rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Alice Burdick

 

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author most recently of Ox Lost, Snow Deep (a feed dog book/Anvil Press), and of Deportment, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press, Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press, Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press, and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her practice often includes collaboration, and recently her poetry has been used in Woodlight, a series of three films created by Hear Here and Erin Donovan. Her poems have appeared in Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotian Writers (Boularderie Island Press, 2018), GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), as well as other anthologies. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She has authored three cookbooks for local publisher Formac Publishing. From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair, and has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  She is also a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.

Alice Burdick reads in Ottawa on Thursday, November 28, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest, and will be conducting a poetry workshop as part of same on Saturday, November 30 (pre-registration required).

rob mclennan: When did you first start writing?

Alice Burdick: I first started writing as a little kid, and did a lot of writing and drawing. The writing was sometimes plays, sometimes stories, and sometimes poems. As an older teenager I really got into it, though, mainly poems.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AB: When I drew, I would usually be telling a story out loud at the same time, and often it would be with friends, as well as by myself. There was a lot of art and music in my home, and fairy tales and folk tales of all sorts were inspirational. I remember we had a copy of Archy and Mehitabel in the home and that was a rich source; nonsense verse by Edith Sitwell and Edward Lear. It was an easy leap from description to far-out narratives that happened. As with any new poet, a lot of my earlier pieces were a bit overwrought. But once I accepted sound into the process, it opened up.

rm: What did that foray into sound look like? And how did you first start connecting to other writers?

AB: It was the moment when I understood the role of rhythm, internal rhyme, disjunction, the out loud quality of the words on the silent page. That the writing starts with joy and play in sound, and they can transmit a mood or meaning with more velocity. Once I got that, the writing started to come more easily, in general.

I was lucky enough to be in The Dream Class as a teenager, where I was exposed to many different contemporary poets in Toronto, as well as the Small Press Book Fair. After high school ended, it was mainly through my partner at the time, Victor Coleman, as well as the Small Press Book Fair, that I found out about and became friends with a lot of writers, especially poets, who were also usually active in small and micro press.

rm: What was The Dream Class?

AB: The Dream Class was an extra-curricular writing class through the Toronto School Board. As far as I know, only Victor Coleman was the primary instructor. It was held at Christie Pits High School on Bloor Street, so I would travel there one night a week via subway with a couple of friends who also took the class. It is where I first heard Stuart Ross and Paul Dutton read, and found out about Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, et al. It was a great class and really showed me that the world of poetry is as wide as the world of song.

rm: It sounds as though you were engaged with some of this stuff rather early. Were you submitting to journals once high school ended? Were you publishing, self-publishing or quietly working? Who else was around, and what did your activity look like?

AB: In the last year of high school in Toronto, a group of friends and I who also participated in the Dream Class put together a journal called 21 Down (referring to our ages) and it included poems, silly articles, stories, photography etc. It lasted a few publications. Then I moved with my mom and my younger brother to Espanola, as she'd gotten a job as a high school art teacher there. I'd failed my last year of high school as I mainly didn't show up at all and so I graduated in Espanola. I wrote a lot there, on my own. After that point, I moved to Toronto, and then joined in on The Eternal Network, a chapbook publisher with Victor Coleman, and it was through this press I published my first chapbook. I met so many stalwarts of the scene then: Stuart Ross, jwcurry, John Barlow, Jennifer Lovegrove, Nicky Drumbolis, Maggie Helwig, Beth and Joy Learn, Daniel F. Bradley, Clint Burnham, Katy Chan, etc etc. It really was a lively scene in Toronto then. I worked in a cheese store, wrote and drew, then hung out with folks and attended readings. I did a lot of reading of various texts as well, new and old.

rm: I know you had a few chapbooks published through that period. How did you get from (and through) there to the publication of your first full-length collection?

AB: yeah, quite a few were published, both via my press and others. That mainly happened in the earlier to mid 1990s, and then there was a lull. My mother and then my boyfriend passed way within 5 years of each other and I just spent time living, working, and grieving. I was writing too, but not publishing. Every now and then I’d send my manuscript (which was called Anthropomorphic Pride) out to publishers but finally it landed with Pedlar Press. Stuart Ross became the editor for it, and that has continued for other books since. He’s always been an advocate.

rm: Do you see a difference in the way you currently approach a poem, or a manuscript, compared to those early days?

