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Thank you for visiting our blog. As of autumn 2021, this site will no longer be updated. For information about the magazine, the outreach program, how to submit, or anything else, find us as vallummag.com! In the meantime, enjoy poems of the weeks past below!
11 Monday Jan 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
A Dozen Morning Translations
When I talk, again, about Voyager 1
out there beyond the heliosphere,
what I really mean is that
none of us recalls the birth canal.
And when I show you this photo
of my favourite painting, made in Paris
with palette knives in 1954, I’m giving you
my boyhood’s village springs.
Every novelist’s demilitarized zone
wants a good coconut beach.
The robins eating winter sumac mean
the oceans are deeper than we think.
So when I tell you the ladder’s too short
to clean out the eavestroughs,
what I’m really saying is that
the ladder’s too damned short
to clean out the stupid eavestroughs.
What I’m really saying is that bankers
still scavenge everybody’s breadcrumbs.
The baseball at the height of its arc
in the outfield by the ears
of corn is every lost October leaf pile.
The bookmarks strewn across
our desktops mean we’ve forgotten
our grandmothers’ birthdays;
and our once-read grad-school
textbooks will never be
the last ship out of Saigon.
Let’s re-focus our blue-box cylinders;
there are still, right here, green points
in our gardens, pushing up
against three inches of April ice.
The chorus in your favourite song
is next year’s coiled calendar.
So, when I tell you, again,
about Voyager 1 shutting down
its systems, measuring
interstellar gamma rays,
what I really mean is that
none of our kids
can ever be shielded
from even a single solar flare.
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Rob Winger‘s most recent book, It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant, is forthcoming in the spring of 2021. He’s also the author of three previous collections, including Muybridge’s Horse, a Globe and Mail Best Book, CBC Literary Award winner, and finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Ottawa Book Award. He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.
This poem can be found in It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant, which can be purchased here.
Image: Kristal Davis
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:2. To view other content published in this issue, Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
04 Monday Jan 2021
Posted in Poem of the Week
A Day of Nothing in the Multiverse
What comes next doesn’t really matter.
A stripe of light, watered down,
the television a parliament of owls
to wind me up, set the tension
on an internal spring. Considering this:
definitions are softening. What is the world
if not an arctic of sound, a bowl of seeds,
a room of cuckoo clocks?
As though the rain on the concrete
is not rain, and there is no concrete.
It is inside or outside, it is a sky blueing
or a platelet whitening.
How the air bends and light slows down
to size up each particle it encounters
as a potential dance partner,
to samba for a moment that is forever
or only a fractal second, or never at all.
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Julie Cameron Gray is originally from Sudbury, Ontario. She has previously published two full length collections of poetry – Tangle (Tightrope Books 2013) and Lady Crawford (Palimpsest Press, 2016) which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in various literary journals such as The Fiddlehead, Vallum, Prairie Fire, Carousel, Grain, and anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English. She currently lives in Toronto.
This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 17:2. To view other content published in this issue, Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
14 Monday Dec 2020
Posted in Poem of the Week
This Love Like a Rock
My dad hauled home
a beautiful rock. It was three-feet tall
and pocked like a wild sponge.
When it rained, water pooled
in the top pocks and cascaded down
to fill the lower pocks.
He told my mom,
“Pele made em jus fo you, honey!”
She said, “Fairy tales.”
The rock started making
its own water. I monitored it as it
slowly circled our house.
He ate some bad opihi (auwe!)
and was writhing in bed for days
as red moss crept across the rock.
Back at work, a boulder toppled
from the trench of a bulldozer
and caught his leg.
Earthbound meteor left a gash
in his shin. Blood pooled in the top pocks
and cascaded down to fill the lower pocks.
He hobbled out the front door,
gently tucked the rock into the bed of his truck
and we headed for Volcano town.
He returned it
to the grove of ōhi‘a lehua
where he found it.
My father stared at his battered leg
and I worried that the rock would be
there waiting when we got home.
We listened to the urgent trill of the ‘i‘iwi,
dipping its beak into the nectaries of the forest,
our pores wide open
_________________and taking in
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))our own sweet medicine.
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Jennifer Hasegawa is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet who has sold funeral insurance door-to-door and had her suitcase stolen from a plastic surgery clinic in Asunción, Paraguay. She was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi and lives in San Francisco. The manuscript for her first book of poetry, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living (Omnidawn 2020), won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. She is creating videopoems visualizing the book using footage taken while sheltering-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work has also appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Bennington Review, and Tule Review and is forthcoming in jubilat.
