dANDelion 37.3: POETS GALORE!

Words for the House

(After Kate Hall)

The house has gone missing. It’s called a warbler.

Warbler takes paint chips from her beak, makes a dinner.

Warbler points north for the winter, the windows closed.

Warbler tight in the sheets, picking nails.

Warbler with eyes wide and hiccupping asks for spaghetti.

Warbler can’t keep the windows closed.

Warbler pantomimes a throat wound up.

Warbler sees wood paneling in the bed and makes a boat.

Warbler swallows the pillow and spits out the lint.

Warbler rips a hole through the screen and points the ship.

Warbler makes a bath of dishwater.

Warbler sheds bones from the neck down.

Warbler puts the boat in the water and screams.

Warbler finds a man’s tie a formal ending. (Jenny Sampirisi)

When British Columbia poet kevin mcpherson eckhoff was in Ottawa to read for the AB Series a few weeks ago, he did an afternoon talk that focused on some of his interest in art produced by people who don’t necessarily self-describe as artists, ranging from amateur art to folk art to the unintentionally bad. Part of what he used to discuss that interest, and the incredible possibilities that come from such, was the recent issue of dANDelion magazine that he edited with frequent co-conspirator, Jake Kennedy, the “POETS GALORE!” issue. According to eckhoff, part of the call for the issue included self-described professional artists providing work, as well as work by someone they knew, whether a family member, random friend, or the man who ran the grocery store down at the corner. As they write in their “Editor’s Note”:

The issue contains works by some writers. [When we write “writers” we mean folks.] It also contains works by some folks who are either shy writers or who don’t identify as the writer at all. [When we write “folks” we mean writers.] Please, for a moment, forget that superficial differences exist! [I suppose our hunch is that community exists prior to and just after the fact of its naming; mostly we could be acknowledging that as folks and writers and writers and folks we are sharing all the time.] Now, in this same moment, please tear through the writing throughout, forgetting that you’re a reader, but remembering that you, too, are a poet! [We are grateful to all the magical producer-contributor spirits herein; songs poems wanted / songs poems found… (big old fart sound); we bow to the realaccidents, we bow the accidentalreads!]

Some of the results are quite compelling, with contributions by Claire Donato, Elizabeth Donato, Jeff T. Johnson, Kate Mercier, Peter McDonald, Michael Vorhies, Emily Fedoruk, Debbie Bouska, Jenny Sampirisi, William Ashman, Chantal Neveu, Angela Carr, Pierrette Valois Neveu, françois luong, Alicia Escott and Dave Dyment. The mix is interesting, and the idea behind the guest-edited issue is equally interesting, both of which were covered during eckhoff’s Ottawa talk, something I hope he might eventually expand upon in print at some point. Unfortunately for the journal itself, this issue holds as the final issue of the long run and shifting history of dANDelion magazine which, since its re-boot a few years back, has emerged as one of the most compelling and engaging (if occasionally uneven, what with the slate of guest-edited theme issues these past couple of years) literary journals in the country. I don’t know if they have managed to release a long-rumoured “official statement” at all, but I mourn the passing of dANDelion. What the hell happened?

MIAMI

August 23^rd, 2011

Is there area code in heaven?

How do I

Erase you from my head

Let alone your number

In my Blackberry

Its not like its of use

Anymore

Is than a new number up there?

How can I send you

Lover texts

I will never again see you

When I need to

Be reminded that

No one prances

Better than me

On the dance floor

Until I met you. (William Ashman)

There is something really quite magical about Alicia Escott’s work in the issue, her “Love Letters Sent Sometime Before the Continents Split.” As she writes in her short introduction:

This project began in January of 2011. The letters are written for people I care about, to animals that are now extinct, and are sent through the post office without the recipient knowing. The letters approach romance in geologic time scales, collapsing the lineage of evolution.

If you feel that you may need a love letter, you may contact me direct at aliciaescott.com. Briefly tell me something about yourself and provide your mailing address.

Included as scanned, printed letters, the letters are interspersed with archival photographs, and the letters open up something marvelous and unusual. There is something hopelessly sad, haunting and lyric to these letters to the already-lost. I can only hope to see more of this series, and perhaps at some point in trade book form.

January, 20, 2011

Letter to a Thick Billed Ground Dove. Extinct 1927.

My love,

Last week I set the clock on my iphone to December, 18^th 1914.

I was hoping I would be able to find you there.

But it did no good. Everything was just the same as it is now. And you were gone. So I am sending you this letter via post because I see no other way, it is too long to send in text, if that were even an option these days.

So much has happened since you left. Where do I begin? Not long after, the stock market crashed. Then they fixed it, but it would happen again. Then after that we discovered a relationship between mass and energy, but man alive, this has some drawbacks.

