Gordon Phinn : Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, by Lillian Allen, Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin

Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, Lillian Allen, Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin
Exile Editions, 2025

    

 

 

In Muttertongue, a collaborative effulgence by Lillian Allen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, the inchoate life of words and the spaces between them fearlessly explores alternative modalities to destabilize the manufactured consent of our language gatekeepers.  A mouthful one might add, a paradigm shift, a semantic reshuffle,  an ungracious scouring of the politically correct:  all and more, in deed and word. Indeed.  He said saying, he wrote writing.  He resembled, looking.  

     Making its presence felt in print and audio and subtitled ‘what is a word in utter space’, it mines the established areas of concrete and visual poetry, that hard fought for territory in the empire of English Literature, where anthologies gathering and professors professing cobbled together the kingdom of approved stanzas over time, book and college.  Who gains admittance and who gets shifted or shafted.  These riotous rebels, rich in education and cultural roots, revel in their joyous attack on the rational, that castle of purity held in high regard by the cultural mavens that make up the honour guard of our civilized exchanges.

     Liz Howard calls it ‘a sacred ceremony, a joyous and radical cacophony of words of images’, and in this she is more than accurate.  The print contains dialogue and trialogue, provocative and kicking against perceived pricks, poems both linear & visual, and some of what one might term typewriter torment.   The audio (available as digital download and vinyl) calls up earlier expressions such as the Four Horsemen, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the original Dadaists from 1917, whose mad jabber  onstage at the Cabaret Voltaire challenged the chaos left in the wake of WW1, attempting to upend all norms.  As Hans Arp later confessed, t’was in many art forms, - “poetry, dance, song and painting, we were searching for a new order that would expose an elementary art and new order that would lead humanity from the disorder of the era and create a new balance of heaven and hell”.  Hugo Ball, in a published diary, stated that by delving into “the mystical and mythological depths of human consciousness one could uncover that which the enlightenment had buried by “disregarding the importance of human beings, had made reason to be our mortal enemy” Dada would bring “irrationality, fantasy and speculation to transcend the distinction between art and life, reigniting the magical side that had been lost in the process”.

     In the performances at the Cabaret Voltaire it was reported that all seven instigators were caught by ‘an indefinable intoxication’, such were the frenzies of expression.  Also a mystical climax took place in  June 23rd 1916 when Hugo Ball, dressed as a magical bishop dressed in a cubist costume read his verses without words, after having recited his first two sound poems, he wondered how he should end his performance: “When I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation that style of liturgical singing everywhere from east to west, for a moment it seemed as if there were a pale bewildered face in my cubist mask, a curious image of ten year old boy trembling and hanging on to the priest’s words in his parish…Then the lights went out as I had ordered and bathed in sweat I was carried down off the stage like magical bishop.’”  While the actual content of these two sound poems seems not to have come down to us, one suspects some systematic derangememnt of cadence and grammar grafted onto staccato rhythms.  Or perhaps whispers and murmurs surfing the audience’s expectations.     But in the earlier reference to ‘indefinable intoxication’ one feels the cacophonous yet calculated climaxes of the Four Horsemen  and the Muttertongue collective.  Of course, as in all cultural revolutions something is lost in the refining fires of transformation.  Some traditions are gladly scuttled while others are carefully saved and stashed in safe places to be exhumed by later generations.  Thus we yet have Hugo Ball’s ‘Three Propositions of Dada: (1) How does one achieve eternal bliss?  By saying DADA. (2) How does one become famous? By saying DADA.  (3) With a noble gesture and delicate propriety one goes crazy until one loses consciousness.’

     Was Alfred Jarry’s Theatre Of The Absurd, his infamous play Ubu Roi, the scandal it created pushing him into that ‘first prophet of the avant-garde’ and his embrace of Pataphysics another offshoot of the irrational?  In a banquet there can be many courses.  Even going backwards in time, which for the irrational is easy-peasy, we hear that the Zurich Dada group read his play out loud at their first gig.  Myself, I came of age in the sixties’ upending of cultural norms, where the surreal visions of psychedelic substances made pop music makers and fans susceptible to the fantastic and surreal, readymade pretzels that later had to forcibly realign themselves for family and career.  “Semolina pilchards climbing up the Eiffel Tower”.  Another case of the more you look the more you see.  And inevitably the more you listen the more you hear.  And that is exactly what Muttertongue is all about: listening more & hearing more.

