20230123

January 22

 

rob mclennan

 

 

Cole Swensen: should something happen                   to the heart.
You:             a punctuation                    based on elevation, 

thin air. More buoyant 

than I’ve seen you                                 , lately. The composition
of a grain of sand. How mountains, 

weather, artefacts    of library archive. The needle

and the ink-stained press.  A cloud                   of campfire sparks.

I work a desire                                       for an echo

beyond laundry,      that single, unbroken sentence.

Our young ladies               reclaim two-day-old snow, the distance
of their reach                    their only measure.

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

20230109

IN THE LINEAR

Elena Johnson

 

 

 

The train cuts through,
cuts through. Pines 

lift their boughs to the wind,
snags reveal their blackened wood. 

Flashes of birch bark
in the flickering sun. 

What hints remain, remind.

A flock of starlings
near the tracks – 

they startle,
lift suddenly upward.

Alongside
electrical wires 

crisscross, stretch taut,
hang slack. 

Above the wires,
clouds –                                                                                 

suspended
in a pattern of their own.

 

 

 

Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems written at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poetry has been published widely, and has been set to music and performed by choirs in Vancouver and Brooklyn. The French translation of her book, Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine (tr. Luba Markovskaia), was published in 2021 and won the John Glassco Prize. She works as an editor and writing mentor in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She is one of the editors of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021).

20221229

Train : a journal unlucky in love

Issue #13 : Shawn Adrian Charlotte Jung Adam Lawrence Meghan Kemp-Gee Jessica Lee McMillan Colin Morton Toast Wong

 

Train : a poetry journal #13

Shawn Adrian is a poet currently residing in Selkirk, Manitoba. His two poetry chapbooks are Metis head birth & one hundred heads hydra (ZED Press, 2021), and Metanoia’s Prairie (Anstruther Press, 2022).

Charlotte Jung is a concrete minimalist poet and abstract experimental playwright. She’s originally from Stockholm, Sweden and today she divides her time between the Stockholm countryside, and her adopted hometown Chicago. Chapbooks published; MBRYO (Puddles of Sky Press, 2019), (SEED) (Timglaset Editions, 2020), HOLE BEING (NoPress, 2021) and ABCDE (Trombone, 2021). Her poetry has also been seen in (among others); Molecule, Illiterature, ToCall, Pocket Lint and Ad Lucem. Please see www.charlottejungwriter.com for more information about Charlotte and her writing.

Meghan Kemp-Gee recently published a prose chapbook called What I Meant to Ask. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Animal in the Room, is forthcoming from Coach House Books in Spring 2023.  She also co-created Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee. She currently lives somewhere between North Vancouver BC and Fredericton NB. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.

Adam Lawrence’s scholarly essays on folklore and science fiction have appeared in several journals, including two anthologies in the McFarland series “Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy” (2013, 2014). His poetry has appeared in Vallum: Contemporary PoetryThe Feathertale ReviewCypress Press, and long con magazine. He’s currently at work on several poetry chapbook projects. Adam holds an MA and PhD in English, and currently works as a freelance editor and writer in Florenceville-Bristol, the “French Fry Capital of the World.”

Most people in high school thought Jessica Lee McMillan used psychedelics, but really, she was learning to become a poet. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Blank Spaces, Pocket Lint (gnurr), The South Shore Review, Antilang, Tiny Spoon, Pinhole Poetry, Dream Pop Journal, Willows Wept Review, SORTES, Lover's Eye Press, Red Alder Review and others. She writes from New Westminster, British Columbia. www.jessicaleemcmillan.com
twitter.com/JessicaLeeMcM 

Ottawa poet Colin Morton has published many books and chapbooks of poetry including award winners The Merzbook: Kurt Scwitters Poems and Coastlines of the Archipelago, as well as stories and reviews, a novel, and an award-winning animated film. He has twice won the Archibald Lampman Award for poetry. www.colinmorton.net

Toast Wong is an activist, engineer and butch idiot living in Toronto, Ontario. Growing up on the Credit River, she writes about diaspora and gender, divorce and science with a lack of regard for her physical integrity. Sometimes, late at night, you can see her drive like an asshole in the West End.

