Stephen Cain

Some Conceptualism at the CPRG

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 03:20:00 +0000

New in the Review

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 01:29:00 +0000

A selection from Etc Phrases appears in the new Windsor Review. On the stands now!

Something I Like

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Fri, 09 May 2014 03:21:00 +0000

The new poetry chapbook by Sharon Harris, which can be ordered here.

She'll be launching and reading in Ottawa on May 11th at the A B Series with Christian Bok. A great duo to check out!

The Launch

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Thu, 01 May 2014 02:27:00 +0000

Nice recording of the panel discussion at the BookThug launch for bpNichol's THESEUS and bp: beginnings.

Also see Greg Betts's report of the night here.

The Desk

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 03:46:00 +0000

As part of the promotion for bp: beginnings (and for Etc Phrases) I responded to Open Book Toronto's request for a description of my writing space. The original article can be found here, and I've included a larger photo of the space above, taken by the amazing Sharon Harris.

It Begins

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 02:36:00 +0000

Very excited to receive copies of bp: beginnings this week. It looks great and, as it's been the focus of my academic research for the last year, it's very satisfying to see all that sweat materialized into print.

From the backcover:

bp: beginnings brings together bpNichol's pre-Martyrology materials in one comprehensive collection, including such key texts as Nichol's first chapbooks Beach Head and Cycles Etc., the minimal lyric sequences of The Other Side of the Room and JOURNEYING & the returns, and various concrete and sound texts such as Lament, The Year of the Frog, and Ballads of the Restless Are. These collected sequences show Nichol developing his talents in both visual poetry and lyricism, pointing the way towards the union of the two forms in the later Martyrology. Combined with The Captain Poetry Poems (published by BookThug in 2011), bp: beginnings now makes all of Nichol's major poetry sequences available to both the avid Nichol specialists and to aficionados of innovative poetry everywhere.

You can order the book directly from BookThug here. It's also available as an ebook (a first for me!)

And there's also the Toronto launch on April 15th, where I'll be doing a roundtable discussion about Nichol's work with Brian Dedora and Lola Tostevin (moderated by Greg Betts). Info on that night here.

Etc Phrases Arrives

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 22:53:00 +0000

My new chapbook from Bookthug is now available. It's sleek, shiny, and very black.

Sweet Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 19:45:00 +0000

Everyone in the family is looking forward to attending this reading -- the first time the kids have actually asked if they could come see me read!

Goodwill Finding

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 01:29:00 +0000

My nine year old son is a book-hound like his old man, so we often spend weekends perusing used book stores and thrift stores. This week at Goodwill I picked up several books that I felt I needed for my collection, but that I doubt I'll ever read cover to cover (ex. the Norton collected edition of Shelley's poetry and prose, a nice Faber and Faber edition of The Alexandria Quartet). Among the stacks of Life of Pi and The Sentimentalists, however, I was surprised to find a Green Integer book. Stephen Ratcliffe's SOUND/ (system) is relatively obscure, even among GI books, so it was really quite miraculous to find this collection of poetry north of St. Clair in Toronto.

More surprising, when I flipped through it I found that someone had begun to use the book as the basis for a treated text, with the first 30 or so pages covered with ink sketchings and quotations in a fashion somewhat similar to A Humument. The creator seemed to know what s/he was doing and was informed of the tradition, as the treated section contains quotes from Wallace Stevens and Hopkins's "Pied Beauty". There was also the irony that Ratcliffe's text is itself a found collection, based on the letters of Henry James. Judging by the confidence of the drawing, I'd hazard that the creator is more a visual artist who is playing with textuality, rather than a poet branching out into visual poetics, but I could be wrong.

Any Toronto-based poet or artist willing to own up to this cool creation?

[Scans by the wonderful Sharon Harris]

Reading in Eden

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 02:06:00 +0000

I'll be reading at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival on Sunday, September 15th. It'll be my first time at the event, and I'm honoured to be included as part of the lineup for the 25th anniversary of the festival. I'm slated at 3:30 at The Common site with young adult authors Sheree Fitch, Lesley Livingston, and Deborah Ellis.

