Margo LaPierre : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Paul Vermeersch

A Valley Uncanny in NMLCT: An interview with poet Paul Vermeersch

 

Paul Vermeersch [photo credit: Bianca Spence] is a poet, multimedia artist, professor, and editor. His eighth collection of poetry, NMLCT, was published in September 2025 by ECW Press. Paul holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He is currently a professor at Sheridan College where he serves as the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.

Paul Vermeersch reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 27, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026. He is also conducting a poetry workshop as part of the festival on Saturday, March 30 [registration required; spaces still available].

Margo LaPierre: NMLCT has been called visionary, high concept, gymnastic, disorienting, and vivid. What weird thing would you compare NMLCT to? 

Paul Vermeersch: A cephalopod. I don’t know if I have an explanation for this answer. It’s the first thing I thought of. A cephalopod is complex, deliberate, stealthy, swift, fluctuating, and somehow simultaneously appealing and unsettling. Perhaps this book is, somehow, a cephalopod. 

ML: Expand on this line: “Because we did not invent the sun, we have convinced ourselves we cannot trust the light of day.” 

PV: I mean it literally. I suppose it could be read as a comment on the hubris that values human achievement over the natural world, and this book certainly explores the increasing divide between those two states of being. For myself, I want to hear a particular voice speaking this line: a voice that champions post-humanist values and is chiding us for clinging to an anthropocentric view of the universe while sarcastically praising us for inventing absurd machines… and for relying on them. 

ML: “They kept building the wrong house.” What is the right house?

PV: I have to admit that I don’t really know what the right house is. Not in the poem, anyway. I think the idea is that the right house is unknowable. It didn’t get built. Perhaps it’s not possible to build the right house. It might be so speculative, so hypothetical, that any attempt to build it would be condemned to failure. It might be equally difficult to draw a face accurately from memory as from imagination. I suppose the same can be true for a house. All I know is that the poem doesn’t know for sure, or it doesn’t want you to know. 

ML: What is the primary emotion of NMLCT? What about the secondary emotion lurking underneath, the countercurrent?

PV: In this book, I wasn’t attempting to capture any familiar feeling or recreate any known experience. I was attempting to create a new experience, one that hasn’t been felt yet. But, because we only have our “real” experiences as a frame of reference, any new experience can only be compared to what we already know, but it’s never an exact fit, and this creates something like an “uncanny valley” between what we experience and what we expect to experience. So, the primary emotion is that of a wolf that is also a cube. The secondary emotion is that of a forest that has been growing beneath the glaciers of Antarctica for millennia. There are no wolves there, but there are other animals. And birds. What is the emotion of being a cubic wolf, or a lost world inhabited by birds? We cannot know, but we experience it anyway. That. 

 

 

 

 

Margo LaPierre is a freelance book editor and poet. She serves on Arc’s editorial board and wrote the Writers’ Union of Canada’s guidebook on the author-editor relationship. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and a publishing certificate from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her second poetry collection is Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025).

Jérôme Melançon : …more songs the radio won’t play…, by Stan Rogal

…more songs the radio won’t play…, Stan Rogal
ECW Press, 2025

 

 

 

Stan Rogal is very serious about not being serious – even when interviewing deceased poets who briefly return to this plane to mess with him. Sitting down with his latest collection, …more songs the radio won’t play…, I didn’t know what not to expect, and it turns out I wasn’t wrong. The concept behind the collection is simple: take a song, use the song title as title, mention the singer or group’s name, and use the lyrics, or any aspect of the song, really, and transform it into something that is more than the song and more than a poem. Let’s get the verdict out of the way: most of the resulting poems function on their own, without knowledge of the original; the other ones will send you running to the song; and all will heighten your appreciation of the song and by your capacity to relate back to it.

But there’s no formula here. Not one way for Rogal to depart from the song, to remix it, to weave himself in and out of it. The book lets itself be read like a song, but it also begs to be studied, for the reader to read it like a musician would listen to a song so they could figure out the parts by ear, find allusions to other songs, understand the texture, and hit those notes.

I won’t give it the satisfaction.

I won’t! I won’t dissect “Shock the Monkey” and compare it to the song even though it’s much shorter than most other poems and I’m more familiar with it. I won’t, even though Rogal is dangling Wittgenstein explicitly on four separate occasions. The Wittgenstein who’s given up on order and sees everything as a game, is impressed by the games, and kind of wants people to come up with more, better games. The book wants its academic article, subtitled “Reading popular music through Rogal through Wittgenstein,” titled with a witty popular cultural reference.

Because that’s also what happens to the title of the collection, a deformation of Kathleen Edwards’ “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like.” The first trick is to make the allusive (won’t like) into the descriptive (won’t play), all the while adding to the original titular irony by attaching it to poems which, of course, the radio won’t play, seeing as they are poems. The second is to get rid of the capitals in the title so it’s 2020s poetry (in spite of the poems having titles). And then Rogal makes it seem like the title is part of a larger text by adding in ellipses. AND THEN the cover makes us believe there’s nostalgia in this collection by setting up cassette tapes in an artful tableau. The tape is even let out of one cassette (and an old cassette, not the late 90s type!), in a shape that evokes eyeglasses on a string or a baby carriage. More feigned nostalgia: side B is almost done playing. It’s almost time to flip the cassette and start over. Old life returns to new life.

