Stan Rogal : Ars Poetica : Notes from the field

 

 

 

 

Horace’s “Ars Poetica” (or “horse’s arse” poetica, as some certain academic wits and half-wits have joked over the centuries, and who can blame them, poetry often needing a good kick in the pants to lighten up a bit) is a poem about poetry itself, where the poet reflects on their craft and answers the questions of what, how and why. I am making a similar attempt in this short article, though where Horace spoke of poetry’s affiliation with drama, I concern myself with poetry’s affiliation with music, most specifically, song writing.

In 2025 I had a collection of poems published by ECW Editions (a Misfit book) titled …more songs the radio won’t play… (the title inspired by Canadian singer-song writer Kathleen Edwards’ tune, “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” which got me to thinking, yeah, it’s one thing for an artist of any description to create a work, quite another to figure out how to get it out into the world and market it) in which I took popular songs from varying genres and through a series of techniques, i.e.: mixed discourse (including allusions and verbiage from the arts and sciences, philosophy, pop culture, literary theory), plus self-referentiality, plus the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts (both of the songs and the performers) and tried to alter the lyrics so as to make the recycled songs outwardly unrecognizable while retaining some lingering sense or ‘feel’ of the original. Whether I succeeded or not on any substantive level is up to each individual reader, if and where there are any. What I did accomplish (I think) was to create pieces that were virtually impossible to exist as radio-playable songs. And if it all sounds too heavy and formalistic, I assure you, it isn’t. Wasn’t. It was a joy for me, with often humorous results.

Fine, I won’t bore you with examples. Suffice to say, I put my poetry writing hat back on the hook until I stumbled upon a Molly Johnson CD, titled Molly, where I noticed that the songs in the liner notes were written in block form as opposed to the usual stanza/chorus fashion that I was used to. Later still, I found that the group Chumbawamba had done the same thing with their CD, WYSIWYG, though adding side-note anti-establishment commentary rants alongside their already anti-establishment lyrics aimed at consumer society, vanity culture, corrupt politics and the soul-less entertainment industry: “all dressed up in drag inside a Gucci body bag,” as they so sweetly put it. Very cool, I thought. The songs were written more prose-poem-like, which made me imagine it might be fun to write my own prose poems, but use some song lyric techniques, such as including obvious hooks, bridges, rhythms, and nonsense phrases like “sha-na-na,” “oh me, oh my,” and “hey, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah…” in the mix. I proceeded to write seventy pieces (to date) under the title Borderblur Songspiel, “borderblur” issuing from the notion that I’m blurring the line between fiction, poetry and song, “songspiel” issuing from the Brechtian practice of using actors rather than trained singers to deliver stage songs in a manner more spoken than sung.

The manuscript is currently out in the ether, knock, knock, knocking on publisher’s doors. Wish me (and the manuscript) luck.

Now, most recently, I happened to be watching the local news where two broadcasters discussed using an AI generator program that enabled them to take their words (or lyrics) and by pasting and hitting a few choice buttons as to genre, mood, and gender, the program spat out a song, no knowledge or expertise of musical notation or instrumentation required. Which was perfect for me, since even though I enjoy listening to music, I have no professional training nor natural gift for the category. To wit, I recall having taken ballroom dance lessons with my ex-wife and still had to ask: Is this a fox trot or what? I still had to count the steps in my head. The concepts of 4/4 time and just ‘feel’ the music and let it move you were alien to me. I don’t hear the beat nor does the beat have any dance-like influence on my body, especially my two left feet. Needless to say, the only musical instrument I’ve ever been able to play with any sort of proficiency is the radio. But, I digress. At any rate, it struck me that maybe I could take some of my latest songspiel prose poems and convert them to actual songs. I searched for a program — the simplest I could find, natch, me being a confirmed Luddite — paid my money, and got down to business.

