The Garneau Review

issue one; edited by rob mclennan

The Garneau Review

issue one; edited by rob mclennan

rob mclennan Introduction: 5

poetry: Douglas Barbour Snapshot headlines: 7 Jenna Butler The Red Ghazals, Set One 12 Trisia Eddy Figure no. 13 13 Figure no.14 Figure no. 15 Moving from one to the next an unlikely luminary The first four stages spring crossword Lainna Lane east end conclusions 19 boomtown, a dispersal

Alice Major Baucis and Philemon 24 rob mclennan map of edmonton (saskatchewan drive) 26 Ben Murray still-lives with trees 28 Catherine Owen Interstice 8 29 Interstice 9 Interstice 12 Interstice 13 Paul Pearson Until I Have This From Your Lips 33 Christine Stewart bridge (from Propositions from under Mill Creek Bridge) 34 from bridge parts: four ruse and arrangement 36

non-fiction: Shawna Lemay Try 51 rob mclennan moveable (malleable) acts: an interview with Christine Stewart 60

author bios: 67

credits: 70

rob mclennan Introduction: The first issue of what became The Garneau Review came out of my nine months living in the City of Edmonton from the end of August, 2007 to the end of May, 2008, as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Living in Lord Strathcona’s neighbourhood, along the south shore of the North Saskatchewan River, just about everything I did in Edmonton existed in the direct line between my basement apartment in Allandale, my office in the Humanities Building, and the Garneau Pub in-between, named after my more immediate surroundings, after Métis Laurent Garneau who first homesteaded along what is now 109th Street. What do I know about Edmonton? A lot more than I did than when I first arrived. There was much that I already knew, and people as well, and much more I took back home when I left. But what do I then leave behind? The idea of the journal is simple enough, a variant of what I’d been doing the previous half-decade through my annual ottawater: Appearing roughly twice a year, each issue of The Garneau Review will be guest-edited, with the second issue to be edited by current-issue contributors Lainna Lane and Trisia Eddy, and the third by former Edmonton poet laureate Alice Major. With the focus on Edmonton poets and poetry, contributors will be exclusively selected from current and former residents of the City of Edmonton, showcasing and expanding what it means to be a writer in the city known as “Gateway to the North.” What do I know about Edmonton? Enough to know that I don’t know enough, that there is too much going on here for eastern Ontario me to mine alone. Enough to know that they know what they’re doing, and have done already for years, whether or not you’ve been paying attention. rob mclennan Ottawa, Ontario June 2009

poetry: Douglas Barbour Snapshot headlines: It's people they're infamous American disgust little context more acts conclusions bleak forget first systemic commentators sick premature command military abuse high-security acts under officers constantly know guards reports recently quoted concluded 'blatant, criminal' officer said systemic abuse photos terrible hearts took torture rule vicious cells torturers anywhere talk made empty but race must bear terrorism noted struggle simple scant indefinite invasion near-absolute opinion Bush's world no attention justified another conclusion consider 2002 news military interrogators

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extreme deprivation minor torture countries tortured someone's official job reports consistent public deaths have ruled pathologists but no explanation apparently now humiliated worldwide difference made connection disparity without moral imagination empathy abscence failure evident as moral acts bad villains universe but faces monstrous or you samples we people believe neighbours understand people no different my response evidence ordinary no one themselves denying ourselves stop every heart

(Wednesday May 5 2003) (taking one word per line from Dan Gardner's column, 'Just like you and me:

Disturbing truths in Iraqi PoW photos,' Edmonton Journal, May 4)

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bad hair snap: how tell what's hidden from the sun 'a paradoxical combination' the carefully pruned mustache & small beard black & white good vs evil tradition signs of or bristling white above tough mouth ing off 'to come and push' but who pushes back at 'shaggy haired' diplomacy a bypass op or ration as the oil slips down the drain (Edmonton August 3 2005)

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quick snap at the border lines drawn up to & stopped there where laws & power cite them into being 'two and a half days' or two & a half lifetimes the close but not the quick ness of such perusal so much of what crosses cross & fustian these days nights drawn even closer dilated pupils learn what an agreement to bet on or against the line where whatever gets across it's only money lonely money only (Wednesday August 17 2005)

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Snap (from snaps) that these photographs all ways political would remind us that war never does good any nor death how the darkness slow lies treacle flowing out from body by body across floors mud or fires take away flesh or steel walls no enemy sees or allows as if to signal something beyond words cant contain that long ago shadow burnt unsaid untold incised (Wednesday August 24 2005)

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Jenna Butler The Red Ghazals Set One I. A tentative first fall of snow. Already in the vacant lot, children examining dismembered lengths of Christmas trees. I watch you trot down the path to my car. Your wife’s outline on the curtains, thinking herself invisible. Sunset is not the same here, the bloodlight lost somewhere between highrises. His absence is what I cannot reconcile myself to. You creep in around the edges, insinuating yourself into memory. The weathered red barn is raided and probed. Underneath, nine faceless corpses planted like seeds. II. A barrel of silk scarves at the edge of the counter. Damp palms rummage, fistfuls of crimson. A muffled thump on the midnight glass. Thwarted darkness rattles at the panes. Afterechoes of a clandestine dinner: one plate shared, two glasses exchanged. The cold morning kitchen contracts around the oven. Bread dough in her hands gleams tumescent white. A breath of heat in the closed-in salon. The orchids are suspect, throats flushed with perfume.

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Trisia Eddy Figure no. 13 alone despite the presence of other warm body swells (we cant touch at least not thighs, biceps the brutal rise of groin bisecting belly , dividing that faint line still visible pulled multiple directions equations (relativity, for instance fail no energy only mass

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Figure no.14 hair, inevitably lies, invariably ingrown rounded bound reform(ed) small (and large fingers ply apart, seeking treasure to eat? combed daily groomed, soon to be clean , completely or better yet, gone (dissolved)

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Figure no. 15 canny, resilient broad-ended dishes cradle buses, bust loose flaccid placid when not in use, a mammary memory to be held supposition supports the distinct cleavage separating from clavicle making its way towards umbilical nostalgia, rejoined at the hip purses (lips not nearly deep enough to hold all it contains

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Moving from one to the next Deliberation of how to purge one’s system, eliminate a workshop in letting go, (releasing Bare skin, patched w/ rashes sidles along porcelain, stainless steel Towels are left in small piles, tend to wrap around ankles assuming their job undone As though revealing the raw course of nature head spinning, heart pounding a warning, really And under her breasts, the sour smell of pickles, or porcupines left over winter, found again in spring an unlikely luminary despite years of study, & manipulation the light of experience fails to penetrate. repeated attempts fall upon clouded glass, which rarely admits illumination. couldn’t function as a window if he tried

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The first four stages If I fingered your hair the way you needle my sleep, would you cry? The transition from your bed to mine is never smooth: you want the light on I don’t, you prefer music, I like the quiet dark silk a chocolate blue swelling my eyelids & drowning out the streetlamps You throw the covers off with your feet I huddle tremulous under the thinness of our sheets wails harbouring resentment, grasp fiercely close my hand on your belly festooned, a vine billowing with grapes the folding together of petals , in the absence of day

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spring crossword

wild fox cry

abandon greckel

pods between fence

rails leap take

baby rabbit bury

spring rush nestle

water beneath marry

grey fern broken

slides blackwing saddle

red bird hoofprint

literally cries built

despair murder decided

winter retreats slap

melts longing splendour

between toes

goose egg

reveals

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Lainna Lane east end conclusions “move swiftly in these snows, and leave no track” - Gwendolyn MacEwan i. a map held to movement an unrefined window of distilled spare fields, what open shadow is conviction is an occasional tactic not much out here just flecked eyes & for not knowing to look (ask can we lose ourselves the same way twice a bracelet once here in metallurge splinters , momentarily elbows drifting into sulfur lighted hollows deadends the significance escapes flickers us a wrong turn we are streets bent westward cornered ii. I want a scrambling perspective & the familiar sweetly yielding the made mistake right out of the mud & that you b/led just a little with all the difference in it