20221128

The Parking Garage Beneath Westside Pavilion

James Croal Jackson

 

 

I slept beneath the mall for some time
to avoid the burden of capitalism ha! 

if I could that would be glorious to
avoid the landlord hey look I am in 

the parking garage what garbage
all these ads for movies I do and 

do not want to see but I would
not know I did not want to see it 

until seeing that is the predicament
I do not have the cash nor the time 

to spend paying for rent give me
gunmetal cement walls six floors 

beneath the surface where I drive 
to where not even bugs venture 

there I am unbound
I fly in my dreams

 

 

 

 

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has three chapbooks: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022), Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021), and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights, 2017). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com)

20221121

Dark Brain of Night

Adam Lawrence

after Charles Simic

 

This song is a perforated line in your head, a distant chainsaw or electrified fence. You perform a one-man, one-fly vaudeville act (or a scene from Breaking Bad). Somehow bring all limbs into contact with every piece of furniture in the room. Toe obliterated on the solid oak foot of a dresser. Knee lacerated after barking a file cabinet. Groin barely escaping religious conversion in its intimate brush with a pair of scissors hanging on the corner of the desk. But the (aptly named) fly is being itself, is everywhere you are not, is the dark brain of night. And before that—the furniture coexisted peacefully with the fly.

 

 

 

 

Adam Lawrence’s poetry has recently appeared in SurVision Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, and FreeFall Magazine. In his spare time, Adam dabbles in small press projects. He works as a freelance editor and writer in Florenceville-Bristol, NB, the “French Fry Capital of the World.”

20221020

An interview with Matt Robinson

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

There are a number of poets I really enjoy and who have – in one way or another – influenced the way I write. Likely too many to list, but I will try. I’ll also immediately think of others after the fact. I love John Thompson for his stripped down, almost sinewy lyrical attention and use of metaphor. I really appreciate Sue Goyette’s longer line lengths, especially in her earlier poems. Gerard Manlet Hopkins – yes, a Victorian – is also a favourite because of his play with lanaguge and image and sound. I also love Plath’s confessional tone. And Wallace Stevens’ almost cool analytical intelligence is also a strong nfluence for me. Then there are all the current folks out there who are writing amazing poems who influence me with each new book I pick up from my local indie bookstore.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you begain publishing full-length collections?

Not really? What I can say is that I’ve come to realize that I’m really – at my core -- a poet of individual poems, as opposed to a poet of larger collections. Aside from my very first book – which had its genesis as an MA thesis, and my one collection comprised entirely of hockey poems, I simply chug along writing individual poems that eventually get bundled up like a bunch of scattered sticks into a critical mass long enough for a collection. I come up with a poem here and there and gradually a critical mass starts to accrue. I think that sort of thought process and the nature of my writing is occasional in at least one sense of the word? After a while, I find there’s almost some kind of unifying theme or aspect of a certain group of poems that at least loosely hold them together as a “collection”.

You sit on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead. Why do you see such roles as important, and what have you learned through the process?

It’s mostly about community and conversation and fostering those two things. I’ve been involved with The Fiddlehead in various roles for years now and it’s amazing what you get to see and read. It’s also neat to follow folks from initial submissions to journals, to publication, to having collections out and such.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Mentors are always key, whether explicit or implicit. It’s tough to target just one person, but I’ll go with Ross Leckie. He has had a huge influence on me. When I was at UNB, he was a more senior poet I looked up to not only for his rigorous attention to and understanding of metaphor, but also for his incredible dedication to building up poets and poetry communities. He’s also really generous in helping poets become who they want to be, voice-wise, as opposed to trying to mould them into something they aren’t? Ross has had a massive impact on poetry here in Atlantic Canada and across the country as far as I am concerned.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

All of them, really! There are so many great voices out there, doing incredible work in so many ways. It’s hard to pick one. But I’ll stay hyper local: Annick MacAskill is a fabulous poet who just released another collection with Gaspereau Press: Shadow Blight. But there are others, too, like Nick Selig, a younger guy who hasn’t really even published a chapbook or book yet, who are also making great poems. Folks should just read as widely and as often as possible.