I don’t know Rogal’s age but I can see there’s at least a decade between us just by the choice of songs. Again, there’s no nostalgia in the poems: there are newer songs in there, and the songs from the 1970s and 80s are very much alive, present as they are in their corresponding poems. They’ve stayed with Rogal, he didn’t stay behind with them (and isn’t that the dream for someone whose musical taste belongs to a past era, I was thinking, a Smashing Pumpkins song stuck in my head). He isn’t afraid to spend time with Duran Duran or A Flock of Seagulls and reminds us there are several reasons why their songs were so popular. But I’m NOT going to analyze these poems’ relationships to the original in depth. You figure it out.

Because after all, these are poems. Look at this, in “Hungry like the Wolf”: “Here exists the condition of besidedness / A grammatical sense of adjacency / Do do do do do do do dodo dododo dodo.” Rogal floats an idea, throws us into the song, messes up the meditation, takes us away from the proximity the poem was going to create. Instead, we are pulled behind the scenes of a music video. The dododo line reappears and we are clotheslined, thrown down into an exploration of fascination. Simon Le Bon might be comparing himself to a wolf; Rogal instead subsumes the pop star and the animal under a common concept (take that, Wittgenstein), as mysterious and beautiful but not alike in the least, but nonetheless comparable – the birth of symbolism. And then we get back to the poem’s chorus, with the explicit naming of red riding hood which the footnote informs us was the claimed inspiration for the lyrics; we get back to the singing.

Because yes, these poems have choruses. Things happen in poems when lines repeat, poets have used this device sparingly or quite formally. There’s a modulation, a return, renewed meaning, emphasis. But poems don’t have choruses like songs do, do they? Have you found yourself raising the intensity of your reading in a poem because shifts in its atmosphere led you to understand that a change was coming? Speaking along enthusiastically with the repeating stanza? Reciting part of the poem in your head all day? What’s the poetic equivalent of turning up the volume and tapping your feet while singing your head off? Rogal gives us the chance to give it a shot, to move along with the poems to be moved more than metaphorically.

But also he doesn’t, not always at least, but that’s also on purpose. “I Ran (So Far Away)” appears twice in a row: first as a poem in free verse, then as a prose poem that mixes reviews of the song with descriptions and impressions. In the first iteration, the dynamic from “Hungry like the Wolf” is reversed, we find ourselves on the other side of fascination when the speaker (oomph) says he can’t get away. There’s an end of the world feel to this poem, with nuclear obliteration diction and a knowingly misplaced focus on linguistics. There’s such beauty here, like in these lines: “looking back over your atomic shoulder / you play a beam of alabaster across your face / give me your hand, try to find some surface of yourself / that doesn’t impose too much upon / too late, too late.” How’s this for fascination and desire at the end of the world?

The second iteration of “I Ran” takes a step back and shows us what creates this fascination. Chord progressions, guitar techniques, technical observations, descriptions, songs it references. It all seems helpful and correct, but also extraneous, and through this cascade of details and quotations and additions we get the simple pleasure of enjoying a song, perhaps in spite of all we can know about it and what makes it just another pop song (but isn’t that also the essence of everyday pleasures?).

Wait.

I didn’t do this on purpose. The pulling back, pushing back in… There’s a pattern in these poems. I discovered it while writing. I picked the poems because the songs made sense together for me. I can’t help it. And I’m not even done! Check this out: both poems (this one and the Duran Duran one) share a line: “are you a wind instrument, are you breath?” Who says it to whom? The fascinated, or the fascinating? Isn’t this the essence of fascination, the presence of something beyond the corporeal? And of our relation to singers, given the life they breathe into us? I had to look it up, since it’s so striking. Should I tell you where it’s from? Where Rogal found it? Fine – a 2017 poem by Meredith Striker in the chapbook anemochore. But it’s not the first time he’s brought it up in a poem, so it’s also self-referential. Or is it parallel? Online journal publications are much faster than book releases.

There are other more explanatory poems, more references beyond the songs, more replacement of meaning. Take “Sweet Emotion”: a mention of class consciousness and then “It’s so serious today, the party’s over, or haven’t you heard? / We’re bleeding out, & while you deliberate, bodies accumulate.” (A Perfect Circle, really?) With an injection of Marxism and existentialism (no really, check it out). Take the rewriting of “Radio Ethiopia / Abyssinia” by Patti Smith or “Mama He’s Crazy” by the Judds where Rogal makes new poems and explores what analysis can’t do.

These poems are smart, clever, and they laugh at that part of themselves. They’re fun. They push the poetic experience into the extremely familiar. They attest to the life and staying power of other people’s words and songs, to everything we receive from our mediated relationships with others. And they push the poetic forms by destroying the single line of thought and making the presence of the past known and deeply felt.

So yeah, this is good stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Stan Rogal : got no flag at all, by Michael Holmes

got no flag at all, Michael Holmes
ECW Press, 1992

 

 

 

 

To say I accidentally happened upon this small volume while perusing my bookshelf would be a lie. The truth is that the name Michael Holmes had resurrected itself to me as part of an on-going internal investigation into the zeitgeist, as I considered much of what passes itself off as poetry these days [just one person’s opinion, you understand, feel free to disagree]: mawkishly personal, mawkishly emotional, mawkishly sentimental [getting redundant here, I know, but…], insular, hermetically sealed against the world except how the world and its structures impinge upon their own perceived individual rights and freedoms, with much beating of chests and gnashing of teeth; a sort of ‘look at me, I’m special,’ attitude along with the requisite personal journey, personal message/flag waving, tinged always with some level of grief, some level of the will and resilience to overcome (and/or blame); where the word ‘accessible’ — a perfectly useful word if one wants to understand a contract, or enter a building, or catch a train — is currently become saddled with connotations of the simple, the trivial and the banal when it comes to the subject matter and craft of poetry.