AB: Not really. To me, writing poems seems like one long project. So it is always the same and always different. I have taken different approaches over the years, and have found different incentives/prompts, such as listening to music or watching films at the same time. Maybe the biggest difference is that I accept that poems and manuscripts don't always need to be published, and it just comes down to the writing. 

rm: How does a poem begin? Even if you think in terms of your work being a kind of single, ongoing project, when you are writing, do you think in terms of one poem at a time, clusters of poems or manuscripts?

ab: Usually I just think – I am going to write! And then I write, and it is usually just a focus on the writing, not knowing if it will be a single long poem, or if it will become a longer series of poems, linked or not linked. If I am writing in response to a specific thing initially, then sometimes there's an initial containment because of that constraint, but then it usually widens a bit. I don't usually think of something becoming a book when I'm writing the poem(s) but that seems to be something granting bodies like.

rm: Did having a selected poems, Deportment (WLU Press, 2018), that Alessandro Porco put together, shift your perspective or provide any unexpected insight into your ongoing work? What was the process of putting that collection together? Were you involved at all?

AB: yes, Alessandro communicated with me a fair amount – he checked in with me when he had the list of poems under consideration, and we talked about the process together. I also wrote an afterword for the selected, where I talked about how my writing life developed. I have to say that it was illuminating (and surprising) to read what Alex wrote about my writing. I am a reader but I also didn’t go to university, so my understanding of terminology and theory is a bit limited. It was interesting to see what he sees in my writing, as generally I feel like I’m receiving transmissions and then transcribing them as poetry, and mainly don’t plan on a particular effect. It was fascinating to read his take on my poetry.

rm: Has your approach or consideration of your own work shifted since that process?

AB: yes, I think I accept my weirdness more. In the past I sometimes was concerned about “wrapping” up the endings of poems, and now I accept an energetic continuity!

rm: You suggest that your work is a kind of single, ongoing project. How do you see your new collection as part of that trajectory?

AB: I think as I get older, the continuum becomes more apparent. Like, poems are a living practice. Ox Lost, Snow Deep is essentially a chapter in the big book of life. I’m more comfortable with longer poems, and these are occasionally multi-page poems. Also there is more interplay (I think) between the surreal and personal aspects of the poems. 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

 

P.W. Bridgman : A Bouquet Brought Back from Space, by Kevin Spenst

A Bouquet Brought Back from Space, Kevin Spenst
Anvil Press, 2024

 

 

 

It was our iceberg-calving father on the lazy-boy
who collapsed our home into cold waves…

A Bouquet Brought Back from Space is Kevin Spenst’s fourth book of poems. In many respects, it is his most ambitious and fully realised collection to date. Those astute enough in their literary tastes to have read this prolific poet’s three predecessor collections (and his 16 chapbooks) will recognise some familiar themes in Bouquet. They will also discern a broadening and deepening in the sophistication of Spenst’s unique poetic voice.

As was the case in his previous works, the spectre of mental illness casts a long shadow across the poems in this new collection. Spenst makes no secret of the fact that his father suffered from an intractable schizophrenia. He was in and out of hospital repeatedly over several decades which overlapped with the poet’s childhood and young adulthood, forcing the young Spenst constantly to seek “distraction from [his] father’s/ mind as he jettisoned jobs, crankcases, tools, and fortnights of sleep”. Yet, for all that, and despite the resulting trauma that subsists into the present, Spenst declares that his father was the “one man/ he loved most”.

It occurred
under the radiation
of the moon,
that the boy could never
trust his fellow
man ever since the one man
he loved most
had gone lunar…

     [From “The Moon’s Woodcutter Beholds”]

The imprint of troubled childhood experiences is everywhere to be seen in Spenst’s present worldview and sensibilities; it emerges repeatedly in poems that carefully dissect and lay bare the consequences of growing up alongside mental illness within the family. As one would expect from this poet, though, the subject is treated with, by turns, bone-chilling starkness, respectful humour and a deep tenderness. An example of the latter is found in “Kneeling by the Side of the Bed, He Taught Me to Pray”:

… I wish I could go back with what I know
now and work on the mechanics of our awk-
wardness, to stop mid-prayer and tell my dad
he wasn’t a sin-wrecked failure… just different.

Religion also permeates the poems in Bouquet, just as it does the poems in the earlier collections: Jabbering with Bing Bong (2015), Ignite (2016) and (to a lesser extent) Hearts Amok (2020). Kevin Spenst grew up in Canada in a Mennonite family. His parents were but one remove from the sternness and austerity of their Low German-speaking parents—immigrants from Russia and Ukraine—and many strict Mennonite ways and customs informed Kevin’s own upbringing. It is plain that some of the constraints and Biblical strictures associated with that culture added to, and did not ameliorate, the effects of his father’s mental illness upon the trajectory of his own upbringing and development. But, perhaps surprisingly, like the love that Spenst still carries for his father, a somewhat sui generis form of faith seems to have survived all of that. Thus, the large questions of virtue, sin and redemption continue to preoccupy Spenst; they are, however, interrogated insistently, intelligently and with the added wisdom and insight that come with having witnessed both the failures and comforts that are available through institutionalised religion in times of great personal difficulty.

