David Currie & IAN MARTIN : These Guys Get It

 

 

 

Dave: Maybe we can just do this like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. I think the secret sauce is that we’ve known each other for a long time, our writing has been inspired by each other’s entire back catalogue, and throughout Versefest, Two for One, Riverbed, the Factory Reading Series, and we’ve been talking about jokes with increasing intensity.

IAN: Yeah, when we're at poetry events together, we're usually sitting somewhere at the back, joking and riffing off of each other. So that's kind of how the chapbook came together – we would send poems back and forth, writing and rewriting as we went, riffing off each other's ideas.

Dave: I think play is an important part of the project. Comedy writing is often done in small groups. Some of my favourite moments are sitting together and cracking wise during readings.  We're old friends - who only really hang out at readings. It's nice to have a thing. One of the things I think we have both experienced is that poetry events can be...well...self-serious. The number of times I've texted a friend "somebody throw a pie!" during a reading could single space fill its own 30 page chapbook. Once we realized that this stand up project was going to work, we immediately started thinking of ways to make it fun for as many people as possible.

I think both of our sections in the book walk the line between parody and pastiche and I think the "stage show" really mirrors that. 

IAN: I've always had a serious, depressing streak in my writing, and there's definitely a place for that. But humour makes the sad stuff go down a little easier. And people like to laugh! It brings us together. The world is full of so much sadness but sometimes it's so sad that it's kinda funny.

Our stage show came about through riffing as well. Someone comes up with an idea, and you just keep trying to escalate it until it's so ridiculous it shouldn't work, then you do it anyways. We start our reading of the chapbook by copying a darts champion's walk-on song, and we end with a Saturday Night Live outro. Then in the middle we read a bunch of weird poetry and expect to be taken seriously. Riding that line is fun, where the audience isn't sure what's a joke and what's not. The higher the tension, the better the release.

Dave: Ok, that's a fair point. There's nothing wrong with serious depressing readings. There's always an undercurrent of that (?)  in my work as well but I do think if you ask people to leave their houses there should be some effort to add something to make it feel worth it. For my money, Christine McNair is one of the best readers around. She's not exactly Conan O'Brien but she creates a definite mood – a container to hold the audience in stasis until the reading is done. A great reading, a great set, holds you every second until it drops you in a cornfield somewhere without your wallet, your house keys, your shoes, and with somebody else's iguana to take care of.

I guess we should talk about the poems. After we were going back and forth, I hadn't reread IAN's poems until we were doing final edits and I laughed out loud so many times that I couldn't believe how lucky I was to be collaborating with them. For me, IAN's poems in This Guy Gets It transport me out of time and space. IAN does such a good job of replicating the dark stage, hot spotlight feeling of a comedy club while at the same time injecting that space with a whole world of characters, structures, and philosophies. It's such a pleasure to have my poem's next to theirs.

IAN: My poems may take you out of time and space, but yours put me in every time and space at once. Dave's very first poem immediately makes the link between comedy and philosophy, this ceaseless need to observe and question and reframe things over and over and over until you understand it all, or realize that you can't. His poems draw from all these different sources, music, TV, mythology, history, and mash them together in different configurations to try and make some sense out of the bizarre, iterative project of humanity. Dave is so great at capturing what it's like to live in the present, constantly haunted by everything that came before, and dealing with the absurd amalgam of what has survived.

Also he's very funny. 

Dave: We like each other.  We also both really like the book. I'm very grateful to rob mclennan for all his help. People seem to like the book (and the roadshow) too. 

I don't want to make a big thing about this but I saw a lit mag this week say "Don't send humour." Which is in itself very funny. We're seriously starting to put together an expanded full length manuscript. We both talk a lot about how frustrating it is to send our full length M.S.s out and to not find them a home.

This project feels special, though. It feels like it might be a place to start. We're adding a bunch of new poems – we're co-writing more. In This Guy Gets It, the last poem is co-written and I honestly think it might be the funniest poem in the chapbook. We wrote it knowing the shape of the rest of the book. Right now, we're kicking around a poem without a name yet about Lady Gaga that would be great in a full book length project.

For this chapbook, I really do want to thank rob, because there can be 99 publishers in a room and 99 of them reject you – all you need is one publisher to say "fine" to change your whole life.

What do you think IAN? There can be 99...

IAN: ...sandwiches?

Dave: Sandwiches.

 

 

 

 

David Currie is not IAN MARTIN.  He is a different writer with whom IAN MARTIN is collaborating. David's work has appeared in various places – he wishes he could be more specific, but he forgot to write them down, and has been collected into six chapbooks. He is the author of no-book-books, so what are we even doing here?

  

IAN MARTIN is large and barely in charge. Their work has appeared recently in periodicities, BAD DOG Mag, Discordia Review, and Sumac Literary Magazine. IAN has published six chapbooks, most recently EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY (2022). When not writing, IAN makes small video games and complains. Visit www.ianmartin.rocks at your own risk.

Their collaborative chapbook, This Guy Gets It, appeared recently through above/ground press.

Forty-five Ottawa poets : Chris Turnbull and Nico Vassilakis : 2.3 from a-z/z-a

folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets

18-20.

