We are firmly into birthday season, with about six weeks between the boys’ arrivals. This past weekend we had a nice party for the bigger one. We decided to do soccer etc. at Corktown Park which has become a favourite of ours for their perfect kid-sized nets (the boys played in a very low stakes soccer league this summer, but the nets they used for the older age group were so small that when the final game went into a tie-breaking shootout, it took 17 rounds for someone to finally score!).

When I was thinking through what could possibly disrupt our plans I had accounted for all three fields being in use or bad weather, but I did not, however, anticipate all six nets might be encircled by orange construction fencing as part of the City’s impeccably timed annual sod replacement.

That being said, I quickly went home and grabbed the stack of (virtually unused) road cones I bought Jim for his third birthday (during his construction obsession) and we were back on track. It’s sweet to see that at this age they are still delighted by nothing more than the novelty of seeing each other outside of school. Add a little bit of candy into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a party.

Speaking of pylons, back in February, I was invited by the Hamilton Arts Council to contribute some work for the 50th anniversary of the Hamilton Arts Awards. Commissions are unknown territory for me as a poet, but it sounded interesting so I figured I’d give it a try. That, and they agreed to my exorbitant fee.

For a while I’ve been captivated by the niches in the pylons of the Thomas B. McQuesten High Level Bridge on York Boulevard. I wrote about this in my latest book, but the original intention had been to fill those four niches with statues of famous Hamiltonians, though council could never agree on who ought to grace the spaces so they’ve remained empty for the last century. I liked these present absences alongside what felt like a physical incarnation of a city with good intentions but a difficulty with execution.

My initial, totally feasible, idea was to physically reconstruct one of the niches and clad it in custom Tyvek building wrap for a suitably work-in-progress look. For a number of reasons, not least being space constraints at the venue (the novelty of a physical medium!), my contribution ended up shrinking a fair bit. In the end, I recorded a sort of poetic duet of my work alongside some of George Oppen’s more civic-minded material in On Being Numerous, largely spurred on by his similar “pylon of the bridge” obsession.

I also spent a great deal of my time this summer putting together a home office in anticipation of both my boys being in school. I tried not to get too caught up in the symbolism of deconstructing the crib and posting the rocking chair on marketplace. But now the carpet is out, the walls have been painted a suitably moody clay, and the books are out of storage for the first time since our midnight shelf debacle more than a year ago.

I was talking to Gary Barwin about this, but it was surprisingly moving to unbox all of these books (onto appropriately anchored shelves) that I’ve developed an attachment to. I found myself just standing in the middle of the room, running through the titles on the spines, not at all hiding from my children, but doing what Gary called a kind of higher-order-reading, thinking about how all of these works relate to one another and how they might collectively inform me and my work.

Some new additions to those spines include Mary Oppen’s stunning Meaning A Life (no comma!). I got put onto this one by fellow Oppen-enthusiast James McDonald of Printed Word fame and it was a savoured summer treat. Wonderfully crystalline reflections on the Oppen’s delightfully strange life that include sailing a 20-foot boat through the Erie Canal to New York City, travelling by horse and cart through rural France, and (famously) fleeing McCarthy &co. to Mexico. It was interesting to read such modern prose from someone of my great-grandparents’ generation, perspectives I’ve not had much exposure to.

I was also blown away by Anahid Nersessian’s How to Have Sex in a Poem which somehow is still not out until February of next year? If you’ve read Keats’s Odes, then you know what Nersessian is capable of and her brilliant mix of scholarly rigour and casual contemporary fluency is on display in this history of erotic verse. I found the earlier material more convincing, maybe because it stayed closer to the poetry, whereas the sections that approached present day, Bernadette Mayer for instance, tended to drag a bit more.

Another recent favourite which I picked up after a double recommendation from the North Sea Poets’ substack was Denise Riley’s A Chorus of Ears. I was at first a bit daunted by the capital-P Poetics but Riley has some wonderful thoughts about maintaining a respect for the form outside of the pressures of professionalism and/or prize culture. A couple of favourites:

“[the inner voice] rapidly turns out to be a tangle of inner and outer, of the echoing presence of half-remembered rhymes, threats, humiliation. And then a large part of the practice of writing must lie in unwilled recollection, a far wilder, less curated affair than any authorial hunt for a recalled past.”

“Given such real uncertainties, some very different inclinations could recommend themselves, as a change from the usual exhortations: for instance, to receptivity rather than blazing confidence and copious productivity. And to patient attentiveness, a tolerance of hesitancy, of stillness. Also to a degree of protective reticence—protective of the lyric itself, and so for some reserve, a readiness to wait.”

Lastly, I’ve been on a bit of a Dale Martin Smith kick, largely occasioned by the joint releases of his chapbook Figures of Speech: Wide Infinity (Polis Press) and the excellent The Passenger (Wave Books). I’ve also been testing my Wayback Machine skills, trying to turn up pdfs of some of his earlier out of print books, and in doing so have also been reading more about his ideas around Slow Poetry which I’ve seen in my peripherals for a little while, but had been meaning to spend more time with:

“I think Whitman observed the importance of loafing to poets. I like loafing—it provides a space for recharge. I think we should all be lucky to write 10 really good poems a year. In a decade there would be enough for a small volume. One poem requires probably several hundred hours of loafing, attention to one’s domestic space, one’s labor for survival, and commitment to expanding capacities to read the world in its diverse complexities.”

Lots to like in here.

To see you out, I’ve included the audio of my Arts Awards commission piece. I could never arrive at a title that I liked and, because it was an audio installation, I didn’t really have to! Learning those visual art tricks after all.

[Oppen comes in hot, don’t get spooked.]