Then came rock n roll. More than anything I wish I could show you rock n roll, you would love it, I’m sure.

And there was the telephone, and then answering machines and call waiting and then caller id, and now you can have that with you always. Honestly.

There would never need to be these distances anymore.

But really, that’s not what I want to say.

How do I explain; you weren’t the only one to leave…. It’s been quite a time.

We’ve tried to stem the tide now, but… well…. I read they have little hope.

I was foolish. The last time we saw you, no one thought it was goodbye forever. Did you know then? I think sometimes that you did.

We looked everywhere for you in 2004-2005. Of course that was much, much too late… I’m sorry.

The little lines under my eyes don’t seem to go away when I stop smiling anymore. What I mean is, it happens so slowly that you don’t even realize how quickly it has passed by.

There are rock doves everywhere, as those places we used to know are mostly concrete now. They remind me of you…. these pigeons.

I can never forget,

Yours always,

Alicia Bainbridge Escott

DANDELION 37.1: The Mapping Issue, guest-eds. Oana Avasilichioaei + Kathleen Brown

PHENOLOGY

March 29, Alma, NB, 8 a.m.

First seasonal appearance of lobster fishermen. Coats same colour

as in fall: blue plaid, faded; red and black plaid. Slight increase in

stoop of older fisherman's back/posture. Seen walking from lobster

shed (paint peeling) to truck (turquoise, '96 Ford) to house (paint

also peeling), pace quicker in rain.

10 degrees C. Cloudy.

Last year's sunflower seed-heads, brown and wet, hang from bent

sinews of stalks. Stems still upright at four feet. Occasional fox

sparrows, house sparrows alight.

Five of six feral cats survived winter. (Elena. E. Johnson)

Over the past number of years, the journal formerly known as Dandelion magazine morphed into dANDelion, and now, seemingly over to DANDELION, where it now produces meaty, magnificent theme issues, the most recent of which is “The Mapping Issue,” guest edited by Montreal writer and translator, Oana Avasilichioaei and the journal's managing editor, Kathleen Brown. Just how far can the definition of “mapping” be stretched in the space of a literary/visual arts journal? As they say in their introduction:

The geography keeps shifting into bloom and decay. Our border disrupts this dialogue. Dialogue will dissolve our borders. Or enflame them. Will these trajectories double back, mislead us? We leave unnoticed through a back gate to mark a country elsewhere. We pass the perennials and smell softly. What is our intention in this space? Our margin is a pinprick. A suite of words we apply to remembering our time in the map itself. One of us balances. One of us records. We enter the idea sideways, disjunctive: produce architectures, perform language, inscribe intervals. The city growls towards a future because it has no direction. The city flaunts the pasts' absurdities in the overpass. Frequencies jam. Then our distoritions wander. How do we chart this aliveness? Or marginal weathers, of limited instruction, insert passage here.

The loop of a map opens closings, a map unravels [maroons]. A map for us to traverse, invent, gnaw at, search for over and over again.

Given that the journal is associated with grad students in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, it seems safe to presume that this association between DANDELION and Oana Avasilichioaei came from her tenure as writer-in-residence at the University during the 2010-11 academic year, making it one of the more impressive tangible extensions I've seen in a while of a writer engaging with and giving back to their new communities. Given that geography and mapping are threads that already exist through Avasilichioaei's own work, such as her second trade collection, feria: a poempark (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), which explored public parks in her hometown of Vancouver, as well as moving from Vancouver to Montreal to (albiet temporarily) Calgary, the idea of an issue dedicated to mapping feels very natural. The issue includes text, sound and visuals from such as Lisa Robertson, Katie Fedosenko and Ray Hsu, Emilio Said, Stephanie Strickland, Betsy Warland, Phil Hall, Reg Johanson, Sarah Cullen, Erín Moure, derek beaulieu, Jordan Abel, Lance Blomgren, Caroline Bergvall, Donato Mancini, a. rawlings, Nikki Reimer and others.

FROM A WORK-IN-PROGRESS

OSCAR OF BETWEEN

Vancouver's signature soundscape. In her 610 square foot nest Oscar perched on the axis of it. Sounds synonymous with home, belonging, womb into the world. Hearing the first sense to develop; last to leave as we die. Sounds. Bearings. How they wrap themselves around us, tide in & out, stroke our forehead in our sleep. Echolocation: the city sending out it's sounds to know where it is who it is amonng at any given moment. The hear of here. Sky a rink of wheeling seagulls' calls freight train whistle-caress of night-valley's contours two-note-descending foghorn in our bones old Hydro Building's whistles twelve o'clock lunch edgy whine of heroin-like cranes loading ships over-sized-bee-buzz of seaplanes into flight evening cruise ships' horn a hum of satisfaction eagle's staccato notes cascading overhead muffled firing of Stanley Park's “nine o'clock gun” cawing of 16,000 crows in dawn & twilight flight path overhead: a city; a landscape; a person made specific by these refrains. Oscar – a person of between – made sound. (Betsy Warland)