          So, these were the trigger points that conjured the name Michael Holmes (or, more specifically, his first collection of poems, got no flag at all from ECW PRESS, 1992). To my mind, the title is not only intriguing, but telling, in that it hints to provide a change from much of what is published today and subsequently championed as poetry of literary merit. A further hint was the cover artwork, a logogram (a written character that represents a word or morpheme) designed by Bill Baker as a tattoo meaning SACRIFICE, likely Chinese or Japanese in nature, since it credits “after Ezra Pound and Ian Hamilton Finlay” inside the cover, two poets who were obsessed with antiquity and sought to encapsulate the world in its most compact forms, being, the image; the word.

The red tattoo itself is mounted on what might be recognized as a black wall-hanging, yet the lower part of this cover image is slanted with a thin edge of white, causing it to resemble a guillotine blade. A sign, one hopes, of what to expect once the book is opened and the eye falls upon the page [shades of the Louis Bunuel film “Un Chien Andalou”]: red for passion/blood, black for conflict/death, white for innocence/purity. As in the poem Mapplethorpe, which ends: “when the mind scissors by a calla lily / the negative shall bleed you”. Lovely use of the word “negative” with its implied double meanings: ‘marked by denial, prohibition, or refusal marked by absence,’ as well as being a result of the film developing process, that serves to warn the viewer: you can’t unsee this, the image of the calla lily will have its way with you, in some one fashion or another. A reminder of Pound’s use of the word “apparition” as either “appearance” or “ghostlike” in his famous poem, In a Station of the Metro.

          The book title also brings to mind [my mind, at any rate; fantastically, mysteriously, confoundingly, even] the character of Diogenes, who lived in the 4^th century BC, who, when asked where he hailed from, declared himself a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the world, hence: got no flag at all.

In the poem, Translating Neruda, we read: “we inhale spanish” closely followed by “we exhale slavic and stand / for Christ’s sake / in moscow or helsinki spring.” In, An Open Letter, the poet meets a washerwoman, “More a Portuguese / wyf-man-o-war … Voice escalating (picture / Salema, Djerba, Lesbos, Liverpool … None of us belongs / here, none but the lost / tribes: / cigar-store Israelites,” the poem comprised of broken lines, broken thoughts, and enjambments that serve to disconnect character from place of origin. Use of the pronouns “we” and “us” place the poet among the rest. Who is the “I” here except an anonymous mind/body traversing the globe — “Sister, I plot migrations on THE WORLD” — picking up and developing a cadence of stripped-down, muscular, street lingo along the way, attempting to discover a way to fit into a landscape rife with shifting boundaries and all manner of socio-cultural diversity; where every day is a struggle for basic survival: “For sixteen years the family has peddled / food off Bloor, not the gold / sweat of Morocco; getting by with less / English and respect / than the leather-men / of Ad Dakhla.”

          Diogenes was a practitioner of the Cynic philosophy which postulated that, as reasoning creatures, people can gain happiness through rigorous training and by living in a way which is natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, fame, and power and even flouting conventions openly and derisively in public. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions. The word “cynic” derives from the ancient Greek meaning dog-like, and indeed, Diogenes himself lived his life like a dog, begging, eating scraps, sleeping in an abandoned water tub on the street. He would also spit, urinate on people, fart, and masturbate in public. Not that I’m comparing Michael or his behaviour to that of Diogenes [except, perhaps, metaphorically], though Michael, as I recall from OMG! 30+ years ago, did sport the typical costume of the renegade poet, along with the cynic’s attitude: long, unruly hair, five o’clock shadow, tattoos, black T-shirt and jeans, cigarette jammed between his lips, he looked a cross between Arthur Rimbaud, Marlon Brando and Jesus Christ, middle fingers pointing straight to heaven, “pecs ripplin, flag / a fleshscape”. In Where the Air Comes Quick Like Winter, writing: “And he tastes the dogsblood they force into him mix with his own and he has it all over now drowning in it. Him seeing through the crimson night their lips peeling back bearing hungry fangs amidst the hot bubbling foam.”

          Whoever said life was easy? Whatever happened to “no pain, no gain”? Whatever happened to “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”? Whatever happened to “nothing worth having comes easy”? Whatever happened to SACRIFICE? Whatever happened to “if I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too”?

          Go ahead, sing it Tom. A little night music, if you please.

From This Leaden Spring read: “Yes, we are all of us immigrants. / And yes, we are serene / (whether blind or mad) / degeneration / of lead.”      

          Meanwhile [if not exactly walking hand-in-hand, at least traveling in close proximity], the pair hold a lit lamp in the brightness of day, seeking an honest person, and, perhaps (even) a reason to celebrate. The poet makes an appeal to an imagined audience in Rainsong: “say come O my people, blow the clarion and raise your tankard high; and breathe deep of the bowels of the city, exhale hard with regeneration; caress each and every dirty brick with hands of naming, the mob of hands, sexless Adams; and colour the black dungeons of impregnable shackled family dwellings with the hues of equality…”

          “The hues of equality.” Not speaking here for the one, but the many.

          Got no flag at all.

          At end, who is the poet? Where is the poet? What is the poet feeling? What is the poet trying to say?

