Untitled (Books for Women)

Julia Polyck-O’Neill

 

 

 

1.
I’ve been reading books for women
Hundreds of books for thousands of women in
the free libraries here 

domestic themes and light comedy. The covers
are mostly turquoise with inviting fonts.
They’re 

all best sellers. They all involve trauma and
death but somehow make this seem airy and
acceptable 

I take cold baths imagining my ugly tub as a
small swimming pool, and I’m a pale whale
sliding around 

mostly I’m on my phone. I drop it in the water at
least once, but the world has made phones
that withstand this, now 

at first I let all my body hair grow in like I’m a
heroine in a fairy tale, time stopped and the
grooming stopped 

I mean it didn’t matter anymore. 
There was no one to see. We might die. We are
mostly alone 

such a bizarre thing. I’m mourning the end of
my marriage, my mother’s illness, and instead
of 

the world marching on, time stopped,
And life stopped for everyone. Even movies
stopped 

we collectively rewatch films about pandemics,
first as an ironic gesture, then as a kind of
research, comparing 

fictions to the news. The news seems
to match, and this is oddly reassuring at a time
when everything shocks 

every day I go for two walks. One is longer,
taking me around the whole neighbourhood.
We map cats 

there is a house with four of them, but only
one is friendly, he purrs and rubs up. For a
while he is my only friend 

we think we know all the cats, but posters go
up to advertise that some are missing. Cats
I’ve never seen are missing.

 

  

 

JuliaPolyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is currently completing an interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation at Brock University, and is starting a SSHRC postdoc at York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology in 2021. She has published three poetry chapbooks with above/ground press.

 

An interview with Julia Polyck-O'Neill

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is a doctoral candidate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, where she is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative critical study of contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She has taught in art history and contemporary visual culture, and is currently a visiting lecturer and scholar in Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, Train, Where is the river, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, forthcoming 2018), and is co-editing a special issue of the journal Canadian Literature with Gregory Betts. Her debut chapbook, femme, was published in 2016 by above/ground press; her second, Everything will be taken away, also from above/ground, appeared this month.

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

I began writing quite young, as a form of rebellion and self-sustenance, which writing often is for young women growing up in small places, perhaps particularly in Northern Canada, where realities can be especially isolating. (I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon.) I found opportunities, which were thin on the ground, in a few institutional spaces to workshop my writing and to perform and publish, although my teachers tended to focus on my other creative talents, so I never learned to identify as a writer, but instead, as a visual artist and a member of the visual arts community, broadly. I rediscovered writing mainly by means of my academic voice. And so, I found myself performing and publishing from within a shifting academic subject position, and from a place of understanding myself and my voice as interdisciplinary, dynamic, and unfolding.

What keeps me going? There’s a dialogic quality to my writing, and I write in conversation with others. I find being the member of an expanding intersectional feminist community in Canada and the U.S. to be quite emotionally generative in ways that only writing and reading can satisfy. Recently, I’ve has the opportunity to work as a visiting lecturer and scholar in transnational American studies in Germany, at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, and I’ve found myself driven to write by solitude and alienation, and a longing to reunite with my communities in Canada, which oscillate between Vancouver and the Toronto area.

What was the process of putting together your first chapbook? Have you noticed a difference in how you approach writing poems now that you’ve published a chapbook?