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iii. that left hand, deft clasps unravels me & what resonates bends the binding ,afterwards unmouthed longing & the porous fiction of wish fulfillment but this sky have you ever seen? from exterior edges without rockwarped river its my city & I barely (even bodies move the dreamed celestial wanders circulates & who is not the passenger ,wishing on what falls iv. how do you say it a flux textured suburb, scattered houses (constellations are riveted strange to their places without parallax how far are we really think of starlight, precise stillness is only an expectation

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v. sooner, air warmer strands slip on treads & the same curve again some other direction the dreamed runway visible then nothing what ghost theory explains & never more willing to risk failure elastic centre of a body meridian (the mean this what dark fields boomtown, a dispersal 1. warehouse padlock wrought steel cut low rain shears mail trucks flexible fence cossetting wooden magpie catches gleaming burlap dust cylinder scaffold yellow lenient hymen tagged diesel breeze depositing fluorescent eye weaves tabulated door opening noon shadows couple collapsing chokecherries full of little fingers

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2. utility shed slack peeling pallet jacket hinge flutters isosceles screen car bin slumping mood swing ramp plastic erosion rushes bitten shingles intimate coffee easement blots fresh tint news lifts trestle trenching cupola transitive spandrel skirt dampens soft illegal fringe turned in seeing evidence of fires 3. chain link cracked hook curl straw threaded vice base bracket collared humming electric knot weedy barb twisting gauged skin puckers truncated blood glint lassitudal carton peter jackson red pocked awning frieze sharpens stray aluminum dream instruction curbing switchback self storage partial cardboard box film buried in snow

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4. blue doorway skeletal strip wash sidewalk tensile snow stroller wheel whistles thunderbird coasting underbrush bottle lacquer fractures bootkick slippage winched grate release puddle exposure soffit drip deadbolt sticker condensing double rooftop favours amber candy oxide plastic doll collection oncoming traffic 5. fire escape metal tracery flung knee bent blue sky swept handrail lilts spraypaint savage dripping blackedge steps sheet hanging squared bone expletives holding cadence thins exit bulb sways elbow lock bolted bullet balcony slithering swim shadows high mimic landings spindle view two kinds of birds comma tails

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Alice Major Baucis and Philemon Transformation started first with him, the husband. Tangles and thickets grew inside his brain, as a bush, pruned hard after the glory of flowering, becomes a mesh of knobbed and stunted branches. Memories now a dry nest where no birds slept. Leaves sealed their stems at the approach of winter, green pigment drained to gold. And she could only watch in sorrow, unaware of what was growing in herself – burl and wormhole in her lungs, their smooth sponge gnarled by knot and whorl, canker and gall. The animal air leaving her at last on a May day. We laid a plume of lilac by her dead hand, and it seemed that she had become its perfume, her breath filling the city. Had become the scent of may-tree petals scattering a drift of bloom across the humble table in the yard, where we remembered. A fragrance he seemed to catch soon afterward, not knowing she was gone. This fact too huge and terrible to lay in the frail briar of his almost-wordless mind. But he was able, still, to ask Where’s Mary? one day, on a walk lifting his face like a small dog to a breeze, turning towards the scent’s kiss.

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She’s coming soon, we told him gently, not knowing then the gods spoke truth through us. He smiled and was content. Within another week of summer days his sealed-off leaf dropped to the ground. Our last gold gift as we are left. ‘We ask,’ said Philemon to the gods ‘that I should not live to see her tomb, nor she survive to bury me in mine.’ - Ovid What I will need to hold your ashes A nest of remembered heather forgotten by its bird. A doll’s house, walls thin as balsa wood, enameled with leaves and flowers alive in all the glowing shades of citrus and ocean. The brown glass of a whisky bottle, sullen, square-shouldered sarcophagus. A dented paint pot, crazed with disuse, layered in an archaeology of colours. The velvet casket of a music box – tinkling, twirling stage for a wobbling ballerina. Tiny screws loose. A teapot. A tea cup. A drawer of spoons. A crater on the moon.

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rob mclennan map of edmonton (saskatchewan drive) for andy weaver 1. a river that would snake a road as simple as it could , who else would down upon, a balcony don’t let the poem end or deep to burn 2. he asks the crow, instead the magpie lyric & staccato hop did the sun leave when then you left or moon was every snowflake hollow & bereft of moisture

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3. how green the cut of valley deep would enter, us & them when you were here & here the worst of sake goes suffering into an oily flame 4. this is spun out a curve on the last turn of rock on the line, on the breath held down there by some is this attention, or length that compels out the river out the endless drive

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Ben Murray still-lives with trees trees listen— hear them listen as they watch people fall and alight upon grass, people-piles clustering trunk and root trying not to look down, they do anyway, and on good days there are always the people, spread before them, at rest listening in, the trees catch rising thoughts and dreams in nets of leaves, releasing them reborn into the air people rise, oblivious to their new lightness, the heavy trunk leaned on layers wiser than before

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Catherine Owen Interstice 8 We were in the parking lot, just beyond a Fringe Fest tent where hundreds of well-heeled deviants were attending an S & M show, drinking beer a genus of the species itinerant had bought for us, Esti & Barbara-Jo, he a punk from Belgium with a blond floss of Mohawk, she a prairie escapee, innocent in braids and a Don't Look at Me shirt, the tramp a man called Dave who touched my knee like a question mark and exclaimed "Tabernac!" in an Edmontonian accent when he thought we'd stopped listening to him. Barbara-Jo rolled a joint tighter than a finger bone - "In Vancouver," she said, "there's four members of the middle class, and even they wouldn't speak to me." Esti laughed in agreement - "it's here that's home now, though even the punks they tell me to get a job!" "I gotta pizza back at my hotel," Dave marbled at me, my knee again an apple beneath his hand and then, "Tabernac!" as a storm cracked out of the dome, his cart plonked full of empties, lightning from everywhere, embossing us.

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Interstice 9 Stopping at the Hinton Husky on our way back to Edmonton in the sick-lemon smell of pulp mills, a truck stuffed with pigs not far from slaughter. Behind the silver grates, snouts screamed a thousand un-oiled brakes of terror, nostrils blasting open twin tunnels and the flesh that would be bacon, ham, pork, quivering pink & nauseous, swizzle tails stabbing at the apertures. The driver, with his portly hands, lifted the squeegee's blade from a bucket, and calmly, lumbering onto the tailgate, began to make each hay-sprayed partition shine.

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Interstice 12 All day, even the sky was snow, and by evening, having seen only one neighbour uselessly brandishing his massive shovel against the drifts, I took my restlessness to the car "drive me anywhere," I ordered, "where there's lights, people." Five minutes from home, strapped in the dust-coloured Thunderbird, BC still on its plates, a truck spurned a stop sign at 53rd and, gunning as it might have, in summer, past, didn't, tires swiveling on the velour, unsalted white of the road, us into its side, one ripe bang, metal fanning towards us as we spiraled into a ditch. And so I found myself depending on the benevolence of strangers: the woman in the Christmassy house who handed me a box of Kleenex like a chalice, the man at Mac's who didn't laugh when I limped in to call a cab, all ice in my West coast hoodie. O there were lights and there were people, "and so we have to be careful what we ask for," my mother was saying in my head, "because we just might get it, and not quite in the way that we thought." Her folded and catholic guilt a little cold god inside me.

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Interstice 13 No crow. Not one on the river Chunked between banks, not One on the poplars. Snow mounts in boulders Or slushes diesel-hued Over every white slash On the Ped-way Glosses over sullenly In egged mounds of ice. No crow And its raspy ballet At nightfall Only the uneludable beauty Of magpies Beautiful but o so prairies My west coast heart Like that sparrow Pecking hard at the windowsill For grain.