At end, how know the dancer from the dance; the poet from the poetry?

How, indeed.

          Perhaps not the most easily accessible poetry around, yet, as my good old pal Basil Bunting was fond of saying: “Never explain — your reader is as smart as you.”

Of course, ever the optimist, Basil also said: “Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.”

          Cheers to that. And cheers to Michael.     

  

 

  

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in the backwater hamlet commonly known as Toronto, along with his artist partner and their pet jackabee. His work has appeared — almost miraculously — in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US, and Europe. He is the author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks. An autodidactic intellectual classicist [reformed]. Speaks semi-fluent English and controversial French. Also a Personal Confessor, Truth Teller, and Psychic Investigator: no job too small; cheap rates.

Kim Fahner : If I Didn’t Love the River, by Robert Priest

If I Didn’t Love the River, Robert Priest
ECW Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

Open Robert Priest’s If I Didn’t Love the River and feel as if the poet has offered you his heart—open and welcoming—in the cradle of his cupped palms. The first poem, “Love Has Nothing to Do,” begins with this evocative stanza: “Love has nothing to do with the stars/except that I see them as symbols of distance/and love can be distant.” Stars string themselves through the book, reappearing in the beautiful poem, “On Star Divination,” in which the poet imagines that humans “are devices thrown down by the stars/divining sticks with no will of our own.” The stars peer down and watch us live our lives: “We’re lots cast down relentlessly like rain/We guide them home when they are lost, our love so luminous/they can’t avert their eyes. And yes, oh yes—stars wish on us.” Distances play a role in this book of poems, too, with reflections on how love can seem both very distant and still terribly close at the same time. Lovers in “Between a Tender and a Tender Place” are fluid beings, “strobe/to our extremes and back in luscious arcs/till stardust starts to tingle in our toes.” In “So Close,” Priest writes: “All I know is/there is some reaching/required/some receiving/called for/some distance/to be overcome/before we can be/close.”

Shifting from the complexity and depth of love in all its many incarnations, Priest ponders the way in which we are too tightly tied to the world of the internet. In “Device,” he considers the ways in which we are addicted to our cell phones: “First thing in my pocket when I dress/you tell me the time/the weather…I hardly need a memory, you store/the essentials.” This is a list poem, full of rich images and metaphors. By the end of the poem, the reader might feel a bit overwhelmed at the seductive nature of cell phones, and this is reinforced when Priest writes: “You are the finger for all pies/And we can’t quit you//You fasten/flies to the web/and make them pay.” In “The Like Process,” there is further exploration of the addictive nature of social media as he documents the ‘likes’ one by one: “I am a like machine/They zero in out of corners/They sponge up out of cracks/Octopus-like likes insincere likes/seeking favour.” There’s an awareness of human greed, emptiness, and superficiality here that continues with “Big Money,” a poem that excoriates capitalism in terms of how it negatively affects the world: “Big money fraks people/drains the human aquifer.” These poems are wake-up calls to how we live in the world. Do we follow blindly, or lift our heads to look around and change our poor behaviour?

If the reader hasn’t already thought about the way humans negatively affect the natural environment, If I Didn’t Love the River leads them in that direction. In “What the Albatross Has Round Its Neck,” the poet laments  “the death of fish/the death of sea lions/the extinction of polar bears/the passing of the otter.” In “Your Brand New Bag,” plastic bags become “White cauls/Jurassic ghosts/mouthing our groceries//choking our birds/clinging to us//hanging from our wrists/like burned skin.”

Often referred to as The People’s Poet, those who have read Robert Priest’s poems for years will know that there will be likely be a call for social justice, for activism, in them. In “Hunger Knows No Lockdown,” a pandemic era poem, he appraises the plight of those who are already marginalized. “Hunger keeps no distance/It comes in close and gets at the throat/devouring muscle/weighing down the head.” In “Egalitarian,” the speaker assesses the risks of wishing for one’s fair share of the world’s pain. “Add up the pain of modern slavery--/of child mortality, of those in jails/and old age homes, of refugees and all the agony/of poverty—then put my own upon the scale.” Our own pains and challenges, he concludes, are ones we’ll likely “stick with.”

In the latter portion of If I Didn’t Love the River, Priest returns to the theme of love with “My Women Named Marsha Kirzner Thing,” and “Nothing Made This Love Inevitable.” In “You Were There,” he writes: “Every place I left/you left with me/And when I got anywhere/it was like you had preceded me/It was like you had always been there/awaiting my arrival.” Despite the hardships of being human, there is hope in the love that winds like a river through these poems. There are rivers that are watched by far-off stars, and love that gathers us together—individually and collectively—even when we straggle haphazardly through difficult times. That hope is the very thing that makes this collection of poems sing with a clear voice.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim’s first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : The Most Charming Creatures, by Gary Barwin

The Most Charming Creatures, Gary Barwin
ECW Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

If you’re familiar with Gary Barwin’s work as a poet, you’ll know that he dances with language and metaphor in a way that most other poets envy. He plays with language, not in an annoyingly punny way, but in a way that encourages you to step outside of yourself and consider how a poem might stretch out like a yoga pose, ask you to sink into the place where meaning is made and transformed through language, and then question your own sense of the world. Barwin presents the poem with a quick hand, turning it so that it prisms in front of the reader. His keen ability to draw the reader into the text he offers is always admirable.