Last time I shared a piece here that an editor was nonresponsive about they immediately replied to me and took the essay regardless of the hordes of Work Book readers having already seen it, so hopefully that’ll become a pattern. Otherwise, it’s nice to have a venue for intrepid reportage that American glossy mags ultimately deem “not quite enough for a piece.” I leave the piece/not a piece distinction to you, dear educated reader.

~~~

As you may know, if you’ve been reading here for a bit, for the past year or so, I’ve been working in the Local History and Archives department of the Hamilton Public Library, in Ontario, Canada. Our main collection scope is that all the material we hold must be connected in some way to this city, and, as such, we have hundreds of historical maps, thousands of negatives from defunct commercial photography studios, as well as a whole room of filing cabinets transferred to us when the local newspaper was bought out by a mass media company and promptly closed its offices.

Being a poet, I’ve been particularly interested in our literary holdings, however limited. I’ve spent many quiet evening shifts in the reading room flipping through small press publications of Hamilton heroes, none of whom have been mentioned in these illustrious pages.1 Given the department’s local focus, I thought perhaps the archives might include material from a Governor General’s Award winner or a (Canadian) Griffin Poetry Prize laureate, but had no hopes that I’d find anything related to a certified MacArthur genius or perennial Nobel laureate (!) contender, and certainly not in, of all sections, the high school yearbooks.

It wasn’t until four years ago, stumbling upon Paul Meyer’s remarkable and mystifying doctoral thesis on Anne Carson, She] ⟨Ha?⟩ She, I became aware that one of our most enigmatic living poets spent the majority of the 1960s in the small town just two miles three kilometres to the east of me—Stoney Creek, Ontario. It seems incomprehensible that a writer so sui generis, so oracular, was once a surly teenager at a suburban Catholic high school.

And it was only this spring I realized, given that Bishop Ryan Secondary fell within Hamilton’s city limits, that the department’s yearbook collection likely contained documentation of a young Anne Carson. Sure enough, flipping through the 1967 copy, there she was in perfect halftone, dripping with teenage ennui.

Across Carson’s four and a bit years at Bishop Ryan (Ontario had a short-lived 13^th Grade until 2003) there are the requisite annual photographs, beginning with full-class shots, and then individual portraits as she moved into the senior grades. I didn’t find anything that radically changed my perception of this laconic poet, no mind-altering images of her tipping off on the basketball court or leading cheers on the sidelines of a football game.

There are, however, three poems included in her 10^th and 11^th years, decidedly the work of a mortal teenager—end-rhymed and filled with morning dew, mist, caves and capital-F Fear. The interest in the form is present and they are certainly capable for a young person, but there is nothing undeniable there. The poems were particularly surprising given Carson has emphasized her lack of interest in writing growing up—in an interview with the poet and critic Stephanie Burt for Poets & Writers, Carson said, “I didn’t write very much at all until I guess my 20s because I drew. I just drew pictures, and sometimes wrote on them when I was young but mostly I was interested in drawing. I never did think of myself as a writer!”

Fittingly, for a(n eventual) writer whose books have yet to include an author photo, her image is absent from her graduating year’s book, the only sign of her a characteristically Aristotelian single sentence:

Here are shades of her famously laconic biographical note, “Anne Carson lives in Canada,” later updated to, “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.”

The city of Hamilton seems to be generally ignorant of its admittedly passing connection with Carson. A 2001 article in The Hamilton Spectator, on the occasion of her winning the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize, featured the decidedly unsensational headline, “Stoney Creek woman wins poetry award” (one wonders how they might have addressed her hypothetical Nobel citation). A second mention of her local residence appeared nearly twenty years later, to the day, with almost verbatim copy, aside from an appended anecdote courtesy of an old classmate who quoted Carson’s delightfully dry reaction to receiving another earlier award, “Me? A girl from Stoney Crick?”

Carson’s 2004 Art of Poetry interview in this very publication also makes some mention of these years: “in grade ten or eleven I developed a fascination with Oscar Wilde. Some of my friends shared this fascination so we used to dress like Oscar Wilde and memorize his aphorisms and construct conversations in the lunchroom, as if we were Oscar Wilde and his friends.”

Likewise, she has often retold a story of her first encounter with ancient Greek being in “a shopping mall in Hamilton, Ontario, in about 1965; I was trolling around the bookstore and for some reason they had a bilingual edition of Sappho by Willis Barnstone, the translator and editor, with the Greek on the left, the English on the right and it just looked so fascinating I thought I should learn this.”

As far as mentions of this time in her own published work, they are even more sparse. The fifth tango in 2001’s The Beauty of the Husband, “Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin,” quotes her mother’s reaction to a boyfriend’s inauspicious name when Carson was fifteen:

I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.

Glancing

at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf

she said

I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and

something exposed itself in her voice,

a Babel

thrust between us at that instant which we would never

learn to construe—

taste of iron.

Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t

mean them to.

Reading too much into juvenilia is certainly unadvisable. It would do a disservice to a writer as wild as Carson to give into an entirely biographical reading, to see in these photos and early poems a linear inevitability. What I do see here though is the B.C.E. of a writer who has seemed to drift further from her times with each project, who, when asked to recommend her favourite recently-published book on the red carpet at the 2024 National Book Awards answered, “I don’t really read books that came out this year, I read old books because I’m a classicist, so mostly the books I read are published in 500 B.C.”

Surely, many great and anciently-oriented writers come from humble (even Canadian) origins. With Carson, that effect is heightened by her simultaneous reticence and mythic stature (an otherworldliness only increased by her recently being granted Icelandic citizenship).

For me, her already astonishing work becomes that much more impressive while picking up my groceries in the big-box centre that now occupies the address where she first encountered Sappho, or riding the bus past the autorepair and used tire outlets that replaced the original Bishop Ryan. Knowing that Anne Carson was once familiar with this utterly ordinary place lends it a new charge—passing the garbled vinyl lettering in the parking lot of the laundromat across the street, it suddenly starts to read like a Sapphic fragment.

1

Though, Hamilton legend, Joe Ollmann did successfully make it through the gates on more than one occasion and penned this amazing comic about it, that I had hoped to share on the event of my own publication:

I first came to Coach House Press’s Talking Books series as a Michael Ondaatje completist. After being introduced to In the Skin of a Lion in a high school English class, I made my way through the rest of the novels before moving onto his poetry: first McClelland and Stewart’s The Cinnamon Peeler and House of Anansi’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, but eventually into the scarcer Coach House titles like Secular Love, Rat Jelly, and The Man With Seven Toes. At one point or another in my collecting, I started seeing the cryptic Previous Canoes listed in bibliographies, seemingly a cassette tape of him reading his poetry, but with very little information available.

Dutiful librarian that I am, I submitted a request through our Interlibrary Loan department and the cassette arrived a few weeks later from the University of Toronto, one of the few libraries that hold copies. Given how rare these tapes are, I’m astounded now that a librarian just mailed one off for me to perform amateur experiments on in my apartment.

At that time, I was interested in sound engineering, recording myself and my friends playing music on my laptop. We were also experimenting with cassette tapes for that squished 90s sound, so when the Ondaatje tape arrived, I had the means to play it back. I still remember hearing his voice for the first time, cross-legged on my jute rug. Even through my tinny computer speakers, his readings were so sonorous and present, the clipped ds, the short os, crooning the chorus of “How Do you Think I Feel,” calling along with the crows. These poems I had encountered so many times in print—“Dates,” “Burning Hills,” “Elimination Dance”—were renewed in his delivery. I can hear that opening title and dedication ringing out in his beautiful, patient cadence, “Light…for Doris Gratien.”

Knowing I would only have access to the tape for a few weeks and having a sense that I’d stumbled on something of a rarity, I ran a cable from the headphone jack of my tape deck into the port of my audio interface and made a rough digital version of the cassette which I uploaded to YouTube in 2017. In the years that followed, someone would periodically comment on the video and I’d be reminded of the recording, prompted to revisit it myself.

It wasn’t until the winter of 2025 when the poet Kevin Stebner posted a photo of Hamilton hero David McFadden’s contribution to the series that I gave any thought to the rest of the Talking Books. When I first started looking for more information, the tapes seemed to have more or less vanished into the internet’s maw. So many of the websites that document these types of projects are medium-exclusive; there’s no option for audio on Abebooks, and though there are scattered entries for literary releases on Discogs, given the site’s musical leanings, these kinds of projects don’t really register—too musical for the literary people, too literary for the music people. One bookseller I contacted made the distinction quite succinctly, “Unfortunately we don’t deal with cassettes or audiobooks, just print books.”

~

Ever since Robert Browning had his bungled version of “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” committed to wax cylinder in 1889, poetry has become available in a host of audio formats. Many of the famous Modernists could be heard on LP (and eventually cassette) through labels like Harper Collins’s Caedmon. Likewise, influential American poets of the postwar era like Ginsberg, Waldman, Harjo, Lorde, Snyder and Rich were recorded for cassettes by Watershed Tapes.

The history of recorded Canadian poetry is quite a bit shorter (case in point, the Canadian Poetry Audio Archives contains just 49 recordings, 25 in English). I would be remiss not to mention the Underwhich Audiographic Series whose cassettes have been lovingly documented by Siren Recordings. But as for more traditional commercial releases, the most prominent are a handful of numerically-oriented LPs: Six Montreal Poets (Folkways Records, 1957—later reissued on cassette), Six Toronto Poets (Folkways, 1958), Canadian Poets 1 (CBC, 1966), Canadian Poets 2 (CBC, 1969), and 11 Canadian Poets (League of Canadian Poets, 1973). These LPs were followed by the delightfully oxymoronic Famous Canadian Poets on CD (Canadian Poetry Association, 1999), which was puzzlingly supplemented by a cassette from Milton Acorn. Each of these releases does a fair amount of reproduction with figures like Earle Birney and F.R. Scott appearing in three out of the four projects, and in what feels like an analogy for Canadian Literature as a whole, both sides of Canadian Poets 2 are devoted entirely to Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie.

Though these series all predate the Coach House Press Talking Books, many significantly so, they are without exception much easier to access information on, if not the actual recordings (the Folkways pressing still available for purchase through their webstore). Perhaps the relative disappearance of the Talking Books was an issue of edition size or the tendency of cassette tapes to decay faster than vinyl. It almost certainly involves the brief demise of Coach House Press in 1996 before it was reborn as Coach House Books in 1997, a transfer that resulted in the loss of many in-house records.

Whatever the combination of factors that contributed to its obscurity, the series’ scarcity meant that my search for information was haphazard. I found a few scant listings on Discogs for the Victor Coleman and Michael Ondaatje tapes, including a pixelated reproduction of one of the J-cards from which I was eventually able to piece together the full series catalog.

Once I had the complete list of titles, I was able to find the cover image for Robert Priest’s perfectly titled Rottweiler Pacifist via the Instagram account of the series’ designer Kurt Swinghammer. When I emailed Kurt to see if he had more information, he said he hadn’t archived his work from that era well:

Interesting to see these - I’d completely forgotten about many of them. The unusual aspect of this project was that the covers weren’t printed at Coach House and I was responsible for delivering them. I used a dude who did Queen West posters and some of the designs suffered in the translation…Long forgotten the name of the printer. It was a very small operation just north of Queen, west of Bathurst.

Of course, jwcurry had the bpNichol entries (including EAR LICK) meticulously documented on his voluminous Flickr account. Other online bibliographies, like the University of Toronto’s Canadian Poetry Online, captured the entries of individual authors in the series, but I struggled to find anything comprehensive that addressed the series as a whole.

Eventually, I was able to purchase a copy of the David McFadden tape through Toronto’s David Mason Books. When I reached out to the all-knowing James McDonald of The Printed Word, he said he had the Anne Michaels cassette “at home but not among my personal must keep things.” I placed an order for the bpNichol cassette with another bookseller and anxiously re-read the last line of their confirmation email during the tape’s month-long journey to my door: “please wait for notification from us before sending payment…in the event that an item cannot be located in our stacks.”

A review of the Gwendolyn MacEwen tape in Brazen Oralities was available on archive.org, as well as a two-part review of the entire series in back issues of The Malahat Review. While scattered and spare bibliographic information appeared via the catalogues of various university libraries and special collections, the only complete collection (from what I can find) is held by Library and Archives Canada (though not all entries are linked to the “Talking Books.” series, necessitating some creative searching).

I’ve divulged my browsing history here not because I believe I have exceptional research skills, but rather to highlight how certain information eludes archiving, particularly in an online context. Each of these websites, collectors, publications, libraries etc. is doing important and admirable work in documenting and preserving the history of Canadian literature, but given their particular focuses, while pieces of the series have been collected, the series as a whole has almost entirely been neglected.

That is, until a part-time archive worker/poet rectified past omissions with one rambling essay to unite them all. So, here’s what I’ve learned:

The series was preceded by a promotional sampler in 1988 featuring recordings from the Sarah Sheard, Dennis Tourbin, Anne Michaels, Kate Van Dusen, bpNichol, Margaret Atwood and Victor Coleman tapes. Over the course of 1989 and 1990, thirteen cassette tapes were released [doesn’t that scream special project grant funding?]. The series was a collaboration between legendary Toronto music venue/recording studio, The Music Gallery, and Coach House Press. Each of the tapes was produced by Victor Coleman who was a double agent for both Coach House and The Music Gallery at the time. Paul Hodge handled various technical aspects of the recording/editing process and Kurt Swinghammer handled the design of the packaging. In very fitting small press fashion, the series does not have a clear first, sixth or eleventh entry but rather two 002s, two 005s, and two 008s.

The cassettes were released in two batches with the first six appearing on September 11th, 1989, followed by the final seven between November 1989 and May 1990, an almost even mix of poetry and prose. Each tape came sheathed in a silver box, like a prosthesis that rendered them book-sized. The first instalments are mostly single author recordings whereas some of the 1990 selections are more ambitious, including musical accompaniment. Some were new selections of work recorded by the authors themselves, whereas others were recordings of standalone works. In a few cases, where the author had recently passed away (or was too famous?) the readings were done by local actors.

While the internet might seem to hold all, there are interesting and important histories disappearing. A series that included some of the biggest writers of its day (and our day) is now virtually unsearchable, largely SEOed out by Coach House’s own website, social media, and Wikipedia page, etc.

The Talking Books series is one of the only collections of formal studio recordings of Canadian writers, particularly this generation of Torontonian/Canadian authors. Among recordings of Canadian literature, it seems to be unique in its focus on full works and/or broad selections of individual authors. It is also just one example of many projects that had not made the transition from analog to digital. Luckily, the tapes were sourceable and many of the original contributors were willing to share what they remembered after little more than a cold email.

This is a beautiful and unique set of recordings, an impressive feat of collaboration between some of this country’s finest novelists, actors, poets, musicians, audio engineers, and visual artists. The information is out there, but for how much longer? The links are rotting, the poets are passing, the tape is decaying.

~

Series Catalogue

CH/MG TB000 - A Sampler (1988)

CH/MG TB001 - bpNichol (1944-88) - A Tribute (1989) [#002 on packaging]

CH/MG TB002 - Anne Michaels / Kate Van Dusen - The Weight of Oranges / Not Noir (1989)

CH/MG TB003 - Dennis Tourbin - The Port Dalhousie Stories (1989)

CH/MG TB004 - Sarah Sheard - Almost Japanese (1989)

CH/MG TB005 - Michael Ondaatje - Previous Canoes (1989)

CH/MG TB006 - Margaret Atwood - Murder in the Dark (1989) [read by Clare Coulter]

CH/MG TB007 - Gwendolyn MacEwen - Noman’s Land (1990) [read by Gabrielle Rose]

CH/MG TB008 - Robert Priest - Rottweiler Pacifist (1990)

CH/MG TB009 - Victor Coleman - Nothing Heavy Or Fragile (1990)

CH/MG TB010 - Christopher Dewdney - Video Marquee (1990)

CH/MG TB011 - David McFadden - Selected Lakes (1990) [#008 on packaging]

CH/MG TB012 - EAR LICK - Poets as Songwriters (1990)

CH/MG TB013 - Elizabeth Smart - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1990) [read by Nancy Beatty]

A Selected Audiography(?) of Canadian Poetry

Six Montreal Poets [Folkways, LP & Cassette, 1957]

Six Toronto Poets [Folkways, LP, 1958]

Voix de 8 Poetes du Canada [Folkways, LP, 1958]

Canadian Poets 1 [CBC, LP, 1966]:

Canadian Poets 2 [CBC, LP, 1969]

Poems for Voices [Radio Canada International, LP, n.d./1970]

Al Purdy’s Ontario [CBC, LP, 1971]

Alden Nowlan’s Maritimes [CBC, LP, 1972]

Gwendolyn MacEwen - Open Secret [CBC, LP, 1972]

Louis Dudek - The Green Beyond [CBC, LP, 1973]

11 Canadian Poets [League of Canadian Poets, LP, 1973]

Newfoundland Poets Volume 1 [Pigeon Inlet Productions, LP, 1982]

Canadian Poetry Association Audio Series [CD, 1999, + Milton Acorn cassette, 1986]:

With thanks to:

Kurt Swinghammer, Paul Hodge, Tess Visser, Steacy Easton, James McDonald, Samantha Dawdy at McMaster University Libraries, Monique Flaccavento and Dylan Rykse at Robarts Library, Jaspreet Sandhu at the Ontario Arts Council, Anna and Julia at the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, LT at the Vancouver Public Library, David Kloepfer at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections & Rare Books, Adrienne Connelly at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Kristen Frame at Library and Archives Canada, and the University of Calgary’s Interlibrary Loan Department.

One lovely parenting development is that J and I have started cooking together. I am not naturally one of those parents with a high risk-tolerance for things like open flame and sharp knives, but his fear of injury seems to serve us well in this respect. It’s been funny to see a boy whose favourite food is Eggo waffles capably prepare a garden salad—a good reminder not to underestimate him already at six. Lest you think it’s all organic over here, he’s also quickly become the best “K. Dinner” chef in the house.

Alongside more wholesome pursuits, we’ve also been making our way through the Shrek filmography. The first and second instalments definitely hold up in humour if not in animation quality. Maybe more than the movie itself though, the soundtrack brought me back to such a specific time period—Smash Mouth’s “All Star” blasting on the black egg of a CD-player in my grade school gym class. The boys have now memorized a shocking percentage of the lyrics to “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (E. Murphy / A. Banderas version) and the older one has begun asking me to put on Nick Cave in the morning before school (surely not a sign of melancholia to come?).