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Paul Pearson Until I Have This From Your Lips every lip has a mouth every mouth a face by face mouth by mouth Every lip has a girl every girl a day by day girl by girl every lip has a sound every sound a story by story sound by sound every lip has two every two a four two by four by two I'll build you a house to hold your days your face your lips every lip has a revelation every revelation a swelling belly every belly a baby I'll build you a house to hold your face your mouth I'll build you a house to hold your sound your story your word baby falling from your lips I'll build our baby a house when I hear the word from your mouth your lips

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Christine Stewart bridge (from Propositions from under Mill Creek Bridge)

Bridge is the first crisis of our forgetting. It is anxiety and it is war-logic. It is affiliation and negation. It loosens the water, rests upon the silent obelisk. The beginning of its wandering is history and its power. Everything belongs to the bridge, the glow of its agony, the annexation of its grasp Moribund, dead bridge, bridge of foam, bridge of letter, bridge of truck, bridge of pink transcendence. Radically outside bridge, bridge cuts from its pages; bridge is lost in its accomplice. We would like to mark the date of the bridge and its longing. With sticks we could carve 1962. From its un-readability we could trace an interpretation that we have hunted like animals in the authority of our design. From the bridge we would like the word tissue so that all it has written stretches lines across (filaments) of febrile desire. Bridge is a confession of infinite separation. It interrupts the body. It cites the desert, its vague estate. Did we formulate its reach or does it fashion ours on the obsessed page? An adolescence of locality, the nonplace of its rail: the bridge, the underbridge? Nothing beats and flourishes in the sand, under the weight of its road. The sands are the book. The book is the bridge. The sands are its absence. The bridge remains inaccessible, impenetrable.

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Divided. Everything it has lost, broken and discarded lies on the path below. An oblique rust is born. The bridge is the book, the crossing, and its infinity. How many bridges? How many books? From underneath, for the cold sleepers, from the worn stream, for the shopping carts, the bridge breaks the world open. It gives the impression of something fragmentary. But the bridge is whole. It is axiomatic. It has carvers of solitude, and wrists of foil. It is the light in the absence in which you read. It is the transition from the desert to the city; it is the limit in the habit of evening. There is an animality to its edges, in its gap from up here to down there that forms its calling and grief. It reaches writing and its desert. It stands on the edge of the city in the midst of the forest.

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from bridge parts: four ruse and arrangement

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descriptor echoic II FULCRUM the turn the arch the beak

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WEIGHT clinging white thing

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POWER urge matter to ram to marr or hurl fur beehive & seize do not raise the shade oscular sun eyes lie that retrieve where there is no no reason no leaf just dust over the low snow (no magnolia)

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HORIZONTAL LEVER a quickening duck back in an iron of quiet or oil ire of fire refinery peripheric clench driving in your car what makes you think your myth is [ ] enough

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ARCHIVOLT LEVER how holy it was how windy how the bridge arrayed in beautiful hues how the river rolled to the light of raven no raven

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ANGULAR LEVER the administration stopped the stream from interrupting forced hawk en route a ridge of privilege that wrote explicit who was it and who wasn’t the subject a river in the dust of a private valence asunder which illicit washed up in embedded rivulet offered it watched it sucked it

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RESTING PLATE a sharp lit car an un human coyote by cold tree

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STANCHEON the following ample: of thought in ruin a maple material waits its end simply by asking a lure put in part in place to soften nonetheless certain birds beneath breath

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OBELISK states of urgency to merge there is no future only here this now this bird whirr rail line through wood intersecting and points eroding

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TORSION For discussion of possible (although not certain) occurrence in a field name (fockynggroue) recorded in a Bristol charter of c1373 see R. COATES 'Fockynggroue in Bristol' in N. & Q. 252 (2007 ) 373-6. OED

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DECK BEAM The urged turgid mimic ligitates auton omy. exists existent intimate inter derelict bolic axe ic the toxic excrete paradox of an in sutured oil ethic

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DISSIPATE flattened grass lit under wood brownwater

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SPAN Span of small arcs each 150 00 Ditto to middle arc 194 10 width of arc 42 00 Curvature of middle 12 00 Ditto of small arcs 10 00 Curvature or rise 8 00 Height in clear Height in surface 13 00 Thickness 31 00 Length of ditto 62 00 Depth of water 41 00 The rock at west 21 00 Ditto at east 5 000 Floating 13 000 Floating

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CONDUIT spoon ditch spoon ditto erect itch peripatetic brattice lurch in wend end load

non-fiction: Shawna Lemay Try - I don’t know what a book is. No one knows. (Marguerite Duras) - the text needs the paper (Helene Cixous) Juan Ramon Jimenez said that “he hoped to create a Book so perfectly beautiful that it would return the universe to silence and oneness. One book, his Obra, the Work to end all Work! He thought of that book as an ideal world and of himself as its God.” What is the perfect book? How can all the elements, earth, air, fire, water, come together in text and book to create perfection? Or is failure inevitable? Benjamin speaks of the critic as alchemist working in the laboratory of failure. He says to do justice to Kafka, for example, “one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.” Failure is the element that connects the search for the philosopher’s stone and the quest for the perfect book. So is trying. As Samuel Beckett said in Worstward Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Failure itself just might be one of the many names of the materia prima, the formless void, the beforehand of the work. James Elkins says that in alchemy, “the materia prima was also imagined as a way-station between utter chaos and perfection.” Failure must be folded into the book that returns the universe to silence and oneness. Margeurite Duras says that “there is something exhilarating about successful, magnificent mistakes.” The exhilaration also goes into the crucible along with the failings. The writer knows that her very being goes into the crucible as well, and when she talks about the book, it is the physical book to which she refers. Duras says that in writing, she watches the book advance. It’s the physical book, that “grows, advances in directions one thought one had explored; that advances toward its own fate and the fate of its author, who is annihilated by its publication: her separation from it, the dream book…” The text, the writing, advances towards the fated material book, and the dream book advances toward the text. When they meet, (can they ever meet?) the author faces annihilation. * It has been said that authors do not write books, per se, but I’m not so sure this is true. Or, if it is true, the statement is too dismissive of the deep conversation that the writer engages in with the physical properties or component parts of the book. When I began writing poetry seriously, which is to say with some vague idea of an audience,

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another poet told me that the secret to writing a book was to think “book” in the back of your mind. It’s as though imagining the material object could close the gap between the ink of the book and the thoughts behind the type. In a poem called “Ink,” Jane Hirshfield describes the page warmed by ink and then says, “good ink has also its fragrance.” She goes on: “In itself ink is carrier, solvent, / and pigment to thought: / thought, entering ink.” In the books that we love, we do feel the author’s presence strongly, as strongly as if the author’s blood had indeed entered the ink. How to turn blood into ink? It’s an old metaphor, a cliché, that ink is blood. It can also be fire. In his book Absorbing Perfections, Moshe Idel says that according to the Kabbalists, the Torah is said to be written “On the white fire with the black fire.” The white fire, “though semantically meaningless, directly reflects the divine body.” It is “identical with the divine skin.” Paper as skin, ink as blood. The body of the author (divine or otherwise) and the body of the book exist in a unique tension to one another – a tension that is combustible. When the elements in paper meet the elements in ink, and combine with the energy of the text, transmutations occur that could be more fully explored. * The process of creating a text and the process of creating a book intersect so that there is a mysterious, nearly secret conversation that occurs between these two entities. A book is never just one thing. You may lose yourself, escape, into the text, but then when you “sail out of the story and back into yourself” as Thomas Wharton describes in Salamander, the book becomes “once again a fragile vessel of cloth and paper.” The reader experiences the text through that fragile vessel we call the book. In alchemy, the vessel functions at two levels – the practical and the spiritual. The vessel exists in a myriad of forms (pelicans, water baths, alembics, etc), though Adam McLean, author of a popular alchemy website, says that these can be simplified into “three archetypal forms – which we can call the crucible, the retort and the still.” McLean says that the alchemical vessel is a symbol of the soul. The work of alchemy according to McLean, must take place concurrently on many levels. These levels are, “the physical work with the substances, the experience and manipulation of etheric forces, the interior work on the soul, as well as the spiritual and planetary/cosmic aspects of alchemy.” What arcane and fragrant conversations take place in the alchemical vessel where the spiritual and physical, the text and book meet? Writers have often used the language of alchemy to describe the creative process, sometimes as a sort of transubstantiation of the soul or as a mystical whirling. We might also remember Keats’s idea of ‘negative capability.’ He said that the artist needs to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The alchemist, too, works in uncertainties, manipulating unknowns through the magic of trial and error.

