in the airspace filled with ideas and I think them, and I think them and each idea is a Saturday so sad.

But the saddest day is always Sunday. Whether we’re talking about love or reincarnation, tastes like a mouth on LSD, you said.

Last night we had enchiladas rojas and pie and beer. Later, we stepped outside to look at the night sky and there in the middle of our lives was a tiny Lawrence Welk, like a promise, conducting a miniature orchestra of atoms. And we told each other stories of toasters and our younger selves in motorcycle jackets and the shadows rippled into commas and ampersands  and ellipsis. And I kept thinking of that market kid and his lemonade stand, the saddest poem you wrote, and all the libraries closed, all the city pools, the barber shops, the zoos, the subway, infinite space, closed. And I thought, where does a kid like that go to cry hard?

But the saddest day is always Sunday. Whether we’re talking about hydrogen or flipflops, you only have to want to live and you live. That’s what you said.

The saddest poem is a piece of turquoise glass at the corner of Augusta and Nassau, 2 x $5 tax churros. The girl at the pickup window, hair the colour of condensed milk and somehow your eyes, smiling. But really, the thing I came here to tell you is how easily the skin breaks when one of us is gone. And that a city is held together by nothing more than the routes we walk in tandem and that the saddest poem you will write is the one you write from heaven.

 

 

 

 

Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her book, Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was published in 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her book, Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin was published in May 2023 by Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.

Blaine Marchand : on Elisabeth Harvor

 

 

 

 

 

I first met Elisabeth Harvor, the Ottawa short story writer, poet, and novelist, at the annual gathering of the League of Canadian Poets in 1993. That year, she had won the League’s Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her first book of poetry, Fortress of Chairs, published by Signal Editions, Véhicule Press. I had actually been aware of her earlier. Ottawa was a much smaller city in the 1970s and 1980s and its literary community as equally small. She lived in Ottawa South and me in the Glebe, so our paths frequently crossed though we had never spoken.

Over the years since our meeting, I learned from her what an interesting life she had, and of her incredible dedication and single-mindedness to her craft. Elizabeth was born in 1936, in New Brunswick. Her parents, Kjeld and Erica (Matthiesen), had immigrated from Denmark and were important potters in the Canadian artisanal scene. Elisabeth often said that her parents’ hand-built pottery creations were similar to her approach to writing: both begin with an image or idea of what could be fashioned, followed by the laborious work of bringing it to fruition. She knew early that she wanted to be a writer, announcing her decision to her parents at age 10.

In 1957, she married Stig Harvor, an architect, born to Norwegian parents in Finland. After a period in Europe, Elisabeth and Stig came to Ottawa and had two sons, Finn and Richard. Sadly, the marriage did not last. Her son Richard, himself a poet, died in 2013, aged 49.

Elisabeth was certainly prolific. Her first collection of short stories, Women and Children, was published by Oberon Press in 1973. Although her work brought quick recognition, she decided to pursue a creative writing degree at Concordia University, where she received her MA in 1986. But the publishing world had taken note of her work as her fiction, poetry and reviews fiction appeared in Canadian, American, Mexican and European journals.

Penguin Books Canada published her second collection of stories, If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever, in 1988. Then, HarperCollins reissued Women and Children under a new title, Our Lady of All The Distances, in 1991. And then her third short story selection, Let Me Be the One, was released in 1996 and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction.

Following up on the success of her first poetry collection, Signal Editions, Véhicule Press, issued The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring, in 1997. It was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award, given by the League of Canadian Poets.

The new century brought two novels: Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, released by McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Harcourt in the US, in 2000. This was followed by All Times Have Been Modern, published by Viking Canada/Penguin in 2004, which was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award. And a collection of poetry, An Open Door in the Landscape, by Palimpsest Press in 2010.

Elisabeth was the recipient of many awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Literary Excellence in 2000, the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career in 2003, the Malahat Novella Prize in 2015 and, in the same year, second prize in Prairie Fire Magazine’s Fiction Contest.

Although she lived in many different cities in her life, Elisabeth spent a great deal of time in Ottawa and so can be considered an Ottawa writer. While in the city, she was part of a women’s fiction group that included Nadine McInnis and Sandra Nicholls among others.

Many years ago, Elisabeth moved to the Wellington West neighbourhood, to a condominium just a few blocks from me. I often saw her walking in the late afternoon or evening along Wellington or the Byron Linear Park next to my home. We would chat and she would keep me up-to-date on what she had been working on that day, an idea or a character she wanted to explore in her latest chapter or her frustrations with edits that had been proposed to her work by an editor. All these underlined her consistent dedication to and pursuit of a literary career that spanned decades.

 

 

 

 

Blaine Marchand's poetry and prose has appeared in magazines across Canada, the US, New Zealand, Pakistan, India, France and Ukraine. He has won several prizes and awards for his writing. He has seven books of poetry published, a chapbook, a children's novel and a work of non-fiction. He has completed a new collection, Promenade.

Active in the literary scene in Ottawa for over 50 years, he was a co-founder of the Canadian Review, Sparks magazine, the Ottawa Independent Writers and the Ottawa Valley Book Festival. He was the President of the League of Canadian Poets from 1991-1993.

Craig Carpenter : After Roy

 

 

Your poem/s
Cannot be found
Lost in the annals
Of a digital archive
Broken links
Take me to paywalls
Now
You have left us
With these places to visit
With only
Vague snippets
Of your work
That may have been so
Much more
Could I find it
Now I will write for you
This
Shortened line
Breaking things down
The whiteness
Down the white
Page
The white
Fingers reaching out for
The red and yellow
The redress and reparations
They said sorry
For that too
The Japanese internment camps   in the 80s
When we were feathering our hair
You were reminding us
Of the truth of how
Your parents became Manitoba
Beet farmers
My ancestors were beet farmers
You know I’ve seen photos of their
Fat-as-sausage English beet farmer
Fingers 
Too alongside
Me here
Where the air   cooler
Comes through windows
Fall they found him
Rigor mortis at his typewriter
Not you Roy Miki but the other
Roy Kiyooka   painter and poet
You wrote about
Friend of the TISH they say
Was shit in reverse
Bobby and Daphne now
Still here all the names
nothing now
No thing
Gone
We will all be
Spirits in the cooling air
Soon too   like the leaves
That are turning and
The snow arriving over the mountain
Passes
Palimpsest
Covered in absence
a digital white
Wash of
your poems
I will find a real book
With pages beaten leaves
Pulp and paper for these
Fingers to touch
Now    I will
Find a Roy Miki Poem.

10 Oct. 2024

 

 

 

 

 

Craig Carpenter is a curator of the monthly poetry series snpinktn Speaking. He works developing speech technologies for the critically endangered language of nsyilxcn on syilx territory, the Okanagan valley of British Columbia, where he also works as an editorial advisor for Theytus Books. A former literary editor for poetry magazines such as Out of Service and The Carleton Arts Review, he was a student of the late poet Robert Hogg. His podcast about the TISH collective and Robert Hogg can be found here: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/