David Hayward : Travels in the Airless Night

 

 

 

 

David Hayward is an writer living in Paris. He can be found on Twitter as @Sime0nStylites and Instagram as @davidhaywardwriter

Michael Sikkema : An interview with Gary Barwin

 

Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem 

Interview #7: Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry and numerous chapbooks. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco, Ampers&thropocene (visuals) and A Cemetery for Holes (with Tom Prime). His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear in March 2021. A PhD in music composition, his writing, music, media works and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Michael Sikkema: Your work is powerful, transformative, and sometimes kaleidoscopic. It can feel like magic. My question is: how do you think about poetry as word magic?

Gary Barwin: Firstly, thank you.

 I wonder about word magic. I like the idea. The fact that there are silent letters. Now you see them, now you don’t (hear them.) Or that spellling werks the way it does. (How great is “knight” with all its bits of arcane letter armor into which its sounds are prised. Not to mention its meaning.) Or, really, that we even have words. It seems unlikely. Rocks don’t. And how did we get from molecules or a series of cheeps to Milton, or James Brown or Ceci n'est pas une pipe? Didn’t Joni say that “Words are stardust.” (and continued “Words are often bolded…”) But I have been thinking about transformation a lot lately.

How one thing can become another. Sure, exhaled breath and mouth position and a movement of the tongue against teeth becomes sound becomes word. Or a mix of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescents and other matter is dropped onto mulched tree matter becomes word also. Both with a history, texture, meaning, referent, rhythm, conceptual weight, context. Audience. And sure, how something that isn’t a poem ends up turning into a poem. Or something that isn’t seen as a poem, is seen as one. Frog+mwah=Princess (where frog=non-poem and princess=poem and the kiss is some kind of word magic.)

 And the first part of a poem transforms into the next part in ways that may be mysterious or so obvious that they are mysterious also. And how do choices about the configuration and content of a poem someone chime with a content and configuration that we identify as our own? And what kind of magic are images. An anvil is falling from the sky but lands on the tip of a snowflake falling just slightly faster from the same winter sky. They descend together with a delicate grace. The snowflake which is really a word sets the anvil (which is really a word, too) down onto the sidewalk. In his bed, an old man decides to stop aging. He just stops. And so he lives forever. Also, all that phlegm inside him is a poem. A slurry of the glorious and patient, waiting for the perfect sneeze. Look! It’s coming now. Or at least within the next 100 years. Trust me! I’m a poem.

 Secondly, really belonged at the beginning of the paragraph several paragraphs ago, way up there.

Sikkema: Who did you collaborate with to make your Selected Poems, For It Is A Pleasure And A Surprise To Breathe happen?

Barwin: The poet Paul Vermeersch is the senior editor at Noelle Allen’s Wolsak and Wynn Press in Hamilton. He suggested the selected. I invited the brilliant scholar and great supporter of my work, Alessandro Porco, to select the poems and write the introduction. Paul initially had asked me to consider selecting my own poems. The lid lifted off my head since my brain began doing handstands in there, the idea was so bewildering and overwhelming. What would I know about selecting them? I’m so entirely thrilled to have all these poems gathered together—from the facsimile reproduction of my very first chapbook to all those colour visual poems to some work that hadn’t ever appeared in a book. Without sounding too Pollyanna-ish, it really is true that writing comes into being and is published because of the inspiration, collaboration, context, mentorship, example and support of many. I have always considered all of my work as being part of larger community of voices and creators. Language itself would be very different without a language community. So, too, with poetry, made of language. Because of language.  In language.

Sikkema: Your response to question #1 calls up the fact that you excel at creating spaces for, and charging spaces with performance. I'm impressed with the way that you turn a zoom talk, or what could be a simple stand-at-the-podium poetry reading into a full on performance. Does your love of performance tie directly back to your musical background? Or does it have other roots?