Full details of the festival can be found here.

Surrealism in Canada

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 03:28:00 +0000

Very happy to have my long essay, "Andre Breton in Canada," included in the current issue of Open Letter, guest-edited by Greg Betts and Beatriz Hausner.

It was a fun essay to write, and I spent a good part of last summer reading through Breton's biographies and other critical material to make what I think were some undiscovered observations. The paper also includes a number of great photos of the Gaspe area and Breton's excursions there, as well as a discussion of Tarot cards and Matta's art.

It's quite an exciting issue and has great contributions by: Ray Ellenwood on Mimi Parent, Jean Benoit, and Claude Gauvreau; Steve Venright on the Recordists; Karl Jirgens on Surrealist performance; Kevin Killian on Peter Dube; and new creative work by Ludwig Zeller, Lillian Necakov, Susana Wald, and others.

Open Letter homepage is here; and rob mclennan's commentary on the issue here.

Canadians in New American Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 05:08:00 +0000

Very pleased to have four poems included in the current issue of New American Writing in a special section entitled "Ten Canadian Poets." The four pieces are from Etc Phrases, part of my long ekphrasic translation of bpNichol's "Allegories". And I'm happy to be in such great company--the Canadian poets include Andy Weaver, Nicole Markotic, Rob Budde, Margaret Christakos, Jon Paul Fiorentino and more. Thanks to rob mclennan for putting the section together, as well as to the editors of the journal, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff. Some of rob's thoughts on compiling the section can be found here.

Dog Reviews 2

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 02:32:00 +0000

... but it won the Governor General's Award for 1944!

A Graphic Grey Borders

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:13:00 +0000

I'm looking forward to seeing the wonderful Sharon Harris at this month's Grey Borders event on Friday, March 22nd in St. Catharines.

She's been working on new visual pieces to display as part of a slide show for that evening and they're awesome.

It's Zoom

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 04:56:00 +0000

My new chapbook from above/ground.

I've called it a reverse-homophonic translation of classic sound poems, but I'm thinking it's something else. Moving from what Steve McCaffery would call the proto-semantic to English verse, it might better be termed homo-morphemic translation, or para-semantic translation. Suggestions welcome...

Ordering info here.

NBT Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:54:00 +0000

The indefatigable rob mclennan tapped me to answer these interview questions and pass them on.

What is your working title of your book?

Transition

Where did the idea come from for the book?

After looking at the sequences I’d been writing for the last few years I realized that what they all had in common was that all the poems were engaged with the process of “carrying across” meaning from one to discourse to another.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry/ translation.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I think Helen Mirren could do a good Gertrude Stein. Someone in the Skarsgard clan could pass as bpNichol. With some CGI I can cover Mayakovsky myself.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A book of alternative translations, ranging from homolinguistic to homophonic to ekphrasic.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I haven’t sent it out yet.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’m still working on it, but it includes poems I started five years ago.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Translating Translating Apollinaire, Six Fillious, Zygal, Frogments from the Frag Pool.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The avant-garde tradition in western literature.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It’s got it all: image-music-text, verbi-vocal-visual, comics to captchas.

I was supposed to tag five more writers, but I could only find two people to play, Greg Betts, and Jonathan Ball (who immediately tagged me back). There you go.

Raymond Souster (1912-2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:32:00 +0000

I was very saddened by the news of the passing of Raymond Souster. As well as being an inspiring figure in both his writing and his publishing ventures, Souster's lifelong home in West Toronto (High Park/ Baby Point) has also been my locale for the last decade. I frequently walk past such streets as Armadale Avenue, and never fail to think of Souster and his poem below:

Armadale Avenue Revisted

Street of my boyhood
(I lived right around the corner),
quiet, leaf-heavy street
of West Toronto.
                          Here,
behind that house, in the lane,
from garage roofs we ambushed
the Nelles Street gang,
pinned them down with catapults,
then, out of acorns,
forgot all our strategy
and ran like hell.
                        Out this door,
on Christmas Day
of all days, that queer girl
came sleep-walking, nightgown and all,
and even the snow underfoot
couldn't waken her.
                            At this number lived
the grease-monkey boys,
(their Stutz Touring shined
to a blinding dazzle),
who sometimes took me
as heart-pounding passenger
out the Queen Elizabeth,
to run her, gun her
past eighty on a straight stretch,
with the extra spice
of maybe a speed-cop
coming out of nowhere.
                                  On this lawn
I pounded and bloodied
my next-to-worst enemy,
and curiously found
it wasn't fun anymore.

