Recent Reads: "ARRHYTHMIA" by Janice Tokar

ARRHYTHMIA by Janice Tokar

Published by above/ground press, 2014.

Much like the cover image’s interweaving mountain peaks, ARRHYTHMIA finds Janice Tokar communicating the elemental shifts of our landscape while drawing our eye toward a blurring point. With “Debris from the marshes/ bobs on the waves” and “The forest breathes north/ for a thousand miles”, her commentary seems more interested in how a region creates space and buffers time than any ecological or geographical concerns. It soon becomes clear that this almost sterile view of nature is burdened by its association to a familial tragedy.

ii.

what’s left

or can’t be left behind

The arrhythmia carried

not fatal

but a permanent flaw

In my dreams

she cuts through the waves

with Olympian sureness and strength

I stumble along the shore

If Tokar’s voyage comes across as a conflicted homecoming, the “she” being revived and the arrhythmia passed down make up the sedimentary layers this text aims to plumb. Who is she? What happened to her? As a reader I’d rather have information withheld than offered up too freely, and the secrets of this long poem are addressed with genuine apprehension. As “last year’s calendar/ still mounts the wall” and “This year’s is hung/ loosely on top”, Tokar papers over a black anniversary. When a patch of seaweed looks “like tangles of gold-brown hair”, the poem inexplicably trails off. These clues deepen Tokar’s surroundings with an apparitional presence but too often return to surface details that mind ARRHYTHMIA's delicate atmosphere. The parallels relating distance as a physical expanse and as a proximity to aftermath work fluently; moreover, a mood-piece such as this doesn’t require a central arc or epiphany to welcome a closer reading. But whether the text rewards that closer reading is another mystery. 

iv.

When she left

after

             hard choices made

             histories deanchored

             gold bands

             ceremonially

             tossed in the Falls

I imagine

she imagined

we’d sail free

But the beginning rides in

on an ending’s wake

The above excerpt is rare in that it gives us plenty of back-story but scenery aside, none of these tidbits converse with Tokar’s surveying in a revelatory way. The same can be said for ARRHYTHMIA’s eleventh passage, which despite probing tough issues of abandonment and reconciliation appears completely removed from the pilgrimage that carries the poem.

Is it different with love

or, like crime,

does lack of intent

negate the offence?

Res ipsa loquitur

the facts may speak for themselves

but reveal so little

of what we recognize

as true

The eloquence of this passage floors me, as Tokar meets an impasse between documented and remembered trauma with empathy. But these truths pop up devoid of the surrounding forest and its “patient resuscitation”, reducing some of ARRHYTHMIA’s misty descriptions to pleasant but unnecessary fog. Perhaps the sparseness is intended to stand in for the crux of the mystery, or at least reflect the distance that makes it so inscrutable. (The strong impression that “she” is a mother figure understandably skews the case’s objectivity.) Even if the reader’s appetite for discovery goes a bit underfed, ARRHYTHMIA is an off-kilter study that attributes loss and perseverance to the realm of nature – human or otherwise.

Recent Reads: "Lime Kiln Quay Road" by Ben Ladouceur

Lime Kiln Quay Road by Ben Ladouceur

Published by above/ground press, 2014. The first edition of Lime Kiln Quay Road was published in 2011.

According to Louise Gluck (who appears in quotes on the title page), reactions to “the open” begin with longing and end with joy, leaving “in the middle, tedium”. Whether that trajectory of spirit appears saddle-shaped or as a steady rise depends on how character building you consider tedium, but there’s no question it’s the most pliable force in Ben Ladouceur’s Lime Kiln Quay Road. The first of twenty entries, numbered as such, expands on a stasis – the “letdown” of a rock rumoured to grow an inch per year – and Ladouceur’s shaky tolerance for it. I can see why the author describes this as one long poem; although every page ultimately tackles a new day or activity, there’s a plodding lack of concern throughout. “We don’t grow a great deal”, he relates early on, and it’s a confession he returns to, unfazed, near the chapbook’s close:

If growth occurs in the countryside

I am not convinced it occurs

for any good reason.