To view other content published in this issue, 17:1, please visit Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
07 Monday Dec 2020
Posted in Poem of the Week
Cold War Wash Day
When we integrated under the curve and the fuel
ignited, when push came to
rubber glove, and in all the kitchens
food fell from plates,
_________we leapt into our holes and made
tracks, one small,
one just right.
________One side makes you human.
________One side wakes you.
________One side makes you see stars.
When we pulled out all our handkerchiefs, chain
rule, integration by parts, Bessel
functions and approximation by
infinite series near a point, the gap
_________dilated and everywhere we walked
in new-bought shoes,
_________here one centimeter, zero point five, there
a squeak, a prize
blister, a glow. The lint detached itself
from our jackets and we paraded before our own
discarded fluff. We shed,
_________and were proud.
Never have the oven and the dryer
stood so square, nor their dials
counted further down.
________
________
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she was raised off the grid. She holds a degree in applied mathematics from the University of Western Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Literary Review of Canada, Rattle (Poets Respond), and elsewhere.
To view other content published in this issue, 17:2 “SPACE”, please visit Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
30 Monday Nov 2020
Posted in Poem of the Week
Removes Sleep from the Eyelids
המעביר שנה מעני ותנומה מעפעפי …
A good soaking overnight
and now the clouds
hover spent, going nowhere.
Already the yellowjackets
are up looking for someone
to mess with. Blue jays
mock my prayer which
would be fine if only
they’d help clear last night’s
plates and tissues. But no
they had no part in the mess
and they won’t help
with the aftermath.
My Y is busy recomposing
herself from shining fragments
and my boys are off
to learn something about the world.
Something just fell out of a tree.
Don’t say I was fooled
into thinking I could matter.
Say rather… Say instead,
say nevertheless. Say even still.
Adam Sol’s most recent book is How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry (ECW Press, 2019). He is also the author of four books of poetry, with one on the way from ECW Press in 2021. He is Coordinator for the Creative Expression & Society Program at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College.
To view other content published in this issue, 17:1, please visit Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
24 Tuesday Nov 2020
Posted in Featured Poets
Tags
Cultivating a Testament: Bending Space
Always in the after
we take on responsibility
and devise ways to cope
with the stress and anxiety
which is a contradiction
of terms of arrival.
So many of you are sick
of bird lists but for others
they will always be epiphanic,
and for the birds they are
a fact of our registering
and respecting their presence
of which I am a tree-shaped shadow.
Listening to ‘Walk’ by
Pussy Galore I realise how
caught up I am in the raptor
and pigeons of skyscrapers,
but there is so much more
to distance than a window box.
Listening to the Jon Spencer
Blues Explosion they transition
between seasons — seems possible
and impossible and that’s the
senses of vegetable matter
rotting make new vegetation
rise from the bed of a garden.
Listening to Poison Ivy’s
psychobilly guitar sliding
with a snarl I know it’s not
the same snarl as the shooters’
snarls around here — the bloody
tapping that kills (every) time.
If electricity goes outside
static and lightning and the glint
of a solar cell we will taste the spark
and see sunset in above-ground wires
scintillate in rurality with tendrils
waving, seeking city and its closed spaces.
We don’t let ivy grow here but love her licks.
If I am a pantheist
I am bent in this space —
leaf and flower (few out
just now, but York gums
working up a demi-monde show), stone
and nodules of nitrogen
held to a bean-plant’s roots.
If I am a pantheist
I am folded out of this space —
a stray arrangement
of meteorites showering
as it rains, parody of drought,
and a comet just come into parity.
Starlink has no place in space.
If I am a pantheist
I bend space without grace —
but respect the grace of all places
I subsume into my sentences,
continuations of cultivation,
rows of edible plants,
plants of edible rows.
If I am a pantheist
I need no space to have space —
I will take from no other
and only expand inwards
shedding what little power
and even self-possession
I have: see, red-capped robin!
Always in the after
I acknowledge those who
are always, and listen
where I am able to listen,
the leaf-breeze blowing
through me. I take nothing,
I say, knowing particles lodge
and dislodge, rearranging
before and after, like
industrial music questioning
consequences of industry
defending the workers,
that rub of gold-leaf static.
