Sunday Poem

KELVIBRIDGE, GLASGOW, 2 P.M. 

Look below: the sable-eddied Kelvin
flowing fast, despite the town’s depression;
never angry, only bloody-minded,
rolling on to reach the red horizon. 

Glaswegians put their trust in how it carries:
they toss into its care the things they use:
lolly sticks and condoms, knives and bottles,
babies’ toys, a jilted lover’s shoes. 

A force that churns has somewhere else to be,
especially when spattered with this light.
Someone got it started; it is free.
To go a little closer must be right. 

And sometimes there’s a child from an estate
pulled from games along the muddy edge,
and this is why the branches bend and wait
and why we always pause upon this bridge.

By Alexandra Oliver, from Let the Empire Down (Biblioasis, 2016)

(Photo by Greig Middlemiss)

Sunday Poem

TOO LATE  

The power was out when we went to bed
that night, remember? It had been out
since suppertime—one of those late
afternoon thunderstorms
that used to roll through the valley
like a tidal wave. We blew out the candles,
forgetting which lights had been on,
forgetting about the radio
till, soon after we’d drifted off,
it jumped to life, full volume,
(along with the bedside lamp)
for a brutal second—just long enough
to jolt us awake with a dire,
frenetic male voice proclaiming, “Too late!”
For an instant we blinked at each other,
stupefied. You lunged for the radio knob
as the room went black again,
and there we lay, in country dark
(so much darker than city dark)
with that voice still echoing in our heads.
Was it too late? For what?
There were numerous possibilities.
Even back then, there were numerous
possibilities. The kids slept on, oblivious,
in their little rooms, their wooden bunks
under the flyspecked windows,
and after a moment we began to laugh,
a laugh we can reignite
with those words to this day.
Too late!
We dissolved in each other’s arms
in helpless laughter.

From My Shoes Are Killing Me (Biblioasis, 2015) by Robyn Sarah

Fool's Errand

Dan Wells reveals the story behind Biblioasis's windmill logo:

Three or four years into establishing Biblioasis as a press, it hit me that publishing, or at least literary publishing, is a fool’s errand. There was a moment of real despair when I finally realized both the task I’d set for the press and my inability to walk away from it. I think almost everyone who cares deeply about something most people care nothing about has experienced this kind of despair at one time or another, and the concomitant realization that the despair doesn’t change a thing, and that they are going to continue on out of some odd mixture of love and compulsion. That despite everything, they’ll keep tilting at those windmills. The logo was a way to acknowledge this.

I also wanted the windmill as a reminder of the essential comedy underlining this enterprise, as a reminder to try and keep the proper spirit, to laugh and not take myself or this whole Biblioasis thing too seriously.

(Illustration taken from the concept art to Terry Gilliams' upcoming Don Quixote project.)

Sunday Poem

THE WOUND 

It didn't bleed, but would seep a bit of lymph
on Sundays. It could be kept covered
by clothes, but liked to be exposed as much
as possible—though fresh air did little
to close it. It was a portal, a wormhole
between the time of its infliction
and infinite points in the future. It breathed,
and if, in perfect stillness, you inclined
your ear toward its puckered lips, you'd swear
it muttered in a foreign tongue. Somehow,
it staved off infection, was odourless
but for a faint floral whiff. Once, I saw
a hummingbird moth hover above it,
then bury her proboscis deep in the folds.

From Sum (Biblioasis, 2015) by Zachariah Wells.  

Sunday Poem

INTERVALS 

The years had stacked.
This route between two points left him perplexed:
which path was true? Thus at a loss, appalled
(he'd always liked things neat, exact:
loose pennies rolled
in tidy wrappers, weed-free gardens walled,
addresses Rolodexed,
each day appraised, accounted for, controlled), 

last night he thought
he'd catalogue his cars and toys. They all
appeared: the old Suburban and of course
the brand-new Buick Skylark bought
in sixty-five,
his Comet sled, his wooden hobby horse,
but he could not recall
the Saturn Astra parked out in the drive. 

He'd tabulate
the names of every person he had met
at every stage along his fourscore life—
the one's he'd loved or chanced to hate—
and he would limn
Brick Bradford in detail, but not his wife,
though he could not forget
the music box she'd purchased on a whim. 

Another dawn
has slipped through window blinds to find him still
attempting to remember parables,
a nephew's face, the word chiffon,
the Seven Seas;
to place at last the ordered variables,
those nested n's that fill
the space between his dark parentheses.

From Glad and Sorry Seasons (Biblioasis, 2014) by Catherine Chandler

Sunday Poem

MEETING THE TORMENTORS IN SAFEWAY 

They were all called Jennifer or Lynne
or Katherine; they all had bone-blonde hair,
that wet, flat cut with bangs. They pulled your chair
from underneath you, shoved their small fists in
your face. Too soon, you knew it would begin,
those minkish teeth like shrapnel in the air,
the Bacchic threats, the Herculean dare,
their soccer cleats against your porcine shin,
that laugh, which sounded like a hundred birds
escaping from the gunshot through the reeds—
and now you have to face it all again:
the joyful freckled faces lost for words
in supermarkets, as those red hands squeeze
your own. It's been so long! they say. Amen.

From Meeting The Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis, 2013) by Alexandra Oliver 

(Illustration by Jacqui Oakley.)

Normative Statements

The buzz for Norm Sibum's novel—a 700-page chunk of prose called The Traymore Rooms—has already started. But the publicity photo (above) by Montreal photographer Leslie Schachter is a remarkable event all on its own. I recruited some friends to help explain why.

Jason Guriel:

He looks like character from an August Kleinzahler poem—an old saloon type.

Nyla Matuk:

Looks like someone the Coen brothers would dream up if they did a movie about CanLit.