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A book by the art historian and former painter James Elkins, titled What Painting Is, uses the language of alchemy to describe the process of painting, its trials and errors and sometimes magic. He says that the language of art history, the usual mode, does not speak to the muck and the muddy work of painting. He explores painting using the language of alchemy, because “it is the most developed language for thinking in substances and processes.” Later he describes how paint will overtake a painter’s atelier, and that it is a “necessary insanity.” Then he says, “Perhaps writers have insanities of paper, or of erasers, but they cannot compare with the multicoloured dementia caused by fluids and stone.” This is true, I suppose, they cannot quite compare. But writers, too, are obsessed with processes, and yes, I think many are obsessed with substances as well. I will speak of my own study, which is an insanity of paper, books, pens, ink. I sit in this room and attempt to turn myself into crystal, into that state I believe I must be in to produce the ever elusive, perfect poem. Sometimes I go so far as to imagine the perfect book. I sit in my red velvet crumbling armchair, surrounded by bookshelves. There are eight bookshelves, heaping with books. There are books on my desk, on the floor beside the desk. I have a silver metal box in which I keep bottles of ink (gold, sepia, black, silver), fountain pen cartridges (black, blue). I have a lavender, beaded, wire container I use to keep pens in. I’m particularly fond of a couple of drawing pens with their sepia and gray ink. I have several file boxes full of various sheets of handmade paper. And then there is printer paper. One package gray. One package ultra-white, 24 pound. Paper has always amazed me. The thinness of it – that sheer beauty. In a section of Wharton’s Salamander, called “The Paper-Thin Garden,” he speaks of “the world’s most expensive paper, Finest Tortoise.” The paper is “said to be fashioned of a blending of crushed hummingbird-egg shells, dragonfly wings, and the inner lining of wasp nests.” The price being prohibitive, the character asks for the next best thing, which is called “Breath-That-Folds.” A friend of mine living in Gabon, Africa, wrote me about sheets of paper that could be found at the market in Libreville, which is made with butterfly wings. She said that she was going to buy some for me but then thought it was too cruel, too morbid. But if I would like, she’d try to find the stall again at the market. It would be breathtaking, this paper, ( I want to call it Wings-That-Fly-Twice) and I do want some though I can’t seem to bring myself to write her back. There is something un-nerving about the thought of writing on a sheet of paper made up of butterfly corpses. But more un-nerving is the possibility that we could write on paper made of human remains. At a lecture given to a graduate class I attended on the subject of book history taught by Ted Bishop, Edmonton papermaker Evelyn David of Indigo Paperworks relates the story of a client who wanted to commission a run of paper that would include the ashes of a family member as part of the pulp. She declined. But her unease at even the thought of doing this was palpable, even years after being asked. As she spoke, I could feel my tongue thickening, and I pictured a film of black soot in my mouth. I brushed at my pants with my fingertips, as though trying to get the sticky, gray

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ashes from them. In the same lecture, David also spoke of pulping down a favourite pair of gray corduroy pants to make into paper. Of this process, she spoke lovingly. And it does seem lovely, to take the remains of an article of clothing that might have at one point seemed almost a second skin of sorts. In my mind though, these two stories, the story of the ash and the one of the gray corduroys, became irrationally connected. I drove home that night after the lecture, unconsolable, wondering if I would ever write on gray paper, which is my favourite colour of paper, again. * It’s true that there are bodies in books. I don’t just mean in murder-mystery books. Wharton, once again, talks about a book that “consists of nails, teeth, skin, tendon, marrow; of heart and lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys, stomach and intestines; of the fire of the breath and the wind of the bowels; of sweat, spittle, tears, mucus, urine, bile, lymph, oil of the joints, and fluids of generation.” The last page of such a book is “a page of bone.” Impossible though this seems, it also somehow feels right, this description. And it feels right beyond the metaphorical. In all my years working in libraries and withdrawing books from libraries, I have noted how the body enters books. At the beginning of my year at graduate school, I began a small collection of hair that I found in the books I was reading as research for a couple of term papers. I really had quite a skein of it, all colours and lengths piled up, and this was in the span of a couple of weeks. I had to stop, it became overwhelming. When I worked in a science library many years ago, we would take turns working the circulation desk, and doing the returns. I dreaded the returns. We were to flip through the books, looking for missing pages and the like and then report them. The books were greasy and oily from high circulation. They were discoloured. Mucous, hair, fingernails, bits of skin, and some really unmentionable stuff were found in these books. And maybe they contained also the salt of tears. There is a poem by Yehuda Amichai in which he imagines a letter being written at a small table on a hotel balcony. He says, “ ‘Tears / dry quickly here. This blot is a tear that / made the ink run.’ That’s how they used to write / in the last century. ‘I have drawn / a little circle around it’.” It’s possible to draw little circles around the places in a book where the body meets the text and is slightly altered, becomes another substance. * Salt, according to Elkins, has been identified with the materia prima. At the beginning of alchemical history, mercury was believed to be “the single matter required in the alchemical work.” But later, “salt became the primary principle.” Elkins quotes Johann Rudolph Glauber who says that “everything lives and grows and is sustained and increased in salt” and that “salt is the beginning and ending of every thing.” When human tears puddle their way onto and soak into the pages of a book, they leave the trace of salt, rejoining the material prima. The tears reconcile themselves to the beginning and ending of every thing.

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“That was a month of salt…” begins Moonlight into Marzipan, a novel by Sunetra Gupta. In a basement laboratory in Calcutta, Promothesh discovers how to turn gold into grass, thanks to a copper earring that “accidentally fell into the potion, and gave vital catalysis to the mysterious process.” The secret to feeding the masses, “making food from light” is the unreplicable result of the experiment. The earring that falls into the soupy broth belongs to Esha. This is the same Esha who runs “an inky hand through her hair” and whose memory of that morning of discovery, with its “whiteness of fierce sun, the sky a bed of dull salt” and “the acid smell of unformed paper building stealthily” is a memory that Promothesh recounts to his biographer. He gives his “many-laundered thoughts, yours to fold and crease, and even to dye, that the patches might be hidden in the flawed remembrance of a tropical blue…” Though he fails to replicate the experiment, Promothesh returns his thoughts, his alchemical notes, to the prima materia, in the form of his biography. The book is born not of the same alchemical broth as the secret recipe that feeds the world, but it is born concurrently. The paper and ink are invoked as the prima materia for the biographer, who will take the “churned out” impressions and “reshape” them and then “varnish and tie” them together into the life of the subject. The subject of the biography is created at the same time that the alchemical experiment succeeds. All the while, the scent of the unformed paper builds in the background. * When Yeats wrote of beginning again “in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” he invokes what Elkins calls the “squalor and refuse” of the materia prima. Significantly, the reference is to the raw material for paper. The materia prima, says Elkins is “not only a metaphor for the desperate impoverishment and loneliness of the first moments before creation, but it is also a literal embodiment of them.” When Yeats goes back to re-conceive his poetry, he goes back to the rags, back to the fabric, the materia prima of paper. Louis Hay in “Does ‘text’ Exist” reminds that the notion of text can be traced to “the monastic Middle Ages, when by the 13th century in all European languages the word textus, meaning fabric, became text with the present accepted meaning for that term.” He also says that “the ink on the page is not writing itself.” The text, for Hay, exists in a third dimension – it is neither the writing or the written word. He says that “it is impossible to separate categorically the act of writing from the written work. But likewise, it is impossible to confuse them one with the other.” But there is also something to be gained from seeing both the writing and the written work in a confusion. When we look backward “from the text to the manuscript” the space between is “full of discoveries and astonishments.” What happens when we draw circles around these moments of confusion? What designs hide in that lonely salt-residue of chaos? * A character in The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte talks about Alexandre Dumas’ use of paper in his manuscripts. He is asked “why blue paper?” and responds “ ‘He had it sent from Lille. It was made for him specially by a printer who was a great