There’s a malaise being conveyed rather successfully, a flat horizon line visible whenever Ladouceur steals an object away from near focus. Behind the upturned wheelbarrow in the garden; without the snails on the door; or after a flock of birds has occasioned the property, these poems linger, trying to measure a lacking.

10.

A cast of birds took flight from the shrubs

when I shut my giant book.

Birds aren’t fighters

all they do

is put miles between themselves and you

leaving the garden vacant

nothing but insects

nothing to eat them.

Direct language and sparse punctuation lend these poems an immediate impact but their day-to-day trivialities invite a more curious tension: that of the bucolic setting and its two restless live-ins. The ennui between all three parties feels self-imposed but primed to expire; the “we” of Ladouceur and his housemate but also the wild inhabitants of Blaxhall, whose harsh realities increasingly come knocking. From “16.”, in which the couple strikes a rabbit with their car:

For all I know

the grassy hard shoulders of Suffolk

hide hundreds of nuggets of feces and fur

for all I know their ghosts

have clamped their teeth

into the bumper of your car

and one of us feels the additional

weight and one doesn’t.

In tandem with its domesticated arrangement, Lime Kiln Quay Road stubbornly refuses to break silences. Any travelogue opportunities that might’ve distinguished the cities for which these poems were dedicated – all English boroughs – are likewise dashed. These omissions are brave, reinforcing Ladouceur’s careful tone and paving the way for a last page confessional, an epilogue where shades of Gluck’s longing and joy meet in aftermath. As averse to excitement as this chapbook seems to be, there’s a ramshackle appeal to the way Ladouceur whittles away a season or so of this formative period. Plus, when you consider that Ladouceur first published Lime Kiln Quay Road in 2011, it’s exciting to wonder how a few intermittent formative years might shape his upcoming projects. Good on above/ground press for giving this a deserved – and probably necessary – second printing.

Recent Reads: "The Uncertainty Principle: stories," by rob mclennan

The Uncertainty Principle: stories, by rob mclennan

Published by Chaudiere Books, 2014.

ISBN 978-0-9783428-8-3

Two springs ago I was listening to a talk on contemporary poetry when a fellow enthusiast asked rob mclennan what inspires him. “I don’t wait for inspiration,” he responded. “My father didn’t wait for inspiration. He milked the cows every day because he had to”. That no-frills answer sprung to mind midway through The Uncertainty Principle: stories,, an eclectic compendium of pocket-sized tales crafted from 2008 to 2011. The brevity and randomness of each story makes it tempting to view these as the crème de la crème of one of mclennan’s daily writing exercises. However these individual pieces transformed into a working manuscript – whether they were organized from the start or encountered a “eureka” moment along the way – mclennan’s bounty of ideas repeatedly underpins that day-in-day-out discipline.

Uncertainty plays a crucial part in the flow of so many mini-narratives. mclennan forgoes anchoring his characters with names and ambitions, instead letting pronouns contribute to a foggy tapestry of shared thoughts and concerns. Common themes converse and accumulate throughout, binding playful and contemplative experiences into a lifetime’s knowledge, some vague, communal whole. Recurring subjects in first person obviously lean toward the autobiographical, such as memories of one’s mother or fleeting moments around familiar Ottawa landmarks, while others belong firmly in the speculative.

Describing himself as an errorist, he spends

his day deliberately misspelling, otherwise the

copy-editor could be out of a job and he never

see her again.

The above example illustrates how mclennan populates the fictional side, using unidentified people as a means to observing poignant or funny sociological traits. This lens expands to feature some insightful pop culture commentary, including theories on Hollywood films, comic books, as well as an eerie parallel between two misfits of nuclear fallout – Godzilla and SpongeBob SquarePants. Broadening the humour, mclennan litters a few entries with the hashtag #IDontHaveFactsToBackThisUp to offset the more intricate accounts.

I recently had a Doctor Who-style dream, set

in early twentieth-century Dublin, with you as

my faithful companion. We found James Joyce

and his house of infinite, hidden rooms, stalked

by some kind of vampire creature. Was this,

we began to suspect, something his own de-

mons had created, dark language made physi-

cal, an altered Nora Barnacle? I don’t recall a

conclusion or resolution. This is often the way

of dreams. Someone suggested I write out

what I can, to reinforce memory, flesh out the

scene. The front door of the house was green-

painted wood, with a peephole large enough to

see Joyce’s face, his round glasses. The foyer

had a soft wood paneling, brown and tan

wainscotting. He had been drafting a letter,

left out on the table. There was something we

wanted not to have known.

