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Thumbnail autobiography segueing to chapbook news
Young people, by which I mean under 35, laugh at my dry humour when I say I was on bulletin board systems, and on usenet before the internet, that I had one of the first NCF accounts in Ottawa, that I was building websites when the internet was going up. Now I throw my phone at a friend and say, make it go.
Likewise I was early on chapbooks, making a couple in primary school, more in high school. Yet was nearly 40 before I put together a book-book. Published not-by-me.
I am an early innovator, but also was effectively born in the 1800s, on a farm, in a fundamentalist community with prove-it-to-Thomas attitude about tectonic plates. I entered university expecting to be a monk or bible translator or both. I exited agnostic, soon to be atheist after meeting so many homophobic, xenophobic, racist, sexist, angry, scared, aggressive Christians with so many issues, and so many atheists who had gone through therapy to compassion and stability. They’ll know we are Christians by our mudslinging isn’t how to song went but maybe should have.
To flip backwards, I entered school reading chapter books, but the kindergarten teacher dragged my finger over sandpaper letters to teach me the alphabet which I could not say, audibly. I really wasn’t audible in general life until my 30s. The primary school librarian kept shooing me back to board books and picture books when I was determined to work my way through the Dewey decimal system starting at 0.
I bought my own books at estate auctions, in grab lots of antique books so my reading material was 1880s-1920s. It gave me an odd vocabulary at times. My grade 2 teacher asked for a word the opposite of loose, and I provided “taut” and she asked me to spell it and seemed flabbergasted, saying that’s a word her grandmother used. How did I know it?
My music was my grandmother’s gospel and bluegrass. In school we had to do a project on our favourite musician and I got nothing. Nothing. Who wrote Amazing Grace? I begged and borrowed from Aunts and mom and did mine on Roy Rogers. In the 1980s. Others did boy bands. I had no idea who any were. Next time we were assigned the same thing so I bought magazines and did research on Michael Jackson. I did like Man in the Mirror. You know, studied for research. For science.
Which is to say what? We all take the time we take. We each come from a different place and it’s not predictive of where we’re going. There’s choice in where and how we go.
Poetry is part of the journey of working things out. Empathy with the worst versions of self, and love towards those past people is part. I have a strong forward, don’t look back, don’t circle back, urge that is at odds with poetry which by nature is a gathering up. A carrying.
Reading a fan fiction I was knocked left because it Alternate Universed and made a character a divinity school drop out. It cited chapter and verse in a queer-positive context. The story brought partitioned off parts of my brain in dialogue. It was all still in there untouched. Cite chapter and verse and my mouth could move and recite. I had no idea.
It’s what I love poetry to do, to cross-pollinate what isn’t necessarily in dialogue. To make parts of self and world stand on equal footing, all the registers of language, all the past and the hopes, the spirally loops and the straight runs. It’s putting pieces out for someone to find who might resonate with those bits. If I know about it, or if I don’t get to find that out but someone grabs that for their bower.
So I have another clutch to offer out. rob mclennan graciously accepted one of the chapbooks I’ve been working on, Rushing Dusk. He has a sample poem from it here: https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2024/07/new-from-aboveground-press-rushing-dusk.html
I’ll be launching in person, (in person, weird huh) on Aug 10th at Red Bird in Ottawa. https://www.showpass.com/the-aboveground-press-31st-anniversary-readinglaunchparty/
I'll also have copies in Wakefield that morning at the Author’s Market at the Wakefield Farmers’s Market, 9am-1pm. You can find me at either place, or email me and get a copy, or get a copy from rob, via that first link.
Meantime I’m seeing if I can get 2 more chapbooks sent out from other projects and see how they land. With any luck I might get a second chapbook out this year too.