The following review was posted by Brick Books in its old incarnation, for their 40th anniversary blog. It has been edited for periodicities following the unexpected gob-smacking perishment of John Barlow just after his 64th birthday in October, 2024. Barlow was Czandra’s main mentor in contemporary Canadian poetry on its own beating track, on the heels of her association with Sam Hamill in Port Townsend, Washington. Curator of poets as well as of poetry, as rob mclennan notes in his tribute, he was behind Czandra’s introduction to brilliant, vital poets engaging in everything from performance (jw curry), vizpo (derek beaulieu, for example), through haiku (Marshall Hryciuk and Karen Sohne), to unequalled small press publishing (Lary Bremner and Pearl Pirie, for examples). No one speaks more leapingly than John himself, so here’s a reminder of his words accompanied by a few of his photos.
“All who wander are not lost” – John Barlow
“Going into the woods for a poem improves the poem 99%”
This photo was submitted to the facebook group, Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate and accepted as visual poetry by the vispo group now accustomed to Barlow photos as poems.
The best way to write about John is to go verbatim, quote him complete with typos and punctuation as is. The whole was John’s lyricism, vaulting joyously over convention into the bush of raw intelligence.
“give a writer an alphabet and
the world is there's….
…. i quite enjoy this - let the game of Clue
go the way of oily paper
raiders get back into your own
lives
nobody here but us weeds
people who value things will keep them
same on the internet
luddite processes have the best effect
specially with literature and art
is good guitar or piano still not ideal?
typewriters stuffed full of alien landing beam moons…
… this'll be what it is and not something else
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”
Barlow’s track record is jammed with titles, names of poetry series he invented, wrote, compiled, photocopied at his own expense, mailed to other poets, and handed out at readings or on public transit.
“I should fix up my press's reputations
gardenofpoeticspress OVERSION Psychic Rotunda
Sudden Magazine/Magazen Sudden, Untitled _Press,
The Ghost Plant, Shining In Post-Apocalypse,
Two Column Moon Press, AnyVillager,
and 14 other more scret ones
Aquatic Aples Press, Dead Night At the Idler Magazine,
the many oversion 6's and the numbered presses
you can replace any 7 letters in a text with the capital letter L
jamie [reid] on the phone said
not everyone knows
i'm basically vaguely friendly to everyone
but always overestimate intuition
maybe even over estimate on a list like this
i imagine that 93-97&% have the right amount o f
intu ition - things are fine the day begins friday evening
there are 7 days that then play into that day
friday night is the beginning of time
and thursday night is the end
fridays are athletic for just about everyone
because of the pressure
and then the new week begins
fuck working weekends
the freedom to write exceeds working weekends
a ps by the way, my 80s poem Gargoyles
is one of many from the 80s that were dream transcriptions
little argued with upon transcription when i was y9ung
the original transcription was often sarcastic
but in an inarguable way, if i could
remember my dreams so detailed now
it would resume place at healthiest at 41%
of writing direct transcription, waking with the radio these days
One second dream the next second Andy Barrie
a childhood poem "bon jour, jemme-pele jean
je parle francais a la un cauchon
mais je travailler dans la tabernacle du
l'amour' (1966) and will live like the moon
on african oasis music
but this is a riverspine post, not a ‘submission’ at all”
- John Barlow, Riverspine Canada 2001
My in-box it looks as if the purpose of e-mail is Barlow. My young son grew up jealous, watching me crack up often, grinning through a Barlow post, then get off the computer and grump at him about recycling and homework.
It’s been daily, several times a day for nearly 10 years, this fascination of mine for reading John Barlow – what’s he gonna say today, how decorate the English language? For Barlow it’s been much longer than that, his Exile publication ASHINEoVSUN was 2002, Safe Telepathy 1995, and other published writings go back to the 1980’s . My file for thousands of posts saved under St. John equal a desire to reread his ebullient swings at everything from government to individuals he met or didn’t meet in the subway, cats and birds in wild urban landscapes, love for a woman and poetry, love for everything except what he hates, chronicled too, as only he can: ravines, squirrels, ferals, ferality; municipal polity, police, big gov’t, injustice of any and all kinds - hockey, hockey, hockey, football.