     That Dada soon morphed into the more refined, and some would say disciplined, movement of Surrealism, where the dreamworld and all measure of irrationality and fantasy were slowly but surely dragged into the cultural mainstream to be stamped with the respectability of galleries, museums and university courses, was as perhaps as predictable as the earlier institutionalization of Impressionism.  Innovation has a habit of being ignored, mocked, knocked on the head, defanged and then quietly resuscitated when the initial dangers have been properly packaged as the next big thing, shelves spilling over with coasters, posters and t-shirts.  Cultural expression is a continuous circus.  Performative, as we say, whether category confirming or expanding.

     As Warhol predicted, In the future everyone (and everything) will be famous for fifteen minutes.  That future, something of a fizzle in the 60’s, has now been endlessly extended. How one times out that fifteen is a matter of choice, and in our age of planetary digital display, any iconoclastic expression can find its niche and audience, to then mutate that fifteen into years and decades.  As Allen, Barwin and Betts  make their case for the continued joyous consumption of the irrational and revelatory, we hear the voices of their individual cultural inheritances as they strip the accretions of colonialism and approved culture from the ancient roots they suspect have been packaged for respectability and profit, and if we allow ourselves, participate in the audible presence of chant and chorus as they reverberate around the room we have chosen for consumption.  Their carnival of mad celebration certainly makes a respectful nod to the Four Horsemen (bp Nicoll, Steve McCaffery, Rafael Barreto-Rivera & Paul Dutton) whose performances, particularly the classic CANADADA, are yet available on the net, and unapologetically extends the tradition of ‘sounds assembling’ from some mystery source into their own cacophony of carefree contempt.

     One can only hope they will continue to perform their boundary burning to reveal that all limits are actually invisible, that the rational and irrational, fantasy and reality, order and chaos, conscious and unconscious, rhythm and stasis, the approved and the shadow banned, are in fact, dance partners in the giddy whirl of life as they waltz and shimmy in disreputable indulgence.

 

 

 

 

Gordon Phinn is a poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, editor and videoblogger, a relic who can remember when manuscripts had to be posted with SAE’s in manila envelopes.  Recently, he has been preoccupied with several video projects, - Gord’sPoetryShow (Youtube), Poet Of The Moment (#84 at last count, Facebook) and Poem Of The Day (Instagram).  Since the demise of WordCity, where he was reviewer for four years, the collection soon to be published as Joy in All Genres, he has found a new home in The Miramichi Reader and other hospitable harbours such as the Asemana substack  His older critical work for BooksInCanada and Paragraph has been collected in It’s All About Me and Bowering and McFadden, while his memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions seems to be still shaking the odd tree here and there.  He lives and breathes by the shore of Lake Ontario in Oakville.

 

Stan Rogal : TRAVESTIES, by Karl Jirgens

TRAVESTIES, Karl Jirgens
Exile Editions, 2025

 

 

 

 

After many years of publishing and promoting poetry and poets (note the effective use of alliteration here) through his Rampike magazine and his role as professor at several universities, it’s nice to see that Exile Editions has seen fit to publish Karl Jirgens’ first poetry collection, Travesties. The book is divided into five sections: Travesties (covert irony), Homages (gentle humility), Lingo (language play), Raptures (oceanic pieces), and Dreamscapes (embracing surrealism). The descriptors make it clear that Karl is exploring a lot of territory in terms of subject matter, as well as form, including two very amusing rhyming sing-song poems in Raptures that deal with ecological concerns.

While one section is titled Homages, it is typical of Karl’s humble and generous nature to mention and celebrate numerous characters — either named in the title, or dedicated to, or arising within a poem — throughout the book. In other words, while the poems are obviously personal, they are more about the ‘other’ than the ‘self,’ and it is several of these “tip-of-the-hat” poems that mostly grabbed my attention. The opening poem, Moment, has a Dr. Seuss quality to it, dedicated to Louis Dudek, mentioning Beckett’s Not I, a small boulder is confused for a cat and vice versa, until, in the end, the two images merge: “But, just a rock sitting / at the sidewalk’s side, / its grey fur glistening in the rain”. There is a droll, gentle (even surreal) sense of humour at work here, as in other poems within the collection, also typical of Karl.  