But tonight it's only
ghosts I see around these houses,
the old gang gone,
every one of them;
some killed in war,
some from natural causes,
the rest, I can guess,
growing fat and middle-aged
like me.
           But not one of them
comes back here, I know,
they've got better sense:

just the crazy poet
well hooked on the past,
a sucker for memories.

There have been a number of tributes to Souster in the last few weeks (including a rather back-handed one by Russell Smith in the Globe). One of the best has been Cameron Anstee's consideration of Souster's Contact magazine and press which can be found here. I was also grateful to see that rob mclennan's tribute to Souster mentions an essay I wrote about Souster and Toronto which was originally published in The Canadian Modernists Meet (U of Ottawa, 2005) and edited by Dean Irvine.

In honour of Souster, I'd like to make "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto" available to read here.

Norry Comments on it in 1965

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 04:34:00 +0000

Sharon Harris brought my attention to this article by Russell Smith in this week's Globe and Mail.

Strange that Smith would complain about something that, in his estimation, has not only has existed since 1955, but has been critiqued since 1965. If Northrop Frye--not the most contemporary-minded and radical of our critics--found this trend problematic 35 years ago, why is this news today? What truth to power is he speaking? And what does it say about Smith's peers like Michael Redhill, Anne Michaels, Michael Crummey, Ross King, or Jane Urquhart, who continue to uphold this tradition?

From Frye's "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada":

Why do Canadians write so many historical romances ...? One can understand it in the earlier period: the tendency to melodrama in romance makes it part of a central convention of that time. But romances are still going strong in the twentieth century and if anything even stronger in our own day. They get a little sexier and more violent as they go on, but the formula remains much the same: so much love-making, so much "research" about antiquities and costume copied off filing cards, more love-making, more filing cards. There is clearly a steady market for this ....

Secret Influences 9: General Motors

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 01:42:00 +0000

With the recent news of more closures at the Oshawa General Motors plant I'm reminded of the significance GM has had in developing some of my aesthetic.

In the early 1990s I was fortunate enough to be employed as a temporary line worker for three summers. Over that time I worked the chassis assembly, the brake line, and the engine line and learned much about union culture and work floor politics. Coming from a middle class family in a working class city I've always respected the importance of the auto industry in sustaining my hometown and in the 1990s this was consolidated with first-hand experience of what it means to labour on assembly lines, to do double shifts, to work overnights, and to learn about solidarity and the interaction between bodies and machines.

This shows up most explicitly (and formally) in poems like "Hydra" and in American Standard/ Canada Dry as a whole, as well as in the ideology behind much of I Can Say Interpellation.

Over those three summers I also tackled three long novels I probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to read otherwise: Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and The Making of Americans. Before shifts, during breaks and lunch, as well as the times when the assembly line broke down I'd be able to finish a chapter or so, but I'd also read between tasks--for example, I'd finish one engine or brake and then read a couple of sentences before the next part came down the line. I'd prop the novel up in my work station and hold the page down with a bolt, moving it slowly down the page as the shift continued. I'm sure this affected how I consumed those novels--sometimes slowly, sometimes in bursts, and all connected with the smell of the car factory and the wear and tear the air gun was taking on my wrist and upper body. I particularly associate Stein with that experience and the copy I was reading was one I checked out from the York University library. That copy is still in circulation at Scott and still bears the grease marks on its pages from my bookmark bolt.

