Vallum Poem of the Week: “David (a)” by Stephen Brown

 

 

David (a)

UV light, via sunlight; all night 
psychogeography.  A leftover half glass of house red
gone rosé, just sunned enough to saignée:
so it’s thin blood in a glass in this sawhorse kitchen.
Something nodular, or slightly nodular;
with a slight charcoal inclusion, going grey
to wet graphite and so onepointed you
can agglutinate it with the ‘we’ under a glass sun, 

so we can gel.                                                                      in conurbation

I saw Brahman in a milk aisle in japan
imitation (there was no end to the aisle)
or the sign and its likeness, something 
that from a far way off looked like flies
was not flies themselves but their likeness
and I was not I in reality, but my likeness

the woman                                the man
bagging tomatos,                       weighing tomatos

not themselves
                                                             but in likeness

My mind in conurbation, the Brahman
in the battered shrimp an epiphenomenalism:
an awareness awakened or an awakened awareness
either / or
a full anecdotal externality in economics
              leaning against the push cart, in animation
with a stalk of cilantro caught in my cartwheel
with Brahman in a reciprocating conurbation.

Metastasis, browning at the curb’s edge,
and leaves, and the reiterating brown on brown
of them in displaced metastasis. 
Some ambient consciousness coming down
            Some mauvaise foi, some false consciousness, 
settling in, not in the chava stacking cans
                   in displaced metastasis, la clandestina, fitting
in so well only le flâneur may see her, in gestell.

Nor in the whitechapel                           Nor in el mercado
fruit wagon                                           where you get
with a two pan balance                          galangal and acacia koa
downtown                                            in trade
barrio antiguo,                                      Monterrey  for Campeche axiote.

So you walk the city because you 
need to walk, to debuild the day, each day, 
walk thru neighbourhoods debuilding, 
going thru your day and the day before,
debuilding, down into old neighbourhoods 
with high sidewalks and walls of crumbling
sandstone, in a dérive, walking, debuilding.

Down along Santa Lucia in a drift,
debuilding, not a canal in reality save in its 
likeness as if, a private garden with a real
proportionality constant; bereft, debuilding
so much depends upon, these days, metastasis                debuilding
or as it may apply to Jahiliyyah in general
have a sit on a slab of wood akin to pinewood.

Fall asleep there, on newpapers, at midday.
Feeding the pigeons near your feet, à la flâneur,
drifting, debuilding, or staring at something where
once there was something to stare at, but where 
now there is only spectacle.  In the replica of a park
that looks like the same park in another city, 
the spectacle is a spectacle, with tended gardens.

Walls of failing sandstone, tended gardens
poured concrete pressed with brick moulds, 
ornamental castiron streetlamps, gated parks
the spectacle of an eden in fixed prefabrication
or as it may apply to Jahilliyyah in general, 
contrived instances of hypnotic spectacle,
           spectacle in the workplace, on cubicle walls.

 

Stephen Brown is a Canadian poet living in Mexico City. His first book,
drunken dumbshow, was published in 2008 by slushprint press. His
second book, psicogeografía, was published in Mexico City in a Spanish/
English edition by Textofilia in April, 2019. As a visual artist, his poems
have been curated and displayed as wall installations in Xalapa and
Mexico City. He currently teaches English as a Second Language at
Mexico City College.

To view other content published in this issue, 10:2, 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.

‘Poetry for our Future!’ at Lasalle Elementary

Until the end of June, our online donations manager, CanadaHelps, is running a contest called The Great Canadian Giving Challenge!

This means that if you make a donation towards Poetry for our Future! before the end of the month, our charity will be entered to win a grand prize of $10,000 for each dollar you donate! Every dollar you donate directly through CanadaHelps will count as an entry for Vallum into the draw. No amount is too small, and is gratefully appreciated! Every donation will go directly towards funding poetry and literacy outreach in our community, helping us grow the number of workshops we offer, expand outside of Montreal, and build our website as a hub and publishing resource for our workshop participants!