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admirer. He almost always used this color, especially for the novels. Occasionally he used pale pink for his articles or yellow for poetry. He used several different pens, depending on the kind of thing he was writing. And he couldn’t stand blue ink’.” The ink on the page is not writing itself and the paper on which the words are written, likewise, are not the words. But the paper does have meaning, the ink does have meaning. As substances, they occupy the writing, they occupy the mind of the writer. * There is a book that I return to often called, Little Saint, by Hannah Green. Near the end of the story she tells how she has written the book, how the pages of the book came to be. I love this description and so I’ll quote from it at length, perhaps as a talisman, and maybe only because of my love for it. She says, I touch the papers and smooth the booklet Père André gave me earlier. Then I sit down at my table for a moment and pick up the pages I worked on last. They’re thickening and they have reached the stage where they begin to feel good – rumpled and curled at the edges. They have been written over with ink. I cross out, compress, correct, add things, and think of more things and write them, and type it all up again, over and over, often thinking of something more as I type. By now these pages are dense with the gray words of my typewriter and the blue-black words in ink. They are ready to join the rest of my manuscript to await a final typing, and I am ready to go on. Always I read, hearing it all, either in my head or really out loud – in the unself-conscious trance of work I am not aware which, it is just that I hear it. I listen, all in the process of trying to bring it to life and to get it right and make it evoke what I envision. When I read my copy of this book, with its smooth, creamy pages, its crisp and clear typeface (the font is Galliard), and the computer formatted margins, there is the sense that the rumpled and curled pages exist within, or behind this copy. The ghost of the process remains. The way that the author connects with the materials, ink, paper, type – transforms both the thoughts of the author and the material itself. * Elkins asks the question, “How do substances occupy the mind?” He’s referring in particular to paint, but in a similar vein, we could also ask, in what ways does the book – paper, thread, glue, ink, etc. – pull on the writer’s thoughts? Elkins goes so far to say that “substances not only occupy the mind, they become the mind.” He says that certain ecstatics confuse “ideas, spirits, and substances continuously.” These three are in constant flux. And flux itself, he says, “may be a thing.” * That flux is a thing unto itself is a thought that is not unfamiliar to those that study alchemy. That writers confuse idea, spirit, and substance is not a shocking revelation. But the thought that those people who make the material components of a book also work in a state of flux is less often investigated. In a book called, Meaning in Technology, Arnold Pacey relates the participatory tradition of alchemy to technological experience.

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He says that there are two aspects of this experience: “first, knowledge derived from the senses – touch, smell, and sight – and second, intuitive discovery of the kinds represented by the eureka effect or involving the sense of form.” Pacey describes workers at a pulp mill and paper-making plant with “an amazing range of craft skills.” He says “one man was in the habit of ‘sniffing and squeezing’ the pulp to judge its chlorine content, and another used the static electricity in his hair as a check on the amount of moisture in the environment.” This participatory mode of working suggests that some “vestige of alchemy remains in the way we practice technology.” My guess is that at every point in the creation of the physical book, a similar process occurs. In a book called Making Meaning, D. F. McKenzie quotes from a nineteenth-century typography manual which echoes what Pacey says about the papermakers. For the typographer, a knowledge of paper is very difficult to acquire. It takes a lot of study and experience to recognise at a glance its format when folded; the feel of a sheet, the weight of a ream; to know, by touch or the tip of your tongue, the quality and the amount of size used to give the sheets a smooth surface; its smell; whether it was made by grinding or pounding; whether it’s naturally white or bleached with acid; the quality of the pulp; what its chain-lines and laid-lines reveal of its whole manufacture; which country it came from, even the mill it was made in. This aspect of trial and error, and the use of the body and the senses to acquire knowledge, to test and to try, these are all processes that are compatible with alchemy. The producer of these elements has a connection to the substance that cannot be put into words, but is instead learned from the body. The trace of that learning is left in the substance itself. Alex McGuckin, an Edmonton bookbinder, has described the process of gold-tooling a leather binding. He applies saliva to the heated tool and the sound and sight of the sizzling spit tells him when it has reached the appropriate temperature. His intuition and his senses guide him, along with the knowledge he has acquired from repeated trial and error with the material and tools. Pressed into the gold and leather of the book is the trace of the bookbinder. * In the same way that Hay sees that the text can be traced backwards to a generative dimension, so too can the materials of the book be traced back to origins. In doing so, certain mysteries may be solved. In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a knowledge of the material book is essential to solving the mystery of the missing text. William says to Adso “this page is our only possible starting point in re-creating the nature of the mysterious book, and it’s only from the nature of that book that we will be able to infer the nature of the murderer.” Knowledge of the material and construction of the book in question are key. The book is made from linen, and so its pages will turn differently than the parchment to which the characters are accustomed. The monk-detectives also need to know that manuscripts have often been bound together in one

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volume. The killer’s weapon is, in part, the book itself, aided by the reader’s practice of reading the book, “moistening fingers with…tongue.” How the body meets the book in the act of reading matters. And the origins of the book matter as well. When Jorge, the mad librarian, finally resorts to destroying the book, he begins by eating the book. Because the pages are linen, he is able to tear “to strips and shreds the limp pages” and he “stuff[s] them into his mouth, slowly swallowing as if he were consuming the host and he wanted to make it flesh of his flesh.” But the book must make one more transubstantiation. The book changes from murder weapon, to flesh, and finally to the element of fire, which is as Lyndy Abraham puts it in A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, the “purest, most worthy element of all.” * Alchemy, says Abraham, “is known as the art of fire.” Fire in alchemy is twofold. There is the “secret fire” which “lies hidden in the alchemist’s raw matter (‘gold’)” and this “is stirred into action by the application of the outer material fire.” When books bursts into flames in literary works like The Bookman’s Wake or The Name of the Rose, along with a certain horror, I also feel a joy. A wild satisfaction. The secret fire of each burning book has become stirred into action, the purest element revealed, released. * In Three Steps on the Ladder to Writing by Helene Cixous. there is a certain passage that recounts the story of writers who themselves were burned. The writer of one of my favourite books of all (The Stream of Life), Clarice Lispector had “only escaped being burned alive ten years before she did eventually die. She was seriously burnt, her bed caught fire, and she was saved at the last moment by her son, but her hands were badly burned and she could no longer write by hand.” The other writer Cixous talks about is Ingeborg Bachman, whose bedroom and bathroom “they say, suddenly burst into flames, and she died.” The implication is that it is the act of writing itself which brought on the flames. The writer reached the point of discovering the inner secret fire. The outer flames complied, were inevitable. Cixous says that Lispector and Bachman “died of writing because they went so far toward approaching what is forbidden, so near what Kafka called the fire, that they actually caught fire.” It is as if these writers passed a horrible test, some holy ritual of purification. * Booksellers test their books in an unusual manner to see if they have the inner fire. Many years ago I worked at a bookstore called The Book Company. The method of cleaning books – getting rid of the gummy residue from price stickers and removing fingerprints on glossy books – is to apply lighter fluid with a soft cloth. I remember pulling books one afternoon for returns – books which haven’t sold within the approved period that get shipped back to the publisher. Exhausted, I sat on a chair before the overflowing trolley of books which I had just wiped down, thinking – now! it’s your last chance, burst into flames! But alas, they did not.

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* “In this world of ours,” says Jimenez, “we must burn completely. Each of us must resolve himself completely in the flames, in the resolution that belongs to him alone.” For Jimenez, “poetry and perfection are always becoming…” and “an impossible goal creates a possible path.” The goal is impossible, whether philosopher’s stone or perfect book. There are, though, possible paths, burning paths. What is the perfect book? Does it cast a red glow as some believe the philosopher’s stone casts? Is the perfect book another name for philosopher’s stone? It would fit nicely into the list of alternative names that Abraham cites: “elixir, tincture, medicine, panacea, balsam, Arcanum, quintessence, tree, rose, lily, hyacinth, east, morning, living fountain, white stone, red stone, ruby, crystal, diamond, sapphire, Adam, paradise, Sophia, hermaphrodite, man, red king, red lion” etc. The Stone, says Abraham, “is composed of body, soul and spirit.” This must be true as well of the perfect book. I believe in this book, even though, as a character in John Dunning’s The Bookman’s Wake says, “there’s no such thing as a perfect book.” I believe in the quest, in that state of becoming, which is itself the path. Why not, as one of the desert fathers once said, why not be totally changed into fire? I have come to believe that the perfect book is perfect in every respect. It records the most beautiful, fiery text in a book made of paper called Breath-That-Folds, its ink is made from black tears of the purest thought. The cover has been embossed with gold that turns into grass and feeds its starving guests. Is the paratext of the perfect book perfect too? Let us demand of this impossible book a dazzling preface, a jewelled table of contents, balsam scented reviews, a crystal title: Try.