What discoveries did I make, you might ask? Well, to begin, I learned that much of my language — which I felt was perfectly adequate, interesting and presentable in its poetic state — often came across as too highfalutin and pretentious as a song. Add to this the fact that the AI generator had its own limitations, such as difficulty pronouncing certain proper names (‘Ingeborg’ with a soft rather than a hard first ‘g’), difficulty with long words (‘technological’ as one example, which was more-or-less slurred in some versions), a censor that made it unable to generate a particular text, though no reason given (I had to re-read a piece to see if I could discover what might be causing the difficulty and thought maybe the fact I’d used ‘fag’ instead of ‘cigarette’ might be the guilty culprit, and, sure enough, when I made the switch, everything was fine), and most obvious, I could tell that the program didn’t always understand the text’s meaning or intent, so sections became a wash, the program more concerned with making a line scan according to a built-in algorithm as opposed to having the line (or lines) make logical  (never mind emotional) sense: the program didn’t really understand or feel the lyrics to any great degree. All of this suggesting in no uncertain terms that I had to edit my work both to suit the generator’s programming as well as to meet my own needs. And let’s be honest here, I mainly wanted to hear my words come out of someone else’s mouth as a song, so I was willing to compromise and even sacrifice a level (or two) of poetic erudition and creativity. As for the question, “to rhyme or not to rhyme,” there really wasn’t much argument from me: Make it so, number one!

Bottom line, it’s been kind of a fun experiment and I’ve now managed to generate a couple of songs that I’m reasonably happy with. Sure, the music itself is generally simplistic and recognizable, though, at the same time, I was sometimes pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of back-up vocals and instrumental riffs as a sort-of bonus. Anyway, beyond the music, I appear to have come full-circle with this endeavour, first mutilating songs to become poems, secondly mutilating poems to become songs, to the point where now I’m unsure where one form ends and the other begins.

Thanks to Kathleen Edwards, Molly Johnson, and Chumbawamba for their inspiration, albeit unaware. And if all I’ve ended up with is “one more song the radio won’t like,” nothing new there! It isn’t the first time for me and I’m sure it won’t be the last, so, I’ll just continue to futz about and play happily alone in my own little sand box. Rock on!

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

Christina Shah : Meticulous Fascination: On Sandy Shreve’s Work Writing

 

 

 

For so many of us poets, the passing of Sandy Shreve earlier this year has spurred much reflection, and numerous thoughtful tributes to our beloved colleague:

Rob Taylor’s interview in EVENT with several of Shreve’s colleagues and friends.

https://bcbooklook.com/rip-sandy-shreve-1950-2026/ (BC Bookworld tribute)

Catherine Owen's tribute in periodicities- Feb 11th

Read Local BC’s tribute (Asna Shaikh)

Writers' Union of Canada- Kate Braid's tribute to her dear friend

Although I had never had the privilege of meeting her, her passing has given me pause to appreciate her work writing and activism, and to consider her outsized influence on Canadian work poetry.

Shreve was a union and community organizer, and she wrote unflinchingly about the reality of women’s work and working conditions from her perspective as a university and arts administrator. According to SFU’s Special Collections and Rare Books Archives, “in 1987, she was an organizer of the first Vancouver Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, which celebrated workers’ contributions through artistic expression and sought to build ties between the labour movement and cultural workers.” She edited Working for A Living, a special double issue of Growing Room Collective (now Room), 1988: vol 12 #s 2 & 3 of writing by women about their work. In her first collection, The Speed of the Wheel is Up to the Potter, there’s a section titled ‘Crumpled Smiles’ in which Shreve illustrates how administrative work (traditionally performed by women) is devalued by society.

In ‘That Magic Touch’, she describes a colleague’s typing skills with reverence and flair:

and what remains
is the perfection of her fingers
caressing the keyboard–
the melody and rhythm
of pauses, complementing phrases 

allegretto, andante, spiritoso 

and on the next page, in “White-Out”, there’s sublimated anger after a man higher up the chain devalues her effort:

Comments how, although
perhaps a bore, HE sometimes
wouldn’t mind my job:
just sit all day and copy
someone else’s work! 