This dream recollection bridges the fantastical elements of The Uncertainty Principle with its more somber (but no less intriguing) realities. Besides capturing the fragmentary act of piecing together the unconscious, mclennan’s details settle around an omission that haunts the page. The same can be said for many of the best stories on offer, where an unknowable truth lingers just beyond (or somewhere within) the information made available. Whether oscillating between irreverent and astute or observational and tender, mclennan’s concise anecdotes are remarkable for opening so many doors without betraying their secrets. Here’s a lovely near-poem we can add to the “observational and tender” category:

We were stretched flat on the dark side of the

lawn, opposite the garage light and porch, star-

ing up at the sky. We were counting the stars. I

can’t believe you’ve never seen a shooting star,

she said, as common as goldfish. We remained

for a long time, sweeping our eyes across

Ontario sky, and I looked over, amazed at this

sprout of a child beside me, my ten-year-old

daughter. I was studying the shadowed shapes

of her developing profile, a sparkle in her eye.

There’s one, she pointed. I turned to look. It

had already vanished.

Thanks to mclennan’s discipline, our experience reading The Uncertainty Principle requires none. Organized to accommodate brief interactions (which, like the psychology behind bite-sized chocolate bars, results here in complete overindulgence), the book proves incessantly fresh, taken as a whole or in cursory, page-flipping handfuls. 

The Uncertainty Principle: stories, will officially launch on May 10, 2014 as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series at the Manx Pub in Ottawa. It is now available to buy at Chaudiere Books' website.

Recent Reads: Dennis Tourbin and Camille Martin

THE STREAM and other poems by Dennis Tourbin

Sugar Beach by Camille Martin

Published by above/ground press, 2014.

In 2012, some fourteen years after his passing, Dennis Tourbin was honoured with two, long-overdue exhibitions: a three-venue celebration in his hometown of St Catharines and a cubist-focused show in the Ottawa Art Gallery. Now that the former (and larger) showcase of his collagist oeuvre, entitled The Language of Visual Poetry, has relocated to the Carleton University Art Gallery, continued interest in Tourbin peaks again with newly published, previously unseen poetry. THE STREAM and other poems collects three margin-hugging entries that touch on familiar Tourbin muses from within a dream-like travelogue.

  

The title poem details fishing for brown trout near Millbrook, Ontario, but as each summer finds the stream undergoing certain changes (and therefore imposing new fishing strategies), Tourbin recognizes in it an overlooked universe. The current holds fish but also the memories we harvest through language:

A body of water.

A wondrous sound.

The water, like static,

the stream continuing on,

into eternity,

non stop,

everlasting,

trying to discover

the meaning of

infinity…

This idyllic current, resuscitated from the past, acts as the first of a few carriers that replenish their meanings; Millbrook as memory, water as static. The train in “Morning in Paris” proves another conduit capable of skipping the divide, traversing the gulf between France’s media-occupied capital and the more sensory-illuminated countryside. Imagining an alternate reality wherein Algerian terrorists succeeded in detonating Air France Flight 8969 doesn’t influence Tourbin’s escape to Deauville as much as the endlessly replayed news clips prepped to entail either outcome. As his train basks in the green and grey landscape, Tourbin feels the strain dissipate:

On the train

French lovers kiss,

touch each other lovingly,

no thought,

just the passion.

The News has not yet

reached them.

The rain has not

wet their lips.

In time all the News

will be catalogued,

become meaningless,

just another bullet

to the head

of another

innocent passenger

going who knows where…

Keep in mind, Tourbin wrote this poem in 1994. Pre-Internet, if you recall such a time. We can neither chalk that last stanza up to broad cynicism nor read it as a byproduct of the lassitude we greet headlines with twenty years on.

