How Does Activist Poetry Cope with Ambiguity? – Writing Poetry with John Kinsella

John Kinsella appeared at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam and gave a lecture on writing poetry.

Vallum is proud to have published his chapbooks Globe Hotel and Inner City Poems (2012) and Poet on a Train (2009). Check them out in our online store!

Touch the Donkey #13

 

Great poetry in the 13th issue of Touch the Donkey, order your copy!

Published by rob mclennan and above/ground press, 2017

http://touchthedonkey.blogspot.ca/

 

 

 

marginal prints, by philip miletic

 

marginal prints by Philip Miletic is an accomplished book of avant-garde-type poetry that engages the reader fully. With expert control of his words, Miletic opens an exciting world to us, a world of spaces and meaning, couched within the avenues of a relationship. His poetry has a shifting range of forms, moving from poems like:
15
eyes erred
and edged;
soft-spoken script,
whispered periphery

to:

I thought of the passage
I thought of the passage in relation to you
I thought of the passage in relation to me
I thought of the passage and our shared conversation
I thought of the passage and our shared sense of ecstasy

marginal prints is a chapbook worth reading. Philip Miletic lives in Kitchener, ON and his book is published by above/ground press (2017).

–Eleni Zisimatos

 

Featured Interview: Monica McClure

Lilac Painted Walls and Black Fabric: A Conversation with Monica McClure
Interview by Jay Winston Ritchie

(Excerpted)

Jay Winston Ritchie: When did you start writing poetry?

Monica MM:: I always wrote poetry…I remember covering my lilac-painted walls one day with black fabric and writing very disparate poems on the walls. One was an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that was about the death of a friend, and not accepting that death. I loved the brazenness of it. It goes: “You have gone to feed the roses so elegant and curled but I do not approve.” I can’t remember the title. I liked that because I had just lost my friend, sometimes boyfriend, love interest, someone who I loved very much, when we were sixteen.

JWR: So you saw your own experience in the poem.

MM: I saw my own experience in that poem. Then I found e.e. cummings. I must have had a collection of modern American poetry somewhere in the house. We had books like that. I really liked “anyone lived in a pretty how town” so I wrote that on the wall. Tacked up my paintings and stuff. But before then I had been really into Percy Bysshe Shelley and I memorized parts of “Ozymandias”. Gerard Manley Hopkins. You know, I was that kind of a kid. I was nerdy but also a cheerleader.

JWR: Nerdy cheerleader. I don’t even know if that’s a stereotype.

MM: I don’t know. I don’t think so. Though there was that girl in One Tree Hill who was a cheerleader who was kind of weird. I was like her but actually very weird.

JWR: Do you think that support from older people, specifically parents and teachers, is an essential thing for young people? In order to feel talented and motivated?

MM: Absolutely. Too much of it is bad, too, because it contributes to this sense that you already have when you’re a tortured writer that you’re really special. I think at times I had a lot of that, because where I grew up the public school system was really bad. There was not a lot of literacy. I think some people graduated from my high school not really knowing how to read. And so by comparison, because both my parents had gone to college, which was rare in that community, I was a really good writer and a  really precocious student. I already had this sense of feeling really special and people would always praise me. That helped for sure, but it also maybe spoiled me a little bit and I didn’t push myself to actually become a great writer.

JWR: How old is the oldest poem in the book? How far back does it stretch?

MM: Not that old really. It happened really fast. Mood Swing is in here, most of it, and I started writing that the same year it was published. It came out in like six months, this very big, very playful burst of energy. They’re very easy to write, those poems, because once I’d…it was a very contagious voice once I had figured out this – because they’re persona poems, really – once I had figured out this highly stylized, highly synthetic tone that I wanted to write in, it just felt like, OK, now I can start plugging in the ideas, the themes, the concepts that are really dear to me that I had been trying to write about in grad school but had felt very limited by the way I was supposed to be writing them. Mala happened pretty fast too, all of those – well they’re long poems so there aren’t a lot of poems, there are four, now five – those also happened the same year they were published as a chapbook. The oldest poem is from 2012, probably.

JWR: One of the themes in this book, which I’m clued into through your internet presence as well, is an appreciation and knowledge of fashion. How does fashion play into Tender Data?