During the Great Canadian Giving Challenge, we’re letting you know about some of the great organizations we host literacy workshops with through our ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ outreach program. #GivingChallengeCA

Meet Lasalle Elementary

“LaSalle Elementary School is committed to educating the whole child within a safe, kind and bilingual environment, fostering success for all. The school provides a quality learning environment which encourages each child to develop to their full potential and foster within them a sense of community. Student success depends upon the schools team creating a welcoming and caring school climate where every child feels a sense of belonging and safety.”

Working largely with disadvantaged youths, our workshop facilitators use poetry as a teaching tool to enhance reading and comprehension skills. The collaborative workshops show students how poetry can be a fun way to reflect and express themselves!

You still have one more day to help VSEAL win $10,000 to support ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ workshops! Click here to donate – each dollar you donate before the end of June is an entry into the contest.

Featured Interview: Gwen Benaway

Tags

award, award for poetry, gwen benaway, interview

Interview by Natalie Podaima

Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She has published three collections of poetry, Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild, and was the editor for an anthology of fantasy short stories, Maiden Mother and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes. Her writing has been critically acclaimed and widely published in Canada. She was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ writers from the Writer’s Trust of Canada, the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry, and the National Magazine Awards and Digital Publishing Awards for her personal essay, “A Body Like A Home.” Her fourth collection of poetry, Aperture, is forthcoming from Book*hug in Spring 2020. She is also currently editing a book of creative non-fiction, trans girl in love, forthcoming from Strange Light in 2020. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is a Ph.D student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Gwen Benaway is the judge for the 2019 Vallum Award for Poetry. With the deadline for this year’s competition fast approaching, we asked Gwen to tell us about her own writing process and share some advice for those submitting.

How does a new work begin to take root for you? Do you start immediately with pen to paper, or does your process include a degree of pre-meditation, coaxing-out phrases, collecting images? 

New work starts for me when I sit down to write it. Often certain images or ideas will begin the process for me but they don’t determine the final product. Writing is how I uncover what I’ m working with/through, I think of writing as a practice, almost like a physical act that opens up possibilities for beauty.

With three collections of poetry and another forthcoming (Aperature, Book*hug, 2020), I’ve heard that you’re also editing a collection of essays to be released next year (trans girl in love, Strange Light, 2020). What is your relationship to non-fiction versus poetry? In what ways do you feel that the format informs the content of your work, if at all?

I love creative non-fiction and in some ways, I feel more skilled as a non-fiction writer than as a poet. Poetry and prose are equally demanding to write and read, but I think they do different things in the world. There is overlap between the skills, but they are distinct mediums. Content and form are the same thing to me, but intention matters greatly in writing. What am I trying to create in the world and why? Those are essential questions for me that fuel my writing.

What are you reading right now? 

I just read Ocean Vuong’s new novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I’m currently reading Billy Ray Belcourt’s new book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms, and a trashy werewolf fantasy book by Patricia Briggs.

Pick one: Write what you know, write what you love, write for yourself. 

I pick none of those options! What do we mean when we say “writing”? Writing as an industry? Writing as an artistic practice? Writing as truth telling? Writing as healing? Writing is synonymous with life for me. What are you living for? What do you want? What compels you in daily life? These questions are the ones which should animate your writing because the notion that there is any one guiding principle for literary production is a deeply naive one. Some writers write for money or fame. Others for recognition or praise. And some write for themselves or their communities. These choices are related and none are mutually exclusive, but they often do different things in the world and demand a different set of ethics and relationality.

Do you have any advice for poets wanting to submit their work to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2019? Any advice for poets in general?   

I am drawn to poetic honesty and a generosity of self. In other words, poetry that knows the “small mechanics”, to quote Lorna Crozier. My advice for poets is always the same: who are you? what do you want? what images captivate you? what stories are yours? Look for the answers in a poem. Don’t perform poetry. Just embody it.

*

Don’t forget to submit to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2019! First place receive $750 and publication in the upcoming issue of Vallum.
Deadline: July 15th, 2019
For more information and to enter online today, visit our website. 

 

‘Poetry for our Future!’ at Spectrum Productions

Tags

poetry for our future

Until the end of June, our online donations manager, CanadaHelps, is running a contest called The Great Canadian Giving Challenge!