My first chapbook was produced as part of a special series rob mclennan produced to commemorate “The Concept of Vancouver,” a Canadian studies conference I co-organized with Gregory Betts and Andrew McEwan that featured scholars, artists, activists, and poets. I had assembled a series of poems as a result of responding to a selection of critical posthumanist and other feminist texts, and receiving the invitation to put something together, I thought it might be interesting to see how it felt to see them published and out in the world. I’ve been surprised at the amount of support I’ve received in relation to releasing this little book, and it’s helped me establish a stronger and more sustained writing routine. I credit the sense of writing for and with a community in helping me develop as a writer. That shift from writing only for myself and my own thinking process, to writing with a sense of purpose has helped me to find a voice that in turn helps my academic writing; I feel more assertive, and I feel I have something to share with my audience. I feel the care and attention of the experimental poetry community.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Because my research project is so engaged with the poetics of specific poets, it’s inevitable that my work in theory and criticism and my creative project intersect significantly. My poetic work also engages directly with the work of others because of my often ‘uncreative’ method. To name a few influential poets in my academic life, I’d first gesture to the more obvious: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets; KSW poets, especially Lisa Robertson and Jeff Derksen. Oakland poets; Buffalo poets; Philadelphia poets. Transnational poets. There are also the less-obvious figures of the writerly conceptual artists whose manifestos, art writings, and autobiographical writings I reference in my recent work: Martha Rosler; Adrian Piper; Gillian Wearing. And then there are the philosophers whose work becomes increasingly poetic as I re-examine and turn it over it in my writing: Sara Ahmed; Rosi Braidotti; Hélène Cixous.

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

Consider first that the question of who and what has hindered my development as a writer would also make for a useful question, as least rhetorically. We should be turning our attention to the structural issues that discourage women and marginalized individuals from writing and publishing.

But yes, turning back to the actual question, those who make it easier and safer are of supreme importance. Mentorship has been tremendously important to the development of my work and identity. Certainly, Gregory Betts has helped me tremendously in feeling more comfortable publishing, and his continued support remains quite helpful in building international scholarly and writerly networks. Poet and published rob mclennan also figures prominently in my life as a kind of perpetual support system, not only in offering me opportunities to publish, but also in that he almost singlehandedly sustains a significant community of writers and readers. Poet Jeff Kirby is another person who helps foster and build community at their poetry-only bookshop, Knife Fork Book, in Kensington Market; the whole Toronto experimental scene seems to have undergone a facelift as a result of Kirby’s tireless efforts. I was lucky to read at the closing event for the initial space, just before I left for Germany.

My own emerging role as a mentor is also important to my work. I feel responsible to the students I’ve encouraged, as some of them are writing against all odds. I also do my best to nurture the work of other writers when I am given the opportunity. Writing can be a precarious, delicate affair for many.

What are you currently working on?

In an immediate sense, I am working on a second chapbook for above/ground, Everything will be taken away, which will be published in August this year as part of the press’ 25^th anniversary. I actually have two manuscripts I’m working on in tandem. I’m working on multiple projects in this way because I’ve started to think of my work in terms of seriality and thematic unity, largely because I’ve been enjoying tighter serial collections in my reading. In the longer term, I’m developing a full-length poetry manuscript that connects to my academic research, and explores poetics and visuality, particularly in terms of theories and philosophies of form, ontology, and materiality. And, of course, my dissertation.

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

This is a surprisingly challenging question to answer, in that there are so many talented poets I read whose work occupies a peripheral space in literary performance and publishing, and sometimes in the intersections between literary and academic publishing.

I’ll start with a poet whose work is increasingly important given recent events, and I’m under the impression that many would benefit from encountering: Heriberto Yépez, whose work challenges U.S. border politics and the concept of borders more broadly. I saw him give a paper at the 2016 Buffalo Poetics conference and have been following his work ever since.

Closer to home, I’d recommend encountering the work of Dana Claxton, an accomplished visual artist whose decolonial poetics challenge settler poetics. There are also several emerging voices to attend to, particularly Dominica Martinello, Klara du Plessis, and Noor Naga. And we should all be watching and supporting poet activist Rita Wong who is dedicating her time and energy to protecting the Peace River Valley from the Site C dam, bringing attention to the destruction of sacred land and its longstanding Indigenous communities.

Train : a journal of introduction

Issue #1 : Sean Braune MLA Chernoff nathan dueck Bhaswati Ghosh Canisia Lubrin Geoffrey Nilson Craig Santos Perez Julia Polyck-O’Neill Shazia Hafiz Ramji Rebecca Rustin Jared Schickling Aaron Tucker

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), the ottawa small press book fair, June 23, 2018 (Ottawa ON) and hamilton zineposium, July 8, 2018 (Hamilton ON).

includes shipping

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

Sean Braune’s first book of philosophy, Language Parasites: Of Phorontology, appeared in 2017 from Punctum Books. His poetry has appeared in ditch, The Puritan, Rampike, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. He has two poetry chapbooks out with above/ground press—the vitamins of an alphabet (2016) and The Cosmos (2018)—and a third forthcoming called Face Portraits and Author Cops. A chapbook of his creative writing has appeared from AngelHousePress called Story of Lilith (2017).