MM: I don’t know if I’m that knowledgeable about fashion anymore. It’s now just more of a love of fashion, and an appreciation for how personal style is empowering, how street style is influential. Couture has been so market-driven for so long that I’m not really inspired by it anymore, the big fashion houses. I mean I am, I love Comme des Garcons and John Galliano as much as the next person. I guess I’m more interested in street style and how when the styles trickle down they get worn in unexpected ways that then find their way back up to the runways. That cycle is fascinating to me. I think of the Tumblr girls a few years ago who are writing Chanel on their t-shirts with Sharpies and you started seeing Chanel imitating them.

JWR: Everyone seems to think that Tender Data has a lot of humour, but no one can really pin it down. On the Asian American Writers’ Workshop website you and Jenny Zhang talk about the search for decolonized jokes. Is humour a useful tool for dismantling oppressive power structures? Is it a coping mechanism?

MM: I think it’s both. I think a lot about how to beat the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to the punch, by anticipating their jokes that would belittle me as a woman, as a person of colour, and so I think there’s power in saying it first. It also belies that power though, too, to be in the position where you have to laugh, or you have to make a joke, if you think about how so much pain gets turned into humour. Dave Chappelle is a good example of someone who does that.

JWR: I always think of Richard Pryor.

MM: Love him. It’s tricky. When you’re in a stand-up audience, you’re very much captive to the performer. You have two choices: you laugh, you don’t laugh. I think people are very excited by that feeling of powerlessness, but it can be bad. There’s nothing like that feeling of being suddenly the butt of the joke and looking around and seeing everybody laughing at this really racist, sexist joke and just feeling totally powerless. When you’re writing it’s easy to be as loud as you want because you don’t have to deal with the consequences of it there, on the spot.

JWR: Until somebody brings it up later.

MM: Right, until you’re doing an interview.

JWR: The book ends with “Novelistic Discourse”, which is a long prose poem.

MM: Yeah, and nobody wants to talk about this.

JWR: Really?

MM: No one has written about it or asked me about it yet.

JWR: It’s the most exciting part of the book for me. How did your approach to writing “Novelistic Discourse” differ from the rest of the poems?

MM: I started reading The Dialogic Imagination again, by Mikhail Bakhtin, and I had been wanting to write something that was truly polyglot for a long time, something that would use all this material I had been saving for essays or short stories, things that might find a more expansive form. It’s sort of screenplay-ish. The experience of writing it was very manic. To unpack it a little bit, there’s some thoughts on religion, humanism, the ironization of my own Marxist politics. I feel like talking about the themes is maybe not useful here.

JWR: Can you read it?

MM: “A little girl with my last name fell into a dream. Be a ramp to your sisters. All the stores were closed the next morning and we went out, you and she and I, into a circular Google, where each woman’s question was the other’s top hit. I’ve known a country without commerce, ghosts feeding on cured meat. It’s all about the libidinal relationship between objects, you know, like Katherine Mansfield, David Lynch. To a disappointing lover dripping syrup from my jaw to the white, white petals of male intellect, I say this: I watched Barack Obama get elected a second time. He could be the child of ASAP Rocky and Lana Del Rey, and he is. Angels made love with humans and made giants that made him, but all of them drowned in a great flood.”

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Vallum’s summer  intern, Jay Winston Ritchie talked with McClure over Skype about her beginnings, her writing process, and the use of humour in her highly-acclaimed first collection.

JAY WINSTON RITCHIE is the author of poetry chapbook How to Appear
Perfectly Indifferent While Crying on the Inside (Metatron, 2014) and the
short story collection Something You Were, Might Have Been, or Have Come
To Represent (Insomniac, 2014). His work has appeared in The Puritan, Spork,
Vallum, Glittermob, Matrix, Joyland, and other places. He is Assistant Editor for
Metatron.

MONICA MCCLURE is a poet and performer living in New York City. She has
published two chapbooks, Mood Swing (Snack Press, 2013) and Mala (Poor Claudia, 2014). Her first book of poetry, Tender Data (Birds LLC, 2015).

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To view other content 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 is now accepting original and previously unpublished chapbook submissions for the annual Vallum Chapbook Award 2017. For more information and guidelines, visit the Chapbook rules page. 

“Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

 

Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was an American poet, essayist and educator, and the first African-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. “Frederick Douglass” is taken from The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, (Liveright, 1997). Copyright © Robert Hayman, 1966.