Michael Lista:

He looks like John Brown hiding in a Confederate mop closet. 

Evan Jones. 

Looking at this picture, I think of Oscar Wilde's words after visiting Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, in 1882: "The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."

Bit Player

CNQ has made available the first chapter of Andrew Steinmetz's soon-to-be-published This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla, a book that exquisitely unravels the mystery of his late uncle who had a brief cameo as a Gestapo agent in John Sturge's famous film The Great Escape.

He’s had perhaps a minute on-screen in one of the most watched war movies of all time. Yet as a bit player he is uncredited for the role. In fact, soon after the film was made, he disappeared completely. Shortly after his star flickered, he died, aged 32, from a drug overdose in Hamburg. Watched by millions yet almost completely unknown. And there’s a further irony. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany, partly Jewish and the son of one of Germany’s most famous left-wing actors, playing a Gestapo agent, a role reprised on thousands of television repeats. 

In fact, watching television is how I came to know of my uncle Michael. Alive but not living, stranded in the no man’s land of a motion picture. His character was staged and scripted, but I was spellbound—Michael was convincing. Fedora and trench coat. Elegant. Blond. His smooth transitions. His lively walk, his coat unbuttoned, his fashion the casual flair of some fresh-as-the-breeze fascist. This image, I now understand, years later, is counterfeit, a convenient archetype, manufactured by the American film director John Sturges and his sidekick Bert Hendrickson in Costume Design and Wardrobe. But it is him, close enough to the real thing. 

Sunday Poem

THE ASTRONOMER'S APOLOGY

Sorry for the sound of my steps
on the floor—wherever I
walked, it creaked. There was a new

moon above and I swallowed the dark
(it still comes out now as I speak).
Sorry, too, for the door, I didn't quite close;

the cold pulled you out of your sleep.
It's what the new moon does: it
deals out the stars; it dances, it drinks

and it cheats. All day long,
the planet revolved; it turned in
the troposphere's keep. With new moon

above, I swept through the dark. Then
I swept the dark off my feet. Still
I'm sorry, this morning, when

I came back to bed, if my hands had lost
all their heat. It’s an old tune, love,

what you lose in the dark,
what follows you back to the sheets.

From Open Air Bindery (2011) by David Hickey.

Sunday Poem

AUBADE

The time, if time it was, would ripen
in its own sweet time. One thought of dawn.
One felt that things were shaping up,
somehow, that it was getting on.

Day broke. Upon the waters broke
in waves on waves unbreaking and
night fell, unveiling in its wake
one perfect whitened rib of land.

I slept, and while I slept I dreamed,
a breaking wave, a flowering tree,
and all of one accord I seemed.
I woke, and you divided me.

From Groundwork (2012) by Amanda Jernigan

Sunday Poem

SUMMIT

This isn't the light we wanted, the weather

we're supposed to be having. But it's still

sometimes all we have to talk about. We

put all our little fingertips in the sky

and changed the climate—those are your

fingerprints on the moon, and mine. Now

we've made room for these leaders,

appointments moving like flocks of birds

down the calendar. The police get sweeping

new powers to sweep us away, and we hope

this particular patchwork of leaders will give

a little thought to the little people, some

blank-eyed woman behind a window holding

a sandwich to her face like gauze to a wound.

Not to worry, there are key initiatives,

discussions. I know change, it's like a coin

we take out and toss again and again. All

we're doing is hanging like a water droplet.

From The Least Important Man (Biblioasis, 2012) by Alex Boyd.

My Hair

In an ongoing feature called "The Devil's Engine" (No. 1, No. 2) Tara Murphy has been putting a series of sensible, process-related questions to Biblioasis poets. The latest query, however, is a little whimsical, though Amanda Jernigan bats it out of the park.

Question:

If you had to pick a body part, and make that body part the storehouse for all of your poetic instincts, which part would you choose and why?"

Amanda says:

My hair. As a reminder that my poetic instincts are easily lost; that their loss, if painful to my sense of self is not (or not immediately) fatal; and that, given time, I may grow them back again.

The rest here. It's a pretty cool answer.

Three Way

If you wanted to list the young poets who were likely to figure in many of our literary conversations over, say, the next decade, you could hardly do better than the names on this poster. And I'm happy to say two of them are ours. It's going to be a great reading. See you there?

Rickman on Simic

Actor Alan Rickman reads poems from Bosnian-Canadian poet Goran Simic's book, Sprinting from the Graveyard (1997), translated by British poet David Harsent. The poems -- written during the seige of Sarajevo -- were retranslated by Simic himself in 2006 and published by Biblioasis under the new title Sarajevo With Sorrow. (Hat tip: Karen Shenfeld).

The Pangborn Defense

I had lunch with Norm Sibum last Wednesday at one of his sleepy hang-outs across the tracks from me on Sherbrooke West (Norm: soup. Me: pita souvlaki). Norm passed along a copy of his new poetry collection The Pangborn Defense, published by Bibloasis and sporting a natty cover image by his partner, painter Mary Harman. A original member of the Jubilate Circle, Norm is one of most aloof and mysterious mainstays of the Montreal poetry community (he sometimes reminds me of a modern-day Ovid, banished to the Black Sea of N.D.G.).


Framed as a series of verse-letters to various friends, Pangborn Defense is one of his best collections to date. Rollicking and linguistically unrelenting, the poems are full of strong feelings and sharp observations ("Hobbyists of the pleasures, part-time ingenues, / These women on a Sunday, paunchy and pasty, / go for broke, bedenimed, high-heeled"). Another poetry book called Smoke and Lilacs -- his 15th! -- is forthcoming from the UK's Carcanet Press in 2009.