This means that if you make a donation towards Poetry for our Future! before the end of the month, our charity will be entered to win a grand prize of $10,000 for each dollar you donate! Every dollar you donate directly through CanadaHelps will count as an entry for Vallum into the draw. No amount is too small, and is gratefully appreciated! Every donation will go directly towards funding poetry and literacy outreach in our community, helping us grow the number of workshops we offer, expand outside of Montreal, and build our website as a hub and publishing resource for our workshop participants!

During the Great Canadian Giving Challenge, we’re letting you know about some of the great organizations we host literacy workshops with through our ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ outreach program. #GivingChallengeCA

Meet Spectrum Productions!

“Spectrum Productions works with individuals, both children and adults, who are on the autism spectrum. Learning experiences focus on creativity through film and media production, offering participants the chance to express themselves individually through storytelling, while also promoting a collaborative mindset, and technological skillset.

Activities are organized as summer camp and weekend retreats, as well as after-school workshops for children and social clubs for adults.”

VSEAL hosts workshops with Spectrum to enhance poetry literacy, creativity and free play with an engagement in activism and self-expression. Our workshops have included the creation and performance of both sound and visual collage poems. In the above photos, facilitator Jessica Bebenek imagines and creates book covers with workshop participants.

You still have two more weeks to help VSEAL win $10,000 to support ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ workshops! Click here to donate – each dollar you donate before the end of June is an entry into the contest. Every dollar counts!

Featured Review: Ekke by Klara du Plessis (Review by Zoe Imani Sharpe)

Tags

ekke, klara du plessis

Congratulations to Klara du Plessis, Vallum contributor and former employee, for winning the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her book, Ekke!

Ekke by Klara du Plessis
(Toronto: Anstruther Books, 2018, 92 pages, $18.95 CND)

Eeeeeek. Ek. Ekkkk. Ekke. I play around with this word a few times before opening Klara du Plessis’s debut collection of poetry. That I have to say the word aloud, in different inflections, means at least two separate things: one, I do not speak Afrikaans; and two, the word itself contains myriad possible interpretations. Similarly, there are endless possible ways to review this book, which is a marker of its strength and complexity. One interpretation is through the lens of race; another through thinking about modern nation-states; and yet another is through the ways in which languages structure identity for the immigrant, the emigrant, the settler, the traveller, the multilingual:

I eke
out a meaning for my self.

Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Stottering

Stutter ringing

Du Plessis’s work signals not only how much effort it takes to describe oneself but how that description is multivarious, and therefore mutable, vulnerable to fragmentation. In Afrikaans, the word ekke, as du Plessis’s notes translate, means “an emphasis of I. / A dialect.” In English, the same word is also a sound—of terror, judgement, reaction. The speaker’s sense of self lies in the wide space between names, words, languages.

Du Plessis’s phrasing is startling, dreamlike. “I pluck at juice around the mouth” or “brushing camouflage on stones” are lines that pop. That language itself can be a landscape full of “black line(s) leading tarred to the abattoir,” “subtropical strap-ons,” “pin-pricks of white between grays and browns” is clearly, and beautifully, rendered here.

The second section of the book, “Stillframe Inbox,” is particularly compelling. There is much to be said about technology and ekphrasis, or the ways in which images (emojis and memes, in particular) have become common verse in our languages. Instead, du Plessis’s explanation of the section as a eulogy for her late friend, the artist Dorothea (Dot) Vermeulen, gives the poems an elegiac tone in which one begins to understand that language, like our loved ones, leaves traces:

It’s not safe sex, location is everything and this place
is not the wrong side of the tracks but the tracks themselves
where trains no longer make their elated way
and men walk tracing exhalations in the dust with their boots

If the book has a shortcoming perhaps it’s that I, as a reader, cannot comprehend if the narrative has a definitive political stance. The playfulness of du Plessis’s style, while clever and robust, had me itching for the theme to land on an argument. I wanted more profanity, more messiness in the language. The fact that both Afrikaans and English have been creolized—often by those whose traditional languages were made precarious by the ongoing European colonial project—does not, at least overtly, enter the text. Though du Plessis is careful to underscore the ways in which language continues to mark the landscapes of bodies:

mond oorblyfsels teen die skedel

ancestry perverted as

vertes

…

My language is a secret / secretion …
uncurling its animal muscles when the break is done

Diverging from the boiling anger found within Erin Mouré’s collection of feminist language-overhaul in her 1988 book Furious, Ekke is, on the other hand, meditative. It rides on “brute force.” Concerned with how power operates, the book thoroughly tests what language, as we use it, can offer:

Hunt stands adjacent to hurt
to be protected is to let that person be exposed.
Show-off masculinity and suddenly
there’s a collection of men, a natural history museum right there and
then.

