Peter Midgley : On Community, Activism and Being Writer in Residence at Queen’s University

 

 

 

 

 

Being asked to be the inaugural Carolyn Smart Writer in Residence at Queen’s University was an unexpected honour, and a daunting one. I mean, just look at the department’s most recent writers in residence: Omar El Akkad, Kaie Kellough, Canisia Lubrin, Catherine Hernandez, Karen Solie, Steven Heighton… yeah. This was the year they revamped the program, renaming it in honour of Carolyn Smart, a person whose contributions to Canadian literature are significant. It was also the first in-person residency since before the plague. No pressure. None whatsoever. So yeah, I felt my mouth go dry when the invitation came.

The Carolyn Smart Writer’s Residency is a two-month residency in February and March—right when I was expecting contractors to come and dig up the foundations to our house. Fortunately, Queen’s agreed that we could do a hybrid residency, so I spent February in Katarokwi|Kingston and then came back to Edmonton for March. February in Katarokwi|Kingston involved long walks along the lakeshore, listening to the symphony of melting ice along the shoreline, migrating birds, and people. As much as writers’ residencies are about giving authors the time to engage with their own work, they are also about community, and I wanted community to be central during my time in residence. I decided before the residency even started that I wanted to be as available as possible during my in-person tenure: I was on campus every day and maintained an open-door policy. It did not give me much time to write, but it did lead to many wonderful conversations with students, with faculty, and with members of the local writing community.

I met with graduate students on the first morning before my inaugural talk—I’d barely swallowed my first sip of coffee when they began to ask questions about writing, about editing, and about publishing. What I lacked in writing accolades compared to my predecessors, I made up for through my experience working for a press and as a freelance editor.

My inaugural talk renewed the case for littérature engagée. Now more than ever, I believe it is time for writers to speak out against inequalities and the encroaching dangers that beset our society. I did not consider it coincidental that Freedom to Read Week fell during the last week of my in-person residency or that the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP), in partnership with the Canadian Publishers’ Council (CPC), were about to release the results of the 2022 Canadian Book Publishing Diversity Baseline Survey a week later. These are important matters for writers to be aware of, and I intended to use the opportunities at my disposal to raise awareness.

I followed my talk with two workshops on creativity and self-care for authors that built on the inaugural talk. In addition to the workshops, I also offered a series of informal discussions around key questions: Why do I write? Why do I edit? Why do I read? What compelled me to start writing? How to I bring activism into my writing? Can writing effect change?

The highlight of the month I spent in Ontario has to be the launch of Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s A is For Acholi. Sadiqa de Meijer, poet laureate of Katarokwi|Kingston, welcomed everyone. The past two writers in residence, Kaie Kellough and Canisia Lubrin, read too. What a delight to hear three of Canada’s leading poets read together. What made the evening even better was hearing the young poets read their work—such energy! On quiet nights, I still hear echoes of Billie Kearns (Billie the Kid), Jhordan Layne, Shamara Peart, Abena Green, and Ashley-Elizabeth Best sharing their work. If residencies are about community, as I believe they are, and writing is about actively embracing the shifts in Canada’s literary landscape, it rarely gets better than this.

But let us not forget that residencies are also about giving writers the space to engage in their own writing. I had just completed a novel when I arrived and frankly, the creative well felt dry. Fortunately, the community gave back generously, providing the seeds for what that will eventually become a new book. Thank you Otoniya J. Okot Bitek and Sadiqa de Meijer for the early discussions from which my ideas keep growing. While I didn’t get much writing done over the two months, I did spend the time conceptualizing the new project and applying for grants (thank you Edmonton Arts Council for the gift of an Explorations Grant to continue my work on this planned project).

What are residencies for, if not to engage with other writers and to draw regenerative energy from the writing community? What worth is a residency if we do not make use of the opportunity to impress on people the importance of what we writers do.

 

 

 

 

When Peter Midgley let out his first yelp, the doctor said, “F$%^! Put a stopper in that!” So the nurse shoved his foot in his mouth, which is where it has been ever since. He takes it out only to change feet. He is the author of twelve books and plays, and numerous articles, and has been editing books since neolithic times. Peter’s awards and accolades fill the drawer of a filing cabinet, but highlights include receiving the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence and the Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence; being a joint recipient of the IBBY-Asahi Award for Literacy Promotion in 1996  for his children's book, Thuli's Mattress; having his poetry collection, Unquiet Bones, shortlisted for the City of Edmonton Book Prize; and seeing let us not think of them as barbarians (NeWest Press) on the shortlist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award in 2019. He did once receive a trophy for winning the three-legged race at the church fair when he was in Grade One. You can explore his verbal contortions at www.midgley.ca

Author photo credit: Shawna Lemay
Other photos: Seasmain Taylor

Jérôme Melançon : A Beautiful Rebellion, by Rita Bouvier

A Beautiful Rebellion, Rita Bouvier
Thistledown Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Rita Bouvier likes being surprised. The beautiful rebellion she mentions in her title is that of reality against expectations and attempts at controlling it. It is found in children, in wasps, in history, in bodies – all surprising, and all skirting expectations.