The epigraph to the collection, a quotation borrowed from Rachel Blau Duplessis’ “Precis,” sets the course for the journey. If we have questions about the ways the world works, in both small and large ways, “it is scrupulous to listen./Especially to the shadows.” It is a call to be mindful of what surrounds us each day. In the “Dust of the Wren” section of the book, in “Everything,” Barwin tells his reader that he is going to put “everything/into a poem/but/in a way/that appears/invisible.” Good poets know how to do this, to fashion poems that speak clearly without pulling aside a Wizard of Oz curtain to reveal the time and care it takes to craft a piece of work.

In “I Have No Words,” the poet speaks of how it is difficult to know what should, or should not, be written about. He recognizes that care must be taken, that a writer must locate themselves and consider their privileges before they put pen to paper: “I’m not going to speak/No I will take no air/from those who should speak/from those to whom we should listen.” We write, so we take up space, Barwin says, but he also asks us to think about whether we ought to speak if it is someone else’s space or territory. Still, in the very act of writing a poem, he notes that even the act of writing a poem has it “ending with/the words/my own words.” Even the act of creating a piece of writing takes up space that perhaps isn’t yours to take up, and how do you navigate (and negotiate) that space with care? He asks us to care, to consider, to rethink the context.

In poems like “Phases,” “Errata,” “Portal,” readers will get a sense of the way that Barwin loves to play with typography and space on the page. His wit and sense of humour are conveyed, too, in the way he plays with language. In poems like “Barman,” the poet writes: “Capitalism, Martin Luther and an amoeba walk into a bear.” In “Sandwich,” the three words that make up the poem reflect the physical construction of a sandwich: “bread/something else/bread//bread/something else/something else/bread.” If you’re able, it’s best to hear Gary Barwin read his work in person, to catch the cadence of the ripples of repetition. Sometimes, the humour comes with a wink, as in the necessarily tiny piece, “Haiku,” when he writes: “five snowcapped mountains/seven snowcapped mountains, ah/five snowcapped mountains.” Here is a poet who explores language, sound, and meaning in innovative ways, so that each poem is unique, filled with quirky and sometimes surrealistic internal (and external) landscapes. Barwin might also be the only Canadian poet I know of who has made reference to the game of crokinole, and that’s humourous in and of itself.

All of this is not to say that seriousness does not find a home in Gary Barwin’s The Most Charming Creatures. He writes of the climate crisis in “Goodbye,” creating a litany of things that will be lost if we don’t mind our typically selfish behaviour as humans: “Goodbye he nods but what about the koalas?/We had eucalyptus but now we have fire…Goodbye clouds, streetcars/filled with fish or birds, our hands gripping oceans. We are leaving/now. We are leaving because tangled in this net the ocean comes with us.” The collection deals with loss—of people and places, and even of the passage of time—and grapples with how we manage to live with grief. In “Something Else,” he reflects on advice given by a departed poet friend, Dave McFadden, writing: “it’s been raining all night/and I can’t sleep/half-remembering a poem.” In “For/after Hugh Thomas,” Barwin writes of how “life is long,” unless it ends quickly, like a rocket or “a foot fall/landing on the ground.” He ends the poem with: “but of course I miss you/I miss you/you’re not here//not here/and all I can do/is walk.” When we lose those we love deeply, the grief is just as deeply felt, and Barwin captures this bittersweet truth in his work.

What is really lovely about Gary Barwin’s The Most Charming Creatures is that you turn pages without being sure of where you’re headed, but knowing—if you’ve been lucky to have read his poetry before—that it will be a collection of great depth and complexity, and that his poems will make you think about and then reconsider your place in the world. His artful touch when it comes to poetic craft, and his satirically smart voice and style, can soften or sharpen depending on the topic at hand. It is a gift of craft that too few poets have these days.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim’s first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Stan Rogal : Watermelon Kindness, by David Donnell

Watermelon Kindness, David Donnell
ECW Press, 2010

          a metareview by Stan Rogal

 

 

 

I was wandering the aisles of BMV, the Annex, Toronto, recently [as is my habit] searching out titles, looking, as well, to see if any of my own books were present on the shelves of the ‘writers’ cemetery’ when I stumbled across a copy of Watermelon Kindness, poems by David Donnell. I was unfamiliar with the book, though not with the author. In fact, David and I used to be almost pals, sort of, back in the day. He’d show up on a Sunday night and order a burger and a pint of bitter at the Idler Pub where I acted as host for a reading series for several years. When I could dig up funds from one of the various arts’ councils to offer him a fee, he’d step onto the stage himself and perform for the crowd. We even read together on the same bill occasionally: The Scream in High Park, for example; Jill Battson’s Fringe venue of Poets on the Bus, for another. It was fun and relaxed times.

          I purchased the book, went home, and did a quick Google search to discover that this was David’s final published collection, 2010. I did the math. David died in 2020. What happened in those ten years? Had he stopped writing? Unlikely. Had he passed out of favour, gone beyond his ‘best before’ date, failed to light a fire in the then-current poetry public’s fickle imagination and so ignored and allowed to fade unceremoniously into the CanLit tapestry of lost souls? I mean, David was a prize-winning author, including the GG Award; he helped organize the Old Bohemian Embassy reading series in Toronto alongside folks like Margaret Atwood, Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn MacEwan; he covered the country doing live readings; he wrote articles and reviews about art and literature; his work was widely anthologized in Canada and the US; his papers are stored in UofT’s Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library; he taught creative writing courses, ending at UofT; he wrote songs [which I was never aware of] that were performed in Toronto bars and The Music Gallery;  he was a mover and a shaker in his time as well as a person with a big personality and terrific sense of humour. People liked him. So, what the hell happened?