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 2016 Year in Poetry, Part 1

2016 was (for all its difficulties) an exciting year for poetry. This year saw the launch of Vallum: Contemporary Poetry issues 13:1 and 13:2. We were also happy to add two new chapbooks, Sonnets on a Night Without Love by Yusuf Saadi and String Practice by Jan Zwicky, to our chapbook series. And, after seven previous nominations at the National Magazine Awards, this year we celebrated a Gold Award with David McGimpsey for his poem  “The High Road.”

To help us say goodbye to the year, we asked more than 20 recent contributors to tell us what made 2016 a special year for them. We asked them:

1) What was your Favourite Poetry Book?

2) What was your Discovery of the Year? and

3) What advice do you have for 2017?

Here’s what they said:

Megan Callahan

1.  I absolutely loved Michael E. Casteels’ The Last White House At the End of the Row of White Houses, his first full-length book of poems. The collection is a wonderful blending of the strange and the ordinary, the mundane and the magical, and it was a pleasure to lose myself in Casteels’ surreal and dreamlike poetry. Each page offers a glimpse of an eerily familiar world, where robots and magic elevators are juxtaposed with bleak suburbia and office work. Funny and compelling, and imbued with empathy, Casteels’ collection definitely stood out for me this year.

2. I happened to pick up Sara Sutterlin’s I Wanted To Be the Knife at a book fair this winter, an extended edition of a booklet published in 2015. I was unfamiliar with Sutterlin’s work, and I was immediately grabbed by her awkward, erotic, and painful explorations of love and sex. Her voice is genuine, relatable, and comfortably intimate, and I couldn’t help but laugh and cringe and ache right along with her. I Wanted To Be the Knife cuts deep, and I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for more of Sutterlin’s work.

3. 2016 was a difficult year, and I think many of us are looking ahead with concern and trepidation. When the future feels so unstable, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening in the day-to-day. My only advice is to live in the present as much as possible, and to fully appreciate the good times when they happen.

Megan Callahan is a freelance writer and translator from Montreal. She is currently pursuing a masters in translation studies at Concordia University, where she is researching the auditory features of French poetry. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Matrix Magazine and PRISM International, and her reviews appear regularly in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry. See Megan’s review of Laurie D. Graham’s Settler Education in Vallum 13:2.

Edward Dewar

1. My favourite poetry book is Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems. Earlier this year I was in Pages (my favourite independent book seller – they have a pretty good poetry section). Once I picked up this bilingual volume I was hooked.  Borges has since become my go-to-poet. The way his words line up on the page really digs into my subconscious.  It’s the book I pick up when I need inspiration.  Two of my favourite poems from the volume are “The Hourglass” and “The Dagger.”

2. With regards to my discovery of the year, mine is more like a re-discovery. A few years ago I purchased Charles Wright’s Scar Tissue. I read a few poems, then for whatever reason put it on the bookshelf. I was rearranging the books on the shelf when the word “Tissue” caught my eye. I picked up Charles’ book and spent the afternoon engaged with his language and imagery. It’s one of those books where I’ll partly remember a line then I have to go back and re-read the whole poem. The two poems that stand out for me in this collection are “Wrong Notes” and “Archaeology.”

Edward Dewar‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review, and The Dalhousie Review. See Edward’s poem “A Scar” in Vallum 13:2.

Antony Di Nardo

1. No one book was my favourite, but I kept returning to Vijay Seshadri’s work in 3 Sections and re-read with delight Tomaz Salamun’s Woods and Chalices and The Blue Tower for the umpteenth time. I kept a Pessoa next to me for a good part of the year—Pessoa is always full of surprises no matter where or when I read him. The two new books I very much enjoyed were Sue Sinclair’s Heaven’s Thieves and Matt Rader’s Desecrations. They bring an aesthetics to their poetry that I find inventive, musical, and mindful. Ashbery’s new book disappointed and I’m waiting for Seidel’s to arrive. Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry was promising, but never went far enough in exposing that hatred. It quickly ran out of margins. I preferred Tony Hoagland’s Twenty Poems That Could Save America – a collection of essays that offered fresh and creative ways to think and talk about poetry. Barry Dempster’s Disturbing the Buddha is next on my list.