That this “natural history museum” may include language, or a type of language, or a way of using language, are exciting propositions. As a reader, writer, and someone who thinks in words, my own experience of language—the language used to describe me and the language I have used to describe myself—has often felt imprecise. For example, a compound, North American word like ‘mixed-race’ does not come close to approximating or explaining my particular world-view as a mixed-race person, and thus tends to feel dead on the page. In Ekke, du Plessis holds a funeral for the limitations for every overused, empty, inanimate woord.

Are certain languages too tied up with the logic of the nation-state to be accurate representations of place? I am struck by the way du Plessis’s poems reveal the hidden strenuousness of officialised languages and the constrictive rationale of languages of colonial conquest; English, Afrikaans, French. The collection gestures toward loosening these limitations through the exercise of expansion and connection. It uncloaks how each of these languages exhaust themselves to keep themselves in power, and how observant study may allow new linguistic infinities. This is true specifically in South Africa, where the use of language—and the effect that certain languages have on those who use them, what language imbues— has always had political impact:

To reminisce is a ritual.
But to renew
a book at the library or the cells of the skin
or for a nation to officiate one language to eleven
is the hardest doubling act you’ll see
…
in this country.

The speaker “walk[s] across different languages as if they are flatlands.” I’m reminded of Dionne Brand’s assessment that “no language is neutral,” and as du Plessis elaborates, what if (inadequate, at times partisan) language is all one has to find a physical (psychic) closeness to place? If there is “no lingua franca of the mind,” as du Plessis asserts, how does one’s relationship with oneself operate in different locales? What happens right before “decency intervenes and the distance between thrusts / lingers?” How cavernous is the dialect between the “I” of the languages we speak, and the “I” of the physical landscapes we live in? It seems to me the closing of this gap relies on comprehensive study of what we say and how we say it.

 

Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet and editor based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Sang Bleu Maga- zine, Main Street, Lemonhound, The Puritan, and is forthcoming in The Unpublished City – Volume II. Her chapbook, Sullied, was published by Trapshot Archives in 2011.

To view other content published in this issue, 15:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Featured Review: Obits. by Tess Liem (Review by Domenica Martinello)

Tags

obits., tess liem

Congratulations to Tess Liem, Vallum contributor and former employee, for winning the Lampert Memorial Award for a debut book of poetry for her book, Obits.!

OBITS. by Tess Liem
(Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2018, $19.94, 88 pages)

Tess Liem’s Obits. opens with an epigraph from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric: “There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an ‘I’ discusses socially.” It’s such an elucidating way to enter the book that I must open the same door to begin this review.

But before I go further, I notice my use of the word “enter,” as in “to enter the book”—is it invasive? And now I am aware of my own body, the ways of entering it, ‘it’ being “nothing as a reference / to zero where zero means a vulva,” according to a critical gloss of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The speaker in “My body in three movements (one)” continues wryly, “how nice: / one of my body parts, in being nothing, / is some- thing.”

‘Nothing’ is a symbol standing in for an actual, embodied ‘something.’ Zero for vulva, sound bite for tragic death, and so on. But as the speaker demonstrates, it’s easy to get stuck at an intersection between the two. Throughout her stunning debut, Liem’s self-implicating speaker deepens the reader’s awareness of how statistics, data, news footage, obits, even poems themselves, fail to encompass the complicated and physically experienced ‘something’ of grief and death.