20221006

An interview with Meghan Kemp-Gee

Meghan Kemp-Gee recently published a prose chapbook called What I Meant to Ask. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Animal in the Room, is forthcoming from Coach House Books in Spring 2023.  She also co-created Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee. She currently lives somewhere between North Vancouver BC and Fredericton NB. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I majored in English and French literature in college, and I always enjoyed reading poetry. But I didn't seriously consider writing it myself until long after I graduated... I don't remember any particular thing that got me started. Then, like now, my instinct to write poems simply came from wanting to write something I might want to read. I guess I started to write exactly when I felt like I could write something I'd be interested in reading.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

The poets that I'm most aware of as major influences are the English Renaissance poets I studied in college, especially Shakespeare, Donne, Wyatt, Sidney, and Herbert. That was the first poetry I read seriously, and studied seriously, and loved seriously. I feel very nerdy admitting this! But I think those 16th- and 17th-century guys are always really with me, because they were the first thing I ever read that showed me how poetry works on the human body, how poems could work like little rooms or little machines.

Louise Glück is definitely one of my most important influences, because of what she's taught me about the lyric mode, its geometry and possibilities that I want to spend my life exploring. I have learned a lot from John Ashbery and Claudia Rankine, too, especially from the fascinating things they do with each poem's audience and speaker, the "you" and "I" inside each poem.

In some ways I feel like all my work is about influence. In one way or another, most of my poems are conversations or ekphrastics or "afters" -- my secret imaginary communications with what I've read. It's one of my favorite ways to write.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing a chapbook, or through working on your forthcoming full-length collection?

Yes, a huge difference! Three years ago, I was very poem-focused. I wanted to make each poem a perfect unit that could stand alone -- or that should stand alone. And that's still true! It's still one of the things I love most about reading and writing poetry! I'm still that poem-focused person, as a reader and a writer. I love that you can come to a poem and experience it like a perfect little world, or like a room you can come into and out of, shutting the world out.

However, writing The Animal in the Room really did change my practice. It was my first sequence of poems that was written intentionally as a sequence. But now that I've written that way once, I've never really stopped.

That's how I'm writing nowadays. I like my little projects -- little groups of poems that are in dialogue with each other. My new work since I moved back to Canada in 2021 is all sequences: two new chapbooks and a new full-length manuscript in progress. I even went back and revised all of my older poems (all the stuff I wrote before and during my MFA) into three chapbooks, then added new poems to mould them into cohesive sequences. (That's actually where my chapbook What I Meant to Ask came from!)

Has co-creating and working on a comic strip affected the ways in which you approach working on poems? Has one anything to do with the other?

Oh, boy! This is something that I could really talk your ear off about, because in my other-other life, I'm a composition specialist... and I did my MA research about how writing comics impacts your skills and knowledge in other kinds of writing!

My interest in this area of composition pedagogy came from my personal experience writing comics -- from what I already knew about what comics can teach us as writers in many different media and forms.

So the short answer is... YES! I think comics writing has influenced me hugely as a poet. Comics teaches you to think constantly about how text and image work together dynamically. Comics also (perhaps more than any other medium!) depends on the reader and cartoonist working collaboratively to make meaning happen. For these reasons, I love thinking about poems as comics.

(tl;dr: This is one of my favourite soapbox topics! Poets should read comics theory! You will learn a lot!)

Comics has also taught me about how to work collaboratively with other artists. Scriptwriting requires efficient translation between technical description and stylistic narration -- and between image and text. These are very useful skills for poets, in my opinion, because our whole job is to figure out how to make the un-word-able or un-worded into words somehow.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Yes. Mentorship has been absolutely crucial to my work. I've been blessed with wonderful teachers and mentors throughout my life. My college advisor David Sofield introduced me to a particular canon of modern writers -- Bishop, Frost, Merrill, Walcott, Wilbur -- poets who were in conversation with the centuries-old poetry I was studying at that time. I thought he was teaching me how to read poetry, but he was also teaching me how to write it, even though I didn't know it at the time.

