Our 2014 Summer Poetry Issue is Out!

You are never old, fair friends, our readers, as long as summer’s near. If poems appear as naturally as leaves unfurl on trees, then let the leaves of this our summer issue unfurl easily in your hands. If winter is the time for vistas, if from the warmth of your home you can see through the bare sticks of winter trees, then summer is intimate, as leaves fold over and against windows. Some poems like this intimacy, speaking the lassitude of a copse or grove. But, hey, it’s summer! Play ball! Home run! Head for the beach, the lake, the ocean’s curling surf, the sidewalk bistro, the ice cream parlour, the lettuce-crisp air conditioning of the Cineplex. That’s where some of these poems have gone. It’s the summer poetry issue!

We celebrate this summer with two special sections dedicated to the magnificent poets Travis Lane and Rae Armantrout. Travis is close to our heart; she has given her head and hands to The Fiddlehead for so many years now. She lives right here in Fredericton and drops in to say hello, to pick up books for review, never afraid to encourage or prune as she sees fit. She has lent her gorgeous poems to us in many issues. If you have overlooked Travis Lane, here is the opportunity to peruse her work and marvel, in this selection so carefully tended and introduced by Shane Neilson.

One day, a student came into my office and said, “my favorite poet is Rae Armantrout.” And it seemed perfect. I recalled a winter at Arizona State reading her poetry assiduously, amazed by her sly and spooky juxtapositions and resonances. I recruited Rebecca Salazar, and we spent afternoons in a café talking, thinking aloud, laughing, debating, and puzzling over how to select what seemed to us to be the too few poems that would represent Rae Armantrout. Rae has given us new poems, and Rebecca and I have selected writing from across her career to introduce Rae’s poetry to Canadian readers unfamiliar with her, and to present the dynamic range of her melodies to those who already love her work.

The purpose of these retrospectives has been to place the best of international authors in the context of Canadian poetry, though this year for the first time we present Travis Lane, who came from the U. S. to become one of our most treasured Canadian poets. But it wouldn’t be The Fiddlehead if we didn’t present these poets together with some of the finest new poets, poets who have yet to publish a book or have just published their first or second. Pay close attention to the inventiveness and surprise of Richard Kelly Kemick, Jenny Haysom, Cassidy McFadzean, Nyla Matuk, Kayla Czaga, Michael Pacey, Shoshanna Wingate, Bren Simmers, and Steve Tomasko.

We are in a poetry renaissance in Canada at the moment, recorded in the explosion of poetry in so many directions at once, scattering its exquisite debris all over the place. The Fiddlehead summer issue cannot sort out all of the pieces, but an impression of the different trajectories can be found in the work of Sina Queyras, Patricia Young, matt robinson, Miranda Pearson, Jan Conn, Jan Zwicky, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Compton, Robyn Sarah, A.F. Moritz, Patrick Warner, and Shane Neilson.

You never grow old, friends in poetry. I know it is but summer poetry, yet it will remain in the full four seasons of your heart.

Ross Leckie
Editor

Day on Salamis’ Seacoasts: Eric Miller Reviews Emery George's translation of Frederich Hölderlin's Selected Poems

Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, introduced, edited and translated by Emery George. Princeton: Kylix, 2011. 963 pages. Hardcover.

Reviewed by Eric Miller

1. Nobility

What is “nobility”? In a society, such as ours, that makes a fretful, often duplicitous, yet admirable pretence to democratic practice, the word may seem insistently, even discouragingly, to flaunt a feudal livery, contaminating all the situations into which we import it with the ghost of a titular presumption over the rest of society: an intractable case of most ancient bloodlines. But the origins of the word “noble” offer a means by which to parry, even to disarm, such narrow atavism. “Noble,” like “nobility,” derives from the same root as “gnosis”—“knowing”. When therefore we call a work of literature “noble,” we may address kinds of knowledge. We may designate not what literature knows, but how it knows: or—better—the specific knowledge that literature, only this literature, can both comprise and produce. Then much knowledge is not of some thing, some circumstance, or some fact. Literary knowledge often concentrates or, rather, dilates—as birdsong, that world-building music, also does—into a case of authoritative tone. Can literary tone be properly “noble”? Must nobility be banality, “fine ideas,” inelastic adherence to a stately elevation? I think not: the work of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) makes me think not. It is true that to invoke knowledge or “gnosis,” as I do above, already reinstates, in some measure, it must be conceded, the idea of an elect: an elect of knowers. Election is choosing. What could we choose to know? These questions, as they stand, are too broad: and, to modify or retract my earlier assertion, do require the focus of an instance, a thing, a circumstance, a fact. Herodotus and Plutarch provide coordinates for a theory of knowledge, as ironic as it is defiant. Hölderlin supplements that theory with all the resources of his time and place.

