(Reading Poem 16: mistyped text, Nick Flynn, perfume notes, Hesse’s Hang Up, Rimbaud, Ninjutsu Haiku from memory, Ondaatje, messenger exchange)

John Luna

Have a threat day. Pains that feel like swallowing is every morning I wake up split, missing you. Here, a small piece of light keeps opening and closing on the floor with the curtains as the earth.

Sweat as cotton-blossoms, sweat as cumin seed & coriander, sweat as onions sweating out time in the crisper. The cat, variegated as pepper up your nose, leaps nimbly off the counter; outside lawnmowers brindle the air before it has got up & got warmed. The first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through…was the best time, but it’s lost in summers now (old as in old magazines...) It [was] the most ridiculous structure… “I sat Beauty on my knees…”

A saline twang hangs around all afternoon. Mystery is a furrow set in the center of the attack truth makes in a state of benighted obscurity or liberty, undressed; unconjugated conjugal visitation. Error and romance slide & elide. It strikes you, like light slanting on a log, a roofbeam: for your eyes. Things we lost: (the) knowledge of the dead. Not yet, or not forever. Children who suffer from anxiety, depression, dysphoria, suicidal ideation, are on the frontier of a new shock... one the world has yet

to know personally; everywhere in the house this morning, a smell of paper burning, like fresh latex paint, like Habit Rouge, like Arthur Rimbaud setting down to work. It was lonely

John Luna is a biracial writer, artist and critic, whose practice includes poetry, visual art and critical writing as well as teaching in the areas of visual art and art history. He the recipient of a 2017 BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant for an ongoing project involving text and visual art. Publication of his written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared via Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, Train, Matrix, GUEST, Rattle open mic, and The Hamilton Review of Arts and Letters, among others. His first poetry collection, Listing, was released through Decoupage Publishing in 2015; a second book-length manuscript was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2017. He lives in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia.

Reading Poem 21 (cover of a book about Cathedrals, 3rdhand Decameron, etymology, gaming lore, leftover words, old phone conversation, magazine interview, Chauvet documentary, Wikipedia dérive, pseudonym spy fiction)

John Luna

Apples and pears ripen and fall, totally neglected but regretting rien, like some Medieval orchard visited by a disaster so vast nobody could account for what came before. This whole time I’ve been writing in kind of sweeping, terraced declines; I’ve been

getting older myself, or more properly, it has been getting older, this interspace called directing, commanding, insisting, negotiating, hustling, running, defrauding, collecting (stopping with a hiss & a click as a cliché finds its shape in the mold; leaving a squishy bit in the fabric, the soft spot under the powder-coated skin, sliced tennis-ball fuzz, ‘pop’ of the breathless tippy-top of a baby’s skull…Veil. Lily. Wound. Woods behind the house

where mastery lives, alive as fuck in the long grass. It looks like there is nowhere now I can place you: not in the earth for an oven, not in grain-saying photo developer night, fingers stirring figures in varieties of timber tasted in the teeth of an old saw.  Monitoring expressions like those of doubt or skepticism play like nature over your joy-reliving face. Scumbling up the stairs in sock feet I like the restive, haunted quality of following our ghost’s trail, her tread a fact just as dense as a bear skull

found on an altar in a cave. The psychogeography of what we are reducible to language’s milk-teeth, dead letter of our time together read in the fillings, enamel and permeable mansions of dried speech.

John Luna is a biracial writer, artist and critic, whose practice includes poetry, visual art and critical writing as well as teaching in the areas of visual art and art history. He the recipient of a 2017 BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant for an ongoing project involving text and visual art. Publication of his written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared via Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, Train, Matrix, GUEST, Rattle open mic, and The Hamilton Review of Arts and Letters, among others. His first poetry collection, Listing, was released through Decoupage Publishing in 2015; a second book-length manuscript was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2017. He lives in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia.

Train : a journal of prose poems

Issue #3 : Simon Brown Carlie Blume Conyer Clayton Ariel Dawn Kate Feld Mike Ferguson M.W. Jaeggle Aaron Kreuter Amy LeBlanc John Luna Ian Martin rob mclennan Pearl Pirie Adam Strauss Erin Emily Ann Vance

A limited amount of copies will be available for free at the following locations:
Open Books: A Poem Emporium (Seattle WA), Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Brooklyn NY), knife| fork | book (Toronto ON) and Passages Bookshop (Portland OR).