Barwin: Hey, wait a sec, what’s this? Oh man, what slither, such slip—are those gills pulsing? It’s so cold but oh I’m happy in a way I’ve never been but I’m waist deep in flow, this stream, trying to fish—it’ a metaphor, I’m a poet, see?— but gotta get this trout outta my pants. Floosh. There. down my left leg, trying to be free. It’s free. My leg is left in its contingent freedom, paired with my right. But the fish has found eddies and withering current and now I’m ready and really here. HERE. I’m thinking of that great line from Tom Waits, gravel king of the sorrowful metacabaret of the hopeful heart, “Songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air.” Thinking about his notion of songs filling the possibility of the air they’re made in. And so that’s how I tend to think about making or performing anything. What is the possibility of this air, what are the airfordances of this medium, this moment. Everything as both a constraint and a possibility. Every bug a feature, iridescent and leaving a remarkable trail. I have performed a lot of music but I think I have really seen the performative everywhere. Every time someone speaks. Listens. Preaches. Calls. Lectures. Instructs. Teaches. Or catches on fire. I’ve always been intrigued by the music of the body and its language in operation in the moment, as well as what might be conceivable also. Hey, what are those shadows doing in the cave? What’s the shadow for the word “shadow” look like. How can that shadow be red and how many limbs does that guy have anyway?

Sikkema: I see what you're saying, the shadow of word being a sword, which is of course an S word, and cutting the cave in half. Red? The ochre speaks for itself and others, and as far as limbs go, the six I count stay right near here. The caves are filled with so many paintings of animals and no plants, so few people and most of them are half bird. How many bird halfs are you?

Barwin: I aspire to multiple half-flights, to be one wing plus one wing plus one wing because one wing after the other is writing and also politics. And politics is a half bird, of course. The ochre of the sword, red with our limbs which are caves. When I cut a cave in half, I get a gulley, a gullet and the voices of animals and plants on the painted walls which speak. And which half of the bird? The outside? The inside? The part of the bird which is sky. Which is (s)word.

Sikkema: Can you say more about your "work being part of a larger community of voices and creators?" You do a lot of poetry collaborations, and collaborating is pretty natural for musicians. I'd love to hear you talk more about that and what it means for your work.

Barwin: For me, collaboration actualizes the inherent dialogue between reader and writer, or between writer and their own ideas of writing, the inherent discussion, the generative pushmi-pullyu that writing always is. Or that self or identity is. Or everything, really. We’re always already in discussion with our senses, our sense of self, our unconscious and our society. So collaborating feels like an extension of that. It opens the discussion to someone else, opening the gates of the gated community that is the self and one’s own writing practice.

And, in that interacting with others, engaging with their consciousnesses, their proclivities and energies and curiosities is fun and/or satisfying, collaborating is that, too. It’s fun to build a shed, a boat, a bread, or create a literary event with someone, to brainstorm (or brainshower? a clodburst?), to conceive of an idea, to work together to realize it as it changes in the realization. And so writing with others is like that. We’re a kind of scurvy crew yanking the halyards and mizzening the obscurely named scuppers-and-jag-like features of the word as we slosh our bowsprits through the sawing drink of it all. Ahoy! Purple prose and ridiculous extended metaphor!

To speak to the first half of your question, I am aware of my work being part of the larger dialogue—other voices and creators. A word wouldn’t mean anything without other words or the context within which the word could be used. Likewise, writing. Or, for that matter, a writer. We’re embedded in literature, and, hopefully, the broader discourse of our community and society. Exactly what we do with it depends on lots of things. One’s rating on the curmudgeon scale. How much chocolate is proximate to the day bed. But as writers, we are connected with history and across the present with the larger discourse. What has been said. What hasn’t. What is being said now and what isn’t. What is being said and how. To return to my terrible nautical metaphor, I feel like I’m a barrel bobbing in the brine, a single soggy writer in a large ocean of currents, possibilities and shocking fish. One of which may get stuck in my pants. If I’m lucky.

Sikkema: How did you go about selecting poems from the decades worth that you had to choose from? Will there be another collection of unselected poems? 

Barwin: Initially, I was invited by the publisher to choose the selection. To me that was like looking into Douglas Adam’s Infinite Perspective Vortex and I balked. I balked I tell you! So I asked my friend, the brilliant scholar Alessandro Porco to be the editor and to shape the book, to choose the poems.  He had written a couple of really insightful reviews and essays about my work and had edited the selected poems of Alice Burdick and Steve Venright, both of which collections were fantastic. He really understood and had thought deeply about we poets who emerged from Toronto in the 80s and I trusted his take. He didn’t always pick the poems that I thought I would have, the ones that I expected would be in a selected, but he—as I expected—was incredibly thoughtful and thorough and wrote an astounding introductory essay about my work. It was exciting, inspiring and touching. He so deeply engaged with my work and created a story about the work that was his own take and that was intelligent and took the long view. I don’t think I could have done that. I know I couldn’t have.

