Authors Amy Jones and Rebecca Rosenblum will be reading from their work Thursday, March 29th at 8 pm in the Galleries of Memorial Hall.
Amy Jones is the author of What Boys Like and other Stories
(Biblioasis 2009), a collection of fiction that was awarded the
2008-2009 Metcalf-Rooke Award for Short Fiction and was shortlisted for
the 2010 ReLit Award. What Boys Like explores the complicated
and sometimes beautiful events of everyday life among a cast of urban
misfits and the outsiders that populate the periphery of the city.
Jones’ prose deftly captures the joys and frustrations of the characters
that are at the centre of her stories. The stories of What Boys Like
document the social make-up of the city itself while revealing the
experiences that are common to all of us. Jones’ stories have been
published in The New Quarterly, Grain, Prairie Fire,Event, Room of One’s Own, and The Antigonish Review among others. Jones was the winner of the 2006 CBC Literary Award for Short Story in English.
Rebecca Rosenblum’s second collection of short stories, The Big Dream (Biblioasis 2011), follows the developments of the characters that populate her first collection of fiction, Once (Biblioasis 2008). The Big Dream
examines the often-fraught lives of people living and working in the
urban environment. Many of the stories are set in the offices of a
lifestyle-magazine publishing company, Dream Inc., where the employees
struggle with their personal lives amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of
a business operating in a period of economic uncertainty. Events and
characters overlap and interconnect inThe Big Dream,
creating a web of complexity that encapsulates the human relationships
of the book as well as the narrative structure. Rosenblum’s short
fiction has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the National
Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award. Her first collection of
stories, Once, was awarded the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Rosenblum’s stories have appeared in Exile Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, Journey Prize Stories 19, and Maisonneuve, among others.
The reading is presented by the UNB Department of English, the UNB University Bookstore, The Canada Council for the Arts, and The Fiddlehead.
Recently, I sat down with Canadian poet and journalist Anita Lahey to talk about her latest book of poems Spinning Side Kick(Signal Editions, 2011). Anita's poetry is equal parts playful and profound, and our conversation bounced from the fun of onomatopoeia to the foggy future of literary magazines.
Anita Lahey's previous book Out to Dry in Cape Breton (Signal Editions, 2006) was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award and the Trillium book award for poetry. Previously, she was the editor of Arc Poetry Magazine. She currently lives in Fredericton, NB Canada.
This past October I had the opportunity to both attend and participate in the 8th
annual Poetry Weekend on the UNB campus here in Fredericton. The three day
event is a veritable Newport festival of poetry performance that provides a collegial
atmosphere for established and emerging writers alike to read selections of
their work to an enthusiastic public.
Shoshanna Wingate, one of the weekend’s standouts,
captivated the audience with powerful and emotionally sincere poems read from
her recently published short collection Homing Instinct.
Content
aside, Homing Instinct is a handsome,
limited edition hand-sewn chapbook meticulously assembled using specifically
selected archival papers and print pigments, making it a work of art in its own
right, and a delight to handle. Congratulations to Frog Hollow Press for
constructing yet another distinctive bibliophile edition.
Home and all of its accoutrements, conventions, and cultural imperatives are made
accountable in Wingate’s collection as it moves inexorably towards the final
reckoning we encounter in the closing poem. “Neighbours” and “The Cotton Mill”
come early in the book, and as companion pieces, work to both establish and
entrench the prevailing thematic locus.
In “Neighbours,” tensions between adult realities and the child speaker’s
narration of her perceived experience are subtly communicated, as in the
offhand remark “my papa says it’s quaint and cheap,” describing why they are ostensibly
squatting in an Appalachian backwater. The use of statement also works as an
effective counterpoint to the bucolic scene, as when the speaker surprises us
by suddenly entering the narrative in remarking “no one knows people live down
here,” thus revealing her agency and perspective in the world of the poem. The
children “drape the willows around [their] necks / like scarves, serve moss tea
to frogs / on stumps that serve as parlour sets, / and fan [themselves] with
ferns like queens” as the poem closes, and despite what the reader now knows of
actualities, the notion of home as filtered through the speaker is as pure,
satisfying, and real as we will encounter in these pages.
Wingate continues the childhood Appalachian narrative in “The Cotton Mill,” though the voice of
the poem seems more worldly and knowing. Gone is the fanciful, rustic paradise
of the previous poem, and in its place we find a once functioning cotton mill —
the blind monster of the poem — with all its windows bricked in, eyelessly glowering
over the landscape like a fallen Oedipus. The choral device of repeating the
first two lines — “[w]e raced our bikes around its glass-strewn lot, / along
abandoned railroad tracks down river” — in the middle of the poem, aside from
acting as a temporal reset and referential tie to classical tragic texts, is
yet another means of emphasizing the shift in point-of-view. The children
continue to play in this environment, but its realities are very much
foregrounded, and instead of fanciful, imaginative games of make-believe, they
“[pitch] rocks at the windowless windows” and have “all the injuries / of youth
to unleash: schoolyard fights, our fathers’ / worthless jobs…[,] our lack / of
anything better to do.” That the poem can be read as a post-industrial vision
of America, it’s economic and accompanying cultural infrastructure in ruins, is
likely no accident, nor is the portentous arrival of “folks even poorer than
us” brought, ironically, by the “Holy Roller Church” — an apparent allusion to
outsourcing, and a not so veiled condemnation of missionary interference.