Includes shipping

Canadian $4.00 CAD American $6.00 CAD International $8.00 CAD

Four-issue subscriptions are also available:

Includes shipping

Canadian $15.00 CAD American $21.00 CAD International $30.00 CAD

Simon Brown (1979) is a self-taught poet and interdisciplinary artist from the traditional territory of the Passamaquoddy nation (southwestern New Brunswick) currently based in rural Québec. His French and English texts have been presented in collaborative artworks, performances, collections and artist books, and in magazines such as Lemon Hound, Estuaire, Vallum, Poetry Is Dead, Watts, and The Blasted Tree. As a translator, he has adapted texts by Erin Robinsong, Angela Carr, Danielle LaFrance and Jacob Wren, among others. Recent collections include Grande poussière (with Maude Pilon, squint press, Montréal, 2017) and Outre-flaques (Vanloo, Marseille, 2018).

Carlie Blume is an emerging writer of fiction and poetry.  Her writing centres around deconstructing myths about sexuality, motherhood, and mental health. Her work has been featured in The Maynard, Loose Lips and Pulp Mag. She lives in Surrey and is currently working on her first collection of poetry, as well as a novel.

Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa based artist who aims to live with compassion, gratitude, and awe. Her most recent chapbooks are: Undergrowth (bird, buried press), Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press), and For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press). She released a collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still, in August 2018. Her work appears in ARC, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, The Maynard, Puddles of Sky Press, and others. She won Arc's 2017 Diana Brebner Prize, and writes reviews for Canthius. Her debut full length collection of poetry is forthcoming.

Ariel Dawn lives in Victoria, British Columbia. She spends her time writing, reading, and studying Tarot. Recent work appears in canthius, (parenthetical), Foxhole, Room, and is forthcoming in A Furious Hope anthology.

Kate Feld writes essays, poetry, short fiction and work that sits between forms. Her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including Hotel, The Stinging Fly and The Letters Page.

Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK and widely published in online magazines. His most recent print collection is the sonnets chapbook Precarious Real [Maquette Press, 2016] and he edited with Rupert Loydell the music poems anthology Yesterday’s Music Today [Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2015]. A retired English teacher, he co-authored the education text Writing Workshops [Cambridge University Press, 2015].

M.W. Jaeggle is a poet from Vancouver, currently living in Montreal. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, CV2, Existere, in the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific, and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize.

Aaron Kreuter is the author of the poetry book Arguments for Lawn Chairs (Guernica Editions, 2016), and the short story collection You and Me, Belonging (Tightrope Books, 2018). I have had my work appear in journals and magazines such as The Puritan, Grain, Arc, Poetry is Dead, The Temz Review, and other places.

Amy LeBlanc holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature and creative writing from the University of Calgary. She is currently non-fiction editor at filling Station magazine. Her work has appeared, or is scheduled to appear in Room, Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, and EVENT among others. Amy won the 2018 BrainStorm Poetry Contest for her poem 'Swell'. She is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Ladybird, Ladybird published with Anstruther Press in August 2018.

John Luna: I am a dual Canadian-American citizen born of Mexican + American expatriates. Besides writing, my practice is as a visual artist whose background includes painting, sculpture and installation, and a teacher working in the areas of art, design and art history. I currently reside on an island off of the west coast of N. America. Previous publication of written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, and Matrix, among others. A first collection of poems, Listing (Decoupage Publishing, 2015) was released through a small independent press with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. A second book-length manuscript was recently (2017) shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

Ian Martin is nobody's mom. Ian's work has appeared recently in where is the river, Bad Nudes, Plenitude Magazine, and Pretty Owl Poetry. Ian has published 4 chapbooks, most recently PLACES TO HIDE (Coven Editions, 2018) and YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO KEEP THIS UP FOREVER (AngelHousePress, 2018). When he's not writing, Ian develops small games and complains online. [http://ian-martin.net]

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 collections How the alphabet was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and the forthcoming Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2019) and A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019). 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

Pearl Pirie writes in Quebec's countryside. She has 3 trade collections, most recently, the pet radish, shrunken from Book*hug. http://www.pearlpirie.com