2. Our climate of consensus

Fortuitously, a friend of mine, Iain Higgins, wrote me recently that he was translating Hölderlin’s “Archipelago,” an elegy from 1800; that he was enjoying doing so; and that the poem would certainly not fly in our climate of consensus. The poem, if not the poet, too plainly venerates ancient Greece; the law of the father is not just assumed, but reinforced, with important reservations (the Greeks in their actions and their myths are not as unanimous in their conception of paternalism as the culture of their Persian foes, Darius and Xerxes). What we have learned to call “orientalism” compromises the fabric of the 296-line elegy—if by “orientalism” we mean to denote the depreciation of the invader Xerxes, whose horde (bridging the Hellespont with ships lashed together) fought to break and to occupy a contrastingly heroified, if disunited, Greek heartland.

Hölderlin’s partisan poem is divisible into several movements, like a piece of music. It opens with an apostrophe of Poseidon, the sea-god apposite to the sea-fight that history calls “Salamis” and dates to 480 B.C. (lines 1-61). The tutelary deity of Athens is explicably assumed to be Athena, but Themistocles, the statesman and strategist instrumental to the Greek victory at Salamis, in order to develop support for the shrewd high value he placed on nautical strength, instigated a theological campaign to magnify evidences of Poseidon’s interest in the city-state. Following Hölderlin’s address to Poseidon comes a lament for Athens as it was before the Persian invasion, with a cameo of Themistocles himself (61-85). From verses 86-103, Hölderlin describes the antagonist Xerxes’s arsenal and meditated plans of attack, with the corresponding despair of the Athenians, their city already despoiled. Battle in the straits by Salamis is joined and the fluctuating fortunes of the day are delineated, between lines 104 and 124. Xerxes’s disconcertment at the defeat of his great fleet occupies lines 125-135; the desolation of Athens regardless of the triumph, lines 136-160; the rebuilding of that city 161-178; its cultural acme 179-199; a melancholic allocation of all this to the long-ago past (200-256); at last the testimony of the poet’s persona in the first person singular brings Salamis and a revivifiable Athens into his present—into our present, a present substantiated (for example) by Iain Higgins’s translation. The poem ends with a fresh apostrophe of the immortal Poseidon (288-296).

Fiddlehead contributor Charles Wright Named US Poet Laureate

Photo credit: Holly Wright, poets.org

Charles Wright, Pulitzer Prize winning US poet and past contributor to The Fiddlehead (nos. 236 and 252), has been named the next US Poet Laureate.

According to the announcement on the Library of Congress website, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, says, "Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric. ... For almost 50 years his poems have reckoned with what he calls 'language, landscape, and the idea of God.' Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality."

In the summer of 2008, The Fiddlehead published a Charles Wright retrospective along with a selection of new poems. In the summer of 2012, Wright contributed two more new poems to the magazine.

Fredericton-Area Literary Events

If you're in the Fredericton area over the few weeks, there are some great literary opportunities on offer. The Fredericton Arts Alliance is hosting writer Forrest Orser as part of its artist in residence program this week. And on June 25, CBC Radio will be recording Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids at the Cedar Tree in downtown Fredericton, which promises to be fun and hilarious. Details on both below. 

UNB alumnus and past Fiddlehead contributor Forrest Orser is one of the artists in residence at the Soldiers’ Barracks in Fredericton’s Historic Garrison District until June 20. He will be available to discuss his work and writing in general from 1:30 to 5 p.m. each day. The other artist in residence is Mariah Sockabasin, an aboriginal artist and fashion designer. She will be presenting her work from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. every day. This is the 13th year that the Fredericton Arts Alliance has organizing its series of one-week artist residencies in the Soldiers’ Barracks. The residencies are also part of Fredericton Tourism’s cultural tourism programming. Orser has published poems and short stories, including “Wild Horses on an Island” in the Summer 2011 issue of The Fiddlehead. After more than 30 years as a reporter and editor with The Daily Gleaner, he is now a freelance editor.