The poem He Said is dedicated to Eugene McNamara, and Karl opens by noting (flatteringly, I believe) that the man “never spoke of praise for his own writing” while later lauding the fact that Eugene never said to anyone “your poems are awful… / …go home, find work in a bank.” Karl includes words of wisdom to young writers, using Phil Hall as back-up: “[Eugene] explained how single words can serve as stones / in a stone wall, and how a stone can be a grace note.” Trust Karl to offer teaching moments to poet wannabes, even as he manipulates words and language to fashion his own various walls of sound and vision.

Other writer/artist names appear in further poems. It’s a long list of folks Karl had associations with, either personally, or through their work, and which obviously affected and/or influenced him and his work: Nicole Brossard, Alistair Macleod, Robert Kroetsch, Ray Souster, Margaret Atwood, bill bissett, Jack Kerouac, Judith Fitzgerald, Erin Moure, rob mclennan, Kathy Acker, Al Purdy, Nonal Morriseau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Alanna Bondar, George Elliott Clarke… the list goes on (and on).

An image that especially tickled me is from a poem lifted and reconstructed from one of Karl’s short stories in his book, The Razor’s Edge, where superstar Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist Julia Kristeva “waltzed out of the elevator inside an upscale Toronto hotel gripping a large chalice of Shiraz. The hotel lobby was lined with enormous mirrors which reflected her pirouette. She gazed at me and said, ‘I know in Canada, one mustn’t drink wine on the elevator but I… I am Julia Kristeva!’” Bravo, Julia! After this shameless flourish, we’re presented with a brief history of lit theory that includes the Tel Quel group: Sollen, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, followed by how she embraced Samurai culture. It was a bold reminder that there once was a time when intellectuals (and artists/writers) were invited to be interviewed on radio and TV, treated as celebrities — rock stars, in fact — and that their words and ideas were respected and deemed worthy of consideration. My, my, how times have changed! Or am I, in actuality, lost in some alcohol-induced haze where I merely imagined that such events ever occurred in my lifetime? It’s possible, yes, even likely.

Anyway, speaking of intellectual thinking (and a brave ((these days)) step into the murky waters of postmodernism), check out Karl’s take on the Jack and Jill children’s verse as Jill voices her displeasure at being stereotyped and forced to endlessly tumble down the hill after Jack. “You’ve fallen endlessly,” she bemoans. “Broken your crown repeatedly. Don’t you realize that concussions cause dementia, pathological verbosity? I worry about you, Jack. But what about me?” Well, I’ll allow you, dear reader, to discover what transpires.    

Perhaps my favourite piece in the book is a prose poem titled Father’s Day: Homage to Robert Kroetsch. wherein the narrator (Karl?) is visiting his 90-year old father — who is suffering from Parkinson’s, losing his physical and mental faculties — in hospital. The piece is written in a manner that manages to convey the awkward sadness and helplessness of the situation, though without becoming maudlin and cloyingly sentimental. We are given the facts as the narrator responds in the only way possible, given that the events are not only repetitive, but incurable: “He thinks he’s 99. He’s not. He thinks he’s going to work today. He’s not. He thinks he’s late for work. He’s not… He thinks his wife works every day. She doesn’t. He thinks people are stealing stuff from his bathroom. They’re not.” There’s nothing to be done and we return to Julia Kristeva again, and her notion of Samurai culture, “that for a true martial-artist, / life is a race against death and paradoxically, towards death.”

As with all of Karl’s creative writings, there’s a lot to mull over in this collection, a lot to consider and think about. Fortunately, he also provides a fair amount of humour to keep the journey pleasant and eventful. As my pal Paul Lisson says, “Crushing and righteous thinking and writing. Strong. Not sad. Not sentimental. Adult, with a cigar.”

Congratulations Karl. 

 

 

 

 

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.