Furious
the fingers grip
liquid paper
bloated brush
poised

Interestingly, Shreve also captured some of the nuances of all-male work environments. In Waiting for the Albatross, Shreve created found poems gleaned from her father Jack Shreve’s journals, which he kept as a young deckhand on a Canadian Steamships freighter in 1936. Here, we see her meticulous fascination with form: crown of sonnets, ghazal, madrigal, pantoum, terzanelle, triolet and villanelle all appear, with lines that reappear to mirror the repetitive nature of life on a freighter.

In “Called: 2”, her use of repetition underscores the unrelenting drudgery (punctuated by danger, interpersonal or weather-related drama, and humour) of the crew’s daily tasks. Almost every stanza begins with the phrase ‘Called at 6’:

Called at 6. Shovelling ashes till about 10.30
then started polishing brass. 

Called at 6 and started cleaning winches. Talk about
your dirty, greasy jobs! 

Called at 6. Quite calm and yet there’s a heavy swell.
…Great fun. Just like a rollercoaster!

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union’s 40^th year reunion in May. Shreve was an original member of this work-writing group, (which was active between 1979-1993), and produced the anthologies Shop Talk, and More than Our Jobs. In celebration, all the heavy hitters– Kate Braid, Tom Wayman, David Conn, Zoe Lansdale, Kirsten Emmott, and Calvin Wharton each read one of her poems that evening.

What I find rather curious is how few work-themed poetry anthologies have been released in Canada since the VIWU years, but Hustling Verse (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019) and the recent I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood Publishing, 2025) spring to mind. There were some themed issues from the journals: Prairie Fire’s (‘Work Matters’ Vol 40, No 1, Spring 2019), and Arc’s work-themed issue (‘Labour and Livelihood’, No 90, Fall 2019) in which Tom Wayman laments in his essay ‘Get Real: The Worth and Current Status of the Literature of the Future—Work Writing’, “[a]t present, you can thumb through virtually any literary magazine, attend any literary festival, browse any bookstore or bookfair or anthology of Canadian literature and you are offered a literary portrait of a country in which nobody works”.

I’ve said for some time that we’re due for a new wave of work poetry– especially in these interesting times. The nature of work itself is being reshaped by AI/ surveillance technology, wealth concentration, and climate change. It’s daunting to consider, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see a renewed culture of work poetry in response to these existential shifts– one that builds upon the foundation Shreve and her VIWU colleagues have generously laid. Thank you, Sandy.

 

 

 

 

Christina Shah lives in New Westminster and works in heavy industry, where she drinks from the firehose of knowledge. Her poetry has appeared numerous Canadian literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, Vallum, Arc, Grain, PRISM international, EVENT, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review and elsewhere. Her poem, ‘they canned a good man today’, was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. Her poem, ‘interior bar, 1986’, was selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2023. She is one-fifth of the Harbour Centre 5 poetry collective, whose chapbook, Brine, was released in 2022. Her first videopoem, ‘rig veda’ (in collaboration with videographer Mark Mushet), was translated into Spanish and screened at the 2023 Cinemística festival in Granada, Spain, and the 2023 Versi Di Luce festival in Modica, Sicily. rig veda, her first solo chapbook (Anstruther Press), was released in 2023. if: prey, then: huntress (Nightwood Editions, 2025) is her first full-length collection. She has some strong opinions on soft pretzels.

Sandy Shreve photo credit: Kim Gilker.

Michael Sikkema : An interview with Aakriti Kuntal

Small Press Intravues: 

Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem

Interview #21: Aakriti Kuntal is a poet, writer, and multidisciplinary artist whose creative pursuits span literature, visual arts, and experimental film. She finds inspiration in nature, often retreating into its embrace to write and reflect. In addition to poetry and prose, she explores photography, asemic writing, and short experimental films. Her work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rasputin: A Poetry Thread, IceFloe Press, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Recognized for her contributions to literature, she was awarded the Reuel International Prize (2017) and shortlisted for the RL Poetry Award (2018). She is the author of the chapbook God, Am I Your Eyelid? (Sigilist Press, USA). Her debut book Night Breaks apart, like pomegranate seeds in my palm (Seagull Books), was listed in Ms. magazine's best poetry books for 2025-2026.