MLA Chernoff (@citation_bb) hopes this finds you well. They live a quiet life in “Toronto” (stinky, parasitic condotown) where they collect and care for erotic Minions™ figurines. MLA is a PhD candidate at The Neoliberal University of York University. Their first collection of pomes, delet this, was published by Hybrid Heaven in 2018. Please remember to hit like and subscribe. Best wishes xo xo

nathan dueck’s middle name is russel, which means his initials spell “nrd.” His parents tell him that nobody used that word when he was born, but dictionaries say otherwise. He is the author of king’s(mère) (Turnstone Press) and he’ll (Pedlar Press). His next poetry collection, A Very Special Episode, is forthcoming from Buckrider Books. 

Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction and nonfiction. She’s currently writing a non-fiction book on Delhi, India. Her work of translation from Bengali into English–My Days with Ramkinkar Baij–has been published by Niyogi Books. This work won her the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship for translation, as part of which she was a 2009 translator in residence at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Bhaswati’s writing has appeared in several literary journals, including Cargo Literary, The Maynard, Stonecoast Review, Pithead Chapel, Warscapes, Earthen Lamp Journal, Open Road review, and Coldnoon International Journal of Travel Writing. She has a background in journalism and writes for The Wire.

Bhaswati currently lives in Ontario, Canada with her husband. Her website is www.bhaswatighosh.com.

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, teacher and editor. She has an MFA from University of Guelph. Her debut collection of poems Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017) was named a CBC Best Book of the Year, finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award, Pat Lowther Award and Raymond Souster award.

Geoffrey Nilson is the author of In my ear continuously like a stream (above/ground, 2017), O (Swimmer's Group, 2017), and We Have to Watch (Quilliad, 2016). His poetry and prose has appeared in various publications including Coast Mountain Culture, CV2, Lemon Hound, PRISM international, and The Capilano Review. He is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and is currently at work on a collection of short fiction. 

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-editor of three anthologies and the author of four collections of poetry. He teaches at the University of Hawaiʻi, Manoa.

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is a doctoral candidate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, where she is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative critical study of contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She has taught in art history and contemporary visual culture in the department of Visual Arts at the Marilyn I. Walker School, and is currently a visiting lecturer in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), and The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, forthcoming 2018). Her debut chapbook, femme, was published in 2016 by above/ground press; a second above/ground chapbook is forthcoming in August 2018.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s first book, Port of Being, is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing in fall 2018. She is the author of the chapbook, Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017), and her poetry and fiction are forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and The Humber Literary Review, respectively. Shazia is an editor for Metatron Press and Canadian Women in the Literary Arts.

Rebecca Rustin is a freelance writer and translator in Montreal, QC, with poems in Prism and Pioneertown.

In addition to journal and ephemera pieces, Jared Schickling is the author of several BlazeVOX books, including The Mercury Poem (2017) and Province of Numb Errs (2016).  Other books include Needles of Itching Feathers (The Operating System, 2018); The Paranoid Reader: Essays, 2006-2012 (Furniture Press, 2014); Prospectus for a Stage (LRL Textile Series, 2014); Donald Trump and the Pocket Oracle (Moria Books, 2017); and Donald Trump in North Korea (2017).  He edited A Lyrebird: Selected Poems of Michael Farrell (BlazeVOX, 2017), and he edits Delete Press and The Mute Canary, publishers of poetry.  He lives in Lockport, NY. 

Aaron Tucker is the author of the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan). His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com). Currently, he is an uninvited guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teaching creative and academic writing. He will be beginning his doctorate as an Elia Scholar in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University.