Poet Questionnaire #7 : Karl Jirgens answering Stan Rogal

 

 

 

 

 

To be honest, I don't know that many writers these days, on a personal level. Times have changed, at least, for me. Let’s face it, COVID didn’t help, and it seems like many people are remaining more cocooned in their dwellings; in their computers, rather than involved in the community, live and in person. During the 1990’s there was a vibrant group I hung out with, partied with, put on events with, but this group has (sadly) long since dispersed. I thought it might be worthwhile to re-create some of that old-time camaraderie and "the interview" format seemed a nice, relaxed entry. I also wanted to interview poets who contributed to the literary community in broader ways, not only as writers, but as publishers, editors, event organizers, and such. I met Karl several years ago, though, at a distance, through his readings and publishing efforts. It’s only in more recent years that we’ve gotten to know each other on a more personal level. That, despite the fact I’m in Toronto and he’s in Windsor, kilometers, if not worlds apart.

I was aware that Karl had stopped publishing Rampike magazine, and that he’d retired from U of Windsor, and didn’t seem to be doing much in the way of organizing literary events anymore. Suddenly, he had a collection of short stories appear, The Razor’s Edge, told me of readings he’d set up — including a salon series in his home — and, most importantly (since my intention is to interview poets), he was about to publish his first poetry collection. The timing seemed perfect. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Karl Jirgens, resurrected and rejuvenated.  

1. Will the real Karl Jirgens please stand up! Meaning, give our readers an overview as to who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

Ok, thanks for asking. I’m the former English Dept. Head and Chair of the Creative Writing Program (U Windsor), author of six books (Coach House, Mercury, ECW, The Porcupine’s Quill & Exile). My newest book, Travesties (my first book of poetry) is due this autumn from Exile Editions (Toronto). I edited two books (on Jack Bush, and Christopher Dewdney), plus, an issue of Open Letter magazine with Beatriz Hausner on collaborative creations. My scholarly and creative texts are published globally (most recently, in Japan). My poetry was selected for the anthology Best Poetry of Canada, 2023. I founded, edited & published Rampike magazine, my short-fiction collection, The Razor’s Edge (The Porcupine’s Quill Press), won minor prizes and was published in 2022. And, I’m a Grandmaster of Korean Martial Art (TKD; (8th Degree). Who knows why I did those things? I guess I enjoy those things.

2. You edited and published Rampike magazine for many years. Can you give us some history, and why did you stop publication?

Yeah, I founded Rampike and ran it for 36 years. Rampike featured celebrated international artists, writers, and theorists (e.g.; Paul Auster, William Burroughs, Julia Kristeva, Nourbese Philip, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jacques Derrida, Daphne Odjig, Dennis Oppenheim, Chris Burden, Norval Morrisseau, Leonard Cohen, Judith Fitzgerald, Stan Rogal, rob mclennan, among many others). Rampike’s print archive is located at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library (Toronto). And  Rampike’s digital archive is at the University of Windsor (Leddy Library - Free and searchable:

https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html). The magazine was my gift to the world. It offers a slice of arts history from 1979 to 2016; a very interesting period! I stopped publishing it because it was a drag which included grant applications, distribution, rounding up talent, and income tax, etc. Sometimes I wanted to change the publication’s name to Rumpache.

3. As a former university professor, you also organized many literary events. Any that stand out for you? What does this mean to you in terms of creating a community? What impact do these involvements have on you and your writing?

Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve tried to build a creative community (and yes, also literary). I tried to build arts throughout Ontario (visual art, theatre, music, writing, etc.). I started many publications, Rampike, Algoma Ink, Windsor Salt, and guest edited mags such as Open Letter and Hamilton Arts Literary. I organized dozens of literary events including those for my students. I worked for 10 years organizing BookFest Windsor. Lenore Langs was the Director during that period. I’m unsure of the overall impact of those events. I keep learning and writing. I think Chaucer said it best: “The life so short, the craft so long to learn" (Parlement of Foules).

4. You held literary events in Sault Ste. Marie where the locals would show up just because they knew it would be a wild and crazy experience. I was part of one of those events. A sold-out crowd. There was a bar set up, the audience sat at tables, and you had students perform Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine throughout the space. Can you elaborate on the audience response to all this madness?