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moveable (malleable) acts: an interview with Christine Stewart this interview was conducted over email by rob mclennan from January to September 2008 CHRISTINE ANNE STEWART is from Vancouver and currently writes and teaches experimental poetry and poetics in the English and Film Department at the University of Alberta. She is researching the work of experimental women poets in Canada, and exploring alternative forms of scholarly analysis. She is interested in poetics and philosophies of agency and identity, and the production of previously unexpressed subjectivities in contemporary poetry, film, fiction, and non-fiction. Chapbooks: Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge (Virgin Press 2007). The Trees of Periphery. Edmonton AB: above/ground press, 2007. Pessoa's July: or the months of astonishments.Vancouver, B.C.: Nomados Press. 2006. From Taxonomy. Sheffield, England: West House Press, 2003. Daddy Clean Head. Vancouver, B.C.: Lumpe Presse, 2000. A Travel Narrative. Hamilton, Ontario: Berkeley Horse, 1994. The Barscheit Horse [with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang]. Hamilton, Ontario: Berkeley Horse, 1993. Selected Publications: "What Architecures of Urgency do you Raise? And then Raze?" with Nathalie (Nathanaël) Stephens. from After Alberta (II). Bookthug. 2008. "Reading Steve McCaffery: Seven Pages Missing." co-authored with Edward Byrne. The Poetic Front. 2008. “Urging Surface,” Capilano Review. 3.5. Special Issue. 2008. "This Then Would Be The Conversation: Susan Clark, Lisa Robertson, Nancy Shaw, Catriona Strang and Melissa Wolsak.” Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada. Ed. Nate Dorward. The Gig Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2008. "Sounding Some Poems: Derek Beaulieu's Fractal Economies, Sharon Thesen's The Good Bacteria and Ken Babstock's Airstream Land Yacht." Canadian Literature. 2007. "We Lunch Nevertheless among Reinvention." Chicago Review. 51:4 & 52:1. Spring 2006. 65-70. “State Sentences." ONSETS: a breviary (synopticon) of poems. Toronto, Ontario. The Gig Press. Spring, 2004. (np). "Trees of Periphery." The Gig 17 (2004). 7-14. "St. Augustine." How2 (2003). "Taxonomy (2000). " Particularizing, Historicizing and Ideologizing: A Review of Megan Simpson’s Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language Oriented Writing and Peter Jaeger’s ABC of reading TRG." Canadian Literature 176 (2003): 188-189. "Busted (Inc.) 2001: In Which a New Civic is Guided—An Afterword." Busted. By Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang. Toronto: Coach House, 2001. 108-111. "Au Coeur du Litige." liner notes for Francois Houle's CD, Au Coeur du Litige (Spool, 2000)." How2 (2001): "Jack." (Letters to Jack Spicer). Raddle Moon 18. (1999). 65-80. "Biographia." Raddle Moon 17. (1998). 5-16. "Primativera." [with Lisa Robertson]. Big Allis 8 (1998). 71-72. "Clamorous." Raddle Moon 17 (1998). 5-16. "St. Augustine." Matrix 50. (1997). 53. "Barscheit Nation." [with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang]. Exact Change Yearbook 1. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Boston: Exact Change, 1995. [Published in the UK by Carcanet, 1995). 123. "Taxonomy" [excerpt]. Exact Change Yearbook 1. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Boston: Exact Change, 1995. [Published in the UK by Carcanet], 1995. 127-128. "Taxonomy" [excerpt]. Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry 1993-1994. Ed. Douglas Messerli. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon

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Press, 1995. 157. "Barscheit Nation." [with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang]. Semiotext(e) Canadas. Ed. Jordon Zinovich. NewYork: Autonmedia,1994. 90. Theses: PhD. English—Aroused by unreadable questions: Vico, Spinoza and the Poetry of Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang. University of British Columbia. 2005, MA. English. Thesis. Nightwood: Nightwood—metonymy and melancholy in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. University of British Columbia.1996. rob mclennan: I’m wondering when you were first aware of “writing” and wanting to put words on paper; what first made you write? Christine Stewart: I got your question and the new interviews. Could we contextualize this interview? Considering we have done one last term (however brief). Can we set out the reason why you want to do another one? And can that be part of the interview so that this becomes a process through which both of us are thinking about writing. Can I interview you back? Because when I read this question, I want to ask you a question. I want to ask you why you are asking me this question. I appreciate the concern, the interest. I just wonder about these questions. This one sounds a lot like the one that begins your 12 and 20 series. Is that really what you want to know? If so why? From what I can remember it (writing) had something to do with the stillness of the blank page. The gorgeous texture of books and pages and paper. I liked the notebooks we got at school: half blank, half lined—texture and time. But so what? That is my question to your question. Why does any of this matter? It isn't clear to me that it does beyond some kind of personal record or archive. It doesn't really help us understand, organize the confusions we're dealt on a daily basis. Could we widen the questions? Place them in some context? What do you think? rm: I think that’s a great idea, but what exactly are you thinking? Why am I asking these questions in the first place? If I’m going to find out about what you’ve done recently and are working on currently, isn’t the only place to really begin at the beginning? Writing is essentially a private act made public; I know you might argue that you haven’t really made too much of your writing public yet, but what made you bring your writing first out into the world? Your earliest publication listed in your bio is 1993; what took you from writing privately to making it more public? CS: I don't think that writing is a private act. Maybe I did once, but I haven't for years. I don't know, maybe I never did. Words are not private— anonymous, used and re-used. Nothing private about them. Nothing private about the page. The reader is there, always. Even in the face of blank page. I don't remember the first piece I got published. It was earlier than 1993. There was a small man in Calgary last month who asked me to sign a 1987 Dandelion that had a piece of mine in it. A visual piece. I think it must have been something I did at that Red Deer workshop I did with Fred Wah hundreds of years ago. Catriona has this absolutely great picture of Fred flying a kite from

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the same summer, same workshop. Only she did the publishing week. That was the summer just before bp died. I met bp for the first time that summer. That was a gift. Why did I start publishing? Because I liked the way the envelope felt when it was full of pages, the stamps stuck on, putting the full envelope in a mailbox. Mostly now you send stuff in by email. But either way the published work feels odd. Once the work is down on the page, the textures, the ink, the possibility, everything is smoothed out, stilled and shiny. I don't know. Somehow I’m not as interested in the work as much once it's published. Though the grittier the paper, the more textured the actual paper, the more tangible and cracked the ink on the page, the better I feel. The more comfortable the work feels, the less "finished." As if it might just go on somewhere on its own. I think that is why I still like from Taxonomy. It feels nicely rough, etched and lumpy. rm: I know that “small man” in Calgary; he asked the same of me in the fall of 2006, when I did a reading there. I’m very intrigued by the idea of writing not being a private act; why do you think so? You seem to be uncomfortable with “finished,” something we’ve talked about before. What is it about the process that keeps any piece of writing from being finished? Even when you read at the Olive Reading Series last fall here in Edmonton, you had already rewritten the chapbook produced for the event, reading an altered text from what was being handed out. I’m very interested in this impulse; do you consider your poems unfinished or simply ongoing? Do you feel the same way about your critical writing? You would have been in your mid-twenties during that Red Deer workshop; how did you arrive there from being a young writer in Vancouver? What do you think you learned from Fred Wah and/or bpNichol during that period, and how much of those considerations have changed or shifted over the years since? CS: I think I already explained why I don’t think writing is private. Words aren’t so how could writing be? A word, you never know where it has been, what orifice its been shoved up and in. I like that about them. And they aren’t mine. As for finishing. I don’t know. I guess the idea that anything could still happen is stilled in the finishing and I would rather it didn’t stop. Take the magpie nest outside my window, for example. I liked it better when they had just started it. It was so exciting, this bird at the window with a big fat branch in its beak. I had no idea what the nest would be like and it was still bloody cold and even snowing. Now the nest is about done. It’s dome shaped like a beehive or a wasp nest and now they kind of just hang around guarding it. Liz says that once the eggs are laid and hatched the parents seal the nest off and just shove food in at the babies through the small holes in the dome. Crazy. Magpies are wild and something Precambrian too. They were here with the buffalo. Do I feel the same way about my critical writing? Yes. When I handed in my thesis I thought, okay now I think I know what I have been trying to do. I wanted to take it back