You ask about an unselected. It makes me think about a poet whose selected I edited. When we did the launch, he read only poems that I didn’t select. Hilarious. But what does it mean to “select”? Which poems should be selected? Which should be left out? What is the story? Whose story? And what happens to those other poems? Do they find another life, far from the book, eking out a simple, unselected life of their own, a more pure and individual life free from an overarching narrative, uniquely themselves, living in their own perfect moment, the perfect moment of their own creation? I hope that my work is part of a larger biosphere, part of an ecosystem of writing, speaking and interacting, part of the larger thriving world of writing. I hope that my work has a million points of contact with this world, a million points of contacts with readers. With the language. With that luminous energy which is making. And, of yes, with the sword of the half bird.

Sikkema: To close this interview, I'd like to ask just one last question. What advice would you give to unpoetry to ease the inevitable passage into poetry? I've been thinking a lot lately about the extremely difficult position that unpoetry is in, starting out as poetry, ending up as poetry, but being in the awkward middle phase. What advice do you have for unpoetry?

Barwin: It’s difficult not being poetry because poetry is ravenous. It’s hungry for more, like the sky. Like an ocean that bursts and consumes the land. Something tries not to be poetry and then insatiable poetry absorbs it with greed. The way we consume babies and they end up as adults, losing their delicate head-smell and the infinite abandon of their open-throated cry. Instead they become coif-pated coloraturas with their measly constrained song and narrow voices. And so too unpoetry wants to be the stranger in the undefinable land, an edgeless and indefinite wraith through which language passes unaware, on its way to its galas and conventions. But poetry is always on the move with its wolfish moonlit-eating grin, eating unpoetry like some unStrand coming up from the basement, its lips strained by ink. And so unpoetry is unable to elude the predation of its other. Poetry invades and subsumes, its vast appetite incorporating everything into its omnivorous and bloating corpus. Nothing that isn’t poetry can survive but becomes poetry. Unpoetry is born believing it is its own poetry but by and by becomes but a part of poetry writ large. Imagine a bird on the wing, glorious in flight, careless of the ground. Then it dies and rockets to earth. Unpoetry’s middle phase is that time it falls, a creature neither of the air or ground. If I could choose, I would wish to write unpoetry, unfettered, beyond shape and taxonomy. Too often I write that rocket-fall, that collapse from the air. Or perhaps, the bird-shaped crater that has opened far below. What is poetry’s mythic weakness. That it becomes everything. What is its mythic strength? That everything becomes poetry.

 

 

 

 

Michael Sikkema is a poet, visual poet, and pine cone enthusiast. He has work out or forthcoming in Word For / Word and Otoliths. He enjoys correspondence at Michael.Sikkema@gmail.com.

rob mclennan : Notes from the Field : Letter from Alta Vista

 

 

 

Pandemic-days mean that everything centres around a seemingly-infinite number of singular hubs. We are home, we are home. We are always home. My interactions with other writers, at this point, exist via the internet, social media and Canada Post. All else has gone silent. But while the snow covers the literary landscape, an increasing network reveals itself beneath the frozen surface.

Back in December, I produced the latest issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, an occasional journal loosely structured around an even looser affiliation of local writers, originally prompted around an attempt at a writer’s group we started back in the late 1990s. Part of what I’d been organizing for years is the “Christmas/holiday party” for PFYC, hosting a reading/gathering between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve for those who were able to attend (the logic being that only half of the usual crew might be able to attend, but those that could would be desperate to get out of the house). Instead of a public reading this time around, I produced a new issue, which invited work from a number of my usual go-to Ottawa poets in our loose assemblage—Cameron Anstee, Frances Boyle, Jason Christie, Anita Dolman, Amanda Earl, natalie hanna, Marilyn Irwin, Robert Hogg, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid and D.S. Stymeist—as well as Cobourg, Ontario poet, publisher, editor, fiction writer, raconteur and small press legend Stuart Ross, who is currently the writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa (albeit remotely, from his basement view of Lake Ontario). As far as who is doing what, I know D.S. Stymeist has another manuscript he’s been polishing, as, really, do the whole of the list (I keep hoping to see full-length poetry debuts by Marilyn, Anita and natalie out in the world; and a new collection by Robert Hogg, who hasn’t published a poetry book since 1993, would be long overdue). All in good time, I’m sure.