 

 

 

 

 

 

n/ Two brains on a bench broadcast by accident. Wires cross, languages echo writing, static as a form of listening. A visual libretto pulled like yellow ribbon from a box. Choosing material at a distance. A headspace to fashion a collaged arena sized opera. Unexpected challenges derange and demure in darkness. Machines in the underbrush. Co-laboring among ruins.

c:  There are processes and such that Nico and I are working with as we trade pieces back and forth, but what are you doing when your eyes or ears, or body circuitries, however manifested, land upon our work? Some of the material is adapted/adopted from (our own) other material: partially made or mostly unfinished or somewhat scraps — and re-shaped as sequences of visual/concrete/written comportment. Overall, it is a compilation that works within "opera", but maybe it is something else. Small pieces have shown up in SOME 11 (Vancouver), Utsanga (Italy).

 

 

 

Chris Turnbull is the author of cipher (Beautiful Outlaw Press 2024), [ untitled ] in own (CUE Books)—a collection of work by Turnbull, arawlings, and Heather Hermant, respectively—and Continua (Chaudiere Books/Invisible Press). Her most recent poetry chapbooks include parts path (drift/line 2025) and if/then (JackPine, 2025), a collection of interwoven poems by twelve poets from various countries. Additional writing, collaborations, installations and videopoems are in print, online, or within landscapes. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poetry can be found on trails (www.etuor.wordpress.com).

Nico Vassilakis is a poet who writes and draws language on the visual unmooring of letters from their word position. He has published several books of poetry and text/art. Most recently WONDERMENTAL came out from Pulley Press. He has curated several international visual/concrete poetry exhibitions and currently lives in Greenville, IL with his wife and animals.

 

 

Jon Cone and K.Lipschutz : on An Acceleration & a Calm

 

 

 

 

I am a Canadian who has lived in Iowa City for many years. When I inherited a packet of unpublished poetry by fellow expat P. M. Samson (who died at 84 in 2021), given carte blanche to do with it as I pleased, I was stunned by the sheer amount of material and so felt keenly the responsibility placed upon my shoulders.

Along came K.Lipschutz, with whom I have worked remotely for years, who needed to get out of San Francisco (something “domestic,” he cryptically alluded) and “hide out somewhere” for a month. Iowa City turned out to be that place, in the sweltering summer.

We spent days and nights and nights and days looking for the crux of the biscuit, as it were, winnowing over 500 manuscript pages down to a potent autobiographical sheaf of Samson’s work. A posthumous treasure trove.

K. then enlisted noted critic Barnard Swallow to critique each poem and – Bob’s your uncle – the result was AN ACCELERATION & A CALM, which marries Swallow’s pith and pluck with Samson’s eye-opening, stealth lyrical confessions. And is seeing the light of day thanks to above/ground press.

Beyond this brief background, we decided to step out of the way and let Samson and Swallow speak for themselves. Following are salient excerpts selected by K.

-Jon Cone, Iowa City, January 18, 2026

 

EXCERPTS FROM AN ACCELERATION & CALM

Fire drill, fire plug, fire escape.
Where’d you put the dog?  
My truck, not your truck.
Barking in the fog. 

(from KINDERGARTEN MEMOIR)

A child of the North plays pick-up sticks with the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of his inception.

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

It was Leibniz
who prepared me
for not understanding
Wittgenstein. 

(from DRESS FOR THE JOB YOU WERE JUST FIRED FROM)

. . . burrows overdressed into the urban wilderness of the inner life, the attempt to secure succor and shelter in the classroom while others are getting on with it at refrigerator repair school, graduation from which actually comes with the prospect of employment.

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

Irving Layton had a sneezing fit, rubbed his temples, cleared his throat.
Margaret Atwood answered questions with thought and care.
Marshall McLuhan did not sport a badge.
Alice Munro proved something of a flirt. 

(from O CANADA) 

The pantheon of Gargantua’s “Neighbor to the North” is, put simply, impressive. Munro trailblazed a path to the Nobel. Can Atwood be far behind?

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

No teeth no hair face heavily pocked
Dead at 42 from pancreatic sepsis:
the fate that launched a thousand doctoral theses
Make that a thousand and one 

(from PORTRAIT OF AN 18TH CENTURY CONSUMPTIVE)

You could find individual volumes back in the day. I never witnessed the full complement of all 17 on a single shelf, but volume 9 is on the bookshelf behind me.

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

I made a soup.
It was awful, inedible.
When I poured it down
the sink, the sink complained. 

(from FEBRUARY MARITAL REPORT)

The simplicity of the need for something warming breaks one’s heart. But whose? 

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

 

 

 

K.Lipschutz and Jon Cone have never met. In addition to shepherding this sheaf into print, they have produced the manuscript Conversations about Cats and the full-length play Beckett and Borges Work It On Out. Cone’s works include New Year Begun: Selected Poems (2022), Liminal: Shadow Agent, pts 1 & 2 (2021), and Family Portrait with Two Dogs Bleeding (2009). K.Lipschutz’s works include This Drawn & Quartered Moon  (Anvil Press, Vancouver, BC, 2013), The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (1985, o.p.), and Premeditations (2019).