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and rewrite the whole thing. All three hundred and some bloody pages. And I mean that literally—the bloody pages. Blood everywhere. Theses are like that. How did I get to Red Deer? I don’t know. I can’t remember. In a VW van. I had two little kids and my partner at the time came with me. He looked after the kids all day while I did the workshop. Thanks for that. And there was a rainstorm that whole week. A rain warning. And we camped right along the Red Deer River and everyone at the workshop joked about us being washed away. And we almost were. But the workshop was really something—to have the time, the space, the feedback, the support. I was very interested in visual work then. So I had these huge tables to work on with good paper and time and pens and light and time. It was good. And people to talk to, to bounce ideas off of. It was great to be around Fred and bp because they were so present and had such a good time together. And bp talked a lot about “heavy text” and “eye ball treats” so I worked with that. Did some visual pieces. Catriona’s got one on her wall— “Heavy Text.” But what did I learn from them? That it mattered. That writing, what we did, that it mattered. rm: You make writing, for you, sound like a very physical act; is it? As well, what were you reading around the time you were in Red Deer that made an influence on you and your work? Who else was around you at the time? You were in Vancouver with a partner and two small children, and interacting with Catriona Strang; were you already interacting with Lisa Robertson, Nancy Shaw and/or any other parts of the Koontenay School of Writing? What impact did any of those relationships make on you? And how did The Barscheit Horse get written and published? CS: I am in the airport and don’t have your questions—I can’t get on line. Interesting cab ride here. The cab driver had a twitch of sorts so the car sped up and slowed down intermittently. He was also a keen supporter of capital punishment. Did you return that library book? Okay. I remember you asking about Vancouver, Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang. And yes, they were there. That was 21 years ago now. And they still are. Around. Very much. As influence it is hard to say how exactly and certainly impossible to say how much. Immeasurable. Just that they and their work is something I continually attend to, speak to. That moves me beyond measure. They are part of the world I write with, write to, write for. Barscheit. The small, what? What would you call it? I don’t know. A guerrilla thing. Stapled, legal sized and mailed out. When was the first one out? I can’t remember. One was made on my kitchen table, cutting and pasting. Kids everywhere. Catriona has a great eye, could eyeball a page design, could paste without a second’s hesitation. It was fun, hectic and intense. I was always peripheral. Always had the kids and school and a million unavoidable realities to contend with. Not that Cat and Lisa didn’t. But they were single, at school at the time. Different realities. But they were committed to making sure that I could be part of it. Once they brought Maggie O’Sullivan over and we talked about ponds. It was one of those green voluptuous Vancouver days. I lived out in the woods in Family Housing at UBC. It was Spring. And the two of them, Cat and Lisa, were an amazing and audacious team. A million ideas a second. Jumping up and down. And the manifesto. That was at kitchen table too. We had a lot of fun—but it was also urgent you know. It mattered. I can’t remember what else you asked. But this is a start. Or a finish.

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rm: During your reading at the Edmonton launch of The Peter F. Yacht Club in October, 2007, you talked about your work moving from definition to description. What precipitated this move, and what did you mean by that? CS: It's interesting that you should ask this question now. I have just sent off a piece called "descriptor echoic". I liked the word descriptor because it had something of "raptor" in it. Something rapacious. Earlier, I was interested in definition, particularly while I was working on from Taxonomy. I was asking various questions. What was it to define? Why do we endlessly define? What kind of madness is it, as Locke suggests. And what kind of violence do we bring to the matter by bringing it to definition. What is? How is it? How have we made what is? Verum factum. That is Giambattista Vico. The truth is made. And for Vico, the truth is made by humans through language. In Taxonomy, I wanted to play around with the hyper rational scientific project of definition, the search for the correct box into which we can stuff the messy, seething excessive matter of the world. The project of using language as a tool to create the correct box. Taxonomies were essential to certain social projects that took place during the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment. World domination, slavery, imperialism, to name a few. How to define what is good, who is right , what is of value, what is human, what is subhuman. We are born into taxonomies. The world has been carved up into strange and dire patterns as a result. In writing Taxonomy I wondered what would happen if we dissolved this practice into itself by practicing it ludicrous. After I moved to Edmonton, I became interested in my immediate environment in an extreme and agitated way. It was strange to me. In such strangeness I was a stranger to myself. I felt removed from the ground I walked on. I felt removed from whatever self I had previously been. I observed my environment in a way that I perhaps never have before. I needed to describe what I observed. I needed to address this anxious estrangement. I needed to watch the way language works when we bring it tremulous towards the material world. How our own distance from or our closeness to the material world forms what we see, what we don’t see. I have a project that I am working on that is an extension of this. The project has to do with an underbridge and it began with a bike ride I took everyday under Mill Creek Bridge. I began to acutely observe this underbridge space. I had to. It was a space that I was forced to encounter and one that accentuated my own estrangement by virtue of its extreme strangeness. The world under a bridge is an alien world, a non-place. Dry and arid with garbage and dust. And yet, also a place of shelter and transition. The stream runs under the bridge. Homeless people sleep on the concrete ledges. Thistles grow there. Dogs and people walk the path. Coyotes wait under the trees on the far side. Those big swollen trucks that people like to drive here roll overhead. What I have now come to observe is that way wordswork with the worlds we inhabit. I have noted that description can (like definition) devour. How might I observe that consumption without consuming? How might I watch the space where language meets and interacts with the material world from a wider more generous context? What dust is there? What does that dust transform, What metamorphoses? In "descriptor echoic" I wrote a series of haikus, each day focusing on the same place under the bridge, early in the morning on my way to work. I worked in the time

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and matter of what I saw . I was interested in a quotation from the indigenous Canadian writer Daniel Day Moses, "my work collapsed into bare description." What would that mean? Can description ever be bare? What would such a collapse look like? Can we ever actually document a real thing? Yes and no. What "descriptor echoic" signifies for me is that the answer is yes and no. Yes the world is there and we and our words are in and of it (comprised and comprising) and yet we are also deeply, dangerously, stupidly entangled in it and estranged from it. Strange citizens. This is our grief and our art, our consciousness, our violence and our degradation. It seems to me now that to describe and to observe description in its description and repetition is to observe this practice of making and unmaking the world, this linguistic site of interaction, this underbridge, the dark and light edge of it, dust and stream where the matter of the world and humans meet, sweet, dangerous, ravaged, tenuous. And perhaps to stay there, to hover in that place, to step attentive and continually there. Maybe a different description or perhaps its collapse might constitute us as different citizens, wider ones (metaphysically speaking)—but who might require smaller trucks. rm: I remember you mentioning, at one point, wanting to work on your Mill Creek project with a visual artist. Have you attempted to work with visual artists before, and why do you want to specifically for this piece? CS: I have never worked with a visual artist before. I don’t know if I will for this present Bridge project. It might be interesting though. I have worked with visuals in my texts. For example, in from Taxonomy—I used old engravings from a 1936 Webster's Dictionary. Why? Because in that case it pushed the idea of categorization further. Because I love the engravings. Because to work with ink engravings like those reminded me that the written word is ink on a page. Derek Beaulieu whacks this over his reader's heads so nicely. By virtue of his ink work he challenges what it means to be a writer, a reader. For me and with this present project (concerned as it is with description) the visual is very present. What are the links between the seen and the text? Is the text less visual than a picture? I don’t know. Can we escape language with words or seeing with pictures? I don’t know. Somehow I'd like to. rm: Do you think that's even possible? It's one of those funny things I think so many writers refuse or fail to realize, that text is essentially a visual medium. You talk about moving to Edmonton and starting this brand new project based there. Do you think geography has any affect on writing, or is this a project you could easily have started, say, by moving to a particular part of Vancouver? Just how has your first year in Edmonton affected what you do, or has it at all? CS: Did moving to Edmonton have an impact on my writing? That's it, right? Sure. Of course. The phenomenology of experience and description became very interesting to me because I was exposed to this place. What is it to experience space when you have little of