An interesting feature of that particular issue was a piece by “VII,” self-described as “seven voices fused into one exquisite corpse.” The group is made up of former Ottawa poet Manahil Bandukwala alongside still-Ottawa poets Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson. According to the author biography they included with their submission: “Based on the belief that seven minds are better than one and that many ideas make joyous chorus, we say: We are I and I is VII. Formed in March 2020, VII is based in Ottawa, Ontario, the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg First Nation. Our first chapbook is forthcoming with Collusion Books in Spring 2021.” And while they are working as a singular unit, it is worth noting that each are doing some interesting work individually. Most have at least produced a chapbook or two, and Margo released a full-length debut a couple of years ago. Conyer not only had her debut full-length out last year (with two full-length collections she’s currently polishing), but has been working collaboratively with Manahil, releasing a recent chapbook through Collusion Books.

Manahil is also part of the editorial collective of Ottawa-based Canthius, a literary journal that has been expanding the possibilities of their print journal through a variety of online reviews, interviews and other initiatives. As their website offers: “Canthius celebrates poetry and prose by women, transgender men, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, and genderqueer/gender non-conforming writers. The magazine is published bi-annually on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabeg and the traditional territory of the Ojibway and the Mississaugas of the New Credit. Recognizing the historical underrepresentation of certain groups in the Canadian literary arts, we are committed to publishing diverse perspectives and experiences and strongly encourage women of colour, including Indigenous and Black women, to submit here.” Canthius is easily one of the most engaging centres around which literature is happening around these parts, although certainly not existing in isolation.

Our annual poetry festival, VERSeFest, turned ten years old last March, and the spring in-person event was reformed into a series of virtual events eight months later. The benefit to holding an online festival, at least, is that all of those readings are archived, and you can catch them all here, as though you were there for original broadcast. The in-person workshops run through The TREE Reading Series—a series now more than four decades strong—exist online as well, as part of their twice-monthly zoom readings. And there’s probably a ton of activity I’m overlooking while sketching out these quick notes. Have you seen,for example, the weekly interviews I’ve been conducting with current and former Ottawa writers over the past year-plus? Really, for anything related to Ottawa literature, one should always head over to the monthly literary calendar at Bywords.ca; I mean, everything you might want to know lives there. And they regularly seek unpublished poems by former/current Ottawa residents for online publication. If you’ve ever lived here, you should think about it (they even pay a token amount, which is nice).

I miss when we were able to hold in-person events for the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, an event held twice a year since the fall of 1994, where most if not all of these individuals and publications and presses would be talking, meeting, selling and exchanging. Canada Post is just not enough. I miss being able to see what Arc Poetry Magazine has been up to, or new publications from any of our array of poet-run chapbook presses, including natalie hanna’s battleaxe press, Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press, Pearl Pirie’s phafour press, Marilyn Irwin’s shreeking violet press, Jeff Blackman’s Horsebroke Press, Amanda Earl’s AngelHousePress, Dessa Bayrock’s post ghost press and jwcurry’s 1cent (a number of these, I should mention, as well as my own above/ground press, were interviewed as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors' pandemic-era Small Press Interactive Map). At least Amanda Earl still has her podcast, The Small Machine Talks, and Jason Christie recently founded a new small journal, n-o-b-o-d-y; Jason used to produce small items and backyard readings under the moniker Yard Press, some fifteen or so years ago when he still lived in Calgary. Might there be backyard readings again, someday? Small press fairs, perhaps?

I am hoping by the fall we can be back on schedule. We’ve a lot to catch up on.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). Oh, and two (nine month covid-delayed) cataract surgeries in December 2020 means he doesn’t require glasses anymore. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com