The accumulation of wealth
takes up space for living
of the tree expressing its
genetic impetus towards
a ceiling, but it might
yield a mutation and break
free of out reading given half a chance.
The commodification of space
is the fashion-label of an inland
quarry, or the blasting of a mountain,
or the leak from deep radiation
building against ‘containment’,
and an eagle is more than a hunter.
The making of smoke
to fill the valley
is a control mechanism,
a showing the air we touch
is not ours even around us,
the smokers letting us know
burning their seasonal residues.
As light bends
as we see around
the corner of a tree
the bark-piercing
grubber, a magpie code-
breaker as all magpies
see around the limits
of the age so determined
with space a song-reach
a warning a call a consensus
or a tyranny; what’s a yellow-
plumed honeyeater if you watch
without seeing the way
air and light shift
to accommodate its exquisite
presence its claim and no claim
which is what you aspire to
but are stuck in an XY co-
ordinate’s dimensional thinking?
To love when not loved
doesn’t work within definitions —
the early flower yellow sparks
lopped-off because an end too soon
in pollination and seed
or is that just desire, wanting?
Not loving when loved is not a reversal.
Always in the after
an orientation towards
dysphoria, a longing
for the labyrinthine, places
you can’t step without gardens —
a metonym of deception
or a plethora of emanations,
a bounty of spirits even
with erasures — I learnt
from a generous friend,
an artist whose claims
were outside description.
Always in the after
I can’t even follow on —
a hurt stem, a torn root,
a strip of bark on a damaged tree-note
and all that’s left to transfer as melody, channel,
and yet, and yet the crown — outside
all usurping of wreaths of power —
is lustrous at a time
of decline a future of barrenness
that will celebrate space
whatever laments we put out there,
vascular and chloroplastic and architectures
of bone and skin and water, water
and the vastness crossed (the bridge)
to its making, its formation,
its gathering — life as it understands
life bound to rock-signs of orbit
and visitation, expansion and contraction,
the sense of drumbeat I’ve fallen in with.
As light bends a string. As space crumples a fret.
John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry are Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015, Brimstone: Villanelles (Arc, UK, 2020) and Insomnia which has just appeared in North America (Picador, 2019; WW Norton, 2020), His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015) and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). His recent novels include Lucida Intervalla (Dalkey Archive, 2019) and Hollow Earth (Transit Lounge, 2019). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010), Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017) and Temporariness (with Russell West-Pavlov, Narr, 2018). His new is memoir Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, 2020).
He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, but most relevantly he is an anarchist vegan pacifist of over thirty-five years. He believes poetry is one of the most effective activist modes of expression and resistance we have. He often works in collaboration with other poets, writers, artists, musicians and activists.
John Kinsella wishes always to acknowledge the traditional and custodial owners of the lands he comes from and so often writes about – the Ballardong Noongar people, the Whadjuk Noongar people, and the Yamaji people.
23 Monday Nov 2020
Posted in Poem of the Week
Tags
17:2, Aisha Hamid, Poem of the Week, poetry, Space, Unhappiness
Unhappiness
I am Mama’s eyes
grey-black, glassy, distant eyes that belong
somewhere else
in someone else’s face
walking places I can never learn the names of, places
I will never visit, freedoms that could have been
mine in another lifetime
She is scattered; always
anywhere but here
Her life is an injustice. How can I correct it
Where do I begin. Which corner do I grab when
I too am anywhere but here
I too run off to places
I attend a million funerals everyday
I crunch broken glass between my teeth and wonder
why the bleeding doesn’t stop
Is this what unhappiness looks like—
a woman who is always scattered
scattered like chaff from sifted wheat
like dust particles hovering
like a million drops of perfume
Aisha Hamid is a feminist writer and poet based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated from the University of Warwick with a MA in Gender and International Development and is a Commonwealth Scholar. Her academic and creative writing both revolve around Pakistani women’s agency and the multiple meanings it comes to hold for them. As a woman living and writing in a deeply patriarchal space, she regards her writing as activism. She was among six writers shortlisted for the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women, 2019. She was also among eight writers selected for the residential LUMS Young Writers Workshop, 2019. She has been published by Buchleser Books and Rare Swan Press. Her poetry is forthcoming in The Aleph Review (2021).
This video was animated/illustrated by Bushra Saleem.