Google had no ready answer for this question.

          A further thought struck me: what if, say, I was to write a review on this book, how would I proceed? As a rule, I’m a strong proponent of the Structuralist Method of ‘close reading’ that focuses on the relationship between the ‘reader’ and the formal properties of a ‘text’ — its literary devices, language, structure, and style. This way of reading allows one to interpret a text without outside information such as historical context, author biography, philosophy, or political ideology. It requires putting aside affective (that is, personal and emotional) response to the text, focusing instead on objective study. Well, in this particular instance, and given my [albeit, somewhat loose and sporadic] association with David and his work, where/how would I even begin? I mean, I can’t un-see what I’ve seen, or un-experience what I’ve experienced, right? In fact, I’ve got a pretty strong notion of what I expect to find in the book even before I crack the cover and get to the first poem, so how objective could I hope to be?

          It was — to me and my own particular [perhaps, idiosyncratic] state of mind at the time, you understand — an interesting, even intriguing, dilemma.

          The back of the book jacket told me that “David Donnell is generally acknowledged as a master of the conversational intellectual poem. With more range than any other contemporary poet, Donnell ponders questions of art, history, and psychology while reveling in the sensory and all that makes us real.” The Globe and Mail obit read: “His poetry is accessible, pulsing with the realities of home, street, and working life. And although David was, par excellence, an urban poet, he also immortalized the characters of his small-town boyhood.”

I agreed with this assessment and felt there was a touch of Charles Bukowski in David’s investigations into the ‘reality’ of daily living, though less dirty blue collar, less profane, and the tales of sexual escapades generally more self-deprecating, awkward, almost apologetic in their portrayal [“I thought, who knows, what a lovely ass, so plump & shapely,/isn’t it too bad that we’re into a serious breakup.”]. There was also Buk’s habit of dropping esoteric allusions into everyday situations that provided interesting contrasts and strange juxtapositions, and which served to elevate otherwise banal circumstances. In his poem On Getting Over a Depression David writes: “Bergson’s theory of laughter is too superficial/you need those other faces around the table gulping beer and laughing.” In Platforms he says: “we flirted all over the place like a couple doing a tango,/she was talking to me about Einstein & stratospheric clouds/while she ran off 10 slices of seasoned turkey breast”. In Obama’s iPod, what begins as a simple gift of an iPod containing a selection of Canadiana tunes to President Obama, rambles from 49 pieces of music, to 49 states before Hawaii, to the 49^th parallel [which is rightly pointed out to be more a symbolic than actual dividing line between Canada and the US, considering that the majority of Canadians live below this line [[though David adds, in his own playful and considered manner, “however, it’s the idea that counts”]] to Glenn Gould playing the Goldbergs while k.d. lang sings Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah…

There is no easy map laid out, no accurate GPS instructions presented in order to follow David’s active and curious mental peregrinations, though as in most of David’s poetic trips, destination is secondary, the journey is all the fun, and, as he says: “O there are some unexpected treats.” 

          So, yeah, I agree that David’ poetry is conversational and accessible, to a degree, though I also believe he had one large foot in the postmodernist camp. I also suspect [firmly] that many/most contemporary Canadian postmodernists would disagree with my evaluation, perhaps due to the fact that David didn’t have enough academic notches in his pomo belt to give him street cred; wasn’t a tenured professor, especially of lit theory; wasn’t a frequenter of conferences presenting lectures and rubbing elbows with the haut monde, and so on. In other words, he wasn’t a bona fide practicing member of the club. Yet, he employed several postmodernist techniques and tropes: an embrace of randomness, which included broken narrative and non-sequitur; playfulness and sense of humour; fragmentation; list poems; enjambment; mixed discourse; self-referentiality [“Check these new poems, it’s 2007, they’re fabulous”; “But no I’m not a pedant, definitely, no, I’m not, I’m amiable/Self-assured? Maybe,/but easygoing, pleasant, fun to be with — /you should invite me for a pleasant supper/I do fabulous grilled lobster”]; intertextuality with its consistent allusions to pop culture and its figures [“I don’t think M.G. Vassanji is the new Camus, I don’t think Jack White/is the new Little Richard”], sports figures, political figures, art and artists, philosophers and philosophies, and so on.

          David also had a propensity for writing about food, its importance to us, both in terms of its physical manifestation as nourishment as well as imagistically/metaphorically, and — while the words on the page can sometimes come across as mere description [in the poem The Great Philosophers Don’t Listen to Enough Coltrane [[a poem, which, by the way, says nothing about Coltrane]] he sets the reader up by proclaiming his desire to consider abstract questions from the New Testament, then pulls the rug out from under: “but what I want most is eggplant with parmesan/& tomato sauce. Or/marinate some bite-sized chunks/perhaps,/& have them with chicken & fettuccine.”  — when he read his poems out loud, with that magnificent mellifluous mouth-watering voice, well, the words took on a whole other level of sense and sensibility [think of some simple flat pop song lyrics that suddenly fly off the page when performed by a strong vocalist backed by a funky beat and shredded guitar licks, ie: Bang a Gong (Get It On), by T. Rex]. Even those of us who have never been overly fond of eggplant — “the testicles of Christ”, according to the Greeks according to David — or have never purchased eggplant, are suddenly prepared to dig deep into our pockets and head for the nearest market to secure a bagful and follow the recipe. In Jaffa Oranges Are Sweet he opines: “The cranes are flying & I’m eating strawberry cheesecake/at a little diner called Billy’s & I think confidence is just/a question of what you’ve had for breakfast.”