2. Richard Siken. He read at the Edmonton Poetry Festival and I had just picked up his collections, Crush and War of the Foxes, which I found dazzling and compelling. Beautiful language, crushed and bruised between his fingers, his poetry an aesthetic of felt experience, obsessive, images to relish. Like all good writers do, he inspired me to respond to his work in kind, engage in conversation, so I wrote a suite of poems I entitled “Dear Richard,” talking to lyrics like “all paint is sent downstream, into the future.”

3. When you’re not writing, read. Read poetry everyday. Every single day of the year. Poems are so compact and portable – they’re on every device, on every shelf – and so rewarding with so few words. I read them for language, for words, for music, and rhythm and rhyme, for metaphors and ideas, for stories and characters and splashes of paint. And all of that usually in only one poem. A good line of poetry can so caress the eyes.

Antony Di Nardo’s poetry appears and is forthcoming in journals across Canada and internationally. He is the author of Roaming Charges (Brick Books 2015), his third collection of poetry, and is finishing work on a manuscript entitled, “Secretary of the Lawn Chair,” poems from and about village life in a global village.  See Antony’s poem “The Gardener” in Vallum 13:1.

Jim Fisher

1. SONG by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951 – 2016).

2. Hip Hop Family Tree, Vol I: 1970s – 1981, by Ed Piskor.

3. Two propositions from Baudelaire’s “Three Drafts of a Preface” for Les Fleurs du mal:
     Proposition 1. Rhythm and rhyme answer the immortal human need for monotony, symmetry, and surprise.
     Proposition 2. Poetry is related to music through prosody, whose roots go deeper into the  human soul than any classical theory indicates.

Jim Fisher is a music educator for school children in Richmond, California. See Jim’s poem “The Beast in the Garden” in Vallum 13:2.

Miki Fukuda

1. Don Domanski’s chapbook Field Notes contains a single poem and is absolutely breathtaking.  Every time I enter this poem, it makes me feel so alive, feeling and experiencing with all my senses, noticing new discoveries, within and without, because the poem itself and the language continue to renew themselves.  It is mesmerizing.

2. Discovery of the Year:  Leaves Like Spindrift by Isabel Chenot.  Her graceful lines and exquisite music make me linger and forget time.

3. I won’t offer any advice, but I find stillness to be the most important space because imagination and waking dreams can come from there.

Miki Fukuda is the author of the chapbook Finality of the Morning (Baseline Press, 2016) and the leaflet small book Songs from Twelve Moons of the Bear (Leaf Press, 2015). See Miki’s poem “Bestiary” in Vallum 13:2.

Evan J. Hoskins

1. Laurie Graham’s book Settler Education. Laurie has written about a forgotten history that just has to be told, and she’s somehow done it clearly, strikingly, and poetically. It really is a book with voice. These poems highlight speckles of various Canadian locations and histories, including the prairies and Toronto—my two homes—so it’s hard not to love it.

2. Self promotion time: The discovery of the year has been Toronto’s new and incredible arts/reading series for emerging artists, Slackline Creative Arts Series! Every month I am stunned by what people present. In all honesty, the work that Canada’s emerging artists are doing I often find to be far more interesting than that of “established” artists/authors—and I read a-lot from all levels of authors these days. The discovery of the year was that emerging poets are doing just what they should be doing: taking risks, reinventing, and pushing the craft beyond itself.

3.  The year is just a collection of days, which is a collections of hours, which is a collection of minutes, which are very easy to misplace in this busy life. Stop trying to clutch the slippery seconds and your hands will be free to type.

Evan J. Hoskins runs (with a big amazing team of co-volunteers) the Slackline Emerging Artist Series in Toronto. See Evan’s poem “Marks on the Ice” in Vallum 13:2.

Sean Howard

1. Niche, by Basma Kavanagh (Frontenac House), winner of the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. I also had the good fortune to hear her read twice from the book, and she mesmerized both audiences. An extremely serious, but seriously unpretentious, work of eco-poetry.

2. I had the chance to review (for Arc) John Terpstra’s slim masterpiece This Orchard Sound (Wolsak & Wynn, 2014): 14 exquisite sections, loosely based on the Stations of the Cross, reflecting on the making of a new cross (in Hamilton) from wood found in an abandoned, traffic-drowned orchard (in Burlington). The book, appropriately, is full of both suffering and revelation, the old, entwined testament of nature and poetry – the “testimony of apples,” the “body memory” of trees – renewed.