As a visual artist with a degree in architecture, Bushra Saleem aims to deconstruct patriarchal methods of research and imagining, to answer questions attached to geographies of fear and fearlessness, and how love and empathy can be brought together through the means of magical realism. It is through sharing the untethered dreams, hopes and visions that she tries to bridge the now to the feminist future.
To view other content published in this issue, 17:2, please visit Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
16 Monday Nov 2020
Posted in Poem of the Week
Tags
Emily Chou (she/her) is a poet and cartoonist living on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territory. Featured in Lemon Hound’s list of upcoming Vancouver poets and In/Word magazine’s 30 under 30 issue, her work has appeared in Room, Ricepaper, Chinatown Today, and various other collections and anthologies. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for PRISM international. She has lived in the UK, Japan, and Italy, but somehow manages to always find her way back. Find her at @_rhymeswithwow on Instagram and Twitter.
To view other content published in this issue, 17:2 “Space”, please visit Vallum’s website.
Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.
11 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in Featured Reviews
Year of the Metal Rabbit by Tammy Armstrong
(Kentville, NS: Gaspareau Printers & Publishers, 2019, 107 pages, $21.95 CAD)
Tammy Armstrong’s fifth book of poetry, Year of the Metal Rabbit, comprises a series of deeply imagistic illuminations of the human encounter with the natural world and the animals that flit and ghost through it. As the author and her husband, American poet George Moore, reside in rural Nova Scotia, it is not surprising that the specific geographies of the Maritimes figure largely in these poems. Nonetheless, Armstrong’s bioregional focus is not solely limited to the Atlantic Canada; there are poems that travel through the unique ecological terrains of the Prairies, the American Southwest, the Louisiana wetlands.
Countering the current Can-Lit preoccupation with urban pop-culture, Armstrong shamelessly indulges a passion for richly layered natural description: “the bat orchid’s whiskery mouth/its vaulted keel petals, fat as a bottom lip.” While nature poetry has been dismissed as romantic sentimentality, in this moment of heightened ecological crisis our relationships with nature have acquired new importance and valence, as we’ve seen in the prescient work of Elise Partridge, Basma Kavanagh, and Don McKay. Without being overtly political, Armstrong’s ecopoetics probe the dimensions of this foundational and kinetic relationship with nature that “we hardly know.” In “Mole,” “myopic star men” press up against and undermine our urban constellations: “these squatters break ground/below our artless streets, our empty suburbs.”
In an interview with the honest ulsterman, Armstrong reveals her enthusiasm for “thinking animal-human couplings.” Not surprisingly, her verse erodes and makes porous the divide between animal and human. In “Dry Spell, Still,” people take on the attributes of wild fauna:
From the stoop, I watch the neighbour—
gone tooth and scruff sometime over the past year
a touch of the bird about him now
flocked on some upper bough of thought—
One would expect, from the long and storied tradition of lyric nature poetry, that the first-person speaker of Armstrong’s poems is driven into the confrontation with the wild in order to further define and delineate herself. Yet, Armstrong, as the collection’s blurb offers, “give[s] slip to the snares set by lyric and narrative convention” by refusing to adhere to the notion of a singular or knowable self, much less a self that could be unlocked through an encounter with nature. For instance, the poet-speaker in “Sea Break” others her former self as “that girl” of “another time.” Dividing self into the “twoness of she and I,” the speaker then takes this former self “out to where the sand gave way to the under-tow” and drowns her. In a similar vein, the poem “At Daniel’s Head” uses the encounter with “sharp-faced/sickle-winged/terns” to expose the speaker as “an unfinished otherwise, a shade and corner thing” who never sought identification with the flitting terns but sought instead “the unsettled scatter/the stacked thought…”
At a hundred and seven pages of densely descriptive poetry, this collection is no slight, starveling calf, but a finely muscled beast fully deserving of readers’ full attentiveness. Frankly, her work impresses, delights, and astonishes both with its sustained maximalism and its vatic revelation of how “we happen in the gaps/in the stranger places.”
D.S. Stymeist’s The Bone Weir (Frontenac 2016) was shortlisted for the Canadian Author’s Association award for Poetry. He has published widely in both academic and literary magazines. Alongside fending off Crohn’s disease, he teaches at Carleton University. For a number of years, he was president of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.
Vallum: Contemporary Poetry 