The Shrek soundtrack was my first exposure to songs like Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah” which seemed at the time like an entirely new use for music, even visually accompanied by so much electric green. Coming back to these movies got me thinking about other soundtracks from that time and how these unassuming cultural products became vehicles for a different kind of musical education, in particular the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games, rented from Jumbo Video for 48 hours, which introduced me to everything from N.W.A. to Motorhead, Rollins Band to The Ramones.

In the slightly deeper past, my grandparents are in the process of moving which always seems to stir up the historical documents, and in this case it turned up a photo of my (maternal) great-great-grandfather, George Bootland, who ran a fruit store at the corner of Hunter and John in Hamilton, an address that curiously no longer exists. The photograph is another from Ron Nelson of London, ON, a commercial photographer whose archives are held at UWO and who coincidentally also photographed my paternal great-grandfather’s butcher shop.

It’s often interesting what a newspaper search turns up on someone’s relatives—the typical mentions are birth/marriage/death announcements, brushes with the law, and housefires. With Bootland that was certainly the case—there were details from his criminal trial after being caught running liquor from Buffalo to Port Maitland in 1925, mention of a fire at his store where his family was evacuated but given that he was bedridden, they just posted a fireman to watch over him until the fire could be extinguished, a ticket for reckless driving, a spare tire stolen from the trunk of his car (value: $25). It’s fascinating the difference in what was considered newsworthy, as well as the lack of concern for personal privacy—the majority of the clippings identify not only his name, but his home address. There seems to have been, for better or worse, a different accountability to your location, that people likely knew you and knew where you lived, or could quite readily find that information out.

In the interest of throwing off any circling debt collectors, I recently made my biannual trip out to Toronto to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the mighty knife | fork | book, a press doing some of the most beautiful publishing in the country, and who I’ve been delighted to publish two different projects with now, most recently my chapbook, [A] Sensitive Man. We had a beautiful day for the launch at Arts Etobicoke, a light-filled gallery space, and a room full of people I don’t see often enough.

James Lindsay read from his excellent long poem Choral Coral Carol which moves with such music, through beautiful slippages (see the title) and is full of humour and surprise:

When all the undulating has gone under, the ululating
Can truly get going. Together we can show what a voice

Is capable of when one with other voices. Yes, it is impossible
To not talk over each other always, but there is an invisible

Moment when you realize the singings have begun to fall in
Step, negotiating discord, ripening in texture, an understanding. 

Zane Koss read from new a project that I’ve also really enjoyed: “Why must everything have/ so long a duration/ to be worth doing.” Afterward, I got to chatting about hockey with Jennifer Lovegrove and she put me onto her article for the CBC about coming to the sport later in life and reckoning with its culture.

While I was there, I was also pestering Dale Martin Smith about good work on fatherhood and he mentioned Graeme Bezanson’s Ultra Blue, which I loved and was frankly stunned by the strangeness of given the jacket copy’s namechecking of Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. Especially in their promotion, I think there’s increasingly a pressure for poetry collections to be topical, or as Graeme puts it, to have “the strangeness/…filtered from them.” Maybe it’s simply a product of work like Bezanson’s, which is so atmospheric and elliptical, being difficult to characterize in so small a space:

The true word for horses is lost
Because for a long time everyone
Was too superstitious to use it
Light from the morning star
Is vague
Second-hand
Waves blooming within waves
The pond filling up
Into a succession of
Smaller ponds
With decreasing elevation
So that in the end there must be
A single droplet of water hovering
At the earth's exact centre

To be clear, the aforementioned rightwing ghouls are present in the collection by virtue of an intermittent erasure poem, but the main body of the work feels more timeless and mythological—Gluck-like in the presence of horses, boats, and dark forests.

I recently stumbled on a poem from the Michigan poet Linda Gregerson which started a month-long journey through five of her books. It’s definitely my particular flavour of collaged realism, moving quickly amongst time-periods and speakers, but braiding these disparate settings and images into something beyond simple anecdote. There’s a connection here to Karen Solie’s work, both in their shared Nordic ancestry and agrarian upbringings, but also their attention to syntax. My first exposure to Gregerson was her poem “An Arbor” (a pun on the name of her hometown) which not only looks attentively at the world of children but includes the following lines:

                       The new
            inadequate software gets the reference librarian

fired. 

Too perfect for me not to read further. While Gregerson’s books start out with more baroque titles and framings (appropriate to her being a Renaissance scholar) like Fire in the Conservatory (1982) and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), her most recent collection is Canopy, which the jacket copy describes as addressing everything, “From the Syrian refugee and ecological crises, to police brutality and COVID, to the Global Seed Vault buried under permafrost.” My issue with this setup is not that Gregerson isn’t meaningfully and skillfully engaging these important issues, but that together they form something like a checklist of orthodoxy rather than speaking to the poet’s unique facility with language or the originality of her thought. These topics are available to anyone enlightened enough to address them, but what sets a poem apart is how they are addressed.

For all of the self-apparent pandemic poems in Canopy, there are also subtler moments like “Melting Equestrian (Cavendish Square)” which examines the titular sculpture, recently reinstalled after a “hundred/ years of empty plinth,” though this time crafted out of soap:

I tend to trust the news release: the scented
                                  soap provided etc by

                                  Scented Soaps etc which you
can purchase at your local shop. The arts and the

ever-in-need-of-augmentation art of patching up
                                   public subsidy.

                                  The lead-and-gilt original
was paid for by a single admiring donor while

the donor’s troops (he too was a leader of men)
                                   were shipped to Ireland in rags.

The politics of how we fund and create art are all here, thought neither era comes out ethically superior.

George Oppen, another paragon of *political* poetry, has also been at the forefront of my mind lately. I happened on a recording of him reading his masterpiece, Of Being Numerous, and I am beginning to understand why Phil Hall holds him in such high regard, while also having hazy memories of Oppen lines filtered back through Hall’s own work. I think I may have quoted this line here before, but there’s an attractive humility to Oppen’s poetics, his sense of being, “one of those who from nothing / but man’s way of / thought and one of his dialects and what has happened / to me / Have made poetry.” I can’t help but feel the presence of his 25-year hiatus from poetry here, that he was someone conscious of the role the living played in his work.

As ever, I like to end things off by bringing it back to poetry, back to the actual poems. Here’s a new one that features me doing the closest approximation of study possible these days:

Being But an Ear

I save my Pocket 
Dickinson for that hour 
In the afternoon
When the boys disappear

Into their shows–
Watching “TV” on the 13”
Laptop screen that
Requires an external speaker

To even be heard
Above the furnace fan—
From the opposite corner
Of the family room

Headphones securely fastened–
I can just make out
Chattering trains beneath 
The thundering frigate–

The tears of the aardvark
Amidst the circling fly–
A whining tiger
Under Daisy’s loaded gun

I am a bit wary of this Protestant sense of asceticism, that everything must be difficult and earned, nor do I think that the poems I am writing one by one are of the great variety, but I do appreciate his sense that creativity is not necessarily infinite or immediate. There are writers I know and love who seem to be tireless fonts of words and poems and books, and some of them (Kess Mohammadi! Fawn Parker! Steacy Easton!) produce remarkably consistent (in both quality and pace) work. That has not been my experience, at least not of late, and so it’s heartening to have examples of what Joseph Parisi calls the unprolific, poets like Phyllis Webb, who wrote that her poems were “born out of great struggles of silence,” or in the seventh and final entry from her “Poems of Failure” in Wilson’s Bowl:

                                                                                  One
more day run around and the ‘good masterpiece of work’
does not come. I scribble. I approach some distant dream.
I wait for moonlight reflecting on the night sea. I can
wait. We shall see.

In a moment of synchronicity, I’ve also been reading Rilke of late, largely because he’s available at the public library in various translations. I had been listening to Bianca Stone’s excellent podcast, Ode & Psyche, on the Duino Elegies, and though some of the discussion was a bit beyond me, I appreciated the way listening to the episodes loosened my mind from the material world at the start of a writing day. Once I got past the hyperbolic jacket copy of the Selected Poems which declares that RMR “is widely considered to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century,” I was able to see the actual poems. It’s been a while since I’ve read a Romantic so all of the fleetingness and ancient enmity was a bit jarring, but I particularly appreciated an untitled piece of prose in the middle of the collection:

This is of course full of Romantic exaggeration (Lord, please grant me at least a sonnet’s-worth of good ones), but I appreciate Rilke’s mystical understanding of inspiration, this sense of the transubstantiation of memories into blood, into something nameless that causes the first word to arise.

Fittingly, both Webb and Rilke make appearances in the other book I’ve been making my way through lately, Michael Ondaatje’s The Distance of a Shout, specifically in the poem “Tin Roof” of which the former is the dedicatee, and the latter a poetic lodestar, as the newly-divorced Sri Lankan-Canadian asks of the German mystic, from an undisclosed location in Hawaii:

How can I link your flowing name
to geckoes or a slice of octopus?
Though there are Rainier beer cans,
magically, on the windowsill.

The poem, a dour attempt to put one’s life together after personal tragedy, appears as one of the stronger offerings in Ondaatje’s new selected poems.

I’ve had a copy of Ondaatje’s previous selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, since before I knew who this Wallace Stevens that meets King Kong on page 39 was. Depending on which continent you inhabit, this is either Ondaatje’s second or third selected poems, a feat made even more surprising if you accept this volume’s list of previous works which includes only six books poetry (I count twelve on my shelf). Thus begins the revisionism and normalization of a poet who has, at times, been quite rangy.

Ondaatje is a strange figure within Canadian poetry as he is one of our best known writers—coming to notoriety as part of the Coach House Press set in the sixties, before winning the 1970 Governor General’s Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (16 pages of which appear in this selected), a book whose influence continues to be felt as inspiration for works like Hannah Green’s brilliant XANAX COWBOY which won the same award 53 years later.

But despite his international notoriety, Ondaatje, not dissimilar from Margaret Atwood, seems to have stepped away from poetry in favour of being a novelist, publishing only one new volume of poems (along with the previous selected!) in the four decades between 1984’s Secular Love and 2024’s A Year of Last Things. The later work lacks the vitality and strangeness of the earlier Coach House collections, but reveals a more pensive poet, capable of, at times, a uniquely subtle sentimentality and eros. All this is a rambling lead up to saying that I think Ondaatje has been a vital and inspiring figure in Canadian poetry, and has certainly been an important writer for me, but this latest selection does little to help that reputation.

Firstly, the jacket copy does Ondaatje the disservice of calling these wide and varied works “a singular poetic memoir.” Though there is undoubtedly a great deal of “self” in these poems, this positioning reeks of the idea that poets are simply novelists(or memoirists)-in-training. It’s hard not to feel, that despite the book being dedicated to small press legend Stan Bevington, Penguin Random House couldn’t help but package this as Running in the Family: Part 2 (though without the formal experiment of the original). At the same time that The Distance of a Shout is being framed as a memoir of sorts, many of Ondaatje’s best poetic sequences—“Buried” and “The Nine Sentiments”—a form which provides the flow one might expect in a work of prose, have been chopped up and titled as single-page pieces. Ondaatje is at his best with more room to move, not so constrained by the smaller forms that seem to force premature resolution out of him, which is increasingly evident if one makes it to the middle of this latest volume where the editors have wisely decided to let “Claude Glass,” “Tin Roof,” “Rock Bottom,” and “Skin Boat” stand in their full length.

Ondaatje’s books have always been a bit modular, with both of the previously selected volumes shuffling, dropping, and reordering individual poems. His section titles have always been more stable containers than the full books, and that continues here with the early poems grouped not by book or chronology, but rather the unelaborated thematic headings of Burning Hills and Skin Boat. The shuffling and repackaging of the work is a common and even attractive feature of selected volumes, what irks me though, is that where the earlier selections, There’s A Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979) and The Cinnamon Peeler (1989), at least acknowledged all of the books that came before them, the more recent titles begin trimming his bibliography, starting with 2024’s A Year of Last Things which cuts 1967’s The Dainty Monsters and 1969’s The Man with Seven Toes (a shockingly stereotypical book that was, very quickly after its initial publication, wisely left in the past), and The Distance of a Shout which goes one step further erasing 1973’s Rat Jelly.

While I can appreciate a poet’s retrospective desire to suppress the amateur works of their youth, these three books contain some of Ondaatje’s most vital works and likely have some continued significance for him given this volume’s dedication to their publisher, the aforementioned Stan Bevington. The early career erasure continues beyond the front matter as well with only 8 of the 85 included poems (or 30 of the 259 pages) having been published before 1974. Despite the photo of the young writer that graces the book’s cover, the result is a selection that significantly privileges his later career.

My true gripe is that McClelland & Stewart could have done a Collected Poems of Michael Ondaatje in no more than 600 pages (Atwood’s 2024 M&S Selected Poems was 624 pages), and likely even fewer if the poems were run continuously. Dionne Brand’s 2022 Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems (also published by M&S) ran to 672 pages and omitted her most recently published book, an approach, which if followed here, would have dropped an Ondaatje Collected below 500 pages. [Side note: Goose Lane has the Maritimes covered, and Talonbooks the West Coast, but who will publish volumes of Collected Poems for Ontaria poets if not M&S?]

I will cap off this perhaps ill-advised foray into something-resembling-literary-criticism with the caveat that much of this talk of a Collected is potentially moot. Maybe Ondaatje was offered such a book and declined. Maybe such a volume is still in the works. Maybe there is some Byzantine rights issue. All that said, The Distance of a Shout, which entirely lacks an introduction, includes a slim three-page afterword-cum-reading list, and retails for $40CAD, feels a bit slapped together. Rather than a testament to a poet who, in his prime, wrote some of the most exciting work in this country, we have a missed opportunity, an aimless rehashing of past selecteds that fails to give a sense of how wide and strange a poet Ondaatje has been across his nearly sixty-year career.

Lest you think all I do is read and stew over the editorial direction of Big Five publishers, I have also been spending my time constructing bunkbeds and stewing over the NHL’s full MAGA turn. While I felt fairly certain that the majority of hockey players were not people whose worldviews I would agree with, all plausible deniability is now gone. Thankfully, the weather is turning, the backyard rink is melting, and the famously unproblematic soccer season approaches. Still, I am unsure what to do about my increasingly hockey-centric social media algorithm or the six-year-old’s wardrobe, which includes enough Auston Matthews paraphernalia to outfit him for a full school week.

Why not lean into it and send you out with my attempt at a hockey poem, of which there are (perhaps tellingly) very few good examples (Ondaatje’s “To A Sad Daughter” and Ken Babstock’s “21”).

Hell of a Game

Aside from the elusive matinee, 
their understanding of the sport has been
shaped exclusively by first periods

up until the commercial break
and early morning highlights—
condensed (and uninterrupted) form

preparing them for, I fear, 
the bettor’s fantasy, a future where
the final score is known before

the game has yet begun.
The eldest (who had a math quiz today)
unfailingly opts for the greatest

total goals, whereas the younger’s
preferences are less articulable,
seeming sometimes to involve

favourite animals and/or colours.
We stream from the league’s site
(not the networks) because their edit

favours shots on goal—no scrums or brawls,
no context for the powerplay, just 9:58
of Grade A chances, skipping straight past

the scoreless second to the ever-promising
third, a fresh goalie in the crease,
and a home team rally on the way.

Hello all. Happy 2026.

I’ve gone full suburban dad and spent much of the winter break obsessively checking the weather forecast and thawing our garden hose in the laundry sink, all in service of a backyard hockey rink that my boys have taken to in earnest, with the younger one asking to “go for a little skate” often before the sun is up.

Give that their conceptions of hockey have largely been shaped by watching the NHL, they’ve been a bit perplexed that I am not doing things to professional standards. Their sense of dissonance only increased after seeing video evidence of John Tavares’s children skating on a backyard rink complete with a dressing room and regulation boards, meanwhile, dad is out back constructing a “net” using a staple gun, rusty chicken wire, and a deconstructed shipping pallet. They were similarly confused when we went to watch their cousins’ team play and there was only one Zamboni and just eleven skaters on a team whose helmets were not colour coordinated. Otherwise, rave reviews.

Alongside my return to hockey, I’ve also been coming back to music of late. I’ve thought of myself as a musician for longer than I have a poet, but lately, due to time constraints, that label has felt less and less true, so it was extra gratifying to celebrate the release of Romanticized, the latest album from my constant collaborator, Ben “Thomas St. Clair” McCullough. The two of us have been playing music together since we were teenagers and started recording these songs ten years ago, making the record feel like an archival restoration from another time.

Given that I’ve been existing mostly in the niche worlds of poetry and local history I often feel a sense of being out of time. Back in the fall, I was working in the 19thC church where I have a desk, and just as the school across the street was being dismissed, I shuffled out the side door of the sanctuary in my slippers to get my thermos from the car, nearly walked into a group of ten-year-olds and felt as foreign as a Trappist. All that said, it has been lovely to experience again the accessibility of music, to witness its relative undeniability and universality.

End of the old year and, as I write my grant reports, I’ve been thinking more about pace. Since the government started tracking such things, I’ve written between 5-10 poems each year that end up in my book manuscripts, which is not the most attractive metric for funders, but an agreeable price-per-word for me.