Mid-century cult crime novelist Jim Thompson has one of his characters remark of homicidal anti-hero
Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me that
“a weed is a plant out of place,” and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the
wisdom in those words while considering the closing poem in Homing Instinct, “The City Dwellers.”
Weeds are featured prominently, and their invasive, almost malevolent agency is
masterfully presented and complicated throughout. “Their roots,” we’re told,
are “as thick as wrists, had gnarled split tails, / white flesh… as long as
twinned ermines.” Ominous, certainly, but in choosing ermines as a metaphor,
Wingate intimates that the weeds, in some capacity, can be read as regal or noble,
a characteristic compounded by their blooming buds, described as “round like
Queen Anne’s lace.”
It’s this notion of belonging and the place of competing identities within the speaker relative to
established definitions of home that Wingate wrestles with in “The City
Dwellers.” As a “domesticated” space, home is rendered untenable here —
something that can’t be, or refuses to be, fashioned to the speaker’s will. Having
settled in the rural environment of the poem some years ago after having previously
lived an urban and presumably itinerant lifestyle, she struggles to impose the
learned sense of order she believes is necessary to realizing her culturally
prescribed idea of home. The fence built by a neighbour, in all likelihood to
block the untidy, unconventional space the narrator exhaustively labours to
tame, is met with relief, as it brings “some outline of order.”
A similar feeling of perceived contentment or groundedness is communicated when Wingate writes off
of her subject by interpolating a back-story episode wherein her speaker is put
at peace by watching a former neighbour exercise his trained pigeons on the
roof of an urban walk-up. But it’s precisely this imposed sense of constraint that
is ultimately undermined as the poem moves forward: “Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall / That wants it down.” Frost’s maxim from “Mending Wall”
couldn’t be more appropriate to Wingate’s purposes in “The City Dwellers,” as
the order of the fence, and the compliance of the trained pigeons, although
outwardly celebrated as efforts at containment, are ultimately indicted as absurd
artificialities. The spanworms that decimate the speaker’s garden act as a
clever thematic counterpoint to the trained pigeons we encounter in the middle
of the poem. Emerging from their pupas, they soar over the “pockmarked garden,
without / another notice, not for its destruction / or their battered homes,
cared nothing for what/they left behind, nor dwelled on what survived.”
The message, then, both in “The City Dwellers” and the collection at large, may well be that we need to
reclassify our notions of what home is and means. It seems much less a physical
place, and more, simply, where we find ourselves. Wherever we are is merely a
vehicle we put to use in the interest of perpetually moving forward. In Homing Instinct, Shoshanna Wingate gracefully
communicates a timeless and difficult truth. It’s in the journey that home is
found, not in some perceived final destination.
Poets Sue Goyette and Lynn Davies will be reading from their poetry Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 1 pm in the Alumni Memorial Lounge.
Sue Goyette's latest book of poetry, Outskirts (Brick
2011), explores the complexity and power of human connections while
reflecting on the tenuous relationship that we have with our natural
environment. Outskirts finds hope in the details of human
interaction and envisions a path forward through a natural landscape
that is increasingly subject to destruction and dissolution.
Goyette is the author of two previous collections of poetry and one novel. Her first book of poetry, The True Names of Birds
(Brick 1998) was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry,
the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have won
the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Award and
the 2011 Bliss Carman Poetry Award. Her first novel, Lures (HarperCollins
2002), was nominated for the 2003 Thomas Head Raddall Award. Sue
Goyette currently resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Lynn Davies is the author of two books of poetry: The Bridge that Carries the Road
(Brick 1999), selected as a finalist for the Governor General's Award
and short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award in 2000, and Where Sound Pools (Goose Lane 2005). Davies' poems have been published in several anthologies and literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and The New Brunswick Reader.
Born in New Brunswick, Davies' poetry reflects on human relationships,
family, and nature while more directly considering the impact of
external events on the our psychological condition.
The reading is presented by the UNB English Department, the Canada Council for the Arts, the UNB Fredericton Bookstore, and The Fiddlehead.
One of the most prominent Irish transplants now dwelling in Atlantic
Canada, Gerard Beirne was quick to root himself here, and foster its
writing community. He’s currently teaching at UNB, where he has also
been a writer in residence, and acts as an editor at one of Canada’s
finest literary journals, The Fiddlehead. He also plays a big
role in a fantastic organization — The Writers Federation of New
Brunswick — who do as much or more for their members as any similar
organization...To read more
The gangly-legged childhood version of me wanted to be a figure skater. My parents, regrettably, acquiesced and, after getting me properly outfitted in a pair of Don Jacksons and some sparkles, sent me tottering off to the Sackville Arena. I spent hours rehearsing camel spins, Salchows, and Ina Bauers, went through endless pairs of flesh-coloured tights, but, in the end, I was always flutzing my Lutzes and gradually came to accept that I would never be an Olympian (let's face it, I was already older than Tara Lipinski. Also, I had better things to do after school than endure below-zero temperatures in the few months of t-shirt weather we got (and, those sequined dresses aren't cheap, you guys). So I settled for playing my Michelle Kwan Figure SkatingCD-Rom game on my parents' desktop and reading all the books in the Silver Blades series. (I'm not gonna lie. I still own Rumors at the Rink.)