Closing poem “In Her Apartment in Paris” offers “the stream” yet another meaning: of routine street happenings Tourbin watched replenish themselves on a daily basis. That repetition transforms the window glass into a television screen as well as a mirror, occasionally reflecting on the author’s own uncertain mortality. Layered but plainspoken, “In Her Apartment in Paris” hinges on an explosive moment that deserves to be experienced, not narrated. That said, THE STREAM and other poems creates a small whirlpool of Tourbin’s most celebrated preoccupations: terrorism, media, identity and, yes, fishing.

Never one to forget the individual gaze amid complex, national calamities, Tourbin’s vision is being posthumously celebrated at a time we miss him most – this “media age” of phone-tapping governments and lingering terrorism fears. These are adventure poems, seeking out beginnings and endings that no science or language has come to terms with. What THE STREAM and other poems accomplishes in Tourbin’s absence is a sense of finality, an eventuality he knowingly snuck within the static.

Occasionally I read too much into a title and end up rewinding my own assumptions; that happened with Sugar Beach, Camille Martin’s new chapbook. As it turns out, Sugar Beach isn’t especially concerned with one of Toronto’s newest recreational hangouts. The title poem’s cold, streamlined setting conjures the industrial backdrop but with an air of fantasy the author entertains, then vanquishes. As outdoor scenes from whimsical French paintings come face to face with “now’s black pigeon, head jerking across white sand”, Martin’s voice unearths juicy angles wherein gruff realities lie dormant. Or, as “Sugar Beach” puts it:

[…] – lady and slipper

freeze-framed at the apex of symbolic order

before gravity once more kicks in […] 

That voice of cynicism acts as the unifying principle in a collection made up from two separate manuscripts (R Is the Artichoke of Rose and Blueshift Road). For each hint of levity, there’s an instinctive, gravitational response. Many of these poems take a crack at constructs or wave their hand through illusions. “Doppelganger’s Lament” reads like a poetic verdict handed down to some middle-aged reflection, guilty of imagining an alternate life. “Endless Regression of Heavens”, reprinted below, alternately looks at global warming through the amassing recurrence of chicory blues:

Glaciers dribble foreign rocks

as dawn releases chicory blue.

Its fickle hues waltz round equator,

spool, top, dizzy moon, gainly

as the patter of millipedes ruffling

toward a country with no flag

but fields of chicory blue. Horizon,

chromatic with moments. What

of the next and the next, plunging

into myth evolving in the deeps?

Haunting the deeps while manning

the crow’s nest? With each finite

duration we arrive closer by half

to a famished constellation,

blinking beast perpetually devouring

a platter of chicory blue.

I included the whole poem for two reasons: Martin regularly dangles a line between stanzas that I’d rather not scissor, but also, “Endless Regression of Heavens” finds her language, rhythm and tone wholly at peace together. Wonder and tragedy fastened in an ouroboric cycle, rendering the epic concise.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the poems that leave the more lasting impression – I’ve mentioned a few already – each consist of couplets, triplets or quatrains. This structural foresight lets Martin’s loaded language breathe while giving the reader a more hospitable passageway in. Otherwise we tangle with “No Such Identical Horses” and “More Jars Than Lids”, single chunks of verse that escalate in figurative leaps (the latter piece, even after several approaches, I have only a shaky handle on). These poems trace Martin’s deductions and you can sense a developing logic but the brawniness of communication feels coded. In other words, I suspect the author’s stance on a scenario without ever learning the details. 

It’s possible that those vague boundaries are intentional. After all, Sugar Beach has oblique poems which open doors as well. The same could-have-beens that paint “Doppelganger’s Lament” into a corner hover unspoken and strangely on “Blink”:

            Light is not

    inevitable. Overshot it

        or not yet there.

       Nothing, for that

     matter. In any case,

    not arrived. Anything

       could have been

           otherwise.

As with the other, more minimalist poems that I believe stem from R Is the Artichoke of Rose, “Blink” floats free of margin and context. Yet the plain speech Martin utilizes here allows the poem to connect on a number of levels. The trajectory in question, the ominous object of “light” and the beckoning negative space of “otherwise” are consistent with Martin’s gruff lens – always seeing the conveyor belt behind the pixie dust – but there’s room for intuitive analysis, too.