Michael Sikkema: What ecosystem does this book fit into? What other books, films, art, animals, etc does this book interconnect with? What works were you enjoying when you composed it? This is sort of a follow up to some of your answer to question #1. For example what classical music are you drawn to? 

Aakriti Kuntal: This book is permeated by trees and trees. Trees as they swim in me, make me, and stitch me. Green as it flushes the soul, as it caresses the senses. I think the Semal and Jacaranda trees represent the book's colour imprint. The book is flashes of blue and red, blue and red running into each other, around each other, tracing each other like amoeba in a field.

Seas rush through the mouth of the book. I have always lived in cities, away from seas. There has been a constant yearning to return to the sea ever since I saw it in the small town of Pondicherry in India. The sea at night, is a black pearl blooming in the throat. It has invaded my inner being and hence dresses this book in parts.

I was especially listening to Max Richter, Philip Glass, and Vivaldi when composing poems in this book. Max Richter’s November, On the Nature of Daylight, and Sleep were played on repeat while absorbing the silvery husk of evenings. Other artists I listened to around that time are Ezzio Bosso, Nils Frahm, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Another element that runs through the book is the stone. The stone as a motif also occurs in Vasko Popa’s The Dream of the Quartz Pebble, Wislawa Szymborska’s Conversation with a Stone, and Zbigniew Herbert’s Pebble.

The Golden Fleece or El Vellocino de Oro by artist Wolfgang Paalen seems to me overlaps with the symbolism and threads of the book.

Among the books that were read during the process of this book and left a lasting impression on me were The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems by Vasko Popa, and Penguin Modern Poets 7 (Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Geoffrey Hill, Rowan Evans).

My friend suggests that The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov speaks in tones of the book. I also think the reminiscence is similar to that in the Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky.

I’ve always been drawn to salamanders. They wear the shimmering orange gel sun on their backs. I think in some sense I’m always burning like them. There is conflagration in my being.

MS: Lastly, can you link us to work of yours outside the book, other poems on the web, or videos of readings or interviews? And are there other artists or movements or anything you'd like to take a second to shine some light on? If you could direct our eyes to something important right now, what would it be? 

AK: Here are a few links:

Podcast feature on the Poetry Vessel:
https://youtu.be/0GwFor6IjDM?si=jB6cSFliiSKueksP 

Podcast Feature on the Spoken Label:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsKzdioDSAk 

Outlook Feature:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTC8IyfAtcc/ 

A reading of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUIfqK6E3jt/ 

Some Poetry:
https://stonepoetryjournal.com/aakriti-kuntal/ 

I am very inspired by Shringi Kumari, Sumana Roy, and Sophie Strand among others.

Many things come to mind, and among them is the art of tree hugging. It is related to India’s historic Chipko movement and the Japanese practice of Shirin-yoku. I believe just staring at a tree can soothe the many upheavals within. The pockets of air filled in the cervices, the arms extending to embrace the sky. Just imagine hugging a tree then? Or caressing a stem? Feeling the coolness stick to the skin.

Another that comes to mind is playing music to the plants. I love playing music to my plants whenever I can. Classical and jazz are harmonious for both them and us.

 

 

 

 

Michael Sikkema a poet and visual artist living as best he can in West Michigan where he works and hikes and learns how to bird by ear.

rob mclennan : Nebulas, by Meghan Kemp-Gee

Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee
Coach House Books, 2026

 

 

 

 