Sure, those events were free by the way. And audiences loved those shows. You did a great presentation at that event! I remember! The students who performed Hamletmachine rehearsed for many weeks. I asked them to present the play amongst the audience. It was a fabulous performance that included in-house large-screen video,  acoustics, and blood pouring out of refrigerator on stage, 3 television sets, and a person on a swing moving back and forth over the heads of the audience! My events included music, theatre, and writing and were held in a “black box” theatre (very flexible). I’ve found that venues elsewhere are more confining. I did shows with you, Beatriz Hausner, & Gary Barwin in Toronto, and Windsor. You and I are due for another show with Peter Hrastovec (Windsor’s Poet Laureate) for an upcoming show/book-launch at Biblioasis Bookstore (Windsor, April 24th, 7 pm; free). I’ll tell you a little story about one of my shows. There was a hippy dude who wanted to read at one of my events. I asked if he was a writer. He said no, but he liked to recite musical lyrics. So, I thought of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and I said ok. On the night of the event he recited TV show lyrics, and intoned “Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, na-na-na-na-nah, Batman!” The audience loved it!

5. Although you’ve stopped publishing Rampike and have retired from university, are you still involved with the Windsor live literary scene in any way?

Of course, and all over Ontario too! And I hope, soon across Canada. I’ve got publications all over the place. I’ve got writing forthcoming in Jacket 2, and Guernica editions. I just participated in a Writers Union of Canada reading (online), and I’ve organized readings at my house with roughly 2 dozen guests featuring writers such as Stuart Ross, Andre Narbonne, Jade Wallace, & artists like Collette Broeders and Iain Baxter&, plus musicians including professional musicians such as Nicholas Jirgens. I want to integrate arts presentations (music, visual art, writing, etc). I’m planning a series of shows at Villa 92 (in Windsor) with artist, Chris McNamara. So, I’m as busy as ever. This autumn, I plan on a series of book launches, so if someone wants to invite me, then please email me (jirgens@uwindsor.ca).

6. Have you noticed a change in the live literary scene, pre- and post-COVID?

Yep. COVID pretty much killed live literary scenes, but now they’re making a come-back. So, I think we’ll see more hybrid events; live and digital (Zoom). COVID was rough but it inspired Zoom readings, so that’s an unexpected benefit. Writers and artists  are a resilient bunch.  

7. I know that your fiction has been published in book form, but you’re also a poet, though you’ve never had a collection published, which I find sadly surprising. This is about to change. Can you tell us something about your book coming out this year with Exile? Feel free to advertise.

Thanks. My book is a collection of poems that I wrote over 20 years. It’s kind of a “collected.” Exile will release it this autumn. I’ll read from it and will have books for sale this spring, at the Biblioasis event in April (poetry month). The book is divided into 5 sections: Travesties (covert irony), Homages (gentle humility), Lingo (language play), Raptures (eco-rap & oceanic pieces), plus Dreamscapes (embracing Surrealism). It’s a lot of fun with some serious stuff too. Here’s the CIP (Cataloguing in Publication) from Exile: “Travesties is a brilliantly crafted collection of poems about the world we live in and fundamental questions about ourselves, life, and death. Karl Jirgens, through his range of innovative and experimental literary expressions and passionate demonstrations of delight for shifts in perception/altered states/eco-poetics, powerfully reminds readers of the bond between every individual, all living things, and the world that continuously shapes us.” I am very grateful to Beatriz Hausner (editor) and Michael Callaghan (publisher), who both worked very hard on this book.

8. What keeps you writing poetry given there are fewer poetry publishers and even fewer poetry books being sold? Or am I wrong in this evaluation?

To be frank, my next book is a novel (covering family history). The working title is Cold War Blues. Then, I want to work on a book about how people are obsessed with money$. Maybe I’ll call it “Ka-Ching!” I’ll keep writing poetry, but yes, there are fewer publishers, and fewer books of poetry sold. So, I will pursue fiction for a while, but I’ll make it beautiful and poetic.

