I'm still sorting through the mass I picked up from above/ground press and other writings from the Ottawa odyssey.

Here's what I have:

Calendar Girls by Lea Graham. Poems of love, poems of whispers, poems of winter: "language it is the same word as hope." Working within lyricism and meditation traditions, the poems all seem to push towards a question and insinuate the optimistic potential outcome. Age has proved the happy acumulation of wolf whistles and rivers of wine; and the soul is something one can still talk about without irony.

six strains: variations by rob mclennan. A plunderverse project in progress. mclennan works through three and four different variations of particular poems, using the plunderverse technique of inserting deletions. Some are distinctly more successful than others. Not surprisingly, considering mclennan's devotion to that other GB, the most effective plunders are of Bowering's work -- particularly "Do Sink -- variation three" which creepily blurs the line between mother, love, and cynical opportunist: "for fame, love, we must edit / our romance // dear to keep, a line / we walk." Some of these pieces may appear in a forthcoming issue of Maple Spits (details pending).

the blind aesthetic (or, sorry im all ears) by rob mclennan. I'm still learning how to read rob mclennan's work, a problem compounded by its sheer abundance. The lines have rhythm and a sonorous tonality, but in a small collection like this the lines only leap to life at almost random and haphazard occasion. For instance, lines that mean nothing to me but seem like just words piled atop one another:

beside the conference confers, initiated
description of alignment, a number
of collective are

a studied, work & garment

drone into a trance

I will give him the benefit of the doubt that this is no ironic moment of self-reflexion (the poem concludes, in fact, "w/out the least bit personal / broadcast."). To be fair, the light pun of "confers" returns throughout the sequence and becomes a soft motif. But if the language has the feel of a randomness (which, it should be remembered, is an aesthetic embraced by conceptual artists across the divide), linked by the subtle turn of an embedded word, a pun, or loose association, this tactic produces rich moments too:

dead lovers & absconded, friends
on the delicate essentials
deconstruct the hopelessness
with the dirty topped

indulging in aroma, constellations
on a brain

nine small(er) essays by rob mclennan

The first piece, "the poetics of accident," is a personal essay on his own poetic method that moves through creation by the accident of association, happed upon connections, or even less. This essay confirms, to my mind at least, my experience when reading the poems -- for as much as those connections are environmental and specific, they are lost from the final work, which are sent forth as decontextualized relics of the time. Poems by other poets "trigger" or "result in" poems that are "made out of accidents, random acts and the largest amounts of the unknown." This creates a network between works in a perfectly closed system. Where is the opening to permit entry? mclennan quotes Fred Wah and Bowering to defend his accidental writing "as act of exploration and discovery" -- but this is very different from mclennan's own exploring and discovering, which, unlike Wah and Bowering, does presuppose or depend upon the value of the object found. mclennan, it seems by this essay, would prefer to drop the diamond and skip off toward the sun glint on puddles; a connection found.

Other essays include a useful descriptive review of Victor Coleman's lipograms and eulogistics, and several (essentially) loosely narrated bibliographies on topics like long poems and urban poetry. There are also useful descriptive introductions to Andy Weaver, Writing the Terrain (UofC Press) and Post-Prairie (Talonbooks), Clare Latremouille, and Stephen Brockwell. Reading nine small(er) essays is much like reading a newsletter update of rob mclennan's desk (and bar table), a first account of those books that have just crossed his path; a sampler of things going on and connections loosely made. It is sort of like an extended remix of his blog.

(end of part 1, more to come)