This is perhaps one of the most ambitious projects the journal has undertaken since the special issue on Roy Kiyooka (although I haven't seen a couple of the issues preceeding this one), with two hundred pages including full-colour images and an accompanying dvd. The issue also includes an extension of Lisa Robertson's “Office for Soft Architecture” project, published in book form as Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria OR: Clear Cut Press, 2003; Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), included here as “Reports to the Office for Soft Architecture: Wilderness in Alberta and Alberta's Protected Areas: the plus 15's” by Emily Chin, Stephanie Lis Davis, Tyler Hayden, Claire Lacey and Indra Singh. The issue as a whole seems to conceive itself as a furthering of innumerable projects, extending the map of what has come before so much further, and even into some points previously unknown or unexplored. Other highlights of the issue include Jordan Abel's powerful “The Totem Pole Transported to Toronto,” Sarah Cullen's “The City As Written By The City,” Erín Moure's “from the map of O Cadoiro (2003-2005) made in Lisbon and Montréal,” Alex Leslie's “The Land App” and “The And Registry,” and Kristian Carlsson's “Ahead of Directions,” where he writes:

Without language, the mapping becomes

invincible on the map. Even a treasure map

needs it X.

Ongoing notes: some (Canadian) journals

Calgary AB: The new issue of dANDelion arrived in the mail the other day (why does filling Station, despite the fact that I think I'm in them, keep refusing to send issues? I haven't seen an issue all year...); what happened to the website? At least the issues are still appearing. One of the standards of publishing new and compelling writing by Canadian and international authors, one of the highlights of this issue is the fact that we finally see new work from damian lopes, who had a poetry collection out a few years back, and then quietly disappeared. Where has he been all this time? Another highlight has to be the interview with (conducted by Jonathan Ball), and new work, by Calgary poet ryan fitzpatrick, as well as same with (conducted by derek beaulieu), and by, UK poet caroline bergvall. I’ve been finding that Canadian literary journals are fewer and further between for meaty and compelling interviews compared to what existed, say, twenty years ago. Where have all the interviews gone?

JB: You’ve expressed (in private) an interest in “the trace” and in “ghosts” as well as the abject. Could you flesh out what this interest means to you, in the larger context of a general poetics, and also on the level of craft?

RF: At a recent reading I gave that I think might have spurred your question, I said that the poems from Fortified Castles that I read weren’t “about ghosts” but “had ghosts in them,” which, I think, speaks to my interest in the absent (or, to steal a bit from Baudrillard, the more absent from absent). I’m very intrigued by the idea that we’re affected and driven by something that we can’t see but can sense. There is a trace of something. Something spectral. Something constantly behind me, urging me to move in certain directions. My interest has spurred a lot of reading into psychoanalysis, but the books that spurred my interest are Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and their shared notion that what we think is dead is actually not and is pursuing us relentlessly. As a writer, what this interest has done for me is that I have had to realize that I can’t get to the root of things (as a good radical writer should) by tackling things head on – I need to approach things sidelong, hoping to catch glimpses of the capitalist hegemony with its pants down.

Toronto ON: I’ve been getting copies of Descant magazine in the mail for as long as I can remember, and when the issues are memorable, they’re very so. The newest one, #142, is another theme issue, on “Hotels.” I’ve always liked theme issues, but get somewhat wary of journals that seem only to be able to work such; where are the general issues? Sometimes I just want a journal to publish what they think is the most interesting work, instead of working a theme every single bloody time. But still, the “Hotels” issue is a good one, with perhaps one of the most attractive covers I’ve seen in some time (unfortunately the back cover is nearly unreadable because of the design), with photos on the cover and inside by Arnaud Maggs, from the series “Hotels of Paris.”

Room Twelve

After this, when other lovers lend tongues
and lips, they’ll taste slightly off, like rust
to the drinking water, red wine about to turn.