3. Osip Mandelstam stressed the nature of reading as an activity, itself participatory and creative. (What he called ‘passive reading’ was a terrible danger, an affront against the nature of language [and, I’d add, in the spirit of Terpstra’s work, the language of nature]). I also think listening (not just, or even mainly, to words) can and should be an activity, a mode of creative perception requiring tome-consuming cultivation.

Sean Howard’s new book is The Photographer’s Last Picture (Gaspereau Press), an experimental reflection, in poetry and prose, on twenty photographs from the Great War. See Sean’s poem “Shadowgraph 141: To Trace Out a Shallow Figure” in Vallum 13:1.

Jami Macarty

1. Favorite chapbook: Let Me Be Clear (2016)—Poems from Bernie Sanders’ filibuster speech on December 10, 2010 as (re)written by 10 incarcerated men at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility in Wilton, New York, edited by their poetry class teacher Cara Benson, and published as a Dossier by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Favourite full-length collection: The Good Dark by Annie Guthrie, Tupelo Press, 2015

2. Two new-to-me poets discovered in a friend’s book divestiture pile: Erica Jong’s Half-Lives (Henry Holt & Co, 1973) and Leslie Ullman’s Slow Work Through Sand (University Of Iowa Press, 1998).

3. Dear Citizens of 2017: Listen.

Jami Macarty‘s chapbook Landscape of the Wait, a poetic response to her nephew William’s car accident and year-long coma, is forthcoming in May/June, 2017 with Finishing Line Press. See Jami’s poem “Nor’easter” in Vallum 13:1.

Nathan Mader

1. I think my  favourite book of recent poems has to be Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property (Penguin, 2016). Schiff’s tightly-wound-yet-sprawling lines accumulate endlessly surprising sonic effects and resonant images—from “A Doe Does Not Replace Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar” to “Amerithrax.” Pure incantatory force!

2. My discovery of the year was Max Ritvo and his book Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016). Sadly, this is both his debut full-length collection and his final one. Just before his book’s release, he passed away from cancer at age 25. A deeply felt knowledge of mortality haunts his poems, but don’t let your guard down: Ritvo crafts explosive inner-worlds with humour, confidence, and precision.

3. My advice is to read Gregory Scofield’s shattering Witness, I Am. For a good time call Daniel Scott Tysdal’s Fauxccasional Poems. A few other very recent ones: Michael Prior’s Model Disciple, Courtney Bates-Hardy’s House of Mystery, and Richard Kelly Kemick’s Caribou Run (and the list goes on…)

Nathan Mader has an essay forthcoming in The Literary History of Saskatchewan Vol. 3 (Coteau, 2017). See Nathan’s poem “Eilmer of Malmesbury” in Vallum 13:1.

Stuart Ian McKay

1. My favourite book this year is Jay Millar’s esp Accumulation Sonnets: So beautiful, so interesting, a book to return to over and over again.

2. I just finished reading Milton, for the second time too.  What an amazing poet!

3. My advice?  Go outside often, walk around and clear your head.  Read everything, especially the Bible, Milton, Du Fu and Kroetcsh.  Support Canadian literary journals.  Write longhand on paper.  Creativity is best when messy – enjoy writing!

Stuart Ian McKay is a Calgary poet. See his poem “An Indentation Is Also A Where” in Vallum 13:1.

Michael Prior

1. This year has seen some memorable chapbooks from poets with a full-length collection or two (or three) already on shelves, I’m thinking of Stevie Howell’s Summer, and its fierce, dialogic lyricism, as well as the labyrinthine-intelligence winding through Dani Couture’s Black Sea Nettle.This year has also been full of new talent publishing small press debuts: Curtis LeBlanc (Good for Nothing), Rebecca Salazar (Guzzle) and Michelle Brown (Foreign Experts Building) have each assembled striking chapbooks that work their poems’ emotional stakes through varied formal acumen: the results are memorable and well worth reading.