“I was concerned that in writing poems for or about the dead I would turn them into objects or tropes in service of my own feelings of loss or loneliness,” Liem elaborates in an author’s note published on the Coach House blog. The speaker in Obits. asserts that “[s]tories about the dead will be about the dead” in an attempt to unburden those lost of the symbolic baggage often foisted upon them. The book also resists the impulse to universalize this most ‘universal’ of experiences—especially in a world where “some lives count & others are counted”. “Call it” puts it another way:

To speak as if we all share the same loveliness, the same doom,

is not to speak

of the fact that some people have their hands

around other’s necks

Many of the poems in Obits. are centre-justified on the page, giving the impression of making direct eye contact with the reader. Interesting, then, that the speaker worries over the possibility of navel-gazing. In “Aesthetic distance” the speaker observes “how I circle back on myself continually” despite the speaker’s attempts to centre others. A distant but formative aunt who died, Thian Hoei, “steps in & out of my memory again, again, my grief, a timid animal.” The speaker’s sadness is especially acute “[w]hen the object of my mourning is missing” // when no obit. is print- ed.” In the case of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, not only is there no obit printed; one can even agree on the numbers.

Obits., then, raises the complicated question: is there a line between grief and wallowing, mourning and morbid affixation? Who gets to draw it? Does it have to do with proximity, with kinship? Throughout Obits., the speaker grapples with grief both privately (prostrate on the bedroom floor) and publicly (contemplating Obitsarchive.com while riding the metro), trying to parse its uses and applications. “Aesthetic distance” ends on a frustrated, exclamatory note: “What to make of this sadness! // What does it do!” The speaker wants to use sadness and the experience of trauma to do actual good in the world but is often depressed by the feeling of futility.

That’s not to discount futility on the part of others, often in more unforgivably powerful positions. In the collection’s opening poem “Dead theories,” the news of “forty-nine dead in Orlando” is broadcast in the metro and “a man with platinum hair / & his own TV show / [breaks] down crying reading their names.” Of the forty-nine dead in the Pulse nightclub massacre, the majority were queer latinx people of colour. The man with his own TV show, presumably Anderson Cooper, does have a personal stake in the tragedy. He’s gay—he’s also a rich cis, and white. In response to crying on TV, the speaker again wants to know: “What did that do.” These questions aren’t exactly rhetorical, though Liem’s failure to answer them creates some of the collection’s generative energy.

Also propelling the poems forward is the sense of dailiness created by the backdrop of the metro platform or train, and of course the refrain created by the several “Obit.” poems. Public transportation seems to be the perfect liminal space to contemplate death while implicating the body—crowded in with strangers, touch without intimacy, being moved from one place to another. There’s also the physical proximity to death, as the speaker reminds us while contemplating a poster for an adaptation of Anna Karenina during her commute: “her ending is before you / every morning, every evening, on the platform of the metro.”

Of course, the beauty of Liem’s language (“The mango in one hand, knife in the other, a slick, shrinking yellow sculpture”), the deft motion of her mind, and her keen sense of humour (a self-serious professor who only reads and teaches dead men is, “in the year two-thousand-seventeen, // …still worried about Lady Gaga’s influence”), make a book about death undeniably alive. There is also room for hope and tenderness, a space that almost feels more fraught for Liem than death. The first poem in the book ends, for example, with the speaker admitting: “when I look forward to spring / it feels like a risk,” and the last lines of the book acknowledge: “I’m taking a risk / when I don’t know the dead.” Hope and grief, connected through shared emotional risk.

In fact, I’d say Liem’s willingness to risk failure and implicate herself (and others) so fully is part of what makes Obits. distinct. If there is truly no innovating loss, Liem doesn’t allow herself to simply “[s]tep over the potholed thing” and “[c]all the step a poem.” The speaker in Obits. under- stands that “[t]here is a point at which you must jump into the hole / in order to keep digging,” no matter how dark that hole may be.

Domenica Martinello is the author of All Day I Dream About Sirens (Coach House Book, 2019).

To view other content published in this issue, 16:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Event Recap: Resonance Reading Series Finale

Recap by Rosie Long Decter. Photos by Brian Campbell.

There was a special on gin cocktails at Resonance Cafe on August 7, in honour of the final instalment in the Resonance Reading Series. The cocktails were, appropriately, bittersweet.

Speaking to a packed house, host and curator Klara du Plessis began the night by telling the story of the Reading Series’ inception, how she started it six years ago while working there and how it grew to become one of the most established literary events in Montreal. This, she admitted, was part of her reasoning for closing it down: Resonance became “an authority.” Du Plessis doesn’t have the resources to curate the Series in the way she feels this authority would need, so she’s letting it reach its end naturally and going out on top.

Rebecca Salazar Leon

The night was definitely a testament to the strength of the series du Plessis has built, beginning with the first reader, Rebecca Salazar Leon. Salazar Leon began with a warning that her poems would feature a considerable amount of gore and bad puns. She wasn’t lying, but the gore was soft and unsettling, not overwhelming, and even the bad puns were effective and affecting. “Are rooms so interchangeable with entrails to you,” she asked in the first piece she read, a trilingual poem examining sex, dating, and desire from the perspective of a young woman in Catholic school. She went on to read a couple of pieces that addressed the damage inflicted on her childhood home in Northern Ontario by mining companies, followed by several others examining misogyny and magic. In “Pain Management,” Salazar Leon probed intergenerational trauma, searching for a means of coping, if not healing. “My pain and I lay side by side,” she read, her voice resigned, like the act of accepting pain is as radical as overcoming it.

Eric Schmaltz

After Salazar Leon was Eric Schmaltz, a multimedia artist whose book Surfaces came out earlier this year via Invisible Publishing. Schmaltz read excerpts from the book, an interrogation of “what of us gets lost or erased in digital communications.” Schmaltz, realizing that the text itself contained few words, paired his reading with a visual display in which various geometric shapes and formulations rearranged themselves on a purple background. The poems were definitely sparse, consisting mostly of surreal phrases (“material information bleed”) that juxtaposed digital and mechanical processes with bodies and nature. With his even voice, Schmaltz’s recitations themselves felt almost mechanical, further blurring the line between screen and self.

Dani Couture

Following a short break, Dani Couture took the stage. Couture has published three collections of poetry and one novel, Algoma, via Invisible Publishing. Her cool voice drifted across the room as she recited a poem that looked at life as a process of recycling and reorganizing: “here on earth, everything stands for one thing or what it used to be,” she read. “How did you keep splitting to only become one thing?” Her poems dealt carefully and quietly in connections and absences; a piece titled “Contact” asked plainly: “when does knowing a person begin?” Given Couture’s subdued presence, her reading felt a bit like floating through a hazy day, providing the lovely calm of not needing to arrive anywhere in particular.

Shannon Maguire

Closing out the night – and the whole series – was Shannon Maguire. Maguire began with a piece about a wolf interpreted from Old English; the piece had intrigued them because it sat somewhere between a riddle and an elegy. Maguire enunciated each word with energy and enthusiasm, their diction adding new dimensions to the already vivid words. Another piece, “Pleasure,” from their book Myrmurs, chronicled a series adventures with a partner or lover, set in Maguire’s hometown of Sault Ste. Marie. With lines like “we stuck our index finger into our lower jaw” and “you were boy and girl and rabbit and hawk moth,” the piece was overwhelming in the best possible sense, flooded with life.

Du Plessis came back to the stage to wrap everything up. She remarked on how the readers had connected with one another over the course of the evening: Couture decided to read a piece about a phantom limb because she was inspired by one of Salazar Leon’s poems; Maguire mentioned that Sault Ste. Marie was not far from Salazar Leon’s hometown of Sudbury. This is one of the best parts of Resonance, du Plessis explained – allowing readers to influence each other, to form a community. Though the Resonance Reading Series may be finished for now, that sense of community carries on.

---

 

Read our review of Dani Couture’s Yaw, originally published in Vallum 11:2, here.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “the consolation of trees” by Su Croll

“the consolation of trees”

with much taken away    it is a small mercy
dementia patients have trees   their remaining
presence ceaselessly focusing the horizon

a horizon offering nothing that isn’t
in the present tense but with much
already lost    maybe it is luck to have trees

opulent    flooding the sky

in dementia   the mind is held in thrall
to trees   the late summer soothing
movement the wind makes of them

that hypnotic amazement and with much already
stolen   already forgotten   there is the consolation
of trees filling the mind   the sky ceaselessly

remade into a gift

 

“the consolation of trees” is from a manuscript of commemorative poems for Su Croll’s  father called Someday which is currently seeking publication. Recently, another poem from this manuscript, “side track”, was short-listed for Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award. In 2015, a short sequence from Someday was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize. Su Croll has published two other collections: Worlda Mirth and Blood Mother, and completed a novel, Image Hungry, which is also seeking publication. To find out more, visit sucroll.wordpress.com.