Adam Strauss lives in Louisville, KY.  He is the author of one full-length collection: For Days (BlazeVox). Most recently, poems of his appear in Fence, Interim, The Tiny, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Erin Emily Ann Vance’s work is forthcoming in Coffin Bell Journal, Augur, Post Ghost Press, and Bad Nudes. She is a contributing reader and writer for Awkward Mermaid Literary Magazine. A 2017 recipient of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize and a 2018 Finalist for the Alberta Magazine Awards in Fiction, she completed her MA in Creative Writing in August 2018, and will complete an MA in Folklore in 2020. Erin's debut novel, Advice for Amateur Beekeepers and Taxidermists will be published by Stonehouse Publishing in 2019.

An interview with John Luna

John Luna: I am a dual Canadian-American citizen born of Mexican + American expatriates. Besides writing, my practice is as a visual artist whose background includes painting, sculpture and installation, and a teacher working in the areas of art, design and art history. I currently reside on an island off of the west coast of N. America. Previous publication of written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, and Matrix, among others. A first collection of poems, Listing (Decoupage Publishing, 2015) was released through a small independent press with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. A second book-length manuscript was recently (2017) shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

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

Sometime in grade school… There was a huge making culture in our house… My mother was an etcher who also worked with puppets, wrote children’s stories, and made us toys. My father had been a painter and curator and also wrote poetry, fiction and entertained a host of unpublished research projects, and my sister drew pictures and wrote stories… This was a huge component of mutually sustained esteem for an underdog family. The will to prolong and preserve that culture is something that I have trouble framing and frankly don’t want to; it (that culture) is formless, or it formlessly asserts itself in the desire to continue to write.
  
Your author biography mentions your work in painting, sculpture and installation. Are you able to work on poetry at all during the creation of visual artwork? How are you able to keep the two separate?

You put your finger on something very difficult. I used to move back and forth between them, swearing one off… because the problem is the notion of an outlet, and that the enterprise has to seem like the only possible choice (outlet or escape or way of going forward) otherwise it succumbs to all kinds of limiting conventions. But fertile times for one are also (generally) good for the other, and I learned a lot about how to approach editing after years of problems by adopting tools or attitudes used in painting and collage or assemblage. One problem is my excusing a lack of studio time because writing has been happening, or vice versa, and knowing that this is just a sop for the drive.

I don’t know that I want these things to be separate (I can recall my Dad giving me Blake’s Dante to underscore the idea of doing/being both), but I know that they have, often, very different audiences. And I don’t want the product of both situations to point back to some notional person (the hybrid artist/author person) at all; something about the self-consciousness of this approach is repellant. I am in the midst of organizing a show right now of visual things that also includes writing, and the importance, the priority, is in maintaining a kind of incoherence between them as a way of addressing this problem. A parallel I am trying to address it is by having a study in the attic and a studio in the basement, so that this kind of Bachelardian (Poetics of Space) construct can supplant the idea of being both people. I like the idea of the house, with its naïve space, as generator…   

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

I studied poetry minimally in school (one creative writing class years ago), and kind of prize my amateurism, because thinking of the work as professionalized, conventionalized or academicized is something that was a tremendous grind for me in pursuing an MFA in painting and teaching art and art theory in colleges and in high school; It furnished me with a kind of place-identity and set of passcodes, but it also got to be an awful purgatory that I can only seem to work my way out of by working in less-formal teaching situations.

My mother’s library introduced me to Anne Sexton as a teenager, and the idea of this kind of confessional yet hysterically detached, dry irony was something I loved at that time (15? Later, I would pick up the threads of this through Eliot, Plath and Auden, in that order)…When I was seventeen there was a sort of punk rock t-shirt shop that sold t-shirts with Picasso’s sketch of Rimbaud on them. I asked my father who he was, and he reached into the shelf and handed me Louise Varèse’s translation of Une Saison En Enfer, and, as they say, nothing was the same. I guess there was kind of a teenage dandy cult I shared with in my neighborhood that included Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Eliot and around that time Artaud entered the picture… and a few years after (early 20’s) the hugely important (to me) in media res questioning of Rilke and related negative theology of Paul Celan.

