Dale Smith : New Again: Two Mornings in October

Oct 16, 2017

9:05 Receive email prompt from rob to think about my writing day. I just tried to knock out a weekend’s worth of email. Now looking at the screen. Now coffee. Now time to flip the record (Nina Simone at Newport).

9:08 Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas has got me thinking a lot about writing, about how such thinking inhabits writing. That is, the words of others can often inflect my own sounding within a writing day. Shapes and phrases, sounds and rhythms of urgency move into my thinking, the daily hum and calm of routine. I value these adjacencies. In Long Soldier’s work there is an intimacy with language and an awareness of the social removal of the writer from her language, the train wreck’s white tongue. The flapping of social discourse that inhabits an English that must, at some level, be coeval with a body of feeling. I think about the priority of language next to the sensate images and feelings that coexist with words, that shock or absorb certain words to include new outlooks, an achievement of an attitude. This latter is hard to accomplish. Form is not a stable object. Poetry is a history of adjustments and attunements. Attitudes arrive from the knotty substance of life. One’s position in relation to others is activated, assessed, required. If I can’t form a new outlook, don’t bