National Poetry Month : Margo LaPierre,

How to Scour Ghost Wounds Using Only Water

i. establish associative architecture

translucent freckle

sluice noise constant

a cracked leather couch

a conch salad

a wake away

sucking rock

waking up

trying to twist

bracing cloudfall

white triangles

flowing roots

a reminder to

driftwood, memory

overhead a bucket

engorged and rippling

the ghost attacks

birds reappear

fishing for beetles

black dinghy shuffle

tidy fullness 

a dog’s jowls flap

along the shore

truly dove-like

ii. locate a horizon line

all animal life disappears the ground is still the only sound the mechanic crash of the lake groaning in the wake of party boats an excommunicated sun grinds out a flagrant auto-eulogy— The wet ghost of this poem renowned for his stranglehold, for blotting sunsets

iii. drink while urinating to feel wide open

the ghost’s mouth and incandescent gush all I can think of at 5 a.m. unregulated by circadian flow my breath strong underwater and unbroken in a body longing to be held for a minute or two before swelling into unknown territory like forever turn away sleep collective forehead chatters

iv. cross a large body to erase a curse

beyond the jumbo jet window an ocean erases the intentions our enemies harbour for us— In that pristine cabin we are light as curses lift like dirt from a Coca Cola coin, clean and acidic, clean and gorgeous, clean and shackled to the corridors of the ghost’s conditions

v. watch full-immersion music videos

in a prayer-like echo of cloth and hair bubbles issue from naked pores like unclasped balloons, tracing retroactive inquiries around the ghost’s ambiguous limits

vi. learn to say anemone

before the ghost smashes through French doors with muscular shoulders before homemade lemonade pools sway on the floor (lashes liquefy their stunned object on tile) let me go back and say to the ghost go grey and foolish go sing to no one somewhere outside of me under a tin roof raining

vii. show gratitude to houseplants

I fill myself with jars and jugs wash out lipstick stains buy dish soap ignore ghosts and tend to corners of the apartment with thin streams of care for living things saying thank you, I will take care of you, look at how green you are

Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, neurodivergent Canadian poet and editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions in 2017. She is a poetry selector for Bywords.ca, board member of Arc Poetry Magazine, and Membership Chair of the Editors Canada Ottawa-Gatineau branch. Her work has been published in filling Station, CAROUSEL, Train Journal, and others. She/her.

National Poetry Month : Dale Tracy,

Vaunt

Inked yet unked, I utter to the last extremity.

I gather up my unprocreant twiggage, my unrimpled me.

I am grateful to my alleged disarray.

I am grateful to my candid friend’s pearls.

I am grateful to commit clutched rhymes.

I am grateful to my qualified disappointment.

I am grateful to the news at my fingerprints.

I am grateful to judge lest my judgment be judged.

I jest when I just want to be grateful.

I am gracious, sateless, unbecoming.

Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbooks Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018) and The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020), the four-poem chapoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication and is currently the associate chair of the Writing Centre at the Royal Military College of Canada.

Six Questions interview #13 : Blaine Marchand

Blaine Marchand's award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in magazines across Canada, the US, New Zealand and Pakistan. He has six books of poetry, a young adult novel and a work of non-fiction published. He has an essay on his mother, A Long and Lucky Life, which will be published in a New Zealand anthology, Love and Loss, in April 2020. He has just completed a full-length manuscript of poems, Becoming History. Active in the literary scene in Ottawa for over 50 years, he was also the President of the League of Canadian Poets from 1992-94 and a monthly columnist for Capital XTRA, the GLTBQ2 community paper, for nine years. He is currently working on a three different series of poems – on his cancer, Finding My Voice; on aging, set in a forest reserve, Old Growth; and on the Ornamental Gardens at the Central Experiment Farm in Ottawa.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

Oh, seventy years. My parents brought me into the world. Born in the Grace Hospital, now Grace Manor, which is about eight blocks from where I have lived for the past 38 years and several more from where I grew up in Champlain Park area. What do they say – the apple never falls far….

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I began writing in elementary school. I kept a notebook of stories and drawings. My grade seven teacher, Mrs. Davis, was the first person to say to me – you could be a writer. She loved poetry and would recite it to us often. As a result, I became intrigued how poetry worked – the imagery and the use of words to convey meaning. One of her favourite poems was Indian Summer, which is by the Ottawa Confederation Poet, William Wilfred Campbell, although I did not know that. In high school, I kept a notebook of poems. My English teacher, F.J. McElligott – who wore natty suits from the 1940s – gave me free reign to write my essays as poetry. He put me in touch with a poet called Ruth E. Scharfe, who mentored me. She belonged to the local branch of the CAA, which was an active group, many of whom were very talented poets, such as herself and Lenore Pratt. So, I had a sense of community very early on.

In the early 70s, it was my time to give back and create opportunities for Ottawa poets and writers as felt as everything in Ontario was Toronto-based. More often than not, this came about due the sense of community and commitment of a group of local authors. Claire Harrison, Clive Doucet and I started Ottawa Independent Writers very much in that vein. And a group of poets in the city at the time, Tim Dunn, Robert Craig, Kathryn Oakley, John (as he was called at that time) O’Neill and I started the monthly poetry newsletter Sparks [editor’s note: see my 2015 interview with Blaine Marchand on Sparks here]. Later on, I got involved with Patrick White’s Ottawa Review, later changed to Anthos.

I also started a reading series that took place in Major’s Hill Park, during the Tulip Festival, Poetic Intent, called that because the NCC provided a military tent for the event. Then, during National Book Week, with funding from the League of Canadian Poets, writers from across the region and Ontario gave readings and took part in panel discussions. Eventually, working with Francophone poet, Jacques Flamand of Editions Vermillon, and YAA Tony German and others, the week morphed into the Ottawa Valley Book Festival/Festival des livres d’Outouais, which became a bilingual annual event at Archives and National Library Canada. It was at that time, I founded the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, giving it that name as a result of suggestion by Ottawa poet Robert Eady.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I think it exposed me to all sorts of different voices and various takes on how poetry or prose can be written. We are writers because we want to communicate. I think my travels in the developing world let me experience so many things beyond my own culture that this impacted on what I write about. But it was the openness of the literary community in Ottawa that, to a certain extent, allowed me to embrace things that are different from my own view or writing style. Even today, when I hear younger writers, I think wow - I wish I could write that way. To a certain extent, everything I hear or read shapes how I write. Not always changing my style but the way I approach and think about poetry. I hope I am always this way.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

It is hard for me to answer this question as I have always lived in Ottawa, except for two years in Islamabad, Pakistan, where, by the way, the writing communities were divided along linguistic lines and which, like Ottawa, feels that too much focus in on Lahore and Karachi. I attended poetry readings in both English and Urdu. Although I do not speak Urdu, I liked to let the musicality of the poetry flow over me. I did have a Pakistani friend who came with me and she would translate it spontaneously when I wished. Another friend, poet and artist Ilona Yusuf, and I put together a proposal for Vallum magazine to do an issue highlighting Pakistani poetry in English. It was accepted and came out two years after my return to Ottawa in issue 9:1 in the winter of 2012. It featured 26 poets.

One thing I have found about Ottawa over the decades is that there is a strong and supportive community of writers. The community has always been welcoming as new voices emerge. It’s my impression that in other centres, particularly Toronto, the literary community is quite divisive and there are in-groups and those on the outside. Kinda like in high school. I never found that in Ottawa.

It is natural that groups do form along cultural or race lines or around writing styles or age. But beyond that, I do think the Ottawa literary community has been very welcoming and supportive. We all want each other to succeed.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I write very much out of my experiences and my environment. Many of my poems are directly about Ottawa as that is what I know most intimately. I worked for the Canadian International Development Agency and it certainly impacted on my writing through my travels to the developing world. But I always had the security of a home base to return to. I am very much rooted in it. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a columnist for Capital Xtra, the local LGBTQ paper and wrote a monthly column, which focused on the gay community here and told their stories.

When I belonged to a poetry group in my 20s, the person leading the group kept insisting that being too local was not a good idea as readers from elsewhere could not possibly know the references. I kept thinking but we read poetry about England, France, Ireland, Mexico and the US. Many of the cities in those countries I have never been to. So why is it acceptable for those poets to make local references but not me?

I think in the Ottawa of today there is greater diversity and this brings it’s a greater wealth to culture in the city. All this, you absorb and it finds a way into your writing. I cannot be other than whom I am but the way it is expressed alters over time with age and experiences and being exposed to other approaches.

I have just sent off to publishers my latest manuscript of poems, Becoming History, which explores the life of my mother, who was abandoned by her parents, raised by a loving older couple in Ottawa East, my childhood with her in Ottawa West, as it was then called, and her final years in the Grace Manor. She lived till almost 104 and her memory was so vivid. She told me so many stories about her life. So, as a result, it is a book very much imbued with Ottawa.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have several things on the go. I had a chapbook of poems, My Head, Filled with Pakistan, published by catkin press. I continue to write poems about my two years living there. I am also working on a series called, Finding my Voice, about my bout with laryngeal cancer five years ago. And I have begun a series called Old Growth, set in Shaw Woods, an old growth forest in Renfrew County. It theme is about aging. And a series of poems on the Ornamental Gardens of the Central Experimental Farm, where he volunteers.

Six Questions interview #12 : Claudia Coutu Radmore

Montreal-born writer Claudia Coutu Radmore has lived, taught and created art in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and China. She is the President of Haiku Canada. She started catkin press in 2012, and along with several full collections, Accidentals (Apt. 9 Press, Ottawa) won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

On Fogo, poems short-listed for the 2017 Malahat Long Poem Contest, was published by The Alfred Gustav Press, Vancouver, in 2018. A poem from the camera obscura (2019, above ground, Ottawa ) is included in The Best Canadian Poetry of 2019.

Ask her about her recent keen interest in gasometers, and how coal was/is transformed into gas...

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I never actually got right to Ottawa. I lived for about twenty-five years north of Sharbot Lake in fairly remote settings. The last six of those years, my residence was an 800 square-foot house that I designed and had built, with a sixty-foot pond instead of a lawn, where deer, bears and other wild things felt at home. When Ted and I married we needed a bigger home, so moved to Carleton Place. Since then, maintaining poetry connections in Ottawa has meant a lot of driving, forty-five minutes each way in good weather. But those connections with the Ottawa poetry community have been really important to me. Ottawa also meant access to poetry publications that I never even knew existed. Lightbulbs went on!

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I began writing rather late, and never suspected that I would focus on poetry. It began with a journal in 1990, because I thought that if I was going to write a novel one day, I should start writing something. Looking back at the end of a year, I noted that some of my writing had short lines, that they looked something like poems. So I wrote more like that and self-published my first three books in 1992 and 1994, the beginning of Bondi Studios Press. Those were the days of actual cutting out poems and page numbers, gluing them on the pages, and photocopying the pages. I found that I enjoyed the book-making process. Later being part of the poetry community in Ottawa meant I was meeting ‘real’ poets, workshopping in a group called Mother Tongues that met in the Mother Tongue bookshop.  I joined the Arc board as an editor, and learned so much there. Then as co-director of Tree with rod pedersen and Rona Shaffran, my poetry  network grew, and I was part of the challenge to bring in exciting poets; I got to know them, buy their work.  

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

When I was working alone, making my books, selling them to friends and at local fairs, it was all just fun. Sharing my writing, getting feedback, being known locally as a writer, was all positive.

But the Ottawa community offered so much more! I found poets dedicated to their craft, poetry that taught me more what poetry could be and what it could do and what it could mean. I’d had a few poems accepted by journals, but didn’t understand the import of publication, really. Early acceptances were in Victoriana, paperplates.org, and a journal of The University of Hull in the UK. But my eventual learning curve was due to reading, learning about making better poems in workshops, and experiencing thousands of poems, having to argue one way or another for or against poems when I was on the Arc editorial board.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

For a long time, I wasn’t part of a group, and felt rather stranded. There I was writing by hand, transferring what looked like poems on one of those ancient computers, while raccoons slept on the deck. The first poets I met were Terry Ann Carter and Ronnie Brown, both of whom I met by travelling once a months, a three-hour drive, to The Valley Writer’s Guild meetings in Kemptville. They held poetry contests, and all of us won in those contests. It was the first chance I had to see whether my attempts were poetry at all.  One year, we took them all, first, second and third places. Coincidentally we all had Honda Civics. I don’t remember how I heard about the Writers’ Guild, but this was way before meeting the Ottawa community, and I was determined to meet at least some others who wrote poetry. Terry and Ronnie were my first Ottawa connections. This connection also brought me into the haiku world.

The main thing I saw in the Ottawa community was lack of ego. Experienced and oft-published poets swam with new poets, and for the most part, there was as much interaction as a writer wanted. Workshops were offered, and there was a great deal of encouragement. Opportunities abounded for writers at all levels to read with each other, have their work heard and applauded. There is nothing like clapping hands to make you want to write poems again.

And then there was VerseFest, and the opportunity to be part of that organizing committee. I saw how committed poets were in Ottawa to spreading poetry. I saw the planning and time put into an important project. I saw inclusion and cooperation, among organizers, and got to hear and meet poets from many countries. Ottawa poets are friendly. There are hugs. Not a bad feature.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I was born in a city, and though I loved the rural life, I’d forgotten what a city has to offer. The greatest thing was network, and because of the spirit that existed among Ottawa poets, my work changed because of the wide variety in the kinds of poetry offered, for free, of a Tuesday night listening to, and meeting poets, or a Tuesday morning with the Ruby Tuesday writers’ group, or once a month with The Mother Tongues. I could workshop with Paul Tyler, with Stuart Ross, with Souvankham Thammavongsa, Steven Brockwell. I could hear many of our Canadian treasures say their own poems. It has been an education. My approach to poetry became more serious, but it also became braver. Cameron Anstee asking me, one evening after the open mic at Tree, whether I had any more ‘poems like that’, poems that when workshopped had been criticised from every angle, was a wondrous happening.  That he parlayed my poems into a chapbook called Accidentals was a small miracle, and cosmic encouragement.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’ve had an interesting eighteen months with camera obscura, a chapbook from your above ground press, being published as well as over twenty-five poems accepted in journals, mostly Canadian, along with many acceptances in Japanese-form anthologies internationally.

Two new collections are submitted to presses at the moment, one a rewrite of the box poem collection (like the poems in camera obscura) after it had been rejected a few times, but now newly edited by Jason Heroux of Kingston, it may have a better chance.

The latest collection I’ve sent out is about a gas tank. Literally. I grew up across the street from one of those huge gasometers and it made an impression on me that I never quite realized until I started thinking about what it meant to me, to my early years, to my community and its growth.

I’ve just finished final edits for a book with Aelous Press with Allan Briesmaster as editor. Poems in it range from the purely narrative about my parrot, about my family, about Fogo Island, and about a rabbit. Other poems are more experimental in form and content. My hat comes off to Allan Briesmaster for seeing value in such a varied collection. rabbit should be out in June.