9. Poets deal in words. What is your favourite word? What about another word that maybe strikes your funny bone or makes you feel uneasy/awkward for no particular reason when you say/use it? Why?

I want to be remembered as someone who restored the word “groovy.” It’s a great word that’s almost forgotten. The word “tariff” makes me feel uneasy. Why? Because there’s absolutely no point to a trade war. It benefits no one. Many words are a drag and make me uncomfortable (e.g.: “51st state,” “occupy,” “war,” “invasion,” “nukes,” etc.)

10. What other sources influence your poetry, i.e., music, movies, sports…?

I’ve read a lot of books. I write poems to honour other writers, while pointing to twists of mind. And, I write about eco-culture. I guess my big themes are sex and death. But I won’t reveal my “sources.” Journalists know why one shouldn’t disclose information that identifies a “source.” I think Leonard Cohen once said that revealing a source of inspiration is like revealing your gambit. So, I won’t directly answer that question.

11. Do you feel that poetry has the power to end war, hunger, discrimination, and environmental destruction in the world?

Probably not. Yvgeny Yevtushenko used to be able to pack sports stadiums in Russia (don’t get me wrong, I strongly disagree with Russian politics). But until we can pack forty thousand people into a sport stadium to listen to poetry, I don’t think poetry has the power to change the world.

12. Do you have any advice for anyone who’d like to be(come) a poet?

Use your wits to find gainful employment. You can write poems on the side. Look at the history of some of the world’s top poets, Wallace Stevens worked as an insurance lawyer, T.S. Eliot worked as a bank clerk, a schoolteacher, and a literary critic, and later on he was an editor, and then a publisher. William Carlos Williams served as a doctor, and Charles Bukowski worked as a postal clerk. Tomas Transtromer was a psychologist. Heck, even Lewis Caroll had a job teaching math at Oxford. So, forget about earning a living through poetry. The world isn’t ready. Wordsworth said; “The world is too much with us.” So, don’t squander your time.

13. Please add any additional comments of your own choosing. Manifestos included.

Good question, thanks! I will only add the golden rule; “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Which ought to be the rule for everybody and is embedded in most global belief systems. Here’s my “manifesto”; “Art is art, everything else isn’t.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Karl Jirgens, former English Dept. Head and Chair of the Creative Writing Program (U Windsor), is author of six books (Coach House, Mercury, ECW, The Porcupine’s Quill & Exile Editions). Jirgens edited two books (on painter, Jack Bush, and poet, Christopher Dewdney), plus, an issue of Open Letter magazine with Beatriz Hausner. His scholarly and creative texts are published globally (most recently in Japan). His poetry was selected for the anthology Best Poetry of Canada, 2023. Jirgens founded, edited, published Rampike magazine, featuring celebrated international artists, writers, and theorists. Rampike’s print archive is at the Thomas Fisher Rare books library U of Toronto, & digitally archived (free: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html). His prize winning short-fiction collection, The Razor’s Edge (The Porcupine’s Quill Press), was published in 2022 (See: https://www.jirgens.org/ ). Jirgens is a Grandmaster of Tae Kwon Do (8th Degree Black Belt).

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs and their pet jackabee. 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.

 

 

rob mclennan : on John Barlow

 

 

 

 

Anyone who went through Toronto small press through the 1990s and into the aughts has a story about Toronto poet and publisher John Barlow, whether his kindness, his openness, his small press enthusiasms, his readings, the seeming-chaos of his small publishing through OVERSION. There was a chaos there, one barely contained through pages of poems slightly too small to read, sometimes with submissions laid overtop into an entirely new piece, both saving and combining space. It took some time for me to realize exactly what he was providing along with publication: a perspective, entirely turned on its head. He was always around, always offering copies of OVERSION as hand-out or exchange. I was in a few issues, although issues were also updated, shifted, altered, so there was no such thing, I don’t think, as a consistent “issue” of OVERSION. His poems were non-linear, straightforward, wise, fragmented, punctuated. He would get to the point and then go somewhere else, seemingly. He would say all the right things and then all those other things. It was John in a nutshell.