 

To view other poems published in this issue 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Devil’s Punchbowl, Manitoba” by Megan Alford

 

Devil’s Punchbowl, Manitoba

visitors mind their cigarettes,
cigars, and pipe ashes
all is crushed before discarding

beside a depression in the
earth holding water from
somewhere so deep

it knows the language of
the hognose snakes,
and prairie skinks

with whom it can talk about
dying, musings roll of a
forked tongue, embedded
in an orange jaw

 

Winner of the Lily’s Pond Poetry Prize, Megan Alford’s first poetry chapbook, Piggyfish, is now available from Island Verse Editions. She grew up in Prince Edward Island and graduated from Concordia University’s Creative Writing Program where she was shortlisted for the Irving Layton Award in both poetry and fiction. Other publications include Cirque Literary Journal, Encore Literary Magazine, Dying Dahlia Review, Matrix Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, Soliloquies Anthology, Room, and Vallum. A musician and songwriter, she is currently recording her first full length album. She lives in Vancouver.
To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

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Featured Interview: Malek Yalaoui and Dona La Luna of SistersInMotion

Interview by Rosie Long Decter

In September 2016, I went to see a friend perform at a poetry night in Outremont. The event was at Jardins Cra-Terre; I’d never been before, and found myself wandering outside for a while thinking I was in the wrong place. When I finally arrived, I found a clearing lined with benches, where a full audience sat watching the stage with care. Throughout the evening, the crowd cheered on and lifted up the performers, all women of colour, and in a break between sets, friends gathered to eat dinner in the open air. More than just a welcome reprieve from white-male dominated arts scenes, the night felt like an entirely different kind of literary event; the warmth was infectious.

In the two years since that first event, SistersInMotion (SiM) has become a fixture in Montreal, continuing their performance nights and expanding into workshops. This summer they’ve held a series of workshops, concluding this weekend with When Trauma Speaks The Bones, led by Kai Cheng Thom. I spoke with SiM’s founders, Malek Yalaoui and Dona La Luna, about that first event, the relationship between art and community, and how SiM continues to build its sisterhood.

Malek Yalaoui at the first SiM night in 2016. Photo by Võ Thiên Việt.

Rosie Long Decter (RLD): Can you tell me a bit about the origins of SistersInMotion? How did this organization come together?

Malek Yalaoui (MY): Dona and I met at another writing workshop for racialized women and girls called Unravelling in Rhymes in – I wanna say – 2015/16. Anytime women and femmes of colour gather I feel like it’s just so magic. So [I] came out of Unravelling in Rhymes wanting to do a show.

I actually have a background in spoken word and specifically slam poetry, competitive poetry. And what I found competing again and again is that women and, in particular, women of colour were being judged quite harshly. You know, you do a poem and the audience gives you a score from 1 to 10 and, depending on how well you do, there’s all sorts of travel and career opportunities that open up. So on one side there was really harsh judging and high standards and then on the other hand I would see cute white guys get up there and mention feminism once or twice and nines and tens would be given out.

That was really disheartening for me – the idea behind slam poetry really is poetry of the people, it’s supposed to be more accessible, more equal. And yet we found that all of the biases that play up in larger society – you can’t keep them out of slam. So I’ve had this desire for a long time to do a show where the stage would be closed to the work of women of colour, so that the audience wouldn’t get a chance to let their unconscious, implicit bias play out and would be forced to reckon with the work on its own terms.

When I went to Unravelling in Rhymes, that idea came back. And at the same time Dona had contacted me – she was organizing a poetry show on a beautiful piece of urban farmland in Outremont and asked if I’d like to perform. My response was yes, I would, and by the way would you like to perform in the show I’m trying to organize! We realized this should really be the same show.