Dog and the Man

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 17:25:00 +0000

Finally having a chance to read Various Positions, Ira Nadel's biography of Leonard Cohen (1996, rev. 2007). So far the most revealing passage has been:

As a child, Cohen had a small Scottish terrier, nicknamed Tinkie for the tinkle of his license and identification tags. His parents surprised him with the dog as a gift ... His mother had actually named the dog Tovarishch, but his father disliked the reminder of the site of the Russo-German treaties. Tinkie disappeared in a snowstorm fifteen years later and was found dead under a neighbor's porch the next spring. The dog had been one of Cohen's closest childhood companions; Cohen still keeps a picture of Tinkie in his Los Angles home. To this day he refuses to get another dog...

I don't think I need to read anymore of the biography after this: everything is there in essence.

Fathersbloomsday

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 02:29:00 +0000

This is the first year that I noticed that Bloomsday and Father's Day are so close together. It's strangely appropriate for a novel so concerned with questions of paternity, patronage, and sons (missing, dead, resentful...) as well as the desired surrogate father-son relationship between Bloom and Stephen.

[Image from the BBC radio dramatization of Ulysses].

While this year is significant for Joyce studies due to the works coming into the public domain, for me, 2012 also marks 25 years since my father's passing.

Happy Birthday Bro

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:25:00 +0000

Happy 40th Birthday to my amazing brother Michael who features in several poems in Double Helix, and for whom the sequence "Arcadian Suite" is dedicated.

THE CRYSTAL PALACE (from "Arcadian Suite")

"The arcade is a street of lascivious commerce only; it is wholly adapted to arousing desires."

-- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project --

The site of youthful addictions. Perhaps a Parnassus, or Fortress of Solitude. But only when school was skipped, before the crowds arrived. Mall rations, tokenism at best, anniversary adversaries.

So revel without pause. That brief magic moment before it was all brought home. Colours as candy, the rotting as subliminal, darkness at the centre of town. Exercision. Eye or hand, a quarter nation.

No pleasure without fraternity. Two-player team-ups with the lines drawn religiously. Paying to fight, just like a colony. Queen Elizabeth II confrontations. Cain my brother, Cain my enabeler.

God Save Jamie Reid

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 13:35:00 +0000

1977 was the first year that I was conscious of what year it was. The first weekend of June that year I was turning seven and birthday cards & books that I received were often inscribed with "1977". Thus it's not surprising that that year is vividly embossed in my memory. During that time I was also a novice stamp collector & remember being annoyed that many of the Canadian stamps in the early part of the year were devoted to images of the Queen (at the expense of other cool things that seemed to happening that year, like a new Toronto baseball team called the Blue Jays, or Star Wars, a life-changing film I had seen a month earlier ...).

Flash-forward to 2012, my birthday is approaching & earlier this week I couldn't buy a set of postage stamps anywhere in Toronto that didn't have military hardware or images of the Queen on them. And fully half of last night's National was devoted to the Queen's jubilee (at the expense of detailed stories on the Montreal protests, Syria, European and U.S. economic meltdowns, the gutting of environmental research in Canada, General Motors closures, and so on...)

At this time I feel it's worth revisiting Jamie Reid's original artwork for the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" which responded to the Queen's Silver Jubilee & which is more transgressive than the eventual artwork utilized: swastika eyes & all...

And Canada's dreaming...

New Conley Launching

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:58:00 +0000

I had the opportunity to read an advance version of Tim Conley's first collection of poetry, One False Move, and contributed a blurb for this great book. I don't know the other readers on the bill, but I'm excited about checking out this launch on Tuesday as Quattro continues to publish more and more interesting work.

Quattro Books Spring Launch

Quattro Books, ‘Home of the Novella’, hosts

the final launch of their Spring 2012 list

FEATURING:

Ken Klonsky, Life Without;

Binnie Brennan, A Certain Grace;

Leah Murray, Romancing the Buzzard;

Tim Conley, One False Move; and

Chantel Lavoie, Where the Terror Lies

Tuesday May.29thSupermarket Restaurant,268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto 7:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.

Admission is free. Books will be available for purchase. Drinks and food are sold through the restaurant and bar. www.supermarkettoronto.com

www.quattrobooks.ca

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cain) — Mon, 21 May 2012 04:52:00 +0000