George Bowering : Artie’s Hotel & Mine

 

 

 

For this calendar year I have been working on a notoriously unpublished book of poetry (well, it has been published in a few pieces by Talon and others) by Artie Gold, Romantic Words. It is a sequential (and numbered) poem he worked on from 1969 till 1993. You could say that he was in a sense taken over by this sequence, even naming his previous work Before Romantic Words. Artie was a prominent member of a Montreal group called the Vehicule Poets, and was much loved by his cohort, including Endre Farkas, who published one of Artie's major works The Beautiful Chemical Waltz, through his press, The Muses' Company. That book was introduced by another friend, Ken Norris, who is writing the intro to Romantic Words. Endre wrote the afterword to Talonbooks' marvelous The Collected Books of Artie Gold, the title of which is a nod to Jack Spicer, one of Artie's two favourite contemporary poets.

           I should say a few words about the history of all this. When I was the writer in residence at Sir George Williams University in Montreal while the sixties were becoming the seventies, I met a lot of young (going to be) poets. I have mentioned elsewhere being encouraged about the futures of two of them, Artie Gold and Dwight Gardiner. These two youngsters were the only people at the university (including faculty) who had heard of Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer. You know, the kind of students who make you think it might be all right to be a professor.

          So I kept track of the Vehicule poets, and came to town to read in their series at their Vehicule Gallery. I read their books and magazines. I corresponded with them. When Artie Gold died I bought an air ticket to Montreal to attend his celebration at his beloved book store, The Word. I ate half of the chicken livers. Endre was the person who found Artie's body and then faced the spectacular task of making some order in his literary remains. The lads knew about Romantic Words. They had heard Artie read from the book and sometimes talk about it. It was obvious that something had to be done with the manuscript. But where had it gone? Parts of it were to be found in his books and elsewhere, but as for the whole pile of paper? It was apparently lost, the newest member of that club.

          For various reasons, one might think of Artie's life and output as being a mess. But like Jack Kerouac, he kept his papers in order, treating them as he treated his famous collections of glass, stones, poetry books, illustrators, etc. , and sure enough, eventually his typescripts of  unpublished work showed up in the McGill University library. (That in itself is a miracle I might tell you about some time.) The question arose: could Endre Farkas turn these pieces of a book into a book? Could Ken Norris? Could GB? By the way, Artie was the first person to address me that way. Let me look at the typescript as held by McGill, I said. No promises. And so those poems sat in my hard dive for a few years.

          Well, certain events in which I took place or vice versa suggested that while I was working on other books I might have a look at Artie's sequence I wrapped up three other books and stopped half way through a fourth (my memoir of La Manzanilla), and poked at a computer file called RW. Well, you know, a couple critics of Canadian Lit have noticed that a lot of my books are collaborations. They are right, I noticed, I have cowritten books with living writers, dead writers, older writers, younger writers, single writers, groups, even imaginary writers. I won't mention them all, but they include George Stanley, David Bromige, Michael Matthews, Angela Bowering, Charles Demers, Ryan Knighton, David McFadden, Fred Wah (unpublished), Jean Baird; enough of those. I also do a lot of writing in which I make use of other people's work without their knowledge. So with Romantic Words. In his intro Ken mentions some of the approaches I take to my co-author's poems. I think that perhaps the best point he makes is that there hasn't been a book (in Canada at least) constructed this way. I sort of knew that when I dived in, but I never felt confused about what I was doing.

          A word about the structure. Artie was never sure about whether a poem he had written was part of RW. The typescripts show us this. Some of his friends think that all his later poems might be included in the sequence. Before I had been doing the work for long I felt that there were two books here: RW and what are usually called "Unpublished Poems." A look at the back end of The Collected Books will show you what I mean. Well, I listened to Ken and I listened to Endre and I listened elsewhere, and I understood their views. Then with their help, I came upon this idea: Artie's late period was spent on one big life work, and I can produce one big poem with Book 1 and Book 2. Thinking of what I said about my life's work being part of an ongoing task that the poets attend to as a shared activity, I can say that in a smaller world, all of Gold's poems are parts of his life work. I am pretty sure that Artie felt that way, and that most good readers will have picked up on that feeling.

          In Artie's typescript there are a few shorter sequences. One of them bears the title The Hotel Victoria Poems, and was published by above/ground press in 2003 as a chapbook. My reply is called Hotels, and is published as a chappie by above/ground eighteen years later. These sequences may be related section by section. What fun.

          Here's what Norris writes at the end of the first draft of his intro:

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George’s openness as a reader/writer/editor/friend/fanboy allows many things to transpire.

It’s a curious book, and there is a genuine dialogue happening between the Artie poems on the left hand page and the George writing happening on the right hand page. What the reader sees happening is certainly some version of admiration, affection and love.