The round dance, specifically, with the joy, beauty, and togetherness it creates, and its ability to literally feed people by drawing on traditional practices, stands as the illustration of rebellion. Bouvier presents her understanding of rebellion as deeply Métis. It does not focus on the armed resistance of the past: Louis Riel becomes important not for his political or military actions, but instead for refusing to be typecast as insane and have his actions erased. Bouvier also finds rebellion in the Anishinaabe performance artist Rebecca Belmore’s artwork; “blood on the snow” is mentioned, and “Facing the Monumental” inspires and is present in two poems (and “blook on the snow” was important enough that she brought a photograph of the installation to a poetry workshop I attended for others to draw upon).

This rebellion opposes the harm done to children and the wider massacres, erasures, injuries, and thefts committed against Indigenous peoples are non-human peoples, but also those she witnesses around the world. She expresses “a desire to know what makes us human / as if knowing might save me” (86). She also shares the opposite, in an act of seeking balance: “it is up to you     it is up to you / to take back your humanity and selfhood” (52). These breaths within lines recall the speech of someone who knows thoughts are coming and knows to take the time to let them arrive. Humanity is an opening to what it is not: in “facing the monumental,” the monumental is everything that comes before humanity in the order of things; its monumentality is the extra-ordinary, the immense – the ability to turn to what is not ourselves, to create respectful relationships, to better human life, to nurture.

Bouvier does not only witness rebellion, she also engages in it. Her poems are full of words and sentences in Mitchif and nêhiyawewin. She ensures the languages are noticed, seen, heard, and known to be alive and well. She wants her readers to know she is Métis, to find strength in the strength she can share. Her presence in the poems is vital to their movement. The speaker is the poet; the poet never forgets that she is speaking. The words seem full of simplicity, but in fact are only direct, shaping the reading so that interpretation is not the matter. Interpretation is too risky where peoples have difficulty speaking to one another and treating one another as human; instead Bouvier entrusts us with a key and shows us the way in.

Perhaps I tend to see political philosophy in more places than is warranted – yet even by that standard, Bouvier’s are strong political and philosophical poems. She creates “an awkward moment” by recounting the harms of colonization and adding marginal comments to add. She names, and she does not enter the metaphorical register so that after all the colonial stratagems and structures are named, there remains the full force of language:

as if you could     exempt yourself
from the ethos of the land
its aliveness     its wildness                    (it will haunt you)

But she does use allegory, as in “one late autumn day” (45), where a story about herself, as a child, stealing hazelnuts from a squirrel and being punished for it, opens the way for those with good intentions to reflect on the difficulties of reconciliation. This poem shows the allure and wonder of what is encountered for the first time, the urge to take it, and the harm it brings:

stored deep     in the cool     dark earth
I discovered
the hazelnut had lost its sting
with no regard for my sister squirrel
I stripped her nest and took it all

Bouvier often summons memories, and welcomes the additional memories she encounters as she moves through them (see for instance “a winter’s day in Île Bouleaux”). This movement of welcoming extends to the joy she sees while watching others (“daylight thief at Amigo’s Café”), the excitement of feeling and watching a storm approach (“dark skies over South Bay”), the feeling of togetherness that arises when being close to human and nonhuman animals, and even trees (“ode to the jack pine”). The philosophical impulse – and presence to all life – is also present in more meditative poems, like “listening to stone” (40-41), where the speaker is stone that is sculpted, where the words allow us to feel the life that rests within stone.

As these titles and others indicate, Bouvier’s poems are firmly set in place, between Île-à-la-Crosse and Saskatoon, among the relatives she names and whose memory she recalls, in the close braiding of words, animate and inanimate life, and emotions. The collection offers repeated occasions for meditating along with Bouvier, following her gaze to what will then grab our own.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, is forthcoming with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.

Greg Bem : The Atom, by Sarah Mangold

The Atom, Sarah Mangold
Wave, 2023

 

 

We
are a repetition
of familiar forms.

(from Number 17)

 

Sarah Mangold’s latest work is a foray through a century-old series of drawings by Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint: The Atom Series. Mangold has responded through book length form with her own series, a short interpretation and processing of the works that pushes forward Mangold’s powerful commitments to a contemporary feminist poetics across time and space. Mangold’s writings here are wondrously charged poem responses that bring Klint into 2023 through ekphrasis, existentialism, and literary conversation.

Klint’s The Atom Series was released in 1917, and according to Mangold in her chapbook’s afterword, they “illustrate two images of an atom on each page: one image shows the atom as it exists on the etheric plane and the other shows the atom’s state of energy on the physical plane enlarged four times.” A brief look at these works through a Google search reveals something between geometric elegance and hallucinogenic mutation. Klint is known to many art historians as the first painter to create abstract art, and we see in The Atom Series a fantastical journey between abstraction and representation by way of the painter’s personal relationship to and description of the works as a process, of an opened door.

Klint included captions to each, brief lines of poetry that offered a semblance of representation to otherwise superbly abstract and revelatory works of mysticism. Lines like “Through its longing to create ever more beautiful forms / first on the etheric plane, and then in matter, the body / becomes capable of being penetrated by light” (from The Atom Series, Number 4) accompany the beautiful and colorful artworks. Mangold provides every one of the captions alongside her original works: an awesome offer of reawakening and rejuvenation for Klint’s words, which stand up and feel current, fresh, living.