The novelist Richard Bausch was the person who convinced me to do an MFA and professionalize my practice. Most importantly, he was the first person to call me a writer to my face and tell me I was good enough to actually throw myself into this. That changed my life. And it's a good reminder to me about what mentorship actually looks like. It's really not so much about teaching someone a technique, or telling them to move this line or that comma. Real mentorship can also be reading someone's work like a colleague, like it's something that deserves to be taken seriously in the world. That's what it can look like.

I've had amazing opportunities in graduate school to study with some of the best poets and poetry teachers you can find anywhere: Victoria Chang, Martin Nakell, Carolyn Forché, and especially Anna Leahy, who directs the creative writing program at Chapman University. They've each been crucial to my work at crucial times, showing me what I need to be reading and thinking about to do what I am trying to do! And now I'm doing my PhD at the University of New Brunswick, I'm working under the mentorship of amazing poet-educators like Sue Sinclair and Triny Finlay. I can't say enough good stuff about how inspiring the literary community is here in Fredericton. I love what I'm writing right now, and I feel like this community is a huge part of that.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Since 2017, I've been obsessed by Rainie Oet, who writes these perfect poems about triangles, porcupines, and lyric personas. Everyone should go get obsessed with her, too.

I also just had the opportunity to hear Christine Wu read a poem called "ANCESTRY.COM HAS NOTHING ON ME" at UNB's Poetry Weekend. It's a poem about family, history, and multivocality, and so she used the voice recorder on her phone to produce multiple voices as she read. It was a seamless, thought-provoking performance, and I've been thinking about it ever since!

20221003

Night remains interested sculptor

 

Shawn Adrian

 

 

 

Night remains interested sculptor,

                        of us, epidermal

day-glow phantoms. Underneath

the deck, dusk-loomed

               violet bells nod,

with the hush, which I can’t

identify, flowers or weeds.

Save the silhouetted.   Walk into

openness, past captivity, and

past      the want to remain

                            consolidated.

Stiff egos might crystallize,

closed. Mine (as if I could

directly know any other—

through some sort of sympathetic

resonance) feels impressionable,

prone to                   interference.

                    Trees’ creaks turn

toward a morning of level-

shimmer, among leaf veins.

I am         the interactions, their

seeking through cadence. I

can’t remember it all, or its very

     consequences.

The fragments tease me, my

narrative—my precious devices.

                Then, what happened,

an instant’s hesitation to fractals.

I’m making it up, it being our

isomorphic moment. The subtle-

ties intone my guilty privilege,

for passing behind devastation

              that’s catastrophic—

polar melts and rainwater

toxicity.       Yet, it’s cruel,

cruel in the soft ways, and

their familiarity.

What sympathies lay with

     wishing better for my

cocooned-comfortable life?

And the largest breath would

gasp after a prolonged

asphyxiation, a near-suffocation.

That morning,

                that nature compelled.

 

 

 

 

Shawn Adrian is a poet currently residing in Selkirk, Manitoba. His two poetry chapbooks are Metis head birth & one hundred heads hydra (ZED Press, 2021), and Metanoia’s Prairie (Anstruther Press, 2022).

20220829

Low under indigo,

 

Elana Wolff

 

 

hull of the day.
Two across Formica sitting
underneath a metal ceiling
lit by pinpoint stars.
The land outside is incognito ~
eddy in the rattle of a storm.
Trees along the track
are great galoots
in grubby habits,
grabbing at the glass
in mad abandon.
Before the wind
they’d stood aloof,
at attention,
dutiful—
simply watching trains
and passing wildlife.
Anyone can understand
they can’t be wooden
totems always,
specially not in moody
mid-December.
I lean against the window,
feel their heaving
hitch my breath.
Your face
in dotted dark
is parsed ~
          a noun,
an apparition.