I think the big question isn’t: why does this book exist? I think the big question is: why don’t we have more books like this? As it stands, it is unique in our literature, in our realm of writing.

Fencing, tennis—the metaphors are there for the back and forth the book produces. Left page, right page, left page, right page—it’s an atmosphere of engagement and, occasionally, friendly competition. Sometimes George seeks to explain Artie. Other times he simply says, This is the way I’d do it, and here it is—done.

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          I have to say thanks, Ken, for collaborating with me on this little essay, or note or preface, whatever it is.

 

 

 

George Bowering is one of Canada’s oldest living poets. Last year he published a couple books, Could Be, five years worth of poetry, and Soft Zipper, a response to Gertrude Stein’s book with a similar title. He is working on a number of books as we speak.

Richard-Yves Sitoski : Confessions of a Small-Town Laureate

 

 

 

First, a snapshot of my community, because Owen Sound is a complicated place that not too many know about. It is a small city of just over 20,000 inhabitants, situated on southwestern Georgian Bay, in an area heavily reliant on tourism that some consider more a stop along the way to tourist areas than a destination in its own right. We’re about three hours north of any major metropolitan areas, but not on any major routes. We’re feeling the results of globalism and of processes that started generations ago: we’re a former marine and rail transport hub aware that everything is moving at the speed of Peterbilts on the 401, and a factory town rendered redundant by offshore manufacturing. With the COVID-era housing bubble provoked by an influx of new money coming in from the city, housing has become thoroughly unaffordable for increasing numbers of residents. As in many rural places, opiate use is high and fentanyl deaths are on the rise. And inevitably, as is the pattern in small brownfield cities, in our efforts at reinvention, we’re kind of making it up as we go along. On the other hand, we’re plucky, with a strong sense of identity and a lot of local pride in our thriving arts community. We have more topnotch musicians in this town than in any city twice its size, we are a haven for visual artists who are inspired by the breathtaking scenery, and we are gradually beginning to attract filmmakers and digital media artists. Finally, and most pertinent to me, we are the home of a dynamic independent press, The Ginger Press, that has served as the nexus of publishing and literary activity for both Grey and Bruce counties for over 30 years.

So, far from a list of complaints, this is a list of challenges, and thus what I consider to be my raw materials as poet laureate. I don’t just have an obligation to a constituency, I have an obligation to my art, and to fulfill both requires that I be aware of my surroundings and be prepared to present an unvarnished portrait of what I see. It is an unofficial mandate that I take just as seriously than my official one, which is to focus on environmental issues. I have that liberty because as perhaps the only privately-slash-community funded laureate in Canada (to my knowledge), I am not employed by council as a civic booster. (To be clear, I’m not the [Insert Corporate Name Here ®] Poet Laureate; my position is funded by local arts patrons, and as such is as community-driven as any publicly supported program. In addition, before I am accountable to my sponsors, I am accountable to our Poet Laureate Advisory Committee and to the Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library, which oversees the laureate program.)

For a variety of reasons, my tenure has included very few of the customary occasional pieces laureates are expected to deliver. Rather, I’ve had to use my own initiative to seek out topics and opportunities to present poetry. These reasons start with the old chestnut, that many residents have never even heard of a poet laureate; include the pandemic, which has put the kybosh on most public appearances; and end with the fact that poetry is a tough sell in an area that’s predominantly red meat and blue politics.

I’ve been most successful in compensating for the effects of the pandemic. The onset of COVID-19, of course, sent us all scurrying to our computers. As an artist whose obligation is to make poetry visible, this made me wonder how I could leverage the opportunities presented by digital media. And so I started an online open mic series that has been well received not only locally but internationally. When it was clear that we were beginning to get Zoomed-out, I added A-list headline performers and changed the name to the Oh!Sound Reading Series and Open Mic. I have held online poetry workshops, and became associated with Sheatre as creative mentor in their Sparkin’ Art youth digital studio. I began to publish my poems in online journals. I held a virtual launch of my legacy project collection of poems. I have been participating as an open mic’er and feature performer in as many online venues as possible. I have been making use of social media, employing the Owen Sound Poet Laureate Facebook page, for example, to present Black poets every day during Black History Month, or to post a Poem of the Week. I created a series of 12 introduction to poetry videos for the library YouTube channel. And so on.