Angels are of course intriguing but one approaches them warily in poetry, no? You need not fear. There’s no cloying sentimentality here. While angels do appear quite frequently in the poems in Bouquet, they are almost always delightfully, refreshingly, unconventional (such as the ones who “strive to do their best to resemble/ clouds, potatoes and a handful of bones// in hard bargaining”).

Importantly, the darkness and turmoil captured by the poems in Bouquet—both earthly and celestial—are leavened by rays of sunlight that shine brightly out of Spenst’s approach to the subject of love. Here, he is on solid and familiar ground. Spenst well knows the effects of love’s wondrous power in his own life and he is better than most poets at decanting those effects from experience and pouring their essences beautifully onto the page. The result is that, at the end of the day, Bouquet offers the reader a balanced and highly textured treatment of life’s riches and torments which captures, with admirable deftness, the contours and nuances of both.

Spenst’s mother, a complicated figure—though in a very different way than his father—emerges in the poems in Bouquet as a bulwark. Her intelligence and faith enable her to serve as a quiet, calming force within the family. She is a diffident woman whose actions were clearly loving but who “coughs over/the word love”. Thus,

     …when her husband swatted at
unseen skirmishes from his head, our mother’s smarts
     rose to the surface to protect us. To this day,
          her faith is encoded privately…

The above-mentioned familial polarities of safety and stability on the one hand, and chaos and insanity on the other, provoked the kinds of imaginings on Spenst’s part during his early years that would surely stir even the hardest of hearts:

…Like many, I imagined myself adopted

and rummaged through her bedroom closet for documents
     signed by my real parents…

Many of the immediately foregoing quotations come from a powerful and poignant poem about languages and their power to divide and confound that appears early in Bouquet. It is cleverly entitled (BigGermanDialectWordClankinglyInsertedHere!”) and it ends with a cri de coeur that is at once plaintive and defiant.

     … How have we fallen
through the ages to sprawl in this miracle moment

     through which we reword ourselves with language
that keeps layering in the exceptions and exemptions of
          time’s twists, burls and roots, while knowing…

     silence is the most articulate thing
          from the night sky of our open mouths…

We must be thankful that Kevin Spenst defiantly transcended the beauty of silence he acknowledged so lyrically in that quotation. Bouquet is the proof of that; its collection of well-chosen and well-ordered words and phrases may indeed be the “most articulate thing” to have yet emerged from the “night sky” of his emotionally rich yet complex life.

Like this reviewer, Spenst has devoted a considerable amount of his reading life to navigating and re-navigating the mysteries and magic of the writings of James Joyce. Traces of Joycean wordplay—foreign borrowings, coinings, humorous concatenations—proliferate in Bouquet as they do in Ulysses, each instance of it adding luminosity and a delightful frisson to Spenst’s poems. Thus, in “A Prayer to the Dissenter” we have William Blake looking up into “the darksome air”. In “Through Cloud Cartilage and Guesswork”, Spenst asks, rhetorically, “what is a stranger but an opulence of secrets[?]”. In “The Geometry of Wind Chimes”, the angels “assigned to Mennonites at the schism” preserve a God who is, Himself:

… nothing
but a bureaucratic sprawl of angels

within the slow ambit of a millimeter
clangoring against the nearest husk.

The poem “Hildepartchment Excelsus von Bingen” begins, mischievously:

Upon the Great Bindle Stick of the via ferrea,
a Partch’s clanging thirsts for the inscape of all.
A vagabond composer seeking unselving,
And the soul-deep sound of the plaustrum’s boodle…

Tasty morsels, these, with light seasonings added here and there that just may have been inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”.

One could go on endlessly in a review of this kind but space does not permit that.

So.

Perhaps the right way to close is to acknowledge again the stunning love poetry that, together with Spenst’s quirky humour, leavens and balances out the more troubled memory pieces that comprise Bouquet. Kevin Spenst’s love poetry is, like his other writing, wildly innovative. But it is also exquisitely tender.

“In the Middle of the Trembling Park” provides a good example. The poem chronicles an encounter between two lovers early in their relationship. It concludes gently and joyously, with the final line delicately ornamented by a perfectly wrought Joycean coining:

…The sun did its thing
over other bodies while we changed shapes like
cloudbursts on the tremoring corners of your bed.

Just one more.