          A comestible, a location, a casual comment or parenthetical observation that maybe is neither so casual or parenthetical.

          As poetry books go, Watermelon Kindness is a decent [even large] size, at one-hundred-thirty pages, and there are several poems that I thought were weak, trite, and/or unnecessary in the volume [especially the shorter poems]. I wondered why they were included, as the faults seemed rather obvious. At that moment, I recalled being in London years ago where I saw a notice posted on a wall advertising a premier showing of David Hare’s film Paris by Night [with the fabulous Charlotte Rampling and the equally fabulous Michael Gambon] in which he would be present for a Q&A afterward. I went. I felt that the film was okay, not brilliant, and that there were several problematic issues with the script. It was a pleasant surprise to me when the interviewer raised these very same issues. David listened politely then replied [calmly, confidently] that he had written and directed the film to the best of his abilities and that, in fact, he was very pleased and satisfied with the result, that this was the film he’d intended to make, and that if others had a different view of it, they were entitled to their opinion.

I respected his response, though I wondered if he was maybe too close to the material — like the proud parent who blindly accepts faults in their own offspring whereas they wouldn’t do the same in others’ — and required an outside/objective eye. I wondered the same about Watermelon Kindness especially in terms of who the editor was who took it through the press.

          I checked the opening pages and discovered that it was published by ECW as a misFit imprint, and edited by Michael Holmes. Say what? You could have knocked me over with a feather. Getting back to my earlier point as to how would I review a book ‘objectively’ when I had such close associations with the author, I was now confronted with the fact that Michael and I had also been writer pals back in the day, where we raised more than a glass or two together at various literary functions in various bars, the Café May [now kaput, sadly] on Ronscesvalles, in particular. In fact, he’d acted in a play of mine for The Rhubarb Festival. Moreover, I have always respected him as a writer and editor of small magazines and I know him to be a fine fellow as well as an astute and intelligent person. In other words, I can only surmise, he must have had his own proper aesthetic grounds for including all the poems in the collection and who am I to either argue or disagree?     

          It was a quandary, and a bit of a mind fuck, for sure. I recognized that — in terms of writing a review of Watermelon Kindness — as much as I would want to provide a nice ‘close reading’ of David Donnell’s text, I knew that I would go in wanting to enjoy the poems, wanting to hear David’s voice in my head. A memory suddenly flashed that dragged me back to a time when I was taking a first-year university course at SFU in psychology. The professor [a chain-smoker who vowed to happily quit the vile habit if doctors could guarantee he’d die tomorrow if he continued, BUT, since they could only hazard a wild stab in the dark based on shaky [even questionable] data maybe twenty or thirty years down the road, ha, well…] gave a lecture on how a rat mastered a maze in order to get to the cheese. The popular consensus — that the rat’s actions are determined by simple stimulus-response to its environment, plus positive reinforcement, involving no mental process whatsoever — was based on the theory of Behaviourism: Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, et al. However, the professor continued, as he took a deep drag from his cigarette and blew out a lungful of blue smoke, the more they tested, the more problem-solving the rat was able to perform, the more that many scientists were coming to the conclusion that the stimulus-response theory was maybe a tad too simple, that, in reality, the ‘real’ reason the rat is able to master the ever-shifting maze configurations is because in cold, hard fact, it wants the cheese.

It was then I took stock of my own ticklish situation and came to the difficult, though unmistakable, conclusion: I was… I am… that rat! I also want the cheese!

          In the poem I’m Not Walking in Circles David writes: “…Derrida & Lacan. Lacan?/Derrida? This isn’t 1961. Hot head. Nobody sends a blue flare up unless they’re in trouble.”

          I admit, I am in trouble. Deep trouble. I send up a blue flare.

          Help! Help!

         

 

 

Stan Rogal hangs his hat in the quaint borough known as Toronto. He is the author of several books, the most recent — a novel titled Darkness at the Edge of Town — was launched virtually this past April. Stuart Ross once described him as a man-about-town and bon vivant. Judith Fitzgerald labeled him an intellectual redneck. The truth likely lies somewhere in between. In the words of Gertrude Stein: I am I because my little dog knows me. What greater recognition can one aspire to?  

 

Jay Miller : The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, by Stuart Ross

The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, Stuart Ross
ECW Press, 2022

 

 

 

After reading The Book of Grief and Hamburgers earlier this year, I found the will to start reading again. That’s probably the best thing I could imagine saying about any book ever, so I’m glad it’s one of Stuart Ross’s.

The Book of Grief and Hamburgers is a mindful memoir of sorts, meandering through various scenes, anecdotes, reflections on the stages of grief and poetics, a brief autobiography but through the lens of other creators’ and family members’ biographies. If you were lucky enough to attend one of his pandemic virtual book readings, the tone of this book is very similar to that: intimate, vulnerable, prophetic.

There is so much strength in the humour of Stuart Ross’s body of work. He admits that “in my writing, I have the habit of throwing hamburgers when things get emotionally difficult.” But I would argue that it is far from deflection or some sort of textbook coping mechanism. Elsewhere, he adds “When I was six or seven years old, my mother took me to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see a gigantic hamburger made of painted fabric,” and, in another place yet, regarding his long-time friend Michael Dennis, “I don’t want Michael to be gone. I want to talk poetry with him forever. Though I am a vegetarian, I want to eat burgers with him.” Rereading these excerpts again months later for my review brings tears to my eyes.