For its variety alone, Sugar Beach is a noteworthy collection. It finds an eclectic balance between Martin’s interests and offers a sneak peak at potential, future titles. My preference for certain pieces over others can be partially attributed to its mixed bag foundation but mostly I found the best poems were those that let readers roam her observations and branch off. Martin’s an original voice; that’s clear across selections from both manuscripts. But too often those observations feel hedged in, predetermined by an oppressive gravity.

Recent Reads: The State In Which by Hailey Higdon

The State In Which by Hailey Higdon

Published by above/ground press, 2013.

Recent generations have formed the habit of looking back at the industrious past – when people married at eighteen, when the word “career” suggested a life’s work and wouldn’t dream of being pluralized – and expecting that stability to settle in their own lives. Stories about our parents, grandparents and so on have inadvertently staked these signposts of adulthood in our minds. Yet the recognition that childish impulses and mature accomplishments don’t meet and reconcile at a certain age has only recently been acknowledged on a cultural level. Besides enabling a slew of dysfunctional sitcom and reality TV premises, this awareness that everything isn’t always okay has opened the door, a crack, for discussing mental health issues.

Repelling the comedic surface, Hailey Higdon takes on doubts surrounding self-identity and aging by dissecting common fears with idiosyncratic detail. As an open letter to the anxieties that accompany rites of passage we’re expected to cross cleanly, The State In Which wanders through ignominious aftermaths, month by month. From “January”:

“That song about what a bad

impression you made

today is stuck

growing older in you

making choices with you singing along.”

What begins as a steadfast rut proceeds to seesaw, plumbing indecision through darker soils. The milder “April” and “May” provide an escape from Higdon’s suffocating doubts but they’re easily bruised in the outdoors. From the former:

“I thought I saw Abbi in Nashville today, the lady

scratched her nose with her finger in a way that could only be

my friend Abbi, Abbi, but it wasn’t. Abbi and the gesture had been

taken by somebody else – stolen, and someone that looked like Abbi

too, what gives?

What a rottenly remarkable thing to take – I cried like a baby about it.

Could it be possible that I am growing my feelings in reverse?”

Regardless of whether The State In Which is a convincing character study or something more personal, Higdon’s diary-like minutia will instantly divide her readership into camps. (Discarding the merits of mental illness is a privilege for those of healthy mind, so let’s exclude that group of would-be readers right off the bat!) By “camps”, I refer more to those who, in reading the above excerpt, detect a subtle black comedy at work, and then those who don’t. My interest in which poems those two groups might react to, and whether those reactions ever intermix, reflects the understated strength of Higdon’s unstable text: there’s no clearheaded way to get through this. We experience Higdon’s psychological hiccups on a continuous evolution and respond by utilizing empathy or understanding from experiences within our own private headspace.

If the passing months often feel like stand-ins through which our protagonist passively connects with the greater world, her entire calendar paces conditionally on the person watching it, advancing superficially only to round a circle of doubt. The same can be said for the many destinations she researches, grasping at foreign straws that might cure or transform her.

The static realism of the condition Higdon brings to life doesn’t prevent unpredictable jumps along the way. In fact, by the time we reach June and July, the narrative has scattered and overlapped – inaction rendering time virtually undetectable. What initially appears like a fragmented stream-of-conscious reveals a purposeful disorder of pages; there’s logic within Higdon’s rant about decisions to make, places to daydream about and “the mosquito” (constantly threatening to suck life or transmit decay) but we need to spend time with it. There’s a greater message society can take from this process.

With the cooler months comes a decline in Higdon’s need to explain herself. Obstacles remain, as do the occasional pep talks, but as each page submits to increasingly blank passages, there’s a palpable sense of surrender. Dull panic reverts to dependence over “September” and perspective of self gets lost (“what is or is not a response to bad things happening”). Her stanzas, grouped tidily in early months, push away from the left margin and separate into single, isolated phrases by December.

It’s troubling that Higdon’s resolution, acknowledged at the close of The State In Which, goes by without explicit mention. After so much chatter, that one glaring omission cleverly has us deliberating over the previous entries and the nature of depression itself. In a chronicle made all the more haunting through its casual collapse, Higdon touches the nerves of a conversation that includes everyone.