Barlow’s lone & loyal adhesion to automatic writing is letter-writing, is poetry, spontaneous, undressed, inhabited, and it’s several times every day, long and short posts on-line, running lines of thought, addressed to handfuls of people he can imagine sitting with but would probably just as soon not. My non-virtual world is punctuated with Barlow quotes:
dangling on my computer on a post-it (“one has to learn things the way one learns things learning new ways of learning things that way too”),
my office door
(“those who have ring the same bells as those who have not …..”),
on my wall (“wean
yourself from sense of purpose”),
on the syllabus I gave my students (“each day its own fresh oblivion and curiosity”),
and in my head (tralalalalala).
In his closing lines on list-serve posts, John would inflect his signature tone upward or outward like arrows : “middle finger both sides” (Sat, 13 Apr 2013 08:00:24 -04:00). I have a book-worth of last lines.
John Barlow Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate
1:56am ·
I came across Barlow the way I found some other Cdn poets: Amanda Earl, Bernadette Wagner, Maggie Helwig, Rose DeShaw, on Writers against War, a yahoogroup winding down after 4 or so years protesting the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Barlow wrote often and long, considered and answered other people’s posts, made connections with earlier posts, media reports and ideas from an intelligent, literate coterie. Youthful, he wrote “back-channel” notes in a unique and debonair style. Typos were part of the subtext. How many writers get typos in their subtext?
These days some of Barlow’s typos are repla©ed by ∑ymbols as he mistakenly or otherwise hi±s an alt key on his 2004 computer, and another new language is born compared to yesterday’s. Through repetitions, consistently returning to his subjects, the language is constantly fresh and refreshed. It’s like sitting at the Gladstone Hotel over Guiness with him every evening, nodding to sleep over his words: Toronto/Windsor with cravat and caveat, a nod to Ottawa, an astounding embrace of the rest of the world. Especially the wronged, which is about 99.000034% of the human race and probably closer to 100% of other animal races.
“My eccentric neighbours in this building, and without
landlord approval,
built a garden in the yard and some of the
plants they put in
are winter survivors. Not just disappearing into
seed
but sturdily present when storms and aught else
pass
and life is normal
again, there they are [post complete with photos] with their thick leaves
they've just waited it out under the snow. Like
Disney characters.
…. I didn't talk much as a child
except telepathically or in sleepwalking states,
and with pookey
whom while neutred, had endless mothering
instincts,
but also complete commonality with me, we agreed
on everything.
Being a small and sleepy child, hating going to
school or anything,
especially church, my cosmic reincarnational
'other' as it were,
(and in later life, that suspicion seems
validated/vericated)
or into adult world at all, times being what
they were,
minding up with the sleek tiny fast cheerful ecstatic
spaniel
who slept on me and faced every circumstance in
tandem
set an impossible standard for future
relationships.
Me and that dog could run into woods chasing
bears
clear the woods and be at the pond poking
minnows and running around
by the time my father caught up with us, having
stopped with his binoculars.
Songs of little plants, and animals such as
us” (December, 2014)
or in 2008:
“it all might have seemed to
have
more connectivity in the past was there were just
8 writers at once, and 70 million hoping not to be
burned at the stake by priests
i still think these are cooler times for the writer
*
in that era of many many fewer
writers
they had time to read one another's writing
meet 3 times each on mountaintops
and consider that connected
...across decades ! 3 books, 2 long walks and 1 lunch
no internet or phone in those days, no planes or buses
in the early days of funded
literature in canada
a variety of people would find themselves with the funding
going to big airy hotels and tiny little bars
and big windy conferences and horrorborefront
incredulous at being 'the writers'
then clinging on for the buffalo ride
once there was 400 writers for every small grant
it became a stressful occupation and those that liked stress
moved into those roles while those that loathe it
disappeared into their writing and lives
where we find ourselves now
one way or
t. other”
I published some pieces of Barlow’s work once in a slim chapbook called The Longest Day. It was short-listed for the bp Nichol chapbook award the year Sandra Ridley and Gary Barwin shared the prize. Barlow didn’t know what to make of the edits, minor as they were, and pretty much defied me ever to do that again, though when he read from it at the AB series in Ottawa, we, audience and reader, could hardly get through the page about Uncle Frank’s trailer for utter hilarity. Not getting through a poem is a Barlow specialty, partly because his poems have no beginning, melding easily into others, but Barlow loses faith in them or loses interest in them or can’t see the print half way through, and the page will join a growing jumble of papers on the floor at the foot of his chair as the audience winces and wonders whether this is how a reading should be. He has lots to say about how a reading should be, and is winningly genuine about how uncomfortable readings are in general, and unreservedly enthused about the ones that go well. A Barlow reading was not to be missed. But he stopped reading before Covid, preferring the internet connection without hecklers or pressures to perform. Already he was withdrawing from the world. By 2024 his listserve listeners were reduced to a handful, and he noted regularly that he thought no one was listening and the world had moved on. And still he struggled with and wrote about extraordinary pressures at work.