I had a weird dream after reading this book, too. Following his virtual reading of the book May 26, I went to bed and dreamt that I was just leaving the bookstore where he had just had the reading. Although it took place across the country, in my dream I was in Kingston, and there was another reading in town that night, as sometimes used to happen in Kingston, and it was Steven Heighton, who passed away earlier this year, who would be giving it. He was one of the first writers I remember seeing in person after my mother died who offered consolations to me. In the dream, I was on my way to his reading, arguing with myself as I strode sweatily through the city, “but Steven Heighton’s dead,” and, as though to win the argument against myself, I kept retorting, “but you’re late.” This absurd back-and-forth went on for some time until I woke up, relieved when the knowing words of Stuart Ross coolly entered my head: “Had I been grieving while I slept?” Aha.

There are a lot of snippets of Stuart Ross’s book that served as a touchstone for my own grief, so it should come as no surprise. On page 80, for example, he writes “My mother never stopped grieving for my mother. […] For years I didn’t understand how my mother could still be so sad about her mother’s death so many years later.” This part resonated deep within me, because everything I had learned about grief as a child had come from my mom, too. Reading his words on the subject was reassuring in a way I didn’t know I needed to be reassured about it. When people in the writing community spoke of his generosity in the past, myself included, I think we were mostly referring to his activities as an editor, host, collaborator and advocate of small press poetry, but that is precisely the word I would use to describe this book. I would go a step further in fact; it is his most generous work yet.

There are poets he has worked with in the past who would talk sometimes of the first book that they really understood, that made them really get poetry, works like Poems and Antipoems by Nicanor Parra, or The Spice-box of Earth by Leonard Cohen, both awesome works in their own rights, but I could never put my finger on any one collection personally and say that was the work for me, as regards poetry. But as regards my personal understanding of Canadian poetry, I must admit The Book of Grief and Hamburgers is the best thing since brioche buns.

I would love to stop and say something catchy for the sake of the review, like The Book of Grief and Hamburgers is not for the faint of heart, but I would disavow any cliché before ascribing it to my point of view. Maybe it is for the faint of heart, whatever that means, and there’s a lot I think anyone could identify with in this text, but there’s also material that merits more detached insights, I think, such as his statement on page 64: “So many members of my family disappeared in the Holocaust. How can I even complain about anything? Am I mistaking self-pity for grief?”

This conjured up so many other works I read this year revisiting it afterwards. Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), comes to mind, as does the Polish writer Tadeusz Różewicz, whose work was recently analyzed by Arkadiusz Morawiec, author of Polish Literature and Genocide (2021). In it, Morawiec primarily addresses one short story by Różewicz called “An Excursion to the Museum” (1966), dealing with the reactions of visitors to the Auschwitz Museum shortly following its opening. The narrator remarks upon “the inappropriate behaviour of the visitors and the outright indifference with which they treat this place,” and delicately warns the reader against this indifference while pointing out the shortcomings of the guide, a former prisoner of the camp, who ends the tour saying “words simply cannot describe it, so you have to imagine it for yourselves.” Morawiec goes on to paraphrase, “in the end, he refers the visitors to books. It is significant, however, that none of the tourists buy books nor albums about Auschwitz.” (page 190). What Różewicz reveals with this story is the difficulty of conveying the suffering through objects and exhibits, for the most impactful part of the tour are the photographs of the murdered, which remain there today. In Różewicz’s poetry of the same period, he writes “… at home awaits me / a task: / Create poetry after Auschwitz.” (I saw the extraordinary monster), and that’s why Stuart Ross’s sense of self-pity here brings Różewicz’s work to my mind, as though writing poetry after Auschwitz were a persistent to-do item on a spectral checklist. In the same way, Stuart Ross approaches the subject and meaning of grief with incertitude throughout his work, constantly asking the reader and himself after various chapters or depictions of events, is this grief? And if not that, then this?

The Holocaust makes several appearances in The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, too, including mention of a poem by Dag T. Straumsvåg, translator of a selection of Michael Dennis’s works, as well as some of Stuart Ross’s and Nelson Ball’s. Stuart shows the poem (page 48), then concludes: “Dag has written a poem that contains both the Holocaust and a hamburger.” So, to me, Stuart Ross’s hamburger has, through this book, and taking into consideration all his previous works, been explicitly designated as this all-encompassing icon or symbol of grief: collective, personal, anticipatory, delayed, absent, and all-too-present grief; grief as illness, identity, poetry, and as that which cannot be adequately described.

You take into account all the personal conflicts, regrets and lost ones he describes in this book and you willingly lose sight of the hamburger, but there is something very down-to-earth and reaffirming about this hamburger that is as poetical as it is real. Through it, you not only see this otherwise overwhelming abundance of accumulated grief, but a triumph over that grief, a way for the writer to take back control over his life and say, if I can have this grief that I’m not sure I really understand and might never really grasp and put it into a poem with a hamburger, that’s a really good poem. That’s beautiful. I hope Stuart Ross’s Book of Grief and Hamburgers has touched as many readers as deeply as it did me, and if you haven’t read it yet, I very much hope you get the chance to, too.

 

 

 

 

Jay Miller is a poet, reviewer, and hired pen, with experience in translation, marketing and technical writing, as well as the editor of Poets Against Fascism. He shares an apartment with his loving, supportive partner in Montreal.