All
bodies of
the same kind serve
the substance.

(from Number 9)

The words offer a pathway to the core of each drawing, exploring the essence of “the atomic” through abstraction and poetry. Alongside contemporary discoveries and cultural phenomena including the X-Ray, Radio, and Science Fiction, Klint’s poems and paintings feel both ancient and futuristic, getting to the core questions of humanity. Indeed, they fit into that phantasmagorical period between romancing the pastoral and becoming inundated with the techno-industrial: where do humans, where does the human spirit, fit into this wild and perplexing world? Klint’s atoms are as much about atoms as they are about the awestriking impact of creation, where the minuscule and the infinite coexist somewhere in our minds.

Enter Mangold, at a time where the world continues to brace itself amidst ecological disaster, human rights abuse, and the complete and utter breakdown of consciousness into technological addiction and deadening. Mangold’s The Atom fits right in as a foil to the everyday horror we, global humans, face daily. Sarah Mangold’s small publication is a small siren or horn that beckons us to return to the radical exploration of the self as we move through a historical landscape of trauma and systemic pressure.

In addition to including all twenty captions from The Atom Series, Mangold offers her own interpretations of each work. Her writings capture a uniquely hybrid form that evokes a variety of poetry forms and aesthetics: vispo meets haiku meets confession meets tweet here. Each poem is circular, roughly 9-10 lines in length moving from short to long to short again. The twenty poems correspond with the twenty drawings and are also reciprocal to Klint’s captions.

I
am a pressure
gauge with a circular
face.

(from Number 3)

Like her previous works, Mangold brings personal voice into her atoms. There are many unknowns to Mangold’s words, but they are calm, collected, and despite their curious qualities feel direct and precise. This is a striking difference from Klint’s writing, which feels omniscient, guardian-like, the chorus or philosopher passing along flutters of wisdom. But Mangold’s words, her reflections and responses, her translations, read as wisdom too. They feel her own, and also universal. They have their own sense of mysticism in the era of the internet. As they bridge experience with field, the mystical is a return to seeking the raw, the harmonious, verisimilitude over delusion and consumption. They are open, mysterious, raw, and inviting.

Mangold isn’t the only artist to be entranced and inspired by Klint’s cosmic and awe-inducing visual works, but her poetry finds an element of relationship that connects to Klint’s voice be it through word or picture. She has positioned both the original works and her own into a new space that asks us to consider and reconsider the role of abstraction in our daily world of understanding, alongside the role of history. This aspect of the longitudinal emerges beyond previous postmodern disintegration and instead feels welcome in our shared global contexts.

 

 

 

 

Poet and artist and librarian and union organizer in Seattle Metro since 2010, Greg Bem lives on a ridge, explores ambience, peripherals, artificiality, and mountains.

Louis Cabri : Two poems

Best By

 

 

Pull the doors
off, river
shadow, protector

from flame
the silhouetted
body

propped against corridor wall
black and yellow light
re-simulates yellow light, re-simulates black

Behind and above, voiced shadow
points to elevator
down, Times Square

Questioning the instruction
turn and enter
a pitch volume

The name
Times Square
mathematical

algorithmic
predictive
by “the third

unconscious” what?
and by Verso that
first person pronoun will buy them

discounted
‘Bifo’ and
Joque, “protectors”

in critical
function sense
of art

the way
doing extinguishes
doer

Breton
and his arcane flowering
ego

hates the sea
visits Gaspé
writes of seabirds

all these names
become trinkets I
dream, become

toute cette époque
attroce, nous sommes
de plus en plus conduits

à la voir
à travers
son rȇve

“I” dream?
our dream
becomes

 

 

Image: “Arcane” by Cayusa

 

 

backseat game snap

 

 

Dawn of a new era, bro.
Era of the arse, bro.
Dude. Era of the Art of Nice.
Midnight at the Butt Light, dog.
Don’t say it, dog.
R u policing me, dude?
Just sayin’, bro.

Manpower, dog.
What about girlpower, dog.
That’s “man” and “girl”, dog.
Dude. Girlpower’s different.
Equal, dog.
Girlpower’s different.
It’s workforce, dog, it’s a stat.

The WEBB out there, bro.
Sale at Foot Locker, dog.
Dude. It’s astronomy or whatever.
Dog.
Double-U e b b.
Nasal spray, too.
NASA, dog.

Oh yeah.
Scooch over.
Same universe, bro.
No way, dog.
Norway.
No spoofing.
Am I, though?

Fact.
It’s Windows, dog.
Same uni, bro.
What about manservant?
Dog.
Gimme Lipton Ice, mom.
Some lip, bro.

It’s dog-eats.
What, dog.
Dog?
What, dog.
Bro.
What, dog.
Dog.

 

 

Image by author

 

 

Louis Cabri’s recent poetry includes Treazure Chewings (available at https://ryanfitzpatrick.ca/modelpress/) and Hungry Slingshots (New Star Books).