Recent Reads: Gary Barwin and Monty Reid

Seedpod, Microfiche by Gary Barwin

Moan Coach by Monty Reid

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

In the first, numbered entry of Seedpod, Microfiche, Gary Barwin stakes himself some earth in a local setting and issues a standpoint. The setting carries the calming air of a park, some quaint greenspace barred at all sides by the infringing noise of a city’s hustle, and Barwin articulates the scene as if transcribing the beats of a field-recording. He’ll return to this spot repeatedly over the course of his new chapbook – in spirit if not in person – toying with memory spores that organically shift about.

“1

a grass blade, a truck

a small son

a constellation

evolution is an oblong song

the fishes whisper

seedpod, microfiche of twilight

a dewdrop observed, a cobweb

a weed-wrapped tongue or treetop

bulrush, an art song

consciousness

a fossil 8-track of the city

there is, my love,

a stethoscope whose end

is nowhere

whose earpieces

are everywhere.”

Is Seedpod, Microfiche a long poem exploring the conservation of one’s bearings or a half dozen incarnations of that one twilight? It may read like a shrug when I say “both” but Barwin does too good a job of balancing dual momentums here – one locked in constant revision, the other evolving layer upon layer. As a series of memory drafts substituting aspects of the plateau set in “1”, Seedpod, Microfiche puts forth a playful tone. But as an episodic long-form poem, those word-swaps take on a somber agency of their own, reflecting the aches of an aging timeline.

After “winter makes smaller our small sun”, “3” goes on to say that “seedpod is the nape / of springtime on the map of trees”. With seasons there are years unspooling Barwin’s casual landscape, marked affectingly by the way his metaphor about love and stethoscopes evolves. The youthful romanticism in “1” doesn’t harden so much as loosen into vague uncertainties by “5”:

“an experienced guide can follow

8-tracks through the city

the way a scientist follows

an atom’s breath

love like a stethoscope

with neither ears nor heartbeats”

Possibilities narrow into proofs. The whispering fish build a barbican; “a grass blade” becomes “glass stuck in the foot”. The park is now seen through a different set of eyes. Seedpod, Microfiche’s spectrum can be flipped through within minutes but its brevity belies how a knack for the right words (and some alluring omissions) can deepen an implicit narrative. So it is that Barwin’s “oblong song” exists off the page, between renditions; his unassuming language like tectonic plates opening a fissure that readers will think on long after the last page.

“1.

She was asked to be part of a production of the Vagina

Monologues but after a couple of rehearsals they said she

wasn’t convincing enough.

Convincing enough at what, she thought? It’s your moan,

they said, it needs some work.

You have to moan as though you weren’t doing it for an

audience. You’re going to need some help.” 

You can admit if you’re already hooked. The premise, matched with Monty Reid’s informal storytelling, renders Moan Coach an immediate page-turner. It almost reads like the beginning of a joke headed someplace dreadful but, by page two, Reid commits a potential Saturday Night Live sketch to deeper concerns on femininity, sexuality and authenticity – all twitching through the lens of a demanding society.

It’s still broadly funny, mind you, and Reid’s handling of semi-tragic themes remains light and focused on the oblivious surface. In fact that casual tone seems fitted with the task of keeping Moan Coach together, judging by the way Reid’s line-breaks and punctuation defy any persisting discipline.

“9

She was sleeping poorly.

Something gathered in the corners of the ceiling, abandoned

skins under the bed.

For sure there was all that moaning. Yes, you were doing it again last night, said her partner

I’ll be in the spare room when you want me.”

It takes an unwavering voice to guide Moan Coach’s readability without letting its aloof spirit register as disinterested. And it no doubt helps that Reid’s protagonist, whose sexual identity conforms to a series of male-supervised amendments, faces a highly sympathetic problem: how can we express ourselves without fear of correction? And why is individuality so often met with consternation instead of success? Questions like these shudder like aftershocks well after opening night wraps in Moan Coach, an engaging chapbook that sacrifices easy punchlines for thoughtful commentary.