Candidly: it took years to shake off the influence of reading poetry in translation, which was kind of problematic from the point of view of both developing a sense of rhythm and a tendency to valorize/exoticize European surrogate father figures… My father had grown up with a lot of racism trying to become an academic as a Mexican in Los Angeles, and spoke about five or six languages, sort of reinventing himself in European cultural terms and this rubbed off on me I suppose. He had the best poetry library I had ever seen, with lots of bilingual presentations of Hispanic authours, so I also read Lorca, Neruda and Vallejo; the latter was a favourite because I was attracted to his obscurity and use of neologism (Trilce).

Later interests were more of those same threads: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden and John Ashbery…I sort of credit this continuum of gay uncle-figures (a self-conscious one, I think, linking Crane to Auden to Ashbery and, relatedly, John Cage and the art of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly), a crew of ironized aesthetes, with providing safe passage out of the European problem while still preserving the stoic dandy problem, which is a thing I seem to need to read and use. Recently I have been reading older essays by Joan Didion in the same way.

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

My family was hugely supportive of the whole creative enterprise when I was young (my current family is a great help now), but the relationship to writing was/is at a remove, in part because those years with my parents were years in which the adolescent trope of writing as a form of privacy was the mainstay. But there really was no mentor figure in terms of writing, which probably led to the problem of literature-poisoning at a young age that then had to be grown out of, gradually. At times I’m glad about this, as I put some stock in the notion (from Harold Bloom) of the value of misreading something, and mentors transfer personality and some notion of coherence along with whatever encouragement or craft is delivered… I’m very wary of received information and feel a kind of repulsion towards passed-on lesson where creativity is concerned unless (as in some art teaching) they can be either grounded in the craft limits of a specific tradition or problematized by fundamental mysteries in the way that, for instance, the entropic character of art materials can problematize artmaking.

What are you currently working on?

There are two ongoing projects, both represented by publications in Train. One is a series of fourteen line “reading poems” that use the notion of a reading journal as a casting off point. These will be featured in some form in the exhibition I alluded to…

The second is a small book-length collection of rather dense prose poems (The Accords) whose names are all taken from or referring to commercial fragrances. Train published “(Rive Gauche Pour Homme Eau de Toilette (Discontinued)) in November, which was from this collection. This had originally formed the heart of a longer book that I entered for the Robert Kroetsch Award in 2017; after it was shortlisted but didn’t win, I broke the book up and began working on the parts… The other two pieces (a series of ekphrastic pieces based on galleries in New York, and a sort of negative confession by way of poems based on a suit of clothes) are still in limbo. I am still adding to and editing The Accords, which will be about fifty pages as a word document, but will be trying to find someone who wants to publish it soon, though I have to get over my discomfort with independent publishing houses that ask you to compare your work to other authours they represent as a way of disambiguating your practice, a request that frankly appalls me.

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

I think Nora Collen Fulton (someone I met here in BC, now residing in Montreal) is a chasteningly brilliant individual. I saw her reading from Life Experience Coolant some years ago and it was sort of that experience of just having the voice float as an icebound, room-clearing digestif that you always hope you’ll hear in your own work as you pick your way through the bits and pieces of work/doesn’t work and warm/cool/cold in a piece of writing. She will probably hate my mentioning this, and may already be receiving plenty of attention for all I know, but is it enough, and can it hurt?

(Rive Gauche Pour Homme Eau de Toilette (Discontinued))

John Luna
 

(I.)

The parents were the first body to move. Like a muscle with blood… this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, which was of course we few. Just calculating the ratios in the midst of their art was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. Your body will eventually require the grace of the rooms in which you conceived its lives.

Each time I go down into the basement to let out the dog, I leaf through the books, scanning Perrault’s “Bluebeard” or the cover of Greene’s Power and the Glory. Imagine how much harder it would be if blindfolded by history’s being perceived in a line rather than as a staircase ending at a sagging pocket door where the wind is seeping in. Picture dark corridors coated in dulled white lead enamel & the plastic muskiness of containers for another life’s long irony & their aura; each page a quatrain, the best, the cream, condensed like those yearbooks in navy sleeves.