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Do you still have any of your childhood or teenage writing? CBC Radio presents Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, an open-mic evening of juvenilia — book reports, diary entries, poems, letters from camp — read out loud by adults to a room full of strangers.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014 at The Cedar Tree Cafe (418 Queen St.). Doors at 7:30. Show at 8:00.

Tickets $10 in advance. Readers get free admission.

Visit the Facebook event.

Buy tickets.

Sign up to read.

Writers' Federation of New Brunswick presents WordSpring 2014 Conference & AGM

The Writers' Federation of New Brunswick invites you to its annual WordSpring event, taking place this year in Fredericton from June 6-8. For more information or to register, visit the WFNB website! And follow WFNB on Twitter!

Fiddlehead News

No. 258 Winter 2014

The Fiddlehead's Winter 2014 issue has just been reviewed at New Pages! Reviewer Chip Livingston says that it "turns on moments of awareness of awareness, capturing the instants we catch ourselves catching ourselves, revelations of self to self, to the reader, and to other characters. It’s charming, this subtle focus moving from piece to piece, from poem to prose to poem to poem, and the sequence suggests this international journal from the University of New Brunswick is edited with precision." Read the full review here!

Myler Wilkinson, the winner of our recently-announced fiction contest was celebrated in his hometown newspaper, The Castlegar News, with a very nice profile. Wilkinson's story "Blood of Slaves" appears in our Spring 2014 issue. Read the article here.

Myler Wilkinson

Congratulations to Craig Davidson and Adam Dickinson, both UNB alumi and past Fiddlehead contributors, for being shortlisted for Trillium Awards. Davidson is a finalist for his Giller-shortlisted novel Cataract City and Dickinson for his Governor General's Award-nominated poetry collection The Polymers. View the shortlists here.

And finally, recent Fiddlehead editorial assistant Richard Kemick has been interviewed by Echolocation. Kemick recently graduated from the MA (English and Creative Writing) program at UNB. Read the interview here. And keep an eye out for a few of Richard's poems in this summer's poetry issue of The Fiddlehead!

An Interview with Myler Wilkinson, winner of The Fiddlehead's Short Fiction Prize

Myler Wilkinson has published award-winning short 

stories set in British Columbia in journals such as Prism

International and Pierian Spring. He has spent extended periods 

in Russia and has written three books, including Hemingway 

and Turgenev: The Nature of Literary Influence. He lives in the 

Kootenay region of British Columbia. His winning story 

is written from the point of view of Anton Chekhov and is

dedicated to the memory of Alexander Vaschenko, friend 

of the heart, mentor.

Myler Wilkinson has won this year's Short Fiction prize. Fiddlehead Editorial Assistant Greg Brown conducted the following interview with Myler. 

Greg Brown: This story was a great reflection on life and death, through a very dynamic imagining of Anton Chekhov. What makes Chekhov, his life, and particularly his death, an interesting topic for you in developing a story?

Myler Wilkinson: “The Blood of Slaves” emerged out of a desire to recapture the voice of an artist, to enter into a kind of second life with a writer I deeply admire. Chekhov remains the one figure who leaves a physical absence, as if he might walk into the room at any moment — with his voice, his laughter (he was by far the funniest of all Russian writers, and perhaps the saddest), his genius as a writer.   Fragmentary images emerge in answer to your question concerning Chekhov:   a bench on the hillside at Oreanda just beyond the Pokrovsky Church where Chekhov gazed down on the Black Sea and imagined his most famous story; the muddy roads south Moscow, and Chekhov’s first country home, Melikhovo; while his guests arrive to eat and drink, the writer retires to a small hut in the garden and begins to write a play which begins with the words: “I am in mourning for my life.”  I wrote “The Blood of Slaves” because this world continues to be very real to me; in some way I simply wanted to be accepted into Chekhov’s company; I missed him — by just over a century.  I arrived when I could.

GB: The story is explicitly about Chekhov's death, but also reflects back on his life and ancestry. There is particular focus on his ancestors as serfs, "slaves." Can you comment on this focus on "slave's blood," and why it becomes a prevalent thought for Chekov as he approaches death?

