Steven Ross Smith & Phil Hall : On The Green Rose

 

 

new growing season / June 2024

 

Roses generally take 4 to 10 weeks (28 to 70 days) for re-blooming to occur.

Roses having a lot of petals take longer to re-bloom than roses with only a few petals.

That sounds about right—about wrong—about light—about song...

True green roses are exceptionally rare in the natural world & are often the result of careful breeding or natural mutations.

Ours was natural—tropic—non-factual—no topics...

The green colour in roses is not typically vibrant but rather understated with hues ranging from light pistachio to deeper olive tones.

I think we said that—you said that—I said that—you said that—I said that...

The rarest colour for a rose is the Blue Rose—it is very difficult to mine—it’s not mine!

Ah, but our green is spare—composed on a back & forth—two long threads braided...

Why is it green? Who ever heard? What does it mean—the un-notarized word?

This cannot be blamed on low PH (candle blown out)—he carries limestone in his head.

And SRS (Steven Rose Smith) is neither acidic nor basic—well perhaps basic.

Originally known as rosa chinesis viridiflora—The Green Rose’s uniqueness stems from its lack of true petals.

The Green Rose first made its appearance as early as 1743—SRS & PH were much older then.

This flower arouses genuine interest in people because it is a common novelty.

Roses do best when they are protected from the hot afternoon sun—parasols open!

We wrote mornings.

Then the weathers of the two strands weren’t the same anymore—Victoria BC / Costa Rica.

The first collaborative exchange occurs when the poet’s being—senses / mind /feeling / body / movement and locus—stirs—& language quivers—or vice versa.

Perhaps the oddest rose in existence—it is classified as a Hybrid China & appropriately known as The Green Rose—the incomparable China Green Rose.

Now Rosarians must recognize the Smith-Hall Green. Or ignore it. Either way...

Green-hued roses have historically represented fertility / growth / nature's abundance.

They also represented bounty / goodwill / success in business & romantic relationships—& even jealousy.

Rooted—yes—but all to be found above/ground—our title came from a shard of crockery washed up on the beach: a green rose visible on it.

Few other green hued roses have ever matched the uniqueness & interest of The Green Rose
(says one Anonymous (horti)cultural reviewer).

The Green Rose is a “love it or hate it” kind of rose.

A shared (shard) meditation on poetics grew past us—as Other—uncalculated—uncultivated.

Language speaks for itself.

Once in a blue moon (green moon) the rose might produce a seed pod—you ought to get something from the seed other than another green rose.

On the other hand / then on the other hand / & now handing off…

 

PH / SRS

 

 

 

 

Phil Hall is a founding member of the Canadian Sweater Poets (CSP). Latest book: Vallejo’s Marrow (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024). Forthcoming from Lake’s End Press: mould/Soil (in collaboration with Chris Turnbull). He lives near Perth Ontario.

 

 

 

Steven Ross Smith, Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21, loves music, and beach and forest walks. His seven-book poetic series fluttertongue has created a notable body of work and Book 3: disarray (Turnstone Press) was awarded Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 2005. Pliny’s Knickers, a collaboration was given the bpNichol Chapbook Award in 2006. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, (Radiant Press, 2022.) Most recent is The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall (above/ground press, 2024). Smith lives and writes in Victoria, BC. Find him at stevenrosssmith@me.com &/or www.fluttertongue.ca
 

AJ Dolman : Three poems

 

 

 

 

Post

Fat-bellied plane rattles us
through angry headwinds

as your grandson and I head west
to spill our tears over your ashes.

The newspaper in my lap reads
          Latest War Thirteen Days Old

 

trauma

Some memories stay long after
those who lived them have gone

This one has as props a rifle,
a nazi same as the others,

breaths and rustling, elements
of surprise, your friends and you

having caught him out, figurative, literal
pants down, already wounded

 

tic

Some details matter
less than we convince ourselves: which war,

which village, which friends.                 But the thin border
of oak forest, the nazi’s revolver snatched from the ground,

someone’s knife,    a glimmer of time
fixing itself,                       a body cleaved,                 a blur

 

 

 

 

 

AJ Dolman’s (they/she) debut poetry book is Crazy / Mad (Gordon Hill Press, spring 2024). Dolman is also the author of Lost Enough: A collection of short stories (MRP, 2017), and three poetry chapbooks, and co-edited Motherhood in Precarious Times (Demeter Press, 2018). Their poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including recently Bi Women Quarterly, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, QT Literary Magazine, and The Quarantine Review. They are a bi/pan+ rights advocate living on unceded, unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.

Peter Myers : On Brade Lands

 

Brade Lands began as an experiment at a timestamped writing practice, inspired by Lyn Hejinian’s The Cell. The form gave me license to write lines that were more notational and impressionistic than I was accustomed to, and that resisted (for a time, at least) the intensive revision that typically characterized my writing process. As the project progressed, its preoccupations began to take shape: the exterior manifestations of emotional life, and the abrasive force that accompanies any thing (a feeling, a thought, a self) brushing against its boundaries. As I wrote, the style evolved, bearing the imprint of what I was reading at the time; Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties, Jane Gregory’s YEAH NO, and the short stories of Clarice Lispector all left their impressions. The original composition period lasted around a year, from May 2018-2019 – an italicized heading refers to the date a page was originally drafted.

Since then, the sections have been refined, tweaked, massaged, deagitated, reagitated, and just generally subjected to the whims of my intuition, which change as I change. (For me, I think the revision of a poem stops only once I've changed so much that I no longer have access to the person I was when I wrote it. The amount of time this takes varies wildly.) Yet it was always important to maintain the integrity of the original composition: lines could not move between dated entries, and the entries remained in the order I wrote them. Even more essential was maintaining the poems' notational sensibility, the feeling of jotted-down units of language which didn't follow syntactically or logically but nevertheless pushed and pulled at the lines around them -- these little particles exciting each other with their own charge. At a certain point, my lines began to grow longer, and a self-consciously confessional voice asserted itself. The question, then, was how this emergent "I" would refract the language that swirled around it, the shorter lines which, though composed according to sound and texture, came from the same place -- in Alice Notley's words, “the hole from which images come.”

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Myers is the author of the chapbooks Brade Lands (above/ground press) and The Hangnail (Belladonna*). His reviews and essays have been featured in Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Annulet, and elsewhere.