Geranium tang sings an exhausted carpet dusted with debris: a face awaiting the razor’s skipping-cricket gait; grit-scaping, sagacious, dryly whistling oneself clean; the whole scene the thesis of The School of Athens flashed as diminishing returns towards the three-fold bathroom cabinet mirror, seamed in steam; smooth equivocation of truth and beauty advertised with praiseworthy virtù disclosed to squinting light lately rising from still pines beyond our drive.

Belted into vintage trench coat static-electrical field’s sweeping fall of leaves, Baroque gestures suggestive of crimes against time. Flip-flops, wishes in the days’ shadows under airplanes, picketed with symmetry; robins, hums. What a strange thing to happen to a little boy. Heredity is a long game… Somebody has to put up a stake, and somebody has to take care how it’s paced; lest the lesser is more the morrow. Familiar caricature and truth-telling citation are both important in this sense, as kind regards, best wishes and yours truly. And must it mean if a star nestles into a night like a field of rustling ferns, dry as a pill, resting on the pile of newly-laundered cotton sheet, or a breeze attaching itself to the crown of nail-studded suede, of a freshly buzzed, untroubled head?

Heavyweight the light between elements of doubt & sorcery mixed into Rothko’s suicide cocktail (outside: “yes” whispers of cars and trees, blurred & whirled.) Your unconscious life right now is informed by the movies: a veritable Valhalla of frozen-in-the-open fears, magazine flesh crawling over collaged moonscape floor: under the same night-light, blazing-white pillars of books bathed in sweat, pale parapets of lean and shadow; the strength of any dream being in the effective use of mixed metaphor commuted to thoughts in forespoken, doped-up prosody’s lore. In a mirror, for instance, you noted the writing on your mirror-right hand that read: “left handed gods”, the sign-off from a friend’s letter rendering protective blessing. The past will stay in the past, its aim is an imperfect tense. I’m going to ask you to stay out loud so I can live with myself. We are all so deep in dysfunction, a synthetic lubricant, in this particular winter transmission to be palpably endured by the generations in generous gradations, while the mirror-flexed eye of the shower knob stands as moving observer to my betraying and praying and ultimately staying, as though about to move away from something…fixedly contemplating… turned towards the past. And here we are (coming) back to where we stand; the knight always wins (cellphone message dings.)

(ii.)

If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt at all; become your own guardian. If there was another chance, the whole leftover game to play or one more day of conversations to mate, I’d glean. It could happen here, in the midst of the quiet summers you while away sweetly mapping, tracing, watching, reckoning – but won’t. The fridge crackles cool, consuming fuel. In the beginning, in the work-world of childhood-in-the-making, it was dark; picture people leaving the lights on in late summer evening. You can hear the lawn mowing sounds so you know it must still be warm; but these are means of egress, there are no machines to speak to this.

(But still, you know a Tuesday from a Saturday;) you are a natural as the absent-minded sky over the open-air theatre of asking why. See how much practice it takes the dog to wait out her silhouette on the floor? Gather up some laurels (would it kill you to try?) There, resting on the stove, see the tray for someone’s sick-day meal. Convalescence lasts and lasts, as some discomfort’s due, while a melancholy that never actually ceases getting started settles in to cause furniture to creak and the cat to stretch & shake. See now how with a freshly extinguished match held in your mouth, rolled over on the tongue and beginning to flake, you will taste the warmed wax from the candle knowing in your nose’s memory-banks what it objectively was, explained back by way of quoted soot & grit & bitter wood. Flowers flow uphill as we run from shadows as the sun’s carbonizing math melts pools of silver-grey snow between our worn-in hedge + house.

Erstwhile, you emerge in the doorway to ask if we are planning a vacation. My voice drops an octave, as this is the where and why of it, but idly. There are interesting things to pick out of the day’s accounts; so many to prolong conversation’s end until we’ve both become old men.

 

 

John Luna: I am a dual Canadian-American citizen born of Mexican + American expatriates. Besides writing, my practice is as a visual artist whose background includes painting, sculpture and installation, and a teacher working in the areas of art, design and art history. I currently reside on an island off of the west coast of N. America. Previous publication of written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, and Matrix, among others. A first collection of poems, Listing (Decoupage Publishing, 2015) was released through a small independent press with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. A second book-length manuscript was recently (2017) shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.