2. In particular, I wanted to draw attention to Couture’s Black Sea Nettle, with its elaborate circumlocutions (“If the relationship to one’s body is expressed / algebraically, let every variable be a decorative tuber”) and its sprawling, but deliberate accumulations of images that suggest the speakers’ unfurling worlds, both personal and public: “The waters / no longer run red or court fire.  / We’ve found better blends // to run off. Crushed pills in spoonfuls / of corn syrup. Come, the algae blooms / are so thick, we can walk on water we can’t drink”). When compared to Couture’s latest full-length collection, Yaw, Black Sea Nettle‘s poetics are sonically denser and more rhetorically complicated, marked by sudden shifts in register: Couture’s phrases echo, riff on, and torque the logic of myriad popular and academic discourses in order to evoke her speakers’ oscillating interest in “all opposing mirrors–the universe / trying to both see and collapse itself.” Black Sea Nettle is a slim volume, a scant nine poems, but all are intellectually and emotionally resonant.

3. Read more poetry; read more chapbooks!

Michael Prior‘s debut collection, Model Disciple, was released by Signal Poetry in 2016. See Michael’s poem “Godzilla Versus Mothra” in Vallum 11:1.

Yusuf Saadi

1. My favourite book that I read this year was probably The Snow Party by Derek Mahon, which was published in 1975. It has some really great poems, including the poem many consider to be his best, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.”

2.  I really enjoyed reading Kayla Czaga’s poem “Song,” from her collection For Your Safety Please Hold On. I remember reading it at about 4 am and feeling emotionally-punched; it’s so powerful. I feel that if a poet can write maybe three or four poems of that caliber in their lifetime, they have done well as a poet.

3.  I think I’m in need of advice more than I’m in any position to impart it. What I can offer are the same questions to others as I’ve been asking myself. Given that we’re living in a politically dark time, I think it’s important to ask ourselves again what role poetry has in our contemporary world. Clearly it’s not simply for the dissemination of information, as not a lot of people read poetry; I don’t think it’s merely cathartic release either. What is it then? What power does it have? What do we hope poetry can do? Answering or at least re-thinking these constellations of questions will hopefully allow us to purify our poems, and maybe ourselves.

Yusuf Saadi is the winner of Vallum’s 2016 Chapbook Contest. You can find an excerpt from Yusuf’s chapbook, Sonnets on a Night Without Love in Vallum 13:2.

James W. Wood

1. My favourite poetry book this year is Noel Duffy’s Summer Rain (Ward/Wood Publications, London, UK) – Duffy is a younger Irish poet whose reputation is flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic, with recent appearances in The Irish Times, The Financial Times, and on BBC Radio Four. His work evinces the delicate interplay between modern scientific knowledge and our human capacity for wonder and, at its best, remains in the memory long after reading, inviting us to re-read in wonder.

2. My discovery of the year was the work of the nonagenarian American Poet Stanley Moss thanks to the brilliant new English poetry journal The High Window, edited by poets David Cooke and Anthony Costello. Through decades of practice and observation, Moss has honed his craft, bringing subtlety and light to memories as varied as his service at Normandy in World War II and his life on a farm in rural New York State. Highly recommended.

3. I don’t consider myself sufficiently successful or august to dispense advice, though I now believe pleasure – the pleasure of writing, when we are fortunate enough to be afforded such pleasure, and the pleasure of reading, which ought to be obvious – to be fundamental to poetry’s future purpose and survival. I am concerned that too many poets subsume themselves in the seriousness of their craft, and focus on the development of their “career” as writers (egged on by creative writing courses, etc), without thinking of the sensual pleasure Gerard Manley Hopkins must have derived from writing, or the wit and play of the best of Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc; the passion Donne brought to his verse, and so forth. Without such pleasure, there will be no readers, and poetry will be reduced to a chore or a career, instead of what it should be, which is the endlessly fresh expression of how it feels to be human, and to live.

James W. Wood is the author of five works of verse. His next book, Time Signatures, is forthcoming in 2018. Find him @James_W_Wood. See James’ essay “Perspectives on New Poetry from Britain and Ireland” in Vallum 13:2.

 

Come back tomorrow for even more thoughts on the Year in Poetry.

And be sure to check out our Poem of the Week blog for 52 of our favourite poems this year.

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.

The Uncertainty Principle, by rob mclennan

 

rob mclennan’s book, The Uncertainty Principle, is a notable collection of short meditations on various themes. My favourite literary form—shorts, not quite poetry and not quite long enough to be full-fledged prose—his words resonate with a tone that is reflective and not cynical. I call them meditations because they contain philosophy. They affect you. And they are definitely reflective of ‘uncertainty’ in the sense of it being the world’s basic, unstable building-block. This book comes from deep engagement with the living and not just surface gloss.