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the comfortable to buffer your perceptions? How can we word a state of defamiliarization? And initially there was an odd terror. Of everything. The men who sleep under the ledge under the bridge. The cold grey trees. The flat light. I think in some ways this response had a lot to do with being female. Not knowing which spaces were safe. A skin turned inside out fear and attentiveness. Perception was way too much with me, or something. Apprehension a sharp overload. The huge sky. That flat land. The trucks. The permeable air. Like Vico's Giants who have just heard the thunder for the first time, this terror was of the strangeness of the presence of a profound absence. And isn’t that language? A terrific sign of nothing and everything? And that was Edmonton? Is that what I am saying? That Edmonton is language? Or maybe that Edmonton allowed me to watch the whole and hollow that is language. Which suggests that Edmonton could have been anywhere. Anywhere that wasn’t where I had been. And so then what? How does one inhabit this space? I became very interested in this. In writing this odd space. How to describe in words this linguistic moment of everything and nothing. And the enormous responsibility of being in a space formed and ravaged by words and persons. The underbridge shifted what I thought I knew. And how I knew it. Maybe at this time, in those first few months of Edmonton I was a just post-Giant. Stupid and hewing out time and space for other meanings, wider relations. And so I started to hang out under the bridge. Like a troll. A post-giant troll. And I still do. And so there I answered your questions and it’s your turn. What do you think language is? What is our/your responsibility to it? And what is your relationship to the comma? How do you see it? Why do you use it the way you do? Often and I think always offset. Is this, as Hejinian notes about Creeley, an ethical positioning? You did not answer my question about commas and i think that would be a nice end to our conversation.

author bios: Douglas Barbour is like perspicacity; always in the last place you look. He is a poet, critic, and reviewer, is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alberta, where he has taught creative writing, poetry, Canadian literature, twentieth century poetry and poetics, and science fiction and fantasy. Books of poetry include Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour (NeWest Press 1984), which won Alberta's Stephan Stephannson Award for poetry, and Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdc press 1989). More recently, Fragmenting Body etc. (NeWest Press 2000), Breath Takes (Wolsak & Wynn 2002), A Flame on the Spanish Stairs (greenboathouse books 2003), and Continuations, with Sheila E. Murphy (University of Alberta Press 2006). Critical works include Daphne Marlatt and Her Works, John Newlove and His Works, bpNichol and His Works (ECW Press 1992), and Michael Ondaatje (Twayne Publishers 1993). Lyric/Anti-lyric: essays on contemporary poetry appeared from NeWest Press in 2001. Transformations of Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English appeared from Adam Marszalek in Poland in 2005. Essays have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States, Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, Denmark. He has delivered papers at conferences on Canadian Studies and modern poetry, in Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Scotland, and, of course, Canada. He was inaugurated into the City of Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2003. His chapbook WEDNESDAYS appeared in above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES. Jenna Butler makes her home in Edmonton, Alberta, where she is a teacher, editor, and book reviewer. She divides her time between Canada and England in order to remain active in both literary communities, to teach, and to promote the international work of Rubicon Press. She is the author of three short collections of poetry, Forcing Bloom (published through above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES), weather, and Winter Ballast, in addition to an upcoming full-length collection from NeWest Press, aphelion. Trisia Eddy lives and writes in and around Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has been broadcast on radio, and has appeared both online and in print, most recently with ditchpoetry.com, Perspectives Magazine, Existere, and fait accomplit. She is the founding editor of red nettle press, which released her chapbook, what if there's no weather, in 2007. An upcoming series of red nettle poets is set to be released in 2008. rednettlepress.ca Lainna Lane has lived in Ottawa, Vancouver, and most recently Edmonton where she is very slowly completing her English and Comparative Literature degree at the University of Alberta. She finances this by working in an office tower guarded by peregrines. When not in office or school she enjoys traveling, working at Other Voices literary magazine, playing dodgeball, and mixing a mean mint julep. She has one publication in last year's student edition of the Olive Reading Series chapbook, and has had work appearing in The Peter F. Yacht Club and forthcoming in ottawater.

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Shawna Lemay is the author of five books of poetry, All the God-Sized Fruit (McGill-Queen’s University Press), Against Paradise (McClelland & Stewart), Still (self-published), Blue Feast (NeWest Press), and the forthcoming Red Velvet Forest (The Muses’ Company), as well as Calm Things (Palimpsest Press), a collection of essays on poetry and art. She has a B.A. in Honors English and an M.A. in English from the University of Alberta. All the God-Sized Fruit won both the Gerald Lampman Memorial Award, and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Her blog is Capacious Hold-All. She lives in Edmonton with Robert Lemay, a visual artist, and their daughter Chloe. Alice Major’s eighth poetry collection, The Office Tower Tales, was recently published by the University of Alberta Press. She has won The Malahat Review’s long poem contest and been short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize (twice) and the Stephan G. Stephanson Award, Writers Guild of Alberta. She is past president of the League of Canadian Poets and past chair of the Edmonton Arts Council. She served as the City of Edmonton’s first Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2007. Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of over a dozen trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the novella white (2007), the travel book Ottawa: The Unknown City (2008), the non-fiction titles subverting the lyric: essays (2008) and Alberta dispatch: interviews & writing from Edmonton (2008) and the poetry collection a compact of words (2008). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan) and the online journals Poetics.ca (with Stephen Brockwell), seventeen seconds: poetry and poetics and ottawater as well as the small press action network - ottawa, which oversees the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair. 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 Ben Murray has lived in Edmonton long enough to remember having a mayor actually named Ivor Dent. HIs debut collection, What We’re Left With was published by Brindle & Glass (Victoria) in fall ‘07. His poetry has been broadcast on CBC, CKUA, and CJSR, and appeared in many literary journals and anthologies from Antigonish Review to Zygote, with stops along the way including Descant, Event, CV2, Queen’s Quarterly, Other Voices, The Windsor Review, Carousel, and Prairie Fire. Recent anthology credits include Writing The Land: Alberta Through Its Poets (Blue Skies Press).

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Catherine Owen has been publishing and performing poetry since 1993. Her work has appeared in periodicals such as The Dalhousie Review and Poetry Salzburg. Titles include: Somatic – The Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Exile Editions 1998), nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak and Wynn, 02), shortlisted for the BC Book Prize, and her new collections, Shall: ghazals (Wolsak and Wynn, 06) and Cusp/detritus (Anvil Press, 06), both longlisted for the Relit Prize, while the latter made the shortlist for the George Ryga award for socially conscious literature. A selection from Seeing Lessons, on the pioneer photographer, Mattie Gunterman was recently nominated for the CBC Literary Awards, and her chapbook FYRE recently came out through the above/ground press ALBERTA SERIES. Her poems have been translated into Italian (Caneide with Joe Rosenblatt, 05) and Korean. She has a Masters degree in English (Simon Fraser University, 01), collaborates with painters/dancers, practices photography, and plays bass/sings in the blackmetal band, INHUMAN. Paul Pearson lives and writes in Edmonton where he has been a member of the poetry community for almost two decades. Paul has had poems published in, and been an editor of, a number of small magazines including being a founding editor and chapbook publisher of the Olive Reading Series. Paul spent a number of years working for the Alberta Government and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts as the Writing and Publishing Consultant. Since being bumped up to other, non-literary duties last year, Paul has re-discovered both the time and energy to write. Christine Stewart is from Vancouver and currently writes, teaches and researches poetry and poetics in the English and Film Department at the University of Alberta. Selected publications: “descriptor echoic” forthcoming in The Gig. Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge. Virgin Press. 2007. The Trees of Periphery.: above/ground press, 2007. Pessoa's July: or the months of astonishments. Nomados Press. 2006. "We Lunch Nevertheless among Reinvention." Chicago Review. 2006. from Taxonomy. Sheffield, England: West House Press, 2003.

credits: The Garneau Review issue #1; edited by rob mclennan June 2009 © All poems and writings are copyright of the authors design: mdesnoyers

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