This is our night to forget everything
except skin. Our lives are as thin
as these hotel walls and we are not in love,
but you feel like open green
inside of me, a crocus pushing snow.
I can hear my voice cracking, letting your voice come
through and my wind chimes at home, hung outside
the kitchen window, how they’ll sound
after losing the layers of ice, how I should have
brought them in for the winter. We know
what we are doing is wrong, but we tell ourselves
that these are only bodies, barely
shedding layers and how can real damage
be done. Already, a crack of sun

through the curtains, calling to us
like the Bible in the nightstand drawer.
Our curved shoulders cast shadows
so strange we can’t tell for sure they’re ours.
you get ready to leave, rest your palm
on the same phone book that strangers
have leafed through to find call girls
and fast food, forgetting the number
for a cab. Morning light,

you won’t look at me. What’s left
is how you loved the dark. Maybe
it’s the brightness in the room or the cold metal
keys in your hands, but we know we’ve touched everything
within reach, are not strong enough
to stretch ourselves out
further for more. (Amy Dennis)

Why are so many of the pieces in this collection about trysts? I understand the idea of hotels, but is that all there is? Otherwise, this is a strong and interesting issue, and even includes a photo series of the artist rooms in Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, restored as part of the refurbishing of the building in 2004; wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone could do that in Ottawa, in the decrepit building at Bank and Somerset that once housed the old Duke of Somerset Pub? Another highlight of the issue is contributing editor Mark Kingwell’s non-fiction piece, “Are You Arabic? Drinking in Hotel Bars and the Female Cruise,” which is an absolute must read, working through numerous old films and hotel bars, including To Catch a Thief (1955), Funny Face (1957), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Love Me Tender (1962), and The Graduate (1967), writing:

The particular hotel bar scene is seared on the memories of more than one generation of young men, who can only sympathize silently with Ben’s ineffectual attempts to hail a waiter, appear suave and in command, or even retain his lunch as leopard skin-clad Mrs. Robinson, a self-assured alcoholic, snaps her fingers for a drink and the cheque together, and twits him for not more smoothly arranging a room. But that discomfort is nothing compared to his bumbling dialogue as she undresses in the room later, where he offers her a choice of wire or wood hanger, because, “they have both.” She finally manoeuvres him past his own misgivings by wondering if this is his first time, and then referring repeatedly to his “inadequacy” – a gambit, let it be said, that will work with most men under twenty-five. (Hoffman, playing twenty-one, was actually twenty-nine; Bancroft, supposedly in her forties, was thirty-five and stunning.)

These early scenes can almost make you forgive Ben for the brutally conformist message that is delivered under cover of prima facie satire and that seductive Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. As Roger Ebert has noted, we happily watch Ben and Elaine ride off in the bus, he avoiding her mom and she avoiding the doofus frat-boy fiancé, but their stunned final glances at each other are ambiguous. Really, how long will it be before Ben is in fact moving up in the world of plastics? Elaine was the match his parents wanted, after all. Another victory for bourgeois righteousness and bio-fascist norms. And so much for sexually frustrated middle-aged women.

Other than that, Aaron Tucker’s poem “concierge” is worth reading, poems by Priscila Uppal (including an “Ode to Mini-bars”) and the piece “Temporary Keys” by Nathaniel G. Moore. Do you ever get the feeling more journals and book publishers don’t publish his magnificent work because they just don’t know what the hell to do with him? One of my favourite parts is knowing that the two quotes at the beginning of his piece are by him, from his own two published books. Here’s the first section of the second half of the piece, titled “That’s Him Officer: The Rise & Fall of Nathaniel G. Moore,” that writes:

The door closed behind us. She tossed the bag of ice on the bed, as if she were about to perform some drastic surgery. Fetched some plastic cups. I opened the rum. She poured the juice, added the ice. We drew the curtains and started –

“You ready to party with me?” She was wearing grey underwear?

“It’s my bikini. I’m European, okay?”

“It looks like Serbian army fatigues.”

“Shut up.”

“Is that from the Sylvia Plath collection?”

“No.”

The hotel mattress sighed uneasily as our bodies piled on top of one another. “Bring out your dead,” she said, filling up our plastic cups of dwindling ice. The rest is a blur of pink, red and teeth: lover’s spit and treacherous sweat.

*dANDelion presents --- Radical Translations*

dANDelion magazine is seeking submissions for a special issue on Radical Translation. The issue will feature the proceedings of the "Translating Translating Montreal" conference at the University of Calgary, including poetry and essays by Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Robert Majzels, and Erin Moure.

dANDelion is seeking accompanying works (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and visual art) that engage with this theme of Radical Translation. Submissions may include, but are not limited to:

- existing works translated through employing radical poetics
- existing works appropriated or adapted in some radical fashion
- original works engaging in some way with the notion of translation
- original works exploring the spaces between languages or on the cusp of language

The deadline for this special issue is October 1, 2007.

Please e-mail submissions to *http://by119fd.bay119.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?curmbox=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001&a=63f68b54059974c1a522f6a0d060766b7f15cced5d6c15df333725bd7a548c79&mailto=1&to=editors@dandelionmagazine.ca&msg=00577E08-2C14-4684-A052-E90CAB8DED88&start=0&len=2920&src=&type=x *with *"TRANSLATON" in the subject field. dANDelion pays an honorarium of $50 on publication. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please notify us promptly if you place your work elsewhere.

dANDelion Magazine
http://www.dandelionmagazine.ca/