“I prefer the theory that time is a single point, as
opposed to a linear trajectory. Every moment
ever happened or will sharing this, from the
War of 1812 to the moon landing to the chaos
in Egypt to the birth of my grandfather to the
creation of Stonehenge to my fingers brushing
up against your face for the first time.”

This is the first time I read mclennan’s prose, and I must say it is very different from his poetry, and definitely worth reading. The gaps and breaths of thought and solid word-choice make this book a literary achievement.

“If you don’t eat your cookie, your fortune can’t happen.”

Chaudiere Books

 

new from above/ground press: Kristjana Gunnars

Kristjana Gunnars’, “snake charmers: a cycle of twenty poems” is a rich body of poems strongly evocative of place and mysticism. Her writing style is fluid, with colourful description and emotional tenor:

There is that empty chair, forever.
I can almost hear it whisper:

alone in the middle of the ceramic
tile floor, the herringbone blue, white,
crossing forever, a tossing sea of earth
and a garden table with no cups
and no utensils or flowers, fanning
round in royal blue mosaic, a red
cushion slightly off center on the brown
wicker chair.

This is our courtyard
of existence: these are the things in it,

this dark chair, the pillow
askance, the warm air, heavy, still thick
with the trace of your shadow.

The entire book resonates with lines like these, and the reader
is able to enter into an exotic landscape where not everything is as it seems.
It is well-worth the read. /ez

Published by above/ground press, 2016. http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/

 

In Memorium, P. K. Page

P.K. Page was one of Canada’s most esteemed poets. I would like to remember her as a vital poet of strength and worth, and to quote her poem, “The Search,” published in Vallum 5:2 SPIRIT in 2007. P.K. Page passed away January 2010:

THE SEARCH
By P.K. Page

Hunt, hunt again. If you do not find it, you
Will die. But I tell you this much, it
Is not under the stone at the foot
Of the garden, nor by the wall at the fig tree.
— “Treasure Hunt,” Robert Pen Warren

You have the whole garden to search in.
So begin. Begin now. Look behind every
shrub, turn up stones if
necessary, dig deep in the black
soil. Do not let night
interfere. Use a lamp to
light the darkness up.
There is no time to lose if
you are to succeed, so
“hunt, hunt again. If you do not find it, you”

may be sent to ‘Coventry.’
Not pleasant.
No joke. But worse
is indeed possible. So LOOK.
If you need glasses put
them on. NOW. In that
way you should not even miss a bent
stalk. I cannot really
talk, nor mention what
“will die. But I tell you this much, it”
is not where or what you think–
in the woodshed, for instance, and not
behind the wheelbarrow nor in
the compost. Don’t
waste your time
thinking where were YOU would have put
it, had you been asked. You
weren’t asked. But it–let me assist
you this much in your pursuit–
“is not under the stone at the foot”

of the broad leafed maple. So stop
your wild surmises.
Time is running out and,
as your life
depends upon finding
it, search meticulously.
And good luck, I’d like you to
succeed.
Remember, not in the greenery
“of the garden, nor by the wall at the fig tree.”

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Dangerous Driving” by Sharon Black

 

Dangerous Driving

 

……I clocked you on the verge
..as I dawdled in the slow lane—
….knew I shouldn’t stop
but slowed and rolled my window down—
………………you pulled out sharp
…………your bumper glancing mine.
….Now my heart’s a demented engine:
It brakes at green lights     speeds up at red
….drives through No Entry signs, takes roundabouts
anti-clockwise     jams the pedal
……until rubber burns.     And when we collide
..let’s do it on the central reservation
……ripping through the guardrail, let my chassis
wrap round yours—make the pain
…………………so perfect I can’t feel it anymore.
…….And when they     pull me from the wreckage
let me be unrecognisable,
……limp with pleasure     my chest dripping
………………like rubies—
…………sparkling, impossible to stanch.

 

Sharon Black is originally from Glasgow but now lives in the Cévennes mountains of southern France. She has been published widely and in 2013 won the Ilkley Literature Festival Poetry Competition and was runner-up in the Troubadour Poetry Prize. Her collection, To Know Bedrock, was published by Pindrop Press. http://www.sharonblack.co.uk

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.