North Vancouver poet, teacher and scriptwriter Meghan Kemp-Gee’s second full-length poetry collection, following The Animal in the Room (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023), as well as a handful of chapbooks, is Nebulas (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection she describes in her 2023 interview at Touch the Donkey as “a big manuscript” “about astronomy and afterlives.” At roughly one hundred and twenty pages, this is a hefty collection, held as a single book-length structure of individual poems, from prose poems to sonnets to more open lyric structures. There’s a silence that stretches across these pages, or perhaps, more specifically, a kind of hush, composing a meditative, exploratory lyric field guide of constellations and landscapes, climate change and human activity, and a study of nebulas within the Covid-era. “They lifted the mask mandates. I wonder,” she writes, to open the poem “THE WITCH HEAD NEBULA IS EIGHTY-FIVE / THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN / TRILLION KILOMETRES AWAY,” “nebulae or nebulas – which one sounds / better. We all catch coughs. Is this enough, / I’m asking. And I could start with colour, / double cheekbones, awesome sockets, open / mouth screaming east toward Deep Cove, our lungs’ / open books, the supergiant smiling / at your feet.” There’s an intimacy, and the slightest anxiety, to the quietude of her lyrics, asking fundamental questions and seeking grounding even within the furthest reaches. One might suggest the earliest human questions around self, creation and being came from attempting to comprehend what one saw in the heavens, and connecting it back to what might feel otherwise like the smallness of our lives, and general human purpose. “Who knows / what grows from those mouths,” ends the poem “AN ASTROPHYSICS LESSON FROM THE SNAKE NEBULA, / SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY LIGHT-YEARS AWAY,” “these mouths, just out / of sight on moonless nights, hiding out / from low humidity. Who dares speak / of the glorious spores and soaring / toadstools that might sprout under our forked / tongues on nights like these. Who is to say / which of us came first and who sees what.”

She composes poems such as “JUPITER MAKES ITS CLOSEST APPROACH TO EARTH / IN FIFTY-NINE YEARS, SEPTEMBER 2022,” but, on the following page, provides a lyric closer to the ground, writing “YO-YO MA PLAYS SIX UNACCOMPANIED CELLO / SUITES IN THE PINE CONE NEBULA, TWENTY-SEVEN / HUNDRED LIGHT-YEARS AWAY,” the opening sentence of such, with accompanying line breaks, reads: “If you could make your seat inside each opening note like / an open door an open mouth, / if you could make a sound the size of a nebula a keyhole / like a throat, / magnifying and applying, here you come, // I believe the resulting groan would blow the locks / off every one of the world’s doors, / unscrew the doors themselves from their / frames and jambs, / magnifying and applying.” One could describe this as a book about nebulas; a book of unanswerable questions, or simply a book about feeling adrift, and, looking up.

LIONS GATE HOSPITAL IS ACROSS THE STREET,
JANUARY 2022 

Six months later, the heat wave sends in three
unprecedented winter storms. After
the strangeness, the snaps, the deepest snowfall, 

the morning traffic’s body prone, pinned down,
struggling to breathe, house cats watch salted 

side streets from the eighth floor. The stuffed sky stills,
stuns them, us, like so much heat. Our eyes grow
wide, our shoulders hunch and heave, twitch-lipped teeth 

chirping at something real, or not. Like you
see some feathered not-nothing I can’t see. 

What do you know that I don’t? say there are
birds out there, small bodies like birds just out
of sight, like there were ghosts out in the snow.

It is interesting to think of “nebulas” as the core around which her poems swirl, held as a similar anchor to how she wrote animals in her debut; she writes a foundation for her poems, thus, to touch upon and swirl around, seeing the structure for the larger manuscript. Her poems can theoretically move anywhere and everywhere, returning as they do to that central image. And yet, a poem such as “I STAY UP TOO LATE STUDYING IN FREDERICTON, / NEW BRUNSWICK, FIFTY-FIVE HUNDRED AND / SIXTY-THREE KILOMETRES AWAY” suggests the distances she writes are elsewhere entirely. While, certainly, this is a poetry collection built about and around distances and seeking connection through a lyric study of nebulas, this might simultaneously be a book about something else entirely, as are the best poems, the best collection. Listen, as the poem writes:

They say you shouldn’t ever work in bed.
I’m reading the sonnets, you know the ones
will we or won’t we, clouded treelines full
of I’s and eyes and nothing like the sun. 

You shouldn’t make the wrong comparisons,
but for you I’d make exceptions. I’d make
too many – exceptions, comparisons,
and clouds and clots of earth, your eyes, 

my thousand million nebulas nothing
like themselves. I’d to too many things they
say you shouldn’t, make too much of the eighth
floor, two- and one-ness, thirty-seven earth- 

years, landscapes full of time zones, five heartbeats,
and the two of us talking in our sleep.

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). It is very good.