I’m shocked to hear that he died this past Wednesday, October 9, 2024, in hospital, following a heart attack. It doesn’t feel real. He was present, even if I hadn’t seen him in a while. He was always around, friendly with all the small press outsiders and insiders alike.

He was always around, whether at Toronto readings or small press fairs or a launch or along Bloor Street, near The Future Bakery, appearing in the background when you would least expect it, but always, somehow, present. I think I encountered him nearly every time I wandered into Toronto, which I did often, throughout the second half of the 1990s and into the following decade. He had trade collections with Exile Editions, which seemed confusing, but they were books that existed, almost in conflict with Barlow’s writing and publishing ethos: a solid, formal object. Somewhere in the late 1990s, he offered me a poetry submission while I was at the urinal in the bathroom upstairs at The Imperial Library Pub, most likely during the same evening of an above/ground press event I hosted there, circa 1997 or so. I said, John, man, give me a minute. Who else would submit a poem to someone standing at a urinal? The poem, in case you were curious, was published soon after as an above/ground press “poem” handout.

Or another night, invited along with a group of outsiders for late night Chinese food, most likely after a reading, somewhere along Spadina Avenue with John Barlow, David Owen, Nicky Drumbolis, possibly jwcurry and at least one or two others. A fight broke out at another table, with plates and bowls thrown, with more than a few customers getting out of the way. Barlow, seemingly unfazed, simply ordered more rice.

A 2013 author biography via The Toronto Quarterly reads: “John Barlow was born into the air force in Moncton, New Brunswick, then to a base in St. Jean, then out of the air force to spectacular Windsor, Ontario, and then the world (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Toronto). He has published books with Exile Editions: ASHINEoVSUN II, Laurel Reed Letters, LyrycalMyrycal Press, the cd booklet with Balmer Press, and of course Oversion Press, Sandra and Rose’s presses, and others presses paid for via hourly wage jobs, near all of it ~ lucrative humanly, but wildly unprofitable poetry.” The biography he offered me earlier this year, as apparently he discussed with Peter McPhee: “John Barlow lives and works in Toronto where he farms doves and circus sparrows.”

John seemed the sort of person that, for years, I considered that one could get a sense of other people on what they thought of him: if you liked and admired John Barlow, you were most likely a good person. If you didn’t like John Barlow, well, you lacked something, whether curiosity, or an openness, attention or simply kindness. John had his difficulties, none of which he hid, but he radiated both curiosity and kindness. There’s a story about his bank at one point accidentally declaring him dead, which took a great deal of work on his part to overturn, and shook him a great deal. Maybe the bank knew better than he? And then there’s this, one of his last messages to me, back in May of this year:

The truest seeming thing I’ve ever heard
about life death and eternity, is that some parts of life
are eternal. Completely eternal. Always occuring and always good.

He had abandoned publishing, he told me, but somehow I was offered poems. We were discussing poems and novels and writing across April and May via Facebook messenger, and he’d actually sent along a few pieces for Touch the Donkey, the first of which appeared in the April 2024 issue. And this second poem, which I hadn’t yet placed:

Murderous gangs rule the world 

no myth holds and religions are clearly false 

the only moralities are civic awareness and ecosystem harmony

The people thousands of years ago would agree

Responding to my query about a potential interview around his poem, as part of Touch the Donkey, he declined, offering: “I'm not feeling any vibe for appearing on screen, performative activity, specially qua the technology of internet. I'm not even inhabiting my visuality these days. But I do have the beginnings of a submission for a future issue as such.” I enjoyed his brief offering on writing, as he continued:

The novel is an unwieldy art form. Writing novels one always feels draped across the bow of rickety 18th century ships of narrative continuity. It's just not how my mind works, not for more than a few hours anyway, All continuities are broken, “I am not in the mood of my novel today”

The only way to live is to have numerous things in progress. Today, re-arrange the gnomes, tomorrow put them back as they were. Nothing in this life in time is linear.

Perhaps we should all be reading a random John Barlow poem throughout our readings from now on, continuing that non-linearity (which itself, is a linearity; perhaps I might never get that right). Bill Kennedy offered via Facebook that there will be no formal service, but there will be a memorial, although no details as yet.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan [photo credit: Amanda Earl] lives in Ottawa.