Recent Reads: Rosmarie Waldrop and rob mclennan

Otherwise Smooth by Rosmarie Waldrop

The creeks by rob mclennan

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

The concept of living in the moment is simple in theory but difficult to execute. It’s a cliché dressed up as friendly advice yet also a core discipline in Buddhist thought. It’s a dangling hook for vacationers and an art form for procrastinators. We all feel the passing of time when peering backward but how many of us identify the time ticking away right now, each second as recognizable as individual words being read on this screen, at this moment? Waldrop explores the relationship between our transient time in this cosmic happenstance and the language we’ve constructed to explain it.

That said, if we can ignore Rosmarie Waldrop’s reputation as a known poet and editor for a moment, Otherwise Smooth bares only residual markings of poetry, visually. None of the stern line-breaks she used in The Ambition of Ghosts, no fragile cascades of language here. But, despite the title, these nine, numbered entries elicit a raw form of poetry, one more concerned with understanding its own nature than striking the most appealing pose. Here’s something of a centerpiece from Otherwise Smooth, "5":

“I say “I” and thereby appropriate the entire language. And trust I am,

through words, gradually to become. A person? An instance of

discourse? Plain as the sky to a fisherman? Beginnings are hazy, below

the belt, where a face is not yet possible though already bespoke by

gravity. But pronouns do not refer to anything in space and time

except the utterance that contains them. Each time, like death, unique.

Not like walking in light that lies like fine dust on the ground, but

language handing me, each time, the gifts of memory, a past. A soul?

While the voice excites intimacies of organic existence, modulates the

frequency of pulses from nerve fibres. Code. Clouded sentence.

Crowded square emptied of bustle by a sudden rain.”

The poem reprinted above – indeed in its first sentence – forms an apex upon which all of Otherwise Smooth hinges. Waldrop has articulated a voice that is not only conscious of its own devices, it’s yearning to express innate feelings through the confines of that manufactured language. The poem also ushers in the focal theme of Otherwise Smooth’s second half, loss and death, which lends her “ticks of the watch” awareness all the more acute.

Critically, her assembling process, of choosing the best words to suit myriad situations, plays out on the page. In "6", Waldrop’s grief is “Without body. Without air. Therefore I too can’t breathe. Sore. Sere. The self goes from the self” while, in "7", she describes mourning as “the passage of time you’re no longer in, and the clocks risk stopping. The rock has split. Early. Eerie.” These amendments of speech, almost like stutters on paper, reinforce Waldrop’s shock.

Given the insular (yet universal) subject matter, these poems feel surprisingly sterile. There’s no nostalgia with which readers might veer off course. The past exists and is left alone but the present hasn’t been compartmentalized yet; it leaves no hue or definition. And in that limbo Waldrop connects, her language battered by suffering and hope, predestined to chase after permanence, recording every tick.

“Mercy does not come from the sky”

Norma Cole, Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman

If the above quote, which prefaces The creeks, feels like a foregone conclusion, rob mclennan proceeds to trace mercy’s whereabouts from the ground up. What churns to the surface isn’t necessarily forgiveness but a swelling of earthy compassion; the waterways, hedges and concrete throughways we form relationships with, both as obstacles and touchstones.

Poem "The creeks" surveys a convergence of raw and abandoned materials: the dark, iridescent wet of a cave, the date-stamped artifacts passed over. Appearing in three prose findings, it’s handily the chapbook’s most loaded entry and perhaps its cryptic key. Underground rivers meet slabs of pavement but there’s a sense of disarray, that these “remains of civilization” lack category, appreciation.

Ample cases of contrast exist in The creeks, between natural and manmade discoveries, forming a mute awareness instead of any environmental concern. mclennan is very good at implying the presence of two persons in his work without letting them obstruct his focus, persons who more often adapt to the currents around them than act as agents of change. As such, over “bashed ancient stone” and “useless, feathered, goods” mclennan’s surroundings reverberate on the relationship between his would-be anthropologists, always teasing a sensual interpretation.

Alternately “site map: draft” collects a sequence on Ottawa’s concrete upheavals but still notes a pulse lurking within its infrastructure.