Other people have tried automatic writing, irreverence, ranting, but Barlow is, well, he’s stuck with it; it’s how he writes, knows, sees. Unfiltered clear vision. There are days I don’t want to read the length of the post, but read it anyway and invariably find nourishing scraps to take away that remind me this is no schtick. Constant surprises, ever shifting to finer admustments (I’ve learned to let typos lie sometimes too). When he saw this piece, Barlow felt some of the typos needed to be fixed: even automatic writing is not entirely flawless. The typo intu ition was, he said, “non-designed”, I find a hiccup in the middle of intuition between the time it arises the shudder of being adopted as a thing, to be perfectly apt, far more descriptive than the word as we know it. But for him, “there's all the question of what it means that there's typos to an existence. Those typos were a mix of undesigned and resigned/ to the gummy keyboard type typos.” John’s simultaneous reservations and enthusiasms about being published in edited version are summarized this way:
“there's ways of
arting the page so I typo reads right
when read slow, and there's typos that read
right only when read fast
and there's tonal typos. Going forward into
print is part of the process too
and includes months or years of revision,
testing it with all typos,
and with no typos, each time making further
edits, until tiring of
some passages.
Remember my books come out 1 a year, 12 to 16
pages, permanent, 4 by 5s
so it all gets crunched down.”
Photocopy books were handed out free to all and sundry at readings, often pieces he’d written that very day or week, and sometimes remixes of dredged-up early work. Occasionally someone would buy him a beer, to his great delight and astonishment.
Here, (un)edited by Barlow, as all the other quotes herein:
“my only hope for survival this summer
is to think that it was the lion’s agitations [his cat]
and my total defense of her that was causing
the raccoons to come charging in like that
nearly always when I was stretching
the chance to befriend wild animals
without its impacting such intense loyalties
to lion, with lion in the heart and mind,
and the whole sinewy wand of the afterlifers
those I go down in time with
“our only reality”
the fleeting afterlife memory
some past incarnations just make one smile
how not be extreme “?__”
all trees and plants are extremeties
and the cat’s triumphant knowledge of how to live
are extreme beyond all prescription
real life is instinct
we can’t even walk without it
could as easily fly as sit
but what of the other planets??
how’s it work there???
What if you retire and you just don’t like horseshoes?
….people forget that….
that was the tradition
a university was where you studied philosophy
and everything else that was taught
was supposed to be taught with philosophy
real philosophy, logic, thought,
the plain hearted
argumentation of what is most literally true
I was always so fascinated by it
define everything that way
while keeping that left wing madhouse
total overthrow of western consciousness
in ways that clearly I am not the only who think,
my real politics R definitely pendulum based
keatsian negative capability
…had diggers been ventriioquists
they haven’t ben to
troubadour bar, how thrilling, toward
end of august
people relax to an extent
inconceivable in other months
Sublimely put
jb
Sandra Stephenson reviews poems and writes essays. As Czandra, she writes poems and reads for Librivox.org. She's deeply in love with poetry, despite the bruises it inflicts. It's reduced her to 5-liners. Her most recent publication is Asking for trouble, tanka, from Yarrow Press, Qc.