But as for the problems of defining the role of the laureate and establishing its relevance, things were difficult here long before the pandemic. I try to hit open mics regularly and am amazed at the differences in the reception I get. In wealthier neighbouring towns with higher concentrations of recently moved city dwellers, my spoken word goes down like gangbusters. But in Owen Sound, with its shaky economy and singer-songwriter performance scene, the best way to get anyone to pay attention is to recite poems on top of conventional rock music, and only one local poet has managed to make a decent go of this. I attribute a lot of what success I enjoy to my origins in the songwriting community and at coffeehouses in which music predominated. I built up a crossover audience early on that unfortunately I have barely been able to increase despite shifting to print poetry. It also doesn’t help that most events, from Remembrance Day ceremonies to civic commemorations and inaugurations by way of major public holidays and climate change rallies, are organized by people who have never heard of a poet laureate and don’t realize that it is customary for one to be present with a poem.

So what is a poet to do? This poet, at least, took matters into his own hands. I didn’t let COVID-19 sidetrack my primary mandate of exploring environmental issues: my legacy project, No Sleep ‘til Eden, is of a book of augmented reality poems on the environment (while not the first book of AR poetry in this country, I do believe it to be the first trade book of AR poetry in Canada). I also contributed poems to Fridays for Future, created Snowetry (an activist poetic landscape intervention in response to when a vibrant piece of urban parkland was sought by a developer for a subdivision), and wrote WormWords (an art piece on the theme of vermicomposting, in which shredded poems were used as bedding for red wigglers, making them co-authors as they ingested, digested, and excreted my words to turn something important to the human spirit—poetry—into something vital for our planet—compost). I also had the chance to write a further book of poetry, which is making the rounds of publishers, and two chapbooks, one of which will be published by Bywords as part of the prize for winning the 2021 John Newlove Award.

I have been fortunate, blessed even. My efforts have been appreciated by my sponsors and the overseeing bodies to the extent that my term has been lengthened by a third year, in order that as (if?) society begins to re-open, I might make up for the prior lack of public visibility. Recently I have begun to perform again, mostly at private functions. I have made connections in the poetry community throughout the province and beyond. I am working with Ontario’s Poet Laureate Randell Adjei and have developed a creative partnership with Penn Kemp. I have succeeded in raising the profile of the laureateship, though I would like to get our print broadsheet daily to take as much of an interest in the position as our digital community paper does. I’ve been so busy, in fact, that when it’s over next fall I’ll probably settle into a Now what? funk for a few weeks as I plot my next move. I am also very much looking forward to seeing my successor in action as they confront Owen Sound’s unique issues and work to weave poetry into the community’s cultural fabric. It’s a tall order, but the job wouldn’t be rewarding if it were easy.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard-Yves Sitoski (he/him) is a songwriter, performance poet, and the 2019-2022 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario, on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. He is also the Interim Artistic Director of the Words Aloud festival. With croc E. moses he is part of the spoken word duo O P E N Sound. He has released a spoken word CD, Word Salad, and three books of verse with the Ginger Press: brownfields, Downmarket Oldies FM Station Blues, and No Sleep 'til Eden, an augmented reality multimedia collection of poems on the environment. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Maynard, Prairie Fire, Bywords.ca, in the League of Canadian Poets' Poetry Pause, and as part of Brick Books' Brickyard spoken word video series. In 2018 he was a finalist in the International Songwriting Competition, and he is a 2021 Best of the Net nominee and 2021 John Newlove Award winner. rsitoski.com   FB: OSPoetLaureate2019to2022  Twitter: @r_sitoski

Benjamin Niespodziany : on The Northerners

 

 

 

The Northerners is a chapbook-length poetry sequence written while watching the 1992 Dutch film De Noorderlingen (The Northerners). The movie takes place on one solitary street and in one secluded forest. Together, the film feels like a series of Russel Edson poems. Absurdist vignettes. Folkloric strange happenings. I had already watched the movie a handful of times and decided to watch it on mute while freewriting. Done over three sessions in 2019 and 2020, I then trimmed the writing down – from nearly 2,000 words to 800 – and turned it into a micro poetry sequence. I highly recommend you watch this film by Alex van Warmerdam, as well as his more recent (and more surreal) Borgman.

Along with The Northerners (which was the first of this ongoing series), I have written another 50+ pieces while watching various movies on mute. One during the French film Mood Indigo (2013) that was published in Heavy Feather Review (and nominated for the Best of the Net). One during the Swedish film You, the Living (2009) which is forthcoming from Mercurius Magazine. One during the Greek film Birds (Or How to Be One) which is forthcoming from HAD. All of these are part of a manuscript-in-progress with a working title of Ekphrastic Jazz. Some of the other movies I've watched for this series include Borgman (mentioned above), El Topo, Holy Motors, Pity, Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, and more. Even Looney Tunes makes an appearance.

 

 

 

Benjamin Niespodziany's writing has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Fence, Salt Hill Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and various others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, he currently works nights in a library in Chicago and runs the multimedia art blog [neonpajamas].