I recently read an excellent newsletter by Lisa Brockwell of the North Sea Poets on Elizabeth Bishop’s notebooks where she writes that, “Bishop published only 101 poems and translations in her lifetime” and that, to the dismay of her editors and publishers, “the process could not be simply sped up.” All well and good if you’ve got a significant inheritance and the ability to write “At the Fishhouses.” For myself though, I’ve been trying to find that balance between patience and diligence, acknowledging that there seems to be a reliable pattern to my process and that more writing does not necessarily mean better writing, while also not being a Modernist slug.

I’ve realized that we have a fair amount of language around writer’s block on one end of the spectrum and prolificity on the other—Dickinson’s annus mirabilis, the ecstatic visitation—but I wonder about that very gradual kind of production that can be confused for laziness (even by the host). I do think there is something pleasingly countercultural about slowness and finite production in an age of instantaneously generated content, but I have yet to fully silence the WASPs in my brain.

Poems - Elizabeth Bishop

Not a book you pick up for the title, but after all that talk of Bishop and how few poems there were, of course I had to go back through them. I’m not sure what it says about me, but as I’ve read back through the collected works of some old favourites lately, I’ve found myself returning to the same poems I loved on first reading. “The Moose” was one of the poems that woke me up to poetry when I first heard it read by Nick Laird in the Paul Muldoon era of the New Yorker Poetry podcast. I appreciate Bishop’s formalism to a certain extent, but there’s something about the looser and longer poems that draw me in here, the prospect of a brilliant formalist writing free verse.

something that maybe I   could bargain with
and make a separate peace   beneath
within   if never with.

Ellen Bryant Voigt - The Art of Syntax

Definitely one to tackle on the e-reader so as not to out yourself as the driest person who ever lived. That being said, this one was excellent—up there with James Longenbach’s Art of the Poetic Line for the best installments in Graywolf Press’s Art of… series. It gets very technical at times, and some of the discussion of prosody was over my head, but her considerations about how the rhythm of a line can either complement or challenge its syntax, the two either working in concert or in opposite directions to create a productive tension, were quite engaging.

W.S. Merwin - What is a Garden

I find Merwin a bit ponderous at times and this book could have used a good edit to root out the repetition between the essays, but this quote in particular captured a fair bit of my sense of Southern Ontario and what I was after with As Is:

“my own origins…surrounded me with the insistence that they were ordinary to the point of being absolute, and therefore unnotable. It was taken for granted that everyone lived in rooms, clothes, habits like those I could see, and was urban, middle-class, northeastern American.

The world was the New Jersey hinterland and the minor industrial towns of Pennsylvania, the crimped, seamless propriety of a poorly paid minister’s family in the years of the Depression.”

My experience of only ever living in the post-industrial Great Lakes region is that it has often felt more or less cultureless, a self-apparent blandness, “ordinary to the point of being absolute.” There are a few other moments of great insight in here—that, and the photos of the Merwins’ palm forest are incredible.

A fresh, hot, musically-oriented poem for your trouble:

You Gotta Keep ‘Em Separated

	I

The bassist in 
my middle school cover band,
immersed in an oversized Offspring T,
told us repeatedly he wished

he’d never heard any music,
leaving him free 
from the derivative,
open to untainted melodies.

Well, John, it’s almost 
twenty years on, 
and still I’m singing 
a compromised song,

divulging my employer’s name 
to the local police
so I can chaperone my son
on the space-themed orchestra trip,

that same stage we once graced 
with our knockoff Strats
before the drummer’s dad belted 
both sides of Rubber Soul.


	II

My mother keeps a pair of wooden 
serving spoons by the sliding door,
looses the boys out back to transform
the deck’s aluminum balusters 

into a monotonic xylophone 
when the starlings overwhelm 
the songbirds at the feeder.
Our littlest, Louis, participates,

but maintains he is nothing so slight, 
neither goldfinch nor chickadee,
but the grackle, the crow.
When every species has flown

and brothers, naturally, turn 
their utensils on one another, 
Lou releases his considerable call, 
like the out of sync bird clock 

on the living room wall which, 
though both hands point 
to the crown of the cardinal, 
broadcasts the honk of the Canada goose.

Last week I was talking to Gary Barwin, who is helping prepare Paul Dutton’s archive, and he was saying how amazing it is to be in a house surrounded by art and books and media, to see the physical traces of a life spent making literature and music. It made me wonder what my own house looks like from the outside. Aside from plastic toys, our place is perhaps unsurprisingly covered in books. But it is increasingly a very artistic/crafty house. Despite my efforts to keep at least one side of the dining room table reserved solely for dining, the ooze of drawings and painting and play dough continues its advance. At a loss for what to do with their respective oeuvres, and reaching a point where I was being served targeted advertisements for children’s artwork digitization, Al has started pulping the various 8.5x11” sheets which have been graced with a single line of magic marker and making her own paper with them.

The house is also increasingly suffused with Al’s natural dyeing materials. As much as I hate eating anywhere near the smell of playdough, it has been really invigorating to live in a house so full of creativity, to see Al come into her own practice so assuredly, but also to watch the boys embrace their artistic abilities, even if it means I have some days sketched out three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before 7am. It has also been quite funny, after years of going undercover as a poet, to have to explain a bit of her process to strangers, like when Louis and I purchased exactly 25” of copper pipe from the local Home Hardware and I couldn’t really explain why the diameter of the pipe didn’t matter or exactly what Al was going to use it for. Mostly, these things just feel like life with my strange little crew, that is until I’m offering a friend a ride home from a reading and realize there are multiple cherry branches in the tailgate, the cupholders are full of acorns, and there’s a bucket of unpeeled walnuts in the footwell.

We’ve been starting to batten down the hatches in preparation for winter, including finally deciding to insulate the roof of our front porch/floor of our bedroom after three winters of frosty sleeping. Jim seems to have picked up on all the repair talk as when I told him that Al and I were planning to go out for dinner he asked “Will you and mom talk about the basement when you go out?”

As part of our preparations, two weeks ago I had the strange experience of being wordlessly buzzed into a foyer that housed only a glass elevator, riding up to the floor above the York Boulevard Starbucks, and then passing a double Ziplocked bag of yellow insulation, which I pried out from behind the tongue and groove paneling with a flathead screwdriver, and handing it over to the lab’s receptionist.

At work, I’ve wrapped up my time as an Archival Clerk and have been gradually evolving into an Archival Technician. I’ve been enjoying all things RAD (Rules of Archival Description) and accessioning some of our more recent donations. From the service desk in the Local History and Archives reading room, you can see half of the Coppley building and it’s been interesting, over the course of the summer, to watch it get a facelift. After decades of inactivity, it has been getting sandblasted, power washed, angle grinded as well as being improved with a tool that made my whole body feel like it was being hit with a dental drill when I walked by. One day in particular, when the work was first beginning, there was such colourful smoke wafting out the missing windows that not one but two library workers called the fire department on the contractors. Right now you can see all the way through building to Vine St. a block north. Nothing, nothing, then all at once, some action. Kind of like writing poems. “I wait until the poems seem to be addressed not to ‘Occupant’ but to ‘William Meredith.’ And it doesn’t happen a lot.”

One of the many things I love about library workers is that their frequent interactions with various segments of the public often mean that they have some great stories (and, of course, a keen respect for confidentiality). In our team chat the other day, someone noted that a patron had come in looking for a nonexistent Tai Chi program. Staff Member A posted: “Years ago, before the pandemic, a group met once a week on the fourth floor for an hour of Tai Chi,” to which Staff Member B replied: “There used to be a lovely man who sat on the fourth floor everyday. One day he fell asleep reading and when he woke up he was surrounded by the seniors doing tai chi and he told me he wasn’t sure if it was a dream.” Sometimes it’s a workplace like any other, but every once in a while, you can get a glimpse of the other side.

[I sent this story to Gary because it sounded like something wired directly from his brain and he wrote and recorded a poem about it (with original musical accompaniment) in the time it takes me to turn on my laptop.]

Perhaps my most impactful read in the last few months was Gillian White’s Lyric Shame which examines, as the title might suggest, the persistent sentiment that lyric, I-focused poetry “in which ‘experience is digested for its moral content’” is not only shameful, but politically retrograde in light of the emergence of various avant-garde movements, particularly language poetry. It’s an excellent, complicating read that challenged my thinking in many useful ways, and wasn’t too dense for someone that tends to shy away from poetics/theory. It has also been driving me back to Bernadette Mayer who I think I will likely pull an epigraph from for my next collection: “Doesn’t everybody know everything or not, please let me know,/ isn’t the truth always the same…” White also also made me grateful, in some ways, for not having done an MFA in poetry and my lack of awareness of the traditional breakdowns between the various competing schools, that, for quite some time, I didn’t realize it’s a bit strange to like both Susan Howe and Louise Glück, Anne Carson and Alice Notley.

Speaking of Susan Howe, I got a hold of her newest collection, Penitential Cries. The opening eponymous prose poem is remarkable, conveying with great humour the experience of being an elderly, emeritus master of her craft:

Dear Health Care Provider,

I remember not remembering “bat, banana, apple” twice in the fifteen minutes allotted for my once-a-year Medicare Wellness Check. I didn’t see a memory test for octogenarian pariahs coming and yes I admit the fact that I failed this first one is a bad sign but if only you had asked me to repeat “unanswered, perilous, question” after counting down from forty-seven backward in increments of seven.

The majority of the book’s eighty-ish pages are taken up by her signature collages, though they feel a bit slight here and make the book feel so as well. With only twenty-something pages of poems otherwise, PC feels distinctly like a late collection that could have perhaps been a chapbook. That being said, the aforementioned prose poem is worth the price of admission, and I’ll read whatever Howe sees fit to publish at this point and be grateful for it.

Another aging giant that I’ve turned to recently is Dennis Lee. Jim and I have already had the delightful experience of digging out my childhood copy of Alligator Pie (the source of another potential epigraph “I’ve thought about it in my mind–/ Being Five, I mean–/ And why I like it best of all/ Is ‘cause it’s In Between.”) but I had never really paid much attention to Lee’s work for adults, beyond Civil Elegies. I was pleasantly surprised by Heart Residence—it’s expertly constructed (no surprise given Robert Bringhurst’s involvement). To put it extremely casually, he can be a bit of a kooked-up white boy at times, with all the jazz and horniness, and I suspect I might be overly susceptible to some of his more earnest political statements, but he does seem to grasp and consider the spirit of his times, the true task of the poet, in interesting ways: “yet it is/ better to speak in silence than squeak in the gab of the age.”

Richard Siken was another older poet who I got onto (late) after reading Louise Glück’s introduction to his debut collection in American Originality and being taken with her description of his work/the lines she quoted from it. I Do Know Some Things is new territory, as far as I can tell, coming after/in the midst of Siken rebuilding his life post-Stroke. The collection both traces his pursuit of recovery and documents the suffering—both existential and physical—of his being rendered a patient, dependent. What I love most about this one is the way he presents an axiom or fact, only to quickly subvert it: We are the stories we tell ourselves./ I didn’t remember the story, or He said he slept under the table because he grew up with so many brothers. She said he had two brothers, wasn’t my real grandfather, and she didn’t love him. Funny, cutting, instructive. There’s also a wonderful poem about making borscht with his grandmother that includes the line, “We will need to do a lot of chopping and we don’t trust each other with the knives.”

Another of my recent favourites was Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You. I agreed with the Times reviewer (gasp!) on this one—it’s not her most coherent book, but I don’t really come to Lockwood for coherence. Rather, she has a madcap energy that you won’t find as skillfully rendered anywhere else. I have not laughed out loud while reading very many books (due either to my own humourlessness or poor taste in authors) but I did so at least twice while reading this one, though I won’t say here what sections they were for fear of exposing just how juvenile my sense of humour remains.

Khashayar ‘Kess’ Mohammadi is consistently one of the poets of their/our generation that I am really, truly impressed with, who feels like they are writing (dare I invoke those Scott Griffin-esque terms) at a level that could/would/should/will be recognized on an international scale one day. Their attention to both tradition and the contemporary, their engagement with both Persian history/language/culture as well as their placedness in present-day Toronto, their facility in moving from a high vatic voice, to biting humour, to cogent observation and then delivering each of those tones in a live reading is unmatched. The Book of Interruptions is perhaps my favourite of their books so far (though, some poets, Kess in particular, seem less constrained by the book; Kess is a practitioner of poetry, and the book just happens to be the requisite form). I copied these lines from the opening poem in my notebook:

in the wake of poets

imprisoned in their predestination

the blacksmiths shall die blacksmiths

and the merchants shall birth merchants

Lastly, on the subject of inimitable styles, I recently wrapped up my late summer Shane Neilson trilogy, beginning with the newly Governor General’s award-nominated What to Feel, How to Feel, followed by his latest poetry collection The Reign, and then a re-read of his brilliantly-titled You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations. Shane, perhaps like Kess, is not afraid of the mantle of the poet, he picks up the title and wears it proudly. Perhaps nowhere more than in The Reign, a wild fairytale featuring a romantic encounter between, Willard, an intellectually disabled man and, Casey, who is both an heir to the Irving empire as well as, somehow, a white tailed deer, at a military base in the wilds of New Brunswick, Shane tests the limits of the form. Best to suspend pre-judgement on this one and trust that it is a wild and invigorating ride, and that anyone with as original a vision as Shane brings here is worthy of your time.

And thank you, as ever, for your time here. A Lyric Shame-inspired poem to see you out:

Language Acquisition

Out of his Important Bag 

comes every avant-gardist’s dream

a song composed entirely of

the parts of speech I still

cannot reliably identify

grafted to a nursery rhyme melody,

followed by a sheet where they 

must deconstruct each character

to its constitutive strokes

taking pains to balance each 

wing of the S, tine of the E,

as they put the lead down

trace the dotted lines out

to the end of the sentence.

Perhaps the greatest source of August’s chaos was, on the night of Louis’s birthday, waking to Al screaming about a bat in our bedroom. Once I figured out which way was up, we got out of our room and shut the bat in there. After doing some light middle of the night googling, I decided to try and catch it myself.

Given that all my clothes were in our bedroom and I didn’t want to try and apprehend the bat in my briefs, I put on my parka, Al’s snow pants, some boots and a pair of dish gloves. Armed with a stock pot Al uses for her natural dyeing, I dashed back into the room and got as low as possible while I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. After a few minutes I realized my night vision is not as good as I hoped it would be and crawled across the room to open the blinds and try to get a bit more light in. Turns out the bat was up in the curtains and so this set it flying in ever-lowering swoops through the room, at which point I decided it was time to enlist professional help.

Turns out, if you call Animal Control, even at 3am, they will eventually send an officer to your house. The man who came to our rescue, was short and middle-aged, pulled up in his van at 5 o’clock in a short sleeve dress-shirt and blue nitrile gloves. I let him in and he walked straight upstairs, flicked on the overhead bedroom light and neatly scooped the bat into his specimen container without so much as a flinch from the animal. In and out in five minutes.

The following days featured multiple calls with Public Health and photos sent between Al and I captioned “do these look like fang marks to you?” while we waited 120 hours for the results of a test that was supposed to take 24-48 hours, feeling less reassured after each call where we were told there was still plenty of time for the vaccine, if that proved necessary. “The good thing is you weren’t bitten on the head or face.” I used the extra three days to fill every possible entry point on our house with expanding foam, like a sugar high six-year-old armed with silly string.

At work, I’ve been doing some indexing of The Hamilton Spectator from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s and it’s been interesting to read about times that I lived through, but had less of an awareness of the politics and news, to see stories unfold on a daily level, the analysis shifting as events develop—Rae Days, Jeffrey Dahmer, Mulroney’s bribery, Michael Jackson.

I’ve come across an editorial written by my dad when he first finished medical school, a column from my old CFMU boss Jamie Tennant, and a few library colleagues with bylines from the days when the paper had so much space to fill, they dedicated a full page each week the to the poetry and art of high school students.

I’ve also been using my current position as an occasion to do some family history research. All the material I’ve accessed is not newly accessible because of my position, I could have accessed it at any time, but spending so much time in a genealogical headspace has prompted me to go looking further and more often than I otherwise would.

Perhaps the most interesting find so far is a photo of my great-grandfather’s butcher shop in downtown London, ON. It was taken by Rob Nelson, a commercial photographer in the city who donated 48,000 photographs to Western University in the 90s. Before stumbling across mention of the photo, I had been able to find some advertisements in the London Free Press for “Cliff Robinson’s Quality Meats” (a poet’s sense in those C/Q’s and T’s) including one featuring a small image of the interior of the store. All of the ads stress the hygienic nature of the store which maybe tells you something about the state of Ontario butchery circa 1920.

When I came across the UWO finding aid, it had little information beyond a simple description:

It doesn’t tell you much, not clear whether the front in question is Cliff’s or the store’s, but when the archivist pulled the 8x10” negative and scanned it, the file came out in incredible quality. I’m astounded at how well these seemingly outdated technologies reproduce in digital, that a glass plate can produce a 600dpi scan and be reproduced at size is pretty remarkable.

As the summer has rolled on and I’ve done very little writing, I’ve been attempting to come to peace with my pace. Part of the reason for starting this newsletter in the first place was having something else to focus on when the poems weren’t coming. I really appreciated a quote I came across from the artist Gary Panter the other day, “I have to wait patiently for the little silent bell in my head to ring…Worrying will not make it ring.”

Here are a few others I’ve kept close at hand lately:

“[George] Stanley, like [Robin] Blaser, writes sparingly, a handful of pages a year.” - Gary Geddes

“He works on assignment or self-assignment…His most available knowledge is acquired unconsciously. Something warns him dogged determination however profound can only result in doggerel. His danger is rhyming trivia. His depth is the lightsome blue depth of the air.” - Donald Hall on Robert Frost

“I’m a slow creator—I’ve begun to think I’m on the Bishop plan, or equally the Larkin plan, of about a thing every decade, or a thing every two decades.” - Spencer Reece

“My job is well-wrought writing. My job is not the production of a book every so many years. There is this sense that we should be in a rush, but for what? For whom?” - Jericho Brown

One thing I have managed to do this summer is read, and even some novels!

Kate Cayley - Property (Coach House Books, 2025)

The aging mother living with her grown sons, the porch drinkers, the smarmy yuppies, the labourer working on a neglected rental so much he’s on the street more than most residents, the coffee shop that sells linen baby clothes. Lest it sound like too much of a satire, Cayley flips perspective throughout and manages to keep each character far from caricature. There is subtle critique and humour, but mostly Cayley is after the interpersonal dynamics, the subtle shifts and tells of relational power, all the machinations behind the scenes of the marital text thread.

“The main ambition of his parents was that nothing should ever happen.”

Martha Baillie - The Incident Report (Pedlar Press/Coach House Books, 2009/2024)

The idea of a novel written as a series of library incident reports seems uniquely tailored for me and the sheer weirdness of the accounts, many without resolution, is handled so deftly here. The shorthand for patrons of unknown name—Suitcase Man, Budgie Man, the unusually pale woman—the passive-aggressive finagling between staff members: “If one of us, her coworkers, relieves her on desk two minutes late, she relieves that person exactly two minutes late at the first opportunity; and if the schedule offers no such occasion for petty revenge, she alters the schedule to meet her needs.” Chilling and gratifying to have your work captured so expertly.

Maggie Nelson - Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave Books, 2025)

A return to form for Nelson, a weird Wave Books palette cleanser after that TIMELY book on Freedom, that reminds you, before she was a Genius, she was a poet who wrote lines like:

I sit the cutest little boy on my knee
and read him a book about the history of cod

absentmindedly explaining overfishing,
the slave trade. People for rum? he asks,
incredulously. Yes, I nod. People for rum.

And Wave definitely got their money on this one, releasing it only in hardback at first. Like a Novocain fever dream of associations.

Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Being II (New Directions, 2024)

Feels a bit like a novel where someone asked what if we removed all the elements of a novel: other characters, dialogue, any forward motion. I appreciate plotless fiction but I do struggle with books at times where the idea is to be boring, like you can’t hold their boringness against them because that is in some way, the point. That being said, this book cast a strange spell over me for two volumes, and I’ll probably return to it when the third instalment arrives in English in November, fittingly, the same month that this novel’s narrator remains trapped in.

Thanks as always for reading along. Some doctors, school and darkness to see you out:

A Period of Increased Darkness

The Trustees moved the spring PA Day
to coincide with the total solar eclipse in April.
The peak period of darkness will occur
at approximately 3:20 pm, the press release reads,
posing potential safety concerns during dismissal.
It is up to us, then, to keep their eyes averted.

Our family doctor moved his office
to a retrofitted medical centre on the mountain.
The broader building is dilapidated,
extension cords pulled through drywall,
a sun-starved money tree by the elevator.
His unit, though, is fresh white—
tile, walls, lightbulbs.

Every time Al or I have an appointment, he
implores us not to consider a vasectomy
yet. Never having asked what we deem
enough, he repeats the same story
about regretting his, the ordeal of having it
reversed, as our boys vie for control
of the examination table.

Every time our oldest gets hurt,
no matter how small, he presents his injury
and asks the same question: Will it heal?
What else is there to say but yes. If not,
I’m sure we’ll find a new doctor soon, son,
though a replacement for yourself is technically
still possible.

Just past midnight, our matching touch-activated
bedside lamps turn on simultaneously.
Al and I exchange confused looks.
At the end of the hall Jim calls out twice,
“Dada, guess what!” When I finally shuffle down,
he is fine, fast asleep, bathed in the bubbling
orange of his lava lamp.

One of the pleasures of summer has been more time with my older son, seeing how much he’s learned in the past two years of kindergarten, seeing him take pleasure in language, delight in pure sound. As he becomes more aware of the rules and structures of English, he’s also beginning to realize when those conventions are being broken or played with. Our conversations are peppered now with snippets from books we’ve read, that have become our own shared language: “Bum cack, bum cack! We deed our nragon!” (My Father’s Dragon), “Guggle, guggle, glad I checked,” (Tools Rule), “Boo, bam boodie, bam boodie boo” (Monkey with a Toolbelt), “HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY” (Winnie-the-Pooh).

Alongside this sonic turn, he’s also been on an increasingly metaphysical bent, asking about the “mysteries of life,” a mini Thomas Merton in Spiderman pajamas. The other night, we were installing his training wheels and, accompanying himself with a pair of adjustable wrenches, he improvised a song:

The sky ends and then after that it’s space

But we’re not sure where space ends

One day after humans are all dead

The sun will burn out

The earth will only explode

If it gets hit by a really big meteor

These are the facts that we know

It’s been a while since I felt the mania of having a prose project on the go. The little bursts of poem-power that come through tend to exhaust themself soon enough that I’m not stuck in that heightened state for too long, but prose usually means more work than one day can manage. These past few weeks, I’ve been doing some research on a series of cassettes that were co-released by Coach House Press and The Music Gallery in 1989 and 1990, which featured poets and writers reading from their work, largely in studio. I learned about the series seven years ago when I got a hold of Michael Ondaatje’s contribution, Previous Canoes. Lately I’d been thinking more about the other entries in the series and there is currently so little information about it online that I decided to do some archival digging.

The closest significant collection of the tapes is at Robarts Library (nine of thirteen entries) so I headed that way last week, visitors’ pass tucked safely in my email inbox. After clearing the security gates, I headed up the warren of escalators to the Media Commons where I was kindly set up with the cassettes and a tape machine. I was keen to hear the other recordings, but I also wanted to document the beautiful J-cards that accompanied the cassettes [designed by the excellent Kurt Swinghammer]. I asked a few of the staff if there was a scanner I could use to do so (which I had been assured over email that there would be) but was met with blank stares. A bed scanner? I don’t even know what that means.

So, hands overfull of cassette cases, I wandered up and down the escalators, trying not to look too much like a ‘90s teen who had just ripped off an HMV. The copier/scanner directly outside of the listening room wouldn’t read my USB stick or SD Card. Neither would the one on the first floor. Each time I managed to locate a staff member they seemed to be halfway through the door into a staff area.

When I finally cornered someone on a service desk, they told me that there were indeed bed scanners available, just behind me, though my visitors’ access wouldn’t allow me to log in to the computers. Thankfully, I know my way around the tangle of wires that is the backside of a library PC pretty well, so I popped the scanner cable into the side of my laptop, got my images, and got out of there. Who knew it’s such a dark, cold world on the other side of the service desk.

After fleeing the campus, I made it over to Kirby’s balcony for a refreshingly warm meal—espresso martinis, a summer salad with a rotisserie chicken. I got to hear the exciting plans for the tenth anniversary of her knife | fork | book press, including a chapbook from yours truly, A Sensitive Man.

This year also marks the 30(ish) anniversary of Hamilton’s own reading series Lit Live, which I’ve been intermittently involved with for seven years now, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about the maintenance work that happens to keep endeavours like LL and KFB afloat, all of the admin required to keep these cultural outposts funded and functional.

I mentioned in my last newsletter that I’ve been reading a lot of anthologies lately in some ill-conceived attempt at poetic self-improvement. As a compulsive reading tracker who was once busted for lightly skimming certain titles in the hopes of inflating his Summer Reading Club total, I find these tomes calming in their unrushability. This was certainly part of the appeal of my recent Karl Ove Knausgaard indulgence. I find myself settling in, knowing that I’ve got at least one good book on hand if a moment presents itself.

My most recent anthological undertaking was Gary Geddes utilitarianly-titled 70 Canadian Poets. It’s quite a good survey of 20th century Canadian poetry—as my youngest would say “It’s my best.” Good contextualization of the poets, but with some of the worst author photos I’ve ever seen, black and white, and cropped to postage stamp squares, most of the shots looking punitively candid. The structure is also a bit strange; it’s certainly not alphabetical, but also not fully chronological, kind of periodized into short eras, but without any signage indicating how. Maybe it’s a consequence of the book’s progressive expansion across four previous editions (15 Canadian Poets (Oxford, 1970), 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5 (Oxford, 1978), 15 Canadian Poets x 2 (Oxford, 1988) and 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (Oxford, 2001)).

All griping aside, I think it’s a good selection of work that treads a more or less neutral road amidst the poetry wars (both Carmine Starnino and Sina Queyras appear, comically close together). My favourites were Ken Babstock (a return) whose raucous music really stood out amongst some of the more staid narrative work. I was also struck by Susan Musgrave (I quite enjoyed Exculpatory Lilies ) who has a stunning, intense poem, “The Moment,” about losing sight of her daughter for a moment and descending into an intrusive thought of the child’s abduction at the hands of

                                      ...a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore 
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn’t know innocence
existed...

Her poems are startlingly unsentimental and there are some other good ones in her selected poems (which I also picked up), though after a while they began to feel unrelentingly dark and intense, always in crisis and announcing their extreme tragedy, like Diane Seuss without the comic relief.

The collection was also affirming of my love for some old favourites: Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, Karen Solie. My favourite Kroetsch discovery was from the introductory essay in his section, a quote from his novel Badlands which sums up so much of the history of Canadian Literature:

God help us we are a people raised not on love letters or lyric poems or even cries of rebellion or ecstasy or pain or regret, but rather old hoards of field notes. Those cryptic notations made by men who held the words themselves in contempt but who needed them nevertheless in order to carry home, or back if not home, the only memories they would ever cherish: the recollections of their male courage and their male solitude.

Speaking of male solitude, I’ve been enjoying the American poet Spencer Reece of late. I came to him through Louise Gluck’s excellent essay collection American Originality (which I mentioned a while back) and quite enjoyed his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale (I’m a sucker for clerk representation). After our visit, Kirby was kind enough to send me home on the train with Reece’s latest, Acts (FSG, 2024). It felt to me like a poetic update of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a minor clergyman in an out of the way Spanish speaking town (though Spain here, rather than Mexico). Reece has such good humour about the asceticism and humiliation of the ministry. Many of the poems are working in an epistolary mode, letters written back home to an unknown and perhaps nonexistent American, giving a nuanced portrayal of queer Anglicanism, of mistranslation and the perils of language learning.

I’ve also also been reading Sadiqa de Meijer’s latest essay collection, In the Field, which comes graced with another beautiful cover. This collection feels plainer and more diffuse than alfabet/alphabet, but I could read endlessly about her everyday life. The longest piece in the collection is a moving portrayal of her time in medical school, particularly the struggle between art and medicine which she captures so well in her interactions with medical cadavers and the so-called “bone box”—the conflicting dispositions of the poet and the scientist. I’m only about halfway through, but I am savouring this one for uninterrupted evening reading on the couch, with the window open when the air quality is cooperative.

I’m also almost done what has been my weekend “kids are playing quietly or watching a show” book for many months now—the monstrous A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. I was skeptical of this one, given that it seemed like a piece of merchandise, something to hawk alongside its fictional companion and gift subscriptions to the magazine, but when I saw the list of contributors, which includes many American poets otherwise unrepresented in the public library’s collection, I figured I would give it a look and I’m glad I did.

I’ve been consistently impressed by Kevin Young’s editing, the ~960 pages moving poem-like in their own right, alternating between thematic and chronological organization, between sections organized into decades and hours of the day, which keep the reading experience lively. Young also expertly transitions between the individual poems in the collection on the rotating bases of form, content and biography: a Jane Kenyon poem appearing just before a Donald Hall, Fady Joudah’s translation of Darwish followed by a Joudah original, a clump of prose poems in the Aughts section gradually diffusing into short lean-lined lyrics, the Evening Walk[s] of such an unlikely trio as Don Paterson, Ishmael Reed and Dorothea Lasky seamlessly linking into one another. The way the book moves is an impressive feat across so much material and a testament to Young’s care given that this book would have sold itself with a less intricate structure.

Thanks as always for making it this far. Here’s a poem, from a previous trip to Toronto, to see you out.

Make Belief

My son gouged my nose
while I was pretending to be a hawk 
devouring him. Now I have to attend 
the library conference with this non-
imaginary wound on display, a confession 
we are perennially behind 
on personal hygiene, that he and I 
have made a game of predator and prey, 
that I am liable to walk him 
too far into pretend. 

	~

He is headed for 
the monthly Kindness Assembly 
where an anthropomorphic red-tail
will award hearts to the students
who best exemplify the virtue in question. 
Their classroom is a family affair,
the teacher’s mother often 
her substitute. Her dad, a prosthetist, 
has visited twice: first on 
Terry Fox Day to pass around 
his hands, then last week again 
with Pinch the peregrine falcon who
to their unanimous disgust
eats only raw meat.

	~

At 17, I met a missionary
whose declared hierarchy was
God first, wife second, children third,
rankings he delineated
in their company, among friends
and strangers. I still cannot fathom 
such clarity, such merciless conviction. 
Shortly after we met
he was trampled while trying
to photograph elephants, his wife
and kids returning to the States
to be with her parents.

	~

Half asleep on the train home
three turkey vultures glide above
the harbour and I feel
Jim bound in my talons again
that creaturely fear enveloping
his eyes as our game drifts
somewhere too real. No saviour
or mother at hand, he swings
his little nails, desperate
to peel back my feathers.

On Wednesday, Al and I woke around midnight to the kind of racket that I felt in my chest more than heard. We were both out of bed so fast and running to the kids that we crashed into each other. It sounded like a car had driven through the front of the house, or lightning had split the maple outside our window, or the maple had crushed the car, or…

Once we determined both boys were sound asleep and unharmed, and once my heart rate settled, I made my way downstairs and found our shelving unit, home to hundreds of books, had fully dislodged from the wall sending the aforementioned books as well as plants, lamps, paintings, my son’s many knickknacks etc. spraying across the room.

Anne Carson’s Nox in the box flew about twelve feet from the top shelf to the foot of our stairs. In my bleary midnight mind, I just stood in place and read the scattered titles: Well Kept Ruins, My Private Property, Useful Junk. Seeing all my books spread out across the house, free from the bonds of alphabetization, I couldn’t help but feel I was being sent a message about the weight of poetry, or at least my book buying habits. Maybe the message is just use stronger wall anchors.

Last week marked Jim’s Kindergarten graduation ceremony, where, dressed in their bespoke mortarboards which they crafted out of black construction paper and yarn, the SKs took turns walking up to the front of the gym to receive their diplomas. The following morning, I found Jim struggling to remove the gift wrap ribbon that his teachers had tied the paper with. Unable to get it untied, he eventually just tore the paper open. When he realized it was just a rolled up sheet of blank printer paper, he was incredulous. It’s fake! It’s a fake diploma! Is it just blank?

I tried to explain that it wasn’t fake exactly, but more of a prop, a reason for him to get up and shake his teachers’ hands, but he was in disbelief that the whole event had been a charade, that he had suffered through thirty minutes of public scrutiny and a half-dozen photographs for nothing more than a scrap paper. I tossed the paper out and was about to close the kitchen cupboard, when he ran back over and started rooting through the garbage can. Wait he said, picking the ribbon back up. I can use this!

Earlier in the week, I saw a rabbit our behind the church. There are a dozen or so raised beds where the old church hall used to be, but this little guy was more interested in the clover. It was that perfect temperature where there’s no border between your skin and the air. While it nibbled, the rabbit watched me in profile, holding me in place with its eye, tuning its ears in half circles while the St. Lawrence students screamed on the playground. Not long until the ghostly bells of deep summer.

On the far sidewalk, an older man with a goatee walked by carrying a reusable grocery bag. Halfway up the block, he set the bag down and practiced one clubless golf swing before picking his things back up and heading on his way. A single drop of rain hit me right in the centre of my forehead and the rabbit disappeared into the hedge.

This year’s celebrations began on Friday morning when a patron, whom I hadn’t previously spoken to and did not mention my children to, signed off our call by wishing me a Happy Father’s Day, that famously uncomplicated holiday.

Two days later, we were headed up to Huron County to visit my in-laws. After our first great outdoor meal of the season—macaroni salad, chicken drumsticks, and garden-fresh red lettuce on the deck—we headed into Bayfield for the afternoon. A brief stop at a cold and windy beach and then into town to warm up with ice cream.

While the boys were engaged with their gummy worms, I snuck away to the town bookshop where a heavy-set middle aged man sat in a chair reviewing the store’s lapsed holds while two women with grey bobs buzzed around him, one nearly falling over, but then trying to play it off to her colleagues. None of them said a word when I walked in, just followed me across the room with their eyes.

I found my way to the poetry section which was comprised of an even ten books: Dante, Homer, Billy Collins’s selections of Dickinson, Michael Ondaatje, George Elliott Clarke, Mary Oliver (x2), Rupi Kaur (x2) and Mosab Abu Toha. A most chaotic grab bag. When I headed into the children’s section in the back, a scraggly white lap dog followed me and then proceeded to vomit on the rug, which no employees seemed to notice.

Lately, I’ve been reading a number poetry anthologies. Some of them have been really bad, like Going Top Shelf: An Anthology of Canadian Hockey Poetry (Heritage House, 2005). So many frozen ponds, so many injuries overcome, so self-congratulatory. Not to mention that it’s padded out with song lyrics, which rarely does a song any favours. Ondaatje-stan that I am, his “To a Sad Daughter” was one of the few bright spots, taking hockey as its jumping off point, before heading to more interesting places:

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens…

I also read Rita Dove’s much-discussed 20th Century American Poetry (and unintentionally supplemented the omitted Louise Gluck with the reissue of Averno). Maybe the thing I noticed most was how often Dove includes cause of death in her otherwise bibliography-heavy bios. Many familiar favourites here, as well as some new to me: C.K. Williams, Larry Levis, Gerald Stern. After banging my head against Paterson for a while, the excerpt of Asphodel… has me warming to the other Williams (MD).

I’ve also been listening to the Essential American Poets podcast (tariff-free), each episode of which begins with an introduction/contextualization from the excellent Bianca Stone, before moving onto recordings of the poets reading their own work. I’ve found hearing the poems has been a helpful way into poets that I’ve struggled to connect with in the past. The George Oppen episode in particular got through to me:

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me
Have made poetry

Another recent favourite read was Shane Neilson’s What to Feel, How to Feel. He goes far and wide in this book, which can make it feel a bit eclectic at times, not that I care so much about linearity.

There are some really moving and insightful considerations of disability including the essay, “McDonaldsing into the Future-Death,” which I read online a couple months ago at the delightfully-named blog, swamppink. I particularly appreciated Neilson’s thinking around (surprise, surprise) fatherhood:

Telling a perfect tale of ‘overcoming’ with a tidy resolution, of Daddy Dearest superparenting, is false.

Of course I landed on love as the answer. What else is there? But I have a different question now: Is love enough? One answer: It has to be. another response is: Heaviness. Exhaustion. Inescapable demands of care. This is hard, and getting harder every day.

Obviously, my caring looks a lot different than his, but I was grateful for his reflections nonetheless.

Thanks, as ever, for your attention here. A night poem (featuring a few more critters) on the way out:

My First Animals

Driving home from the First Aid course
where the instructor brought 
the heel of her hand down on the blue baby’s back

I try to photograph the fox creeping across
the adjacent lawns, but catch only a glowing orb 
a ball of white light against the black.

I tuck Jim in and just before the snoring, 
on that brink where he can finally speak 
freely, he tells me, Dad, I am scared 

of three things: people getting hurt,
the dark, and ghosts. Back in my own bed, 
blue and red whirl on the ceiling; out the window, 

I can’t quite see which house the stretcher 
emerges from. In the morning, I ball up 
the damp sheets, carry them to the laundry sink 

where I find a motionless bat next to a chunk 
of plaster. I scoop it into a margarine container
with a stack of neglected sheet music, tip it out onto 

the lawn where it lays, one wing pinned, one 
spread wide. I run inside to check the boys for bites;
when I return, no bat.

A couple months ago, Jim’s teacher messaged me on Instagram to ask if I would “film a short video about my career” for their unit on Community Helpers and my first thought was that she wanted me to read a poem, or worse, provide some explanation of poetry and what it does.

I tried to picture the writer character in What Do People Do All Day?, what animal she might be and kept coming up with: rat. Turns out he’s one of Eliot’s cats (Ts…tss…tss), up in the attic staring out the window.

One of the other dads is a therapist and came in to talk to the kids about the importance of smelling the flowers and blowing out candles (intrusive thoughts?). A chef talked about food production, showed pictures of his livestock and brought in fresh baked goods. Meanwhile, I uploaded a seven-minute video to Google Drive featuring such highlights as me digging through my bag to find my swipe badge, the interior of the branch book drop, a carpet I scrubbed literal shit out of, and other intricacies of maintaining aging civic infrastructure. Apologies to the healthcare administrators, freelance photographers and parents with abstruse or decidedly unhelpful professions for their omission.

Watching the video back, I worried I didn’t explain enough about my day-to-day, nevermind actually say the words “Community” or “Helper,” but Jim told me the part the kids all liked best was the ten seconds when I walked past the branch Lego bins.

In a similar vein, a friend of my dad, who had been away from his family, working as support staff for an NHL team, went to the parent-teacher interview and learned that his son’s class had voted which parent had the best job—the result: a tie between him and the pizza delivery man. Give the kids what they want, I suppose.

My boys are really quite sweet about it all. The youngest seems to kind of understand that I am going off to “work on my book,” and Jim has his own questions. The morning after I was out at someone else’s launch event he asked me, “What book did you read from last night?”

I’ve made another shift at work, starting a contract in the Local History and Archives department, which feels a bit belated given my previous book, but sometimes life takes a minute to catch up I suppose. That and I’m a slow thinker.

I’m all trained up after a couple weeks and have been doing some personal research to get an understanding of the collection. I started by looking up some cheery facts about my house, for instance, in ‘42 someone broke in by inserting an ice pick through the screen door, and in ‘64, a 13-year-old boy who lived there drowned in Lake Erie after suffering a cramp while swimming. Local history is not always (usually?) uplifting.

On a slightly less dour note, I also found a photo of my uncle in a Leafs jersey, much to the delight of my oldest who is dealing with the annual spring heartbreak and asking good questions like, “How come you can tie in soccer and not in hockey?” The North American mind cannot comprehend…

With this flip from spring to summer, school to vacation, library to library&poetry, hockey to soccer, the transitions are revealing. Like watching soccer (or PWHL) makes the particularities of NHL culture so apparent. Or put more eloquently, via Luke Hathaway:

I’m interested in the fact that in order to perceive change, we need the backdrop of constancy. Here it is, June again, and I’m struck by how radically different my life is right now than it was last June—and I see that because it’s June again. Repetition and variation. I find variation in repetition deeply beautiful: the imperfect pattern.

Speaking of rebirth, I finished my nearly year-long reading of My Struggle back in February and am free of the bonds of Knausgaard-dom (for now), so on to other, thinner books.

Some recent hits include Louise Gluck’s two books of nonfiction: Proofs & Theories and American Originality. Like other great critics, she sees so clearly what the poets under her consideration are after and is able to distill their project so clearly and directly. Even when she is being complimentary, she is a balm for much of the non-evaluative fluff that gets called reviewing. And when she is not being so complimentary, look out. Amidst all that clear-eyed evaluating she’ll also drop gems like this one from Proofs & Theories:

“The voice that never existed can issue only from the life that never existed, a life experienced (whether it be adventurous or hermetic) wholly and without sentimental simplification, the enduring general deriving continually from the accepted individual life.”

I loved Cam Scott’s new Manor’s Ransom which is a wild ride. I’m amazed that Cam can be so principled, a frighteningly astute and devoted political thinker, and yet so attuned to the music here, the book being a real pleasure to read. My favourite sections are the prose poem blocks which are full of consonance and slant rhyme so they clank along like a shopping cart full of scrap metal:

“A tin boat overturned beneath barbed wire, abandoned no-/ where near the water. Looking for a softer seltzer on the kitchen island,/ finding only opened cans.”

Also, I read his line “When someone says they split their time, they’re either rich or childless” and knew it was one that would worm its way into my brain for a long time.

Now that I’m reading novels again, I devoured Miranda July’s delightfully bizarre, totally unrepressed and hilarious All Fours.

Isaac Jarnot’s Four Lectures was incredible. I’d listened to and really enjoyed the recordings, and the book is also wonderful. Stories of sneaking an unpublished Robert Duncan manuscript out of the archives, which of course appealed, and other firsthand accounts of American poetry told with humour and the perfect mix of and learnedness and humility. Chapter 3 is titled “Abandon the Creeping Meatball: an Anarcho-Spiritual Treatise.” Say no more.

Lastly, a friend leant me Stephanie Burt’s Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall and, while I found some of the essays a bit overly explanatory, it’s a concise and accessible introduction to (mostly) North American queer poetry including some old favourites (Schuyler, Hacker, bissett, CAConrad) and some new (to me) including Paul Monette, whose “Brother of the Mount of Olives” astounded me for its way with detail and gentle subtext:

...into the library its great vellum folios
solid as tombstones nobody copying out
or illuminating today unless perhaps
all of that has died and there’s a Xerox
glowing green in the abbot’s study...

Thanks for sticking around this long. Given all the school talk above, here’s a “making lunch” poem for the road:

Honk If You Can Read This

All these poets

penning odes to their

illiterate offspring—

I’ll admit I’ve 

misused apostrophe

disguised as direct address

feigned correspondence with

if not the unborn

then the newly birthed. 


These days if I 

encourage Jim to sound

it out, he inevitably 

reminds me I CAN’T READ

and yet still insists 

on a lunchbox note which 

he carries to his classroom 

each morning and 

home again to ask me 

what it was I said. 

Been kinda quiet on this front for a while. I started a new job at the end of October so there has not been a lot of writing happening over here.

That being said, at the beginning of the year, rob mclennan asked me to contribute a piece to his journal periodicities, answering What makes a good poem? and How does a poem begin? so I thought I would share my attempt to answer those questions along with a gooder poems I’ve been trying to write.

Hope all is well with you all. Thanks for following along.

rob gave me two very difficult questions and about five hundred words to answer them, so I’ve opted for a hybrid approach here.

I’ve been thinking about how to be a better poet, or how to write better poems, how to put in effort without the poems feeling effortful. I started thinking about this question in earnest after receiving a kind rejection from editor/poet/polymath Jim Johnstone, who possesses the unique skill of giving a good “no.” My conflict-averse self cannot fathom being in his situation: a friend to so many poets, with space to publish maybe four or five collections per year, but Jim has certainly found a way to manage all the egos with grace and generosity.

When I sent Jim the manuscript of what would eventually become my collection As Is, not only did he offer to help me find another publisher for the book, as well as providing a blurb for the eventual jacket, but he also let me know that the poems had one further step to take. Praise is always nice, but honest (and accurate) criticism is much harder to come by. I could see what he meant, but how to get there? Where does a gooder poem begin?

Part of the answer lay in reading several books that mixed exploration of craft with a kind of literary criticism that tracks a poet’s development across their career—books like Canadian Primal by Mark Dickinson, Almost Islands by Stephen Collis, We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher and even Jim’s own collection Bait & Switch which includes a wonderful essay on editing Tolu Oloruntoba’s The Junta of Happenstance. In each of these books, their authors explore the nebulous process of artistic development. I’m not sure, even after reading these, that I could say exactly what it takes to make that next step, but there is a devotion to the work among many if not all of the poets covered in these books, a deep and seemingly unceasing consideration.

For me, in writing about my hometown of Hamilton, ON, my next step was letting history in, allowing the time scale of the poems to expand. Inspired by Dickinson’s exploration of Don McKay’s Long Sault and its relationship to local history, as well as Collis’s examination of Phyllis Webb’s search for a wider sense of time in her poems about the west coast, I began reading as much local history as I could get my hands on (Ah research, now there’s the ear’s coffin) and waiting impatiently until my poems began to take on a sedimentary quality, a sense of time that was composite.

I’m not sure I came to any strong conclusions, but it was affirming to know that many poets have gone this way before and have directed their attentions at this mysterious craft, given poetry the best parts of their thinking. Ultimately, it is up to each poet to decide for themselves where they are headed and to learn what they can, from those around and before them, about how they might get there (Traveler, there is no road; / you make your own path as you walk.) through some wild mix of intuition and openness and study and focus and freedom.

A New Thing

Pushing the stroller

alone on the third day

I remember how the first

woman’s eyes shone,

fear gone from her gaze. Another

called down from a wooden

fire escape, Aren’t you beautiful!

before getting flushed and shouting

I meant the baby, not you.

My own fieldwork says it’s

the dad who forgoes the Family

Change Room in favour

of the Men’s who’s most likely

to scream Stop and spook

the newborns when his

three-year-old won’t get

in the deep end, to tell

his son he’s embarrassing

himself in front of the lifeguard,

while me, I’m in a stall between

two grandmothers, answering

a question about foreskin

as quietly as possible—

not that I’m never tempted

to shout their tears away

and I do wonder what all this

affection is doing to my brain,

whether I’m becoming something

else. Returning from parental leave,

coworkers I had barely spoken to

covered my desk in

gifts each morning: a seized

safety gate, atonal exersaucer,

a single disposable swim diaper.

Writing to let you know that As Is, the book this newsletter was started to document, is days away from being a physical entity you can hold in your hands.

This is the book I assumed would be my first book. I've been at work on it in some form or another since I started writing poetry almost ten years ago. The oldest poems in here are from 2019, right before I became a dad. The early poems emerged in the lockdowns as I was working from home, walking the neighbourhood every morning with a newborn and thinking rather obsessively about the house we were renting at the time.

I was also reading as much Hamilton history as I could get my hands and many of the poems come as my slight and unorthodox responses to what has been written before. I hope that despite their focus on Hamilton they might be of interest to a more general audience, at least that fabled electoral block: poetry-reading southern Ontarians.

Jim Johnstone, who edited my last book and is an all around great guy, was kind enough to write a blurb that I think captures much of my intent:

As Is serves as a historical reckoning. Taking an unvarnished look at how settler activity formed the city currently known as Hamilton, Ontario, Ben Robinson blurs neglected public records with personal lyrics, by turns interrogating the region’s placedness and its colonial legacy. This is an unflinching, necessary debut.

If you're so inclined, you can purchase/pre order a copy through your local bookstore (note: the publisher does not sell through Amazon). Otherwise, I'll be doing three local events in September with more to come and it would be great to see you at one! 

• Friday, September 13th - Niagara Artists Centre 7pm

• Monday, September 23rd - Flying Books - College St. (Toronto) 6:30pm

• Monday, September 27th - The Printed Word (Hamilton) 7pm

If you're a reviewer/interviewer/event organizer etc. and would like to set something up, please get in touch.

No spoilers, but I'll leave off with the final poem from the collection. Thanks for reading!

The theme was, of course, Hamilton. I started out by reading a bit of Shawn Selway’s excellent essay “What It’s Like Living Here” which ends, “always behind, never ahead; forever hopeful, often deceived. Love in vain. But I just can’t help myself. And you would wind up just the same, my friend, if you lived here.” Then I rambled on about local history and read some poems before sending everyone out to walk the city as my prompt, which my friend — a sessional instructor — called a pro move.

The name of the workshop series is Shower Thoughts and, while I think the casualness is appealing to a lot of attendees — many of the poems read at the Open Mic had been written that night, I am incapable of being casual about much. One attendee called me “authoritative” and another said that the workshop was like being back in school, both followed by “in a good way” caveats. Anyway, Monday is doing impressive stuff like getting thirty people out for poetry with two days’ notice.

Now that school is done (and even before to be honest, we were barely at 50% attendance in June) I’ve mostly been working or at home with the boys while Al is working. Much of life is battling inertia, trying to keep too many things from breaking at once, or at least not being broken for too long. Our microwave has power but won’t heat anything, the sink has a slow leak that drips into the paper recycling bin. I’ve been doing the last 10% of a backyard fence repair for about six weeks now.

At the beginning of June, the boys and I all got a stomach bug at the same time so we were in bed by 7.30 for about a week, cancelled everything but work. I was supposed to go on a canoe trip at the end of May but Al slipped on a section of the endless mess in our house and dislocated a bone in her foot so I stayed home and instead helped my in-laws pack a moving van. When I showed up at my brother-in-law’s house on moving day he offered the sage consolation that “sometimes it’s easier not to do things” before proceeding to drive a U-Haul filled with everything he and his family own six hours away.

In the spring, we got a letter from Hyundai saying that our car was subject to a recall because of faulty rustproofing. It didn’t seem all that urgent in my inexpert opinion, but, dutiful keener that I am, I booked the appointment. When I finally brought the car in, the tech looked at it for about five minutes before telling me the brake lines had almost worn through and needed to be replaced immediately (who says maintenance can’t be dramatic). So I spent my morning in the dealership’s lobby/showroom complete with leather armchairs and a big screen TV which was playing human interest Edmonton Oilers stories in anticipation of Game 6, at least until the staff changed the channel to Euro for an elderly Ukrainian couple.

I found myself a seat between a brand new Hyundai Tucson and a fully-restored Hyundai Pony from the 70s, the presence of which only further illustrated how bloated all the new models look. I had hoped to pass the time reading pirated PDFs on my new-to-me kindle, but instead unwillingly eavesdropped on the man beside me, who, in an Arkells t-shirt, was calling in to a fairly serious work presentation: “I don’t think we can go back to the client until we have a real understanding of where things went wrong last time.”

When the courtesy shuttle finally appeared — an EV (nice) vinyl wrapped in an advertisement for the dealership (less nice) — it was piloted by the human equivalent of an autonomous vehicle, a young man with hands locked to 10 & 2, incapable of straying from the GPS’s route even as it led him further from my house. He played Tame Impala for the entirety of our drive, a band name that has never sounded more self-indicting.

When our IONIQ 5 reached its destination a brief eighteen minutes later, the cars parked on both sides of our already skinny through street caused the driver to short circuit, so I jumped out with a wave and left him to his reversing. Perhaps the most human moment of our time together was when I first got in the car, watching him dutifully print my name and phone number on a blank sheet of printer paper attached to a clipboard.

Later that afternoon, when he called to arrange my return ride, he seemed genuinely disappointed that I was stuck at work and would get myself to the dealership the following morning.

Alongside the maintenance, there have also been some moments to celebrate of late.

Like the beginning of an old joke, our friends, a phenomenologist and a refugee lawyer, got married (the emcee noted that conversation topics on their first date included the legitimacy of the Safe Third Country Agreement).

The ceremony and reception were held at a North York Knights of Columbus compound in the Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery, “often described as ‘Toronto’s mini-Guggenheim,’” complete with white marble sculpture garden and two current travelling exhibits: Unveiling the Queer Italian-Canadian Experience and Bedda Sicilia Terra di ’Ncantu: A Photographic Journey of Sicily.

The ceremony was officiated by an Ontario Court of Appeals judge who expertly trod the line between heft and warmth. I was asked to read a poem (mercifully, not my own) and was shocked to find that not only was my reserved seat at the very front of the room beside the parents of the groom, but I was one of three people scheduled to speak during the service, aside from the two who were being married. Nice to feel like there is an actual social function to poet sometimes. Similarly gratifying was when a friend who’s an electrician came up to me after to expound upon (totally unpatronizingly) the nuances of reading in public; if only it could get me an IBEW card, Kev.

During the cocktail hour, I asked one of the servers whether the cacio e pepe hors d’oeuvre would be safe with my allergy and he smiled really big before walking quickly in the opposite direction. During dinner, I spent the time in between speeches (which were excellent) trying to determine which server would be the first to confuse me and my friend Ben (seated to my left) and our respective dietary restrictions (nuts and vegetarianism). Thankfully, we both came away unsullied.

Given the ongoing cybersecurity outage at the library here, I’ve been making the drive to Burlington to pick up books like Maggie Nelson’s new essay collection, Like Love. It’s a real grab bag — lots about the visual artists she grew up on, a couple great interviews with her mentors Eileen Myles and Wayne Koestenbaum, but mostly I enjoyed her critical essays which spurred me back to writers like Moten, Lerner & Knausgaard, which is maybe what good criticism is supposed to do?

While Nelson writes about Lerner’s novel 10:04, I’ve been enamoured with his most recent poetry collection The Lights. I know he is a meme of a certain kind of overhyped white man and one of the evil Americans infiltrating our beloved Griffin Poetry Prize, but this new book is one I can’t read slowly enough. It dials back the interruptive line breaks of Mean Free Path in a way that feels more natural — like some thoughts aren't worth finishing or at least need not be finished for communication to take place. Like Lerner writes in “Untitled (Triptych)”:

I’ve been meaning to bequeath an innovation,
a small innovation in a minor tradition
like this one, maybe the way I’m handling
portions of the right edge, where old light
streamed, is streaming. 

The continuities of image between the pieces also feel intricately woven, especially for a collection of discrete poems that was written over more than a decade.

I hadn’t read Knausgaard’s fiction before, but Nelson has a way of reevaluating authors like him or Lerner, of returning shine to the overplayed. Maybe that’s by virtue of her book collecting work from across two decades, that it returns the reader to a moment before canonization and shows what, if anything, people were seeing when this work was first published.

With Knausgaard, Nelson commends him for his writing on the banality of parenthood — sign me up. Much has been written about Knausgaard and autofiction so I’ll leave it largely alone, but it’s hard to imagine My Struggle ever being published as a memoir, or at least it makes me wonder about our differing tolerances around boredom/banality in fiction vs. memoir.

I love plotless writing (see this newsletter as evidence) but this was a new level. That being said, hard to argue with his description of housekeeping:

“Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I…do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bath them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do the rooms are littered with mess and junk…”

A bit despondent, but I do acknowledge that superior force.

I’m trying to decide how much to “research” while writing about fatherhood for fear of doing persona poems in the voice of Freud. Lately, that process has involved two books that felt useful for my project, even if I didn’t really enjoy reading them, which is a strange kind of leisure activity to engage in. The first, Lucas Mann’s Attachments, was a bit too pop-critical for my liking — writing about fatherhood via Lebron James and Brad Pitt. Mann is so devastatingly intelligent and perceptive that I’ve enjoyed his interviews around the book more than the book itself. He cites the usual giants of new nonfiction like Nelson/Manguso/Galchen/Biss and I wish there was more of their influence in this book formally — a focused first-person account of someone trying to be a good dad. Maybe I’d like his earlier memoirs more.

The other book was Matthew Dickman’s Husbandry which a reviewer said: “eschews real intellectual and emotional reckoning, real thought, for the cringe-inducing bathos of baby talk.” Ouch. Maybe the most helpful thing here was the blurb from the poet Patricia Smith who formulated the experience of fatherhood better in four lines of jacket copy (fathers as “substitute everythings”) than most do in entire books, which is perhaps a testament to the paucity of fatherhood literature.

Somewhat related to what I’ve been reading is that I’m co-curating Fertile Fest with Kirby of knife fork book this year. We’re holding it at my very favourite bookstore, The Printed Word, and it has been a delight to go through my bookshelf and think about poets whose work I love (who might realistically come to Dundas on a Sunday in August) and have occasion to invite them to town. For my selections, I’ve settled on writers with hard K sounds in their names: Kate Cayley, Kess Mohammadi, Zane Koss, and Cassidy McFadzean — Kate/Kess/Koss/Cass. Hope to see some of you there.

In the spirit of new, if not inventive, works, I’ll leave you with a poem — a little more about inertia.

What To Do When I Am Gone

The to-do list remains unchanged

Mom wants a will

Cracked bathroom countertop 

Missing fireplace tile 

A flagstone walkway we swore we wouldn’t shovel another winter

We paint the white walls

A whiter shade of white

Patch the old holes

And drill new ones

Two inches to the left

I shut the medicine cabinet 

And the chunk of purple quartz perched on top 

Crashes down and through the basin 

Of the bathroom sink

For ten days we brush our teeth in the shower

I clean the black dust from the window sills 

With a baby wipe

Phone alert pings

Replace furnace filter

Our hatchback gets dragged by a transport truck

Right beside the hospital

Shreds the baby’s door

So we lift him out the window

Six thousand dollars and eight days later

You wouldn’t know which door

I send Ben a picture of the scat beneath the lilac

And he replies, unwell cat

Al expected a groundhog 

But woke to a possum in the trap

The morning after releasing it 

A fresh tunnel beneath the sagging fence

New claw marks on the shed door

In order to put away the baby’s stacking toy

One must complete the baby’s stacking toy 

8pm and I am on my knees 

Trying to distinguish ill-cut squares 

From ill-cut rectangles 

I’ve washed the same three pans

I wash every night 

Tomorrow when they have dripped dry

I’ll return them to the cupboard

I travelled from one recently cyber attacked public library to another, from my HPL branch to LPL’s Landon Branch riding into town on a Flix Bus, which did not have the promised WIFI in either direction and on the way home, someone (me) locked the washroom door after exiting, necessitating an unplanned stop at the Woodstock ONroute and begging the question why it’s possible to lock those doors when they’re in the open position.

It seems to be mostly students riding these busses, which makes sense, given the price point. Better than driving, but barely. Sometimes I still think of myself as being the same age as a university student, but on this trip I felt old in a new way, bundled up in every piece of winter gear I own, fussing with a face mask, lugging (and attempting to stow) the beautiful pannier I got for my birthday, right before I decided to take a break from biking. This is my life — carrying a cycling bag on the bus as I shuttle between various southern Ontario library branches.

The young man sitting across the aisle from me on the way home, who seemed to be travelling with nothing but the sweatsuit he was wearing and a pair of Bluetooth headphones, bobbed his head to his music in a way that can only be described as “white boy listening to Kanye,” a theory that was later confirmed when he unlocked his phone to reveal the Vultures 1 album cover. Next time, I will do what the much wiser Aaron Kreuter did, and take the train with a wheely suitcase.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in London over the last fifteen years, so it was nice to be back. Aside from the reading I didn’t have a lot of time in the city, but my two non-negotiable stops were Attic Books and a photo-op at Budweiser Gardens, home of the London Knights, for my son.

Fittingly for London in March, it started snowing as soon as the electric purple Dodge Charger arrived to drive us to the library. The event itself was great and ARP shows their readers so much care in the planning process. One woman told me I looked like “that guy from Barbie, the Canadian,” which was flattering, but patently untrue.

It was also great to see some of Greg Curnoe’s bicycle prints hanging on the library walls. I know rob mclennan toured his former studio with Sheila Curnoe and Penn Kemp when he was in town to read a few months back [which you can read about here]. I first encountered Curnoe’s work in his illustrations for David McFadden’s The Great Canadian Sonnet and he’s since become a patron saint for this project (and beyond).

Curnoe’s book Deeds/Abstracts: The History of London Lot, in which he documents the residents of the land where his house stood as far back as he could go, was critical for me in trying to widen the timescale of my own local history work. In the introduction to the book he identifies the flaws of so much local history when he writes, “The usual practice is to include a summary of 10,000 years of human occupation in the first couple of pages as a prelude to the arrival of European explorers and settlers.”

My new book will begin with the bolded part of this quote as an epigraph:

“When I read a copy of [the treaty] document I began to be aware of spheres of influence that operated in this area in 1790. They survive today: it is a long distance call from London to Putnam (25km). It is not a long distance call from London to Glencoe (50km). Our telephone areas have something to do with our county system, which itself is related to the boundaries of the various surrenders, they are related to the areas of occupation of the various First Nations in Southern Ontario from around 1783 to 1820.”

In this passage, Cunoe’s referring to the so-called “McKee Purchase” which covers south London and shares an East/West border with the Between the Lakes tract that covers Hamilton. This section in particular gave me a context to think about treaties as founding documents when considering place, and how their “spheres of influence” might persist in the present. It felt very fitting to have an occasion to share that work in London.

Curnoe has also been on my mind because of his connection with cycling. Some of his most famous pieces are loving depictions of bicycles, though they read differently when you know that he was eventually killed by a motorist while out on a ride. As much as I love the bicycle, the degree to which riding them opens one up to the possibility of harm has been difficult to accept lately.

After the reading, Aaron and I went out for dinner to an incredibly average sports bar and got identical burgers and ginger ales. When I asked the very kind and muscley server if there were any allergy issues with my order, he proceeded to count off the burger toppings on his fingers — lettuce, tomato, pickle — before going to ask the cook about perhaps less visible contaminants.

Aaron and I had a nice chat and then I returned to the hotel to watch the Leafs highlights in my complimentary bath robe. Doesn’t take much to feel like luxury when it comes to poetry.

It’s a funny thing to be paying attention to professional hockey again after fifteen plus years away. I grew up watching and playing and obsessing over stats and trading cards, but then stopped following it until this year when my older son developed an interest. Now I’m older than most of the players, and in some cases, grew up watching their dads and uncles play. It feels like an entirely new league, very few of the names are familiar and I have no clue which teams are any good.

My dad and my son asked me to join their playoff pool and there’s a very good chance I lose to the four-year-old, who seems to have a photographic memory for hockey highlights, who was just yesterday telling me the score of a Leafs/Capital game from a month ago and which Leafs had goals. Thus far, it’s been a fun activity to share with my son and seems relatively innocuous aside from the occasional fistfight and constant barrage of gambling propaganda. That and the other morning at the breakfast table, I heard him repeating a line from a Dodge Ram commercial under his breath.

[Fair warning: this is becoming a transit complaints and hockey commentary newsletter.]

My bus home from London left at 10:30 and the illustrious Attic Books does not open until ten, so you better believe I was waiting out front when they opened. I picked up The Hockey Sweater for Jim [which is fascinatingly blasphemous in a way I can’t fathom a children’s book being nowadays] and a copy of Phill Hall’s Killdeer which started me on a month-long Hall kick including White Porcupine, Conjugation, Toward a Blacker Ardour and Vallejo’s Marrow.

In one of those books (or maybe an interview?), Hall says “I had to sit alone a long time” which has been true of the writing experience for me — fluency feels, if not impossible, rare and hard-won. With both my books now, I've felt like I just barely made it to something resembling book-length. Hall has also been helpful for me in terms of opening up what I think is possible in the poem. There’s so much sonic playfulness and the series-form makes room for such a variety of material. However, I think I might have gone a little overboard — having read five of his books in the last month, the meta-quality and crankiness about what a poem ought to be are beginning to wear on me.

I’ve been reading a lot of work about parenting lately including classics like Anne Sexton’s Live or Die. Some gems in there including “I look for uncomplicated hymns / but love has none” or “I lived like an angry guest,” which has been something of a counter-mantra for me lately — embracing this life, owning it.

Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse has also been really important for me, particularly the long poem “SONS” which is a rare example of fatherhood poetry in Canada and a really tender one at that. I saw him read with Kirby last night at The Printed Word and blabbed to him about how much I loved this poem afterward.

Leslie Jamison’s Splinters [pictured above], a memoir about motherhood and divorce, which I managed to track down despite the persisting library outage, has also been provoking, particularly the line, “Sometimes motherhood tricked me into feeling virtuous because I was always taking care of someone.” A good reminder of the perilous insularity of the nuclear family, that I ought to and do have responsibilities to people outside my household.

And closing out the recent parenting research [because it’s not enough to live the parent life, I also need to read about it] was Bernadette Mayer’s iconic Midwinter Day which includes the startling line “Sophia points to a banana.” It might seem a bit plain, but there’s something about this line that speaks to the strangeness of living with preverbal children. My youngest is capable of communicating through a series of sounds and gestures understood mostly only to my wife and me. There’s something about the simplicity of this communication, that is both very direct — making a primal need known — and delightfully abstract — though it’s rather obvious what the child wants, they aren’t literally asking for it. “Sophia asks for a banana” would read much differently — there’s no question of interpretation there. Much of Mayer’s genius, for me, lies in her decision to record moments like this and with this particular wording — everything belongs in the poem, or in her own words, “the day like the dream has everything in it.”

Anyway, enough about bananas. I’ll close things out with a hockey-related poem from the fall, thinking about violence — how we learn it, might unlearn it. Don’t tell the journals I’ve submitted this one to that you read it here.

On Fridays, His Teacher Lets Them Watch Paw Patrol at Lunch

The last line 
of the class newsletter reads,
If you have concerns 
about your child’s 
participation in, 
or understanding of, conflict,
please let us know 
before November 11th.
At Jim’s first hockey game, 
the chief of police dropped 
the ceremonial puck. 
There were four fights 
in the first period. 
My grandfather was 
concerned, but I assured him 
Jim had no framework 
for such actions. Same
the biannual lockdown drill, 
the plastic limbs dangling 
from the neighbour’s tulip tree 
all week, unremarked upon. 
Years ago, I skimmed a study 
on violent video games, 
whether they encourage
aggressive behaviours or act
as release. The conclusion:
no effect in either direction.
I cling to the spirit
of this remembered finding,
its introduction of
the unseen third option, 
but am unsure where 
it leaves me. Two months 
into kindergarten, he is 
importing new games 
from the playground:
Smashup Derby, 
Protect the Queen,
a version of football 
that is entirely tackling.
The border between 
his brother’s delight 
and distress is fine 
and often hard to discern
from the next room. 
When questioned, he replies,
Do you know why I said 
by accident? Because 
I like it better than on purpose.
At the soccer final, security 
waves a detector wand 
over my torso, then 
ushers him through. 
A second guard 
makes me empty 
my water bottle 
but leaves Jim’s full. 
We find our seats
tuck our bag underneath. 
When it is time for the anthem
he knows every word.

PS.

Some Book of Benjamin related materials: a review in periodicities, another in HA&L, and part 2 of my interview with Kevin Heslop.

Hi all,

Right now I’m coming to the end of a chunk of funding that meant I could spend the last two-and-a-half years writing at least part-time. It’s been a real gift and I’ve been so glad to get to finish two book projects and start a third in this time.

Most of this work has happened in the vestry of St. Luke’s Anglican church in Hamilton’s North End. During the Covid lockdowns, it was increasingly hard to find quiet places to write, so I’ve been grateful to have so much time in this space. The stained glass is beautiful, it’s so still, and also very, very cold.

The other day I was walking through Jackson Square and I remembered that at one point before I had access to the church, I was starting my writing days in the mall food court for the hour before the library opened at ten. The mall staff had created a boundary around the seating area with caution tape and you had to show your proof of vaccination to a security guard to get in. Not the best working environment to be honest.

Being in the North End though, has also been lovely. It feels like its own neighbourhood with the many bridges separating it off from any half-decent food or coffee. In the past two months, I’ve seen both a bald eagle (!) above the elementary school and the roughest looking coyote — no fur on its back half — down by the tracks.

Fittingly, as I’m preparing to spend less time at St. Luke’s this summer, the old parish hall behind the church is getting demolished. When I stand in front of the window in the church washroom, I can sometimes see an excavator bucket swing by, just overhead.

Sometimes the demolition crew comes in to use the washroom. A couple weeks ago, one of the guys opened the wrong door and found me tucked in between a loom and a space heater reading the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell before quickly shutting the door again.

Much like when the pest control guy comes by for his biweekly inspection and invariably mistakes me for the priest, I tend to just roll with people here and not do too much explaining unless absolutely necessary.

I wrapped up my online residency at the Banff Centre last month and it was great. I’d been once before in 2021 and I was surprised at how much more communal things felt this time. The Director, Derek Beaulieu, suggested that it might be because we also chose the online option this time rather than being forced into it. Either way, it was nice to connect with a group of writers, even through slack and zoom. Lots of parents, people living outside of Canada, people with day jobs. It was helpful to be able to share some new work with my faculty member, the excellent Annick MacAskill. She showed me a couple of pieces that needed to be pushed further, but mostly just confirmed that I was headed in the right direction and that I just needed to keep going. Which seems to be some of the safest writing advice.

My reading has been kind of all over the place lately, mostly because of Hamilton’s Cyber Security Incident™ which has made things at the library kind of messy. I had just gotten the new Sheila Heti before everything fell apart and it has been a great bus read. For those who don’t know, it’s comprised of selections from ten years of her diaries sorted alphabetically so the looping effects of time come through quite strongly. Also the particular characteristics of English syntax — the “W” chapter being so full of questions in comparison to the “I” chapter which is much more declarative or descriptive. Some favourite lines include:

Feelings aren't the most important thing, but rather doing the important things that need doing, but all of that is thrown to the wind when I'm in a bad mood.

On one level...I think about what Gil once said, that no one wants to read the work of an A+ student.

I also read bell hooks’s The Will to Change (on PDF on my laptop, which is a testament to how dire the reading material situation has become). The book was great though, particularly the first half. It feels a bit dated given that it was published in 2003 by someone in their fifties, but for a man raising two boys, there was a lot to think about around letting them feel their little boy feelings. Highlights include:

Feminist theorists argued from the onset of the movement that were men to participate in parenting in a primary way, they would be changed. They would develop the relational skills often seen as innate in women. Parenting remains a setting where men can practice love as they let go of a dominator model and engage mutually with women who parent with them the children they share.

Critical analysis is useful when it promotes growth, but it is never enough. The work of affirmation is what brings us together.

Loving parents already see that if rigid gender roles are not imposed on boys, they will make their decisions about selfhood in relation to their passions, their longings, their gifts.

With hooks in mind, I’ll share a poem that she helped me break open a little bit. A lot of my recent poems have come from journaling, just getting things down until there seems to be a charge or some sense of cohesion, that the pieces are speaking to some shared _____ even if I can’t quite articulate what that might be. I brought a version of this poem to Annick at Banff and she felt it was on the right track but not quite there yet. The poem started as a voice note after seeing a man with STOP LIVING IN PAIN written across the back of his jacket [see below] while riding into work one day. In getting ready to revise, I tried to see where the poem had shifted to since then, what it was really about.

For almost fifteen years, my bike has been my primary mode of transportation in Hamilton. It’s given me a real sense of freedom, sneaks physical activity into my day and has been so unbelievably inexpensive. I’ve been lucky though not to have had any real collisions (I got hit by an off-leash dog once, and tapped in the rear tire by a car doing an incredibly slow U-turn) but being so vulnerable to road rage (mine and others) on a daily basis has been wearing on me.

This winter I decided to take a break from biking and just ride the bus, for both warmth and peace of mind. That anger at being wronged by men in pickup trucks who didn’t seem to care whether I lived or died was taking up too much headspace and I didn’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t until reading hooks that I realized this poem was about calibrating my relationship to masculinity and fatherhood, about inhabiting a body that can be harmed, that feels, a body that ages. With that awareness in mind, I made a few tweaks to the poem and I think it’s in better shape now. Hope you enjoy.

Ceasefire now.

Ben

Has Anyone in Your Family Ever

My takeaway from How to Reset 
Forward Shoulders is 

I’ve been sleeping on my side 
and holding a baby for the last four years.

I didn’t think I was really a dad, more 
a person who happened to have kids

until a bachelor party where I was making 
lunches, wiping spills, laying blankets over 

puked-out men. I fold Lou’s hooded towel 
and press my elbow into the jamb, 

stretch my hips for the morning commute. 
I’m thinking of giving up my bike, 

surrendering to the bus. A driver screamed, 
You’re a crazy motherfucker 

and the adrenaline didn’t leave ‘til lunch. 
A friend of a family friend’s dog 

drew its leash across the lane and I
recognized him as the yell was exiting

my throat. Now I pay the fare 
to avoid the rage. I’m going to my doctor again 

after fifteen years of just texting my dad. 
Palpitations, acid reflux – 

the specialists are all his friends.
They order their tests and leave 

reassuring voicemails. Everything 
is normal. Say hello to the family.

Hope you’ve had a good start to the year.

I went to the Ontario Library Association’s Super Conference a couple of weeks ago, this time as an author rather than a librarian, which split my brain apart even further as I continue trying to straddle those two worlds from hour to hour. Saw my (library) boss shaking hands before I even made it through the front door of the convention centre. Picking up my badge, I was very fittingly confused for the other library world Ben Robinson, who is a children’s librarian at Guelph Public Library, last I checked.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of a signing given my utter lack of notoriety, but it turns out the publishers give the copies away and people are in that conference-induced free frenzy, so, with the expert sales pitching of my editor Jim Johnstone, we moved all 30 copies in our allotted 20 minutes at the table. It was nice to see the book headed out into the world, to hear a couple name stories from people, one woman with a son named Benjamin. I also got to chat with a couple of publishing world friends, a couple library friends, and be reminded of the utter mediocrity of A&W before getting right back on the train accompanied by Kirby’s newest Anstruther Press chapbook, Last Licks c/o Jim.

Life feels small but good right now. My oldest is getting settled back in the school routine after the winter break. Allison is starting to gear up for flower season. The youngest just wanders around smiling at us all as we go about our days. 3/4 of us got sick this weekend and I caught myself being surprised at the presence of other people on the bus this morning, all the many ways people present themselves, after being cooped up in the house for a few days. Nice to be back in the world now that it includes sunshine again.

Al and I were talking about a moment we’ve experienced the last couple of years, that first warmish sunny day where you remember there’s sun and, soon, leaves and you won’t always have to wear a heavy coat, the relief that brings. Having a little cry on the first warm bike ride. Had something like that on Sunday in Gage Park, running into friends, playing soccer with the boys.

Next week, I start an Online Residency at the Banff Centre. Online residency seems to be some kind of oxymoron, or a paradox, or something, but it’s what’s feasible right now, and I did one during the lockdowns and it was actually really nice. A lot of parents in them. Some people from overseas. I will change my screensaver to a mountain scene to mark the occasion.

I’m excited to be working with Annick MacAskill and My Brilliant Friend Fawn Parker on some of my newest poems. At the same time, I’ll also be working through edits on my poetry collection that should be coming out in the fall. Also saying my daily prayers to the arts funding gods as the results loom this month. It seems to all happen at once, but all good things.

Alongside some of my newest poems where I’ve been writing about fatherhood, I’ve also started writing (shockingly) about my history with the Church. The poem I’ll share here is about when I worked as an intern for an after-school drop-in program in my first year of undergrad. Not a job that would work for me now, but I learned a lot from that time, about listening, about the unglamorous work of meeting people’s basic needs, also about hypocrisy and self-importance. These poems, mostly about male religious figures so far, seem to be a foil for some of my thinking around fatherhood, some counterexamples, letting all the bad advice out into the sunlight.

All best. Ceasefire now.

Ben

Full Time

Six months into the position 
the Canada East superintendent 
took me for Caesar wraps next to the Cineplex 
and as the cheque came
inquired after my eschatology. 

The elders wanted me on the ordination track; 
I just needed lunch, a job, 
wasn't thinking past the end 
of the pay period, the semester – 
liked that we fed people.

An English major reading 
Shelley and Stoker, I had no idea 
what the word meant, would have 
thought my request for clarification 
disqualified me from any further meals

though my tenure finished with neither
resignation nor firing, rather,
I returned from summer break to learn
the church had been shuttered by 
its so-called parent due to poor attendance.

Twelve years later, whatever answer 
I attempted at the table that day 
is lost to me, my mind retaining only
the question.

A couple of Work Book-related updates. The first being that a section of the long poem about my drives around the treaty area, that has been the focus of a lot of my writing here, has been published as a chapbook/pamphlet by the indefatigable above/ground press. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to send you a physical copy (or PDF) as a thank you for sticking with this newsletter.

The other news, is that the poetry collection that this newsletter has documented the writing of has been accepted for publication by ARP Books of Winnipeg.

It is tentatively titled As Is and will tentatively be published Fall 2024. Tentative, tentative.

I wasn’t sure if this project would find a publisher, so it’s a great relief to have it selected by ARP.

Their work is principled and brilliant and it is an honour to join their catalogue alongside friends and/or luminaries like Fawn Parker, Cam Scott, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Doug Williams.

Gratitude all around.

I’ll close this off with another new poem.

A couple weeks ago, I ran into a friend and we were talking about kids and climate and the eeriness of them not knowing what they’re missing — that my sons have only ever known a warmed world.

I see the gap between my childhood and theirs in many ways, not least of which, in their education, where even in kindergarten, the older one is being taught about emissions, and I am both heartened and terrified for a generation that starts from this knowledge of the crisis.

Last week, his class put on a performance on the playground, an outdoor winter concert, an event that feels like it would’ve been unthinkable twenty-five years ago.

The kids were all very nervous/excited and cute and colourful in their winter gear. Perhaps the greatest spectacle of the whole thing was watching their teachers arrange around two hundred 4-6 year-olds relatively quickly with their parents etc. in full view.

Unseasonal Song

The choir assembles
cross-legged on the blacktop
bedazzled paper plates
in mitted hands

their hesitant rendition
of Little Snowflake
struggling against the leaf blowers
clearing the front lawn.

Happy holidays all.

Wishing you well!

Dusting off the newsletter to share some book news and send along something new.

If you subscribe to this newsletter then chances are you know my first book, The Book of Benjamin, has been published! I’ve got a fresh stack of copies at home and would be glad to send one your way.

What you might not know is that I’m doing some readings this month — three in Toronto and one in Hamilton (Dundas), a familiar ratio for many residents of greater Hamilton.

On Sunday (November 12th) I’ll be reading for the launch of Neil Surkan’s Ruin at 484 Church Street.

On Wednesday (November 15th) I’m reading to celebrate the launch of Steacy Easton’s brilliant Daddy Lessons (which has a strikingly similar colour palette to Neil’s) at the Black Eagle in Toronto.

And then November 22nd & 23rd, the Palimpsest Press crew will be completing the minimum number of stops to qualify as a book tour, with Toronto on the Wednesday and Hamilton (Dundas) on the Thursday.

It would be great to see you at any of these!

As for the promised “newness,” I haven’t written on here in a while because I think the project I was documenting here is done. I’ve thought it was done many times, but I think I can call it finished for certain because I’ve moved on to writing poems that feel part of something new.

So far they’re mostly about my kids, about fatherhood, or writing about the world from within fatherhood, thinking with a four-year-old at my side and the way he defamiliarizes just about everything.

After living in / thinking about the past for so long, it has been refreshing to shift my view to the future, to be writing poems that can handle more of the contemporary, more feeling, more body, more (attempts at) humour. Maybe it’s like what Matthew Zapruder says in his great interview with the poet Alina Stefanescu, “Maybe that’s just what getting more experienced as a poet is about: being able to include more and more in the poems, without having them break down or become prose.”

Thanks for sticking with this newsletter for a while now. Here’s a new poem about getting my son’s passport photo taken — a seemingly innocuous task, but one that inevitably devolves into me trying to explain the concept of border security as someone who is not exactly a strong borders advocate.

No Smiling

The passport photographer is undeniably self-employed. Pouring rain, double doors wide open. Lennon’s Beautiful Boy blaring. A retractable belt barrier blocks off his work area. He addresses us via the mirror above his editing terminal, turning the music down slightly to give instructions, then back up.

On the drive over, I tried to explain to Jim why he is not allowed to smile. I assumed it had to do with limiting the emotional identification of border agents, something about the state’s resistance to affect, but really smiling distorts the face too much to make a reliable ID. One more reason to laugh.

We wait in a chrome chair. This place is beautiful, Jim says, pointing to the framed hockey jersey on the wall. Beside it, a photo of a couple riding a digitally-enlarged dog. Beside that, a man holding three children in a way meant to look fatherly, but mostly I wonder which kid he is closest to dropping.

The photographer says he will give Jim a sucker, but only if Jim does everything the photographer says. He is the second stranger in two weeks (bag searcher at the soccer game) to offer Jim candy and Jim has failed both tests. I guess I have too.

The photographer parts Jim’s hair with his middle finger. They like to see a little forehead, he says. Eyes up, feet together, chin down, look here. It is over in thirty seconds, maybe sixty. $33.89 for three copies. The sucker is pink lemonade.

I’ll be reading (from this project) at The Printed Word in Dundas, ON tonight (Thursday, July 20th) at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Aaron Schneider’s novel The Supply Chain. It would be lovely to see you there.

The other thing is that I have a book coming out in October. It’s not really related to this newsletter other than that both are written by me. The book is called The Book of Benjamin and I’ve been thinking about it as an obsessive baby name book with only one entry — an essay on birth and grief and naming. If that sounds like your thing, you can pre-order it here.

A couple of months ago, in reading and reviewing Matthew James Weigel’s excellent collection Whitemud Walking, where he describes his experience of holding physical copies of Treaties 6 & 11, I realized in all my reading about the Between the Lakes Treaty, I had never even seen an image of the original document so I emailed Library and Archives Canada and eventually found a scan of the document on their site.

It strikes me as strange that this document isn’t more accessible, more visible. Given the recent attention to land acknowledgements, why is this image not posted on the City of Hamilton’s website? Given that this agreement forms the basis for many of our being here in Hamilton at all, why is it not reproduced on a plaque in the City Hall forecourt?

For those curious to read a transcribed version of the treaty, one is available through the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and Hamilton Civic Museums websites. However, after comparing the existing transcriptions with the image of the original treaty document, it’s clear several errors have been introduced in the process.

The spellings of the names of the Mississauga’s “Principal Chiefs” are inconsistent throughout, full lines of the original document have been omitted from the transcription, and the word “tractor” — coined in 1896 — is introduced to a document written in 1792 through the joining of the words “tract” and “or.” The transcription (and it seems there is just one that has been reproduced across the internet) is messy in a way that presents a significant challenge to the idea that the written treaty record is inherently more reliable than oral interpretations.

There’s also something significant about having my understanding of the treaty relationship mediated by the calligraphy skills of an unknown 18th-century individual. Seeing the handwriting drives home for me that the treaty text is one person’s rendering of the agreement, complete with insertions, irregular punctuation and capitalization, spelling errors and repetitions.

To this point, I haven’t been able to find a more accurate transcription online, but for those who are interested, I’ll post a link to my Google Docs version with the main additions/omissions left intact.

The other error I want to talk about is my own.

In a couple of my previous posts, I’ve mentioned that my drive around the Between the Lakes treaty boundary started in the Indian Point neighbourhood in Aldershot. I started there because the treaty text mentions a “creek that flows from a small lake into the said Lake Ontario known by the name of Washquarter.” This description paired with the map below (courtesy of Darin Wybenga, Traditional Knowledge and Land Use Coordinator with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation) which I can only zoom in on so far, led me to believe that the creek mentioned in the treaty was Indian Creek, the only creek I could find running near the boundary line on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

Recently though, browsing on Google Maps as one does, I saw a marker in the Indian Point neighbourhood for something called “Historic White Oak Tree.” The reviews are mixed: 4 stars on 23 reviews that range from, “Boring. It is a tree on someone’s lawn” to “Best tree I have ever seen. Recommend!”

One of the attached pictures reveals a plaque on the tree that reads:

The tree is quite impressive up close. If the plaque is correct and it was indeed a survey benchmark in 1792, that would make the tree at least 230 years old, but likely much older. And it is thick — one of the thickest trees I’ve seen around here.

A small collar of garden bed separates it from the road, driveway and aforementioned lawn. A new silver F-150 sat parked beneath it as, next door, the neighbour unloaded groceries from her Audi station wagon.

Also attached to the Google Maps location is a video from June 2023 posted by Myles M of someone (hopefully an arborist) up in the tree with a chainsaw.

I was unsure about the tree being a survey benchmark given that it’s not mentioned in the treaty, so I went back to Augustus Jones’s surveying notes the describe where he began the treaty baseline:

Left Mr Beasley at the Head of Burlington Bay at 7 o’clock, went to the outlet of said Bay. From thence to a white Oak Tree marked on three sides with a blaze and 3 notches on each side, for the purchase line about one chain from the water’s edge, being in a direction from the outlet of said Bay N 45 W and run 80 chains apart N 35 W.

Sure enough, there’s the “white Oak Tree” again (and more irregular capitalization). The word “outlet” — not a creek — also caught my eye. I went back to the treaty and read the relevant part again: “the creek that flows from a small lake into the said Lake Ontario known by the name of Washquarter.”

I had always assumed the “small lake” mentioned was Lake Medad or some other feeder lake upstream of Indian Creek. The syntax doesn’t help either — is the creek named Washquarter? Or the lake?

Eventually, I remembered that “Washquarter” was an earlier name for Burlington Bay / Hamilton Harbour, so this “creek” was flowing from the harbour into Lake Ontario. The Wikipedia article for Hamilton Harbour puts it pretty plainly:

the bay was also known as Washquarter, notably as a landmark to delineate the extent of the Between the Lakes Treaty No. 3 negotiated between Simcoe and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in 1792.

Presently, the only outflow between the harbour and the lake is the Burlington Bay Canal, opened in 1826. However, before the canal was built, a natural channel ran through the sand bar, directly across from Indian Point.

I poked around on the Hamilton Beach Community forum, which is populated by more skilled local historians than myself and learned that the former outlet was quite shallow and not all that passable for ships. Stormy weather would push silt from Lake Ontario into the channel, making it entirely impassable. Eventually, people got tired of lugging their trade goods over the sand bar and the canal was cut. The historical sources give it very little mention, but as part of the canal construction the former outlet was inexplicably filled in.

Notably, the occasion for this discussion of the outlet is that the folks on the forum are trying to understand a passing mention of a military fortification that may or may not have been present on the beach strip at one point. Again and again, the only way I’ve been able to access much of this information is through military archives; it’s telling what our historical records are comprised of.

The Hamilton Beach Forums Community thread titled “In search of the outlet” has only three posts, and they suggest that the former outlet is about “66 chains” (4356 feet or 1.32 km) north of the current canal. If this is true, the actual starting point for the Jones Baseline and the second corner mentioned in the text of the Between the Lakes treaty is a buried outlet somewhere near, if not under, the Skyway Wastewater Treatment Plant on Burlington’s Lakeshore Road, about 400 metres from my original starting place, the mouth of Indian Creek.

I wonder if the people who filled in that shallow outlet in had any idea about its relationship to the treaty. Similar to how the creation of Guelph Lake Reservoir flooded a section of the Jones Baseline, and thus obscured the boundary of the treaty, these development projects interfere with the legibility of the treaty area. Same with the shifting names of bodies of water from Washquarter to Burlington Bay to Hamilton Harbour, or even our changing ideas of what constitutes a “creek.” As these markers of the treaty are altered and renamed, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sense of the boundary 230+ years after the original signing.

Looking back at that map that I mentioned above, I can see a small bulge that is likely the site of the former outlet, “the creek that flows.” It hardly registered before, but now seems rather obvious. With this work I’m trying not to introduce the kind of errors that I found in the transcription of the treaty text, but I guess that’s why I’ve called this Work Book — these are my provisional attempts at doing some unburying. Thankfully I can go back and add footnotes to old posts.