In high school, my closest friends were more forward-thinking and had chosen a much more useful hobby--dance. They had shows in downtown lofts; they performed at pep rallies; they were called on for choreography when the drama club put on musicals; they weren't awkward at late-night school functions. I resented my parents for not squashing my dream to learn what seemed, to my hyperbolical high school self, an utterly untranslatable skill. (They could've at least warned me. Or given me some pointe shoes for Christmas.) Too embarrassed to join the young'uns in beginner classes, I decided to love dance from afar.
And so here I am today, considering myself to be (hopefully) a bit less gangly and hyperbolical, even more intrigued by the translatability of dance-- specifically, the relationship of dance to poetry. Lately I have been interested in poets who push closer to the fine line between music and poetry (Dennis Lee's Body Music, Robert Bringhurst's spoken scores for multiple voices, Jan Zwicky's Forge, to name a few). Most recently, I've become obsessed with Anne Carson's collaborations with Merce Cunningham dancers. In their first project together, The Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A lecture on pronouns in the form of 15 sonnets, each poem is danced as well as read aloud. Watching this was a completely different experience than any dance I had seen before although I couldn't exactly describe why. Robert Bringhurst has said that polyphonic poems contain “two or more interrelated but independent statements” and the combination “exceeds the sum of its parts” (“Singing with the Frogs”). In The Possessive Used as Drink (Me), though not exactly an example of polyphony, there are two independent, interrelated statements although they are not both vocal--one does not seem to dominate the other; one does not seem to be set to the other. The dancers' expressions are statements that, combined with the words being read aloud, “exceed the sum of their parts,” and the effect of the multiple narratives happening simultaneously appeals to multiple senses with new possibilities for imagery.
“Drop't Sonnet” is read without much expression or variance in
volume. The dancers' faces are cut off as well, so we turn to the words
themselves and the movement to find expression. At the end, the
faceless dancer in the foreground uses a foot to eclipse the face of the
dancer in the background. Simultaneously, Carson speaks of that loss of
differentiation: “when a language drops a distinction… as for example
English has modified the second person singular” and “I confess not
til I met you did I begin to feel this change as a loss.” It was at this
final movement that I realized poetry is not standing in for music
here. Contemporary dance is usually thought of in combination with
music, but dance combined with the spoken invites you to hear the dance
in a different way. It is not like a dance to music. I have been trying
to discover what this difference is, what it is that seems to change the
to to with, and while it might not fit the definition of musical or
literary polyphony, these poems seem to have a similar effect: the
combination of poetry and dance creates a kind of music, a resonance,
here.
More recently, Carson has continued to
collaborate with Merce Cunningham dancers on numerous other projects.
Nox, the multi-voiced epitaph for her brother that scrapbooks elegy,
translation, lexicography, letters, and anecdotes is rife with
multiplicity even before the dance is added.
In this video, the moment when Carson's intensely
personal words, spoken without emotion, juxtapose with the emotive body
language of the two dancers, the gravity of the loss is communicated so
clearly. Dennis Lee says poetry is “like hearing a constantly changing
tremor with your body: a play of movement and stress, torsion and flex-
as with the kinaesthetic perception of the muscles… More and more I
sense this energy as presence both outside and inside myself, teeming
towards words” (Body Music 3-4). In these collaborations, kinaesthetic
perception of poetry is experienced in a whole new way. The final moment
when the dancer balances, shaking, muscles taut, on the windowsill as
the blinds come down in front of him, trapping him between inside and
outside, is a beautiful image to not only illustrate the restrained
grief of the piece, but also to feel it, bodily, even as Carson's voice
continues in the darkness.
Dennis Lee also speaks of
poetry in dance terminology: “the way the poem moves in time--its pace
and gait and proportions. A poem can unfold with the shapely aplomb of a
gavotte, or meander, or wove with a quicksilver stutter and glide”
(Body Music 197). This is no accident. The two are often connected
figuratively. In these videos, where the connection becomes literal, the
dancers are not so much dancing to the poems (with words substituting
for music), but as a part of them-- contributing their own voice,
speaking simultaneously, even polyphonically, and creating new
resonance.
Salty Ink talked to two great guys/writers on TheFiddlehead Fiction Team
about all things Fiddlehead, and more. Enjoy. Subscribe. Submit. Also,
read Jarman and Beirne’s work, like My White Planet,19 Knives (Jarman) and Turtle or Games of Chance (Beirne)...To read more