“1.

hard-bodied; crunching past,

a singing,         sword; the Queensway,

                                    fractals, lifts; an interruption

             carved from minutes; language promised,

vertebrae, sudden-fused; a blind, and brilliant eye,”

mclennan’s immersed in the language of a city, becoming. A conversation bound to change with each new construction sign. Arising from the title poem’s deep abyss and lush in the isolated prose of his “Escarpment pages,” mclennan repeatedly finds that it is compassion linking the place and its commemoration on paper.

Some might consider that analysis quaint but “Escarpment pages,” turns the relationship on its head with the arrival of letters waterlogged by the elements. “The pulpy mass of paper heart becomes.” As mclennan’s trajectory continues to climb up, away from tangible surroundings, so too does his muse bleach into the creative fray. From “Little sentences,”:

“Each mark is equal to a line or a separate lie. The word sonnet

scratched onto green paper. An envelope edge torn off as a bookmark.

The hair of each curled photo cracks at the crease, memories that no

longer remember. Once you were gone I divided into two distant

pools.”

Again the virtues of place shape the language, this time coding personal vignettes in sleet. And again, mclennan’s “we” proves resilient amid the shifting terrain. Offsetting the massively daunting relationship between place and language with intricacies webbed up in his signature, concise style, mclennan has illustrated a treasure of ideas in unassuming strokes. “We might bend, but in new forms” he suggests in “A terrible decay,”, a fitting closing poem that feels light-years removed from everyday topography but ever-closer to a timeless compassion.

Recent Reads: punchlines by Aaron Tucker

punchlines by Aaron Tucker

Published by above/ground press, 2013.

After a thorough reading of Aaron Tucker’s new chapbook, the follow-up to his bpNichol Award shortlisted apartments, I felt compelled to go visit my parents. That might seem like an odd reaction to a collection with poem titles like “what did the cowboy say when he found his dog was missing?”, but punchlines’ wallop lies moreso in somber, raw data than its comedic trimmings.

Hypertext warrants mention as an important component to Tucker’s poetic craft – he teaches digital literacy at Ryerson University – but the term also applies quite literally to Tucker’s wit. Poem “did you hear the one about the elephant on the crash diet?” is an encoded series of jokes requiring noun/verb substitution. Elsewhere, he goes so far as to include a poem composed entirely in HTML markup, navigating key themes from punchlines as a sort of syllabus on the hilariously titled “what’s wrong with me?”.

As evinced by his take on evolution (“what do you get if you cross a monkey with some egg whites?”), Tucker takes pleasure in the absurdist view of recognizing that the meaning we seek in our lives is intangible, unattainable. It’s this existential humour that provides the cornerstone of punchlines’ yearning subtext. Here’s “what did the Twitter say to the Facebook?”:

“we propel hyperlink from space to space linger long enough to be

terrified + continue

without ornament unaware of external things.

(137 characters)”

This dozy indifference between online avatars and real life is something Tucker engages with constantly, whether tossing a “hyperlink” into the melatonin dream-space of “where do fish sleep?” or surveying the impatience and uncertainty of real-time, physical travel in “when is a car not a car?”. In “when is a turk not a turk?” one of these avatars is even modeled as a small man living in poverty, alone but without complaints within Tucker’s smartphone!

Trapped in Tucker’s careful code are recurring themes that alternately feel quite tangible. Montana seems to be real as well as the death of Tucker’s father; both of which are detailed with surreal potency in “why was the camel unhappy?”, a closing poem that necessitates an immediate re-read of punchlines altogether.

One disadvantage to being digitally illiterate is that, several times through now, I’m still theorizing on parts of punchlines that confound me. No matter. The distinct layers of Tucker’s poetry promise a beguiling read that flourishes under the microscope. And if it makes you call your parents, all the better. 

Except from “what month are we?”:

“that extreme excess of search terms + status updates

as uncontainable as old couch springs

grain of splinters mixes with cotton stuffing

a desk a set of drawers | | metal of lawn chairs

jut into footholds + the neighbourhood

races each other to the top grabbing spare cushions

always one shelf from summit

*/

we stealthy emerge each night

take one object back for ourselves

reupholster it in French

/*”