MW: In one of his most famous letters — to his friend Suvorin, in January 1889 — Chekhov spoke of squeezing the blood of slaves from his body.  He tells of a young boy who has been whipped, who tortures animals, who behaves hypocritically towards man and God . . . all because he is conscious of his own worthlessness, and how that boy begins to squeeze this blood from himself drop by drop until one morning he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is real blood and not the blood of a slave.  Chekhov’s life is defined by an understanding of blood: his heritage as a Russian serf — owned by masters; his contraction of a bacillus which would kill him, suffocating in his own blood; and then finally a reflection on a human truth, which is also an artistic credo:  that blood is impure, humanity infected with the seeds of its own ruin — and salvation — that the blood of slaves runs freely in each one of us, and may, with luck and effort, be squeezed out.

GB: In his short stories Chekov often used a stream-of-consciousness style of writing, which is explicit in your piece as well. Did you consider this a deliberate pastiche of Chekov? What is the value of this writing style for you?

MW: The writer takes pleasure in the text perhaps — the words give a semblance of life as Chekhov once observed. In writing “The Blood of Slaves” I wanted to recover the mystery of a writer’s voice, what he stood for as an artist, what he was as a man. Clearly, memory at the end of one’s life was central to the shaping of the story. This led perhaps to the fragmentary, or pastiche, style you mention. I remember very consciously wanting to bring together beautiful images and words — Chekhov’s words and ideas (and with a scrupulous attention to the words of the artist) but then my own artistic reflections, in my own voice as Chekhov comes back to life — perhaps the micro-history, the private intentions, of a writer that are written down in no book. I wanted to move within that mystery.

GB: Were there any particular stories, plays, or works of Chekov's that specifically drew you to him? Do any of them find a home in some way in this story?

MW: The stories, plays and letters of Chekhov stream through my story — all parts of the voice of a genius. I had hoped to create a home for some in particular: “Lady With A Pet Dog,” a doomed love affair in Yalta above the Black Sea; “Concerning Love,” another unhappy Anna leaving by train, alone, for the Crimea; “Gooseberries,” a narrator who confronts an absent Tolstoy with the question: how much land does a man need; “The Peasants” where Chekhov observes with brutal and tender honesty his own genesis; “The Russian Master” which provides a motif early and late for boredom; and finally “The Darling,” a woman’s story which Tolstoy completely  misunderstood, and deeply admired. These are some of the stories which find a home, and a voice, within my work. And, yes, a dead seagull at the side of the lake makes its appearance, too, as does a doctor named Astrov who sees the coming catastrophe of the natural world.  

GB: I found the characters and their interactions to be very well thought out. To what extent is research or previous knowledge integral to shaping the characters and dialogue in this story? Was it a large part of giving voice to Tolstoy, for example? Or else, what is your process in developing characters and dialogue scenes?

MW: In recreating an artist’s life, you have to know something and you have to know it passionately.
“The Blood of Slaves” is Chekhov’s story, but Tolstoy is in it. However much the great man misunderstood the young genius, he loved him dearly — and he expressed that feeling as only Tolstoy could. How do you get it right? Research, the letters, the writing. You live in it, and then you have a beautiful young man walking up the birch grove at Yasnaya Polyana and he meets a gnarled peasant man, and it is Tolstoy. You enter the voice; it enters you. . . . And then, too, you plan to write other stories — Tolstoy, Pushkin, Akhmatova, others — each voice demands scrupulous attention.

GB: The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov's last great work, was written as a comedy, but is often put on as a tragedy. Both comedic and tragic elements are also at odds in your story. Can you comment on this?

MW: It’s true that comedic and tragic elements mark Chekhov as modernist master. In fact Chekhov famously referred to his play “The Seagull” as a comedy in four acts — which puzzled everyone at the time. With Chekhov, one can never be fully assured within either realm. Perhaps the place one sees this most clearly is in his letters (I have drawn on them freely in creating the master’s voice). There are people who believe Chekhov was the last master of letters as a literary form. They are remarkable — beautifully wrought (as if he could not write a bad sentence), warmly human, a humour which bubbles up from some inexhaustible subterranean source, and always the shadow of sadness. Shadow and light.  I wanted to achieve some of that tone in the writing.

GB: Could you comment on your reaction to winning The Fiddlehead's contest with this story? How confident were you with this submission?

MW: I was confident of the story on Chekhov, and was confident of its worth, from the time I began working on it. I also took an almost unalloyed pleasure in its creation, writerly pleasure perhaps, which can be quite rare. I certainly was not confident of winning The Fiddlehead prize. I assume that there were many fine entries; I am thankful the editors saw merit in what I was trying to do, and out of the myriad of possible choices my story was chosen. I am thankful for that.