 

 

Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Her poems and creative nonfiction have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Arc online (Awards of Awesomeness), Bear Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Canadian Literature, CV2, Grain, Montréal Serai, MONO, Pinhole Poetry, Literary Review of Canada, Taddle Creek 25th Anniversary Edition, Waterwheel Review, and White Wall Review. Her collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions), won the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her newest collection is Shape Taking (Ekstasis Editions, 2021).

 

20220815

SATURDAY MORNING, JANUARY

 

Matt Robinson

 

 

 

Post-storm, the new year’s sun—a soft heat
through the window—toasts the squint
lost sleep of your brow. The dog again, somehow,
sigh-purrlicued behind & against you, a warm
hint, in the near permanent dell—the sunk
weave—of your chair’s cushion’s fur-fetid
funk. She’s all belly & organic heave, a sigh-
manic white noise: a whole mood on huffy junket.         
Poised to gulp more of too sweet morning
coffee, there’s then that moment when Saturday’s
soundscape crescendoes & goes all-at-once,
twice, askew. A spin cycle’s engaged with a click;
Fortnite’s first-personing echoes anew, joy-
sticked down the stairs; your wife’s thumping
a far room’s desk into being, moving chairs
& spare parts. The dog starts & then settles,
a kettle on the verge of calling the day’s pot’s
matted black, but then doesn’t, having thought
better (not at all?) of that smack-talking
gambit.           You think you’d be fine, if—
you suppose—you ended right here, right
now: with this sun’s simple heat, this
dog’s metered breath, a family’s indiscreet
shifting through inane tasks & routines
on this fine, bright, early day. But you want
all the more now to stay: stay & curse
the icy idea of death, of being a stupid guest,
a minor character, in the crude whimsical acts
of your body’s dumb play; fear mostly the way
you’ll at some point never know—the hows,
the whens & the whos; future’s splay—of
what’s just now, right now, again now, again
now, become dear—become clear, post-storm,
in the new year’s soft heat.

 

 

 

 

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).

20220728

An interview with Toast Wong

Toast Wong is an activist, engineer and butch idiot living in Toronto, Ontario. Growing up on the Credit River, she writes about diaspora and gender, divorce and science with a lack of regard for her physical integrity. Sometimes, late at night, you can see her drive like an asshole in the West End.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I've always liked writing in high school, but never really spent the time to hone my craft or anything like that. I played in a bunch of bands that went nowhere, which I think helped me figure out the mechanics of metre and rhyme, but I took a very long hiatus while I was studying engineering.

Being a butch transgender woman makes you tough to the world, I think, because it keeps throwing things at you until you're whittled down. I try to keep those scraps. The first thing I ever tried to get published was a eulogy for my friend Maia, another butch transgender lesbian, and I try to keep her in mind when I'm writing.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

For a poet I'm not very well read at all. I loved Good Bones by Maggie Smith, and I like Richard Siken. I'm split on how I find alt-lit poets like Tao Lin because I'm not a fan of that sort of navel-gazing, but it was formative for me. I find a lot of inspiration in mathematics textbooks, in punk music and political literature. The last thing I read was Jose Maria Sison's The Guerrilla is a Poet, which is a collection of poems written in political exile from the Philippines, which I think is a very different approach to diaspora writing.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing in literary journals?

In terms of approach, I sit on individual poems for much longer now. I don't really know what I'm trying to say in my poetry yet, so I write as much as I possibly can and try to group my poems together by vague themes (bodies in motion, history as it passes through the world). Then I think about how it fits in with the rest of the things I'm trying to say.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I really really do not know what I'm doing, and I think eventually that will catch up to me until someone actually tells me how this poetry thing actually works. There are friends who I probably couldn't have done this without – ML Gamboa and Aeon Ginsberg are two poets who have encouraged me, helped me through submissions and generally entertained my nonsense. Tea Williams, my ex-partner shows me lots of poems and gives me pointers on how I can improve a lot, and I'm very indebted to them.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I've been enjoying Guy Elston's work and Matthew Walsh's These are not the potatoes of my youth.