Though playfully entitled “On the Origins of the Specious”, this poem is a serious meditation on love built on scaffolding supplied by the science of Darwinian evolution. It deserves to be made into a broadsheet, to be read at weddings, to be displayed on the Sony Jumbotron display screen at Times Square. Res ipsa loquitur, as the lawyers and judges say: it speaks for itself.

On the Origins of the Specious:

Our lungs were once wings which, under millions
of years of weighted words, took flight
from fancy and here I am, winded
and grounded, wondering
what we might
have been,

but you are
my guest here under
these gusts of wayward
blows and what I meant to say
under this evolution of blue is that I will make
up as much as I can from scales to feathers for you

 

 

 

 

P.W. Bridgman lives and writes in Vancouver. His fifth book—comprising new poems coupled with a novella in verse—is entitled The Word You Now Own and is due out from Ekstasis Editions in the late spring of 2024. You may visit his website at www.pwbridgman.ca and follow him on Twitter at @PWB_writer1.

rob mclennan : But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves., by Conyer Clayton

But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves., Conyer Clayton
Anvil Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

The second full-length poetry collection from Ottawa poet, editor, musician and gymnastics coach Conyer Clayton, following the 2021 Ottawa Book Award-winning We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2020) is But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2022), edited and produced through Stuart Ross’ A Feed Dog Book imprint. Composed as a suite of prose poems around childhood, loss, CPTSD, trauma and dream abstractions (some of which appeared earlier as an above/ground press chapbook), Clayton’s is a prose lyric of moments that float across narrative, accumulating as would a photo album into a larger story of memory and survival. As part of the acknowledgments, she writes that “This book, at its core, is about CPTSD.” She writes of shimmering absurdities and unresolved emotional scars in physical terms, as the poem “THE BREAK” ends, writing: “I can tell you wish I was in the water / too, sisters. I would warn you of the shifting / sandbar, but I have to find someone to watch / my pig first. I take my hand off for an instant / and squint against the sun to find you, and then / the pig is gone, my sisters are gone, they’re / somewhere beyond the break, they’re there, / they’re there, they must be. But the sun, and / the ships, and the fish, and the waves.” As she spoke of the project, then still in-progress, as part of an interview posted at Touch the Donkey:

These poems are all from a manuscript I am working on of prose poems based on my dreams. Most of the first drafts are spoken into a voice memo app on my phone when I wake up in the middle of the night or early morning, or scratched down in my notebook while I drink coffee on the couch. On some, I’ve added little bits to amplify certain themes and moments of significance, but I really try to stay true to the emotion and mood of each dream.

I have a longtime interest in the realities of alternate states of consciousness aside from our waking one, and this manuscript is my attempt to bring weight to what I feel is often dismissed — weird and seemingly random dreams. There is something to be learned from the places our Self travels when our waking intellect is shut down, and that is what I am leaning into in these poems.

This is a powerful book, one that knows full well how to push an effect best by pulling it back, offering a sheen and a subtlety that provide far more strength than had she worked more direct narratives. Throughout, the surrealism floats from light to dark, even within the same sentence or phrase, composing poems that blur at the edges of memory, repeated images and dangerous situations. She writes repeatedly of and around water, stories involving family members, anxiety, body horror and assault. “One night,” the poem “DEFICIENCY” begins, “as she struggles to sleep, she notices / small hearts dripping from her pores. She can / hear her pulse in every corner of the world. / Small hearts furrow her forehead and catch in / her hair. What can she do but to gather them?” The repetitions tether Clayton’s dream-poems together, offering a lineage, and even a rippling effect, connecting seemingly disparate poems together into a larger tableau. As well, through the waves of surreal memory, this is almost a book of water, whether as threat or salve, simultaneously washing away the pain and threatening to overwhelm her entirely. As the poem “THE MISSING PARTS OF ME” begins: “I stand in the middle of a pond fishing as my / father and older sister watch from shore. The / water is still and up to my waist. When I move, / the surface doesn’t ripple.”

GROWTH

My mac-and-cheese is cold. If I complain I’m never allowed to eat again. I get into a van with the other children. We’re driven across a windless landscape, skin-grey and hollow. The room we enter is full of beds. Blinds drawn. They tell us, The habits you make today will last for the rest of your lives. In the bathroom, I realize the mole on my neck has grown so large I can use it as a cape—fly to bed. As a blanket. It cannot be removed. I wouldn’t let them if they tried. Burrow in. Sleeping bag. The habits I build today will last for the rest of my life. I will always be this silent girl wrapped in her own skin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He is thinking of cutting his hair (but don’t tell anyone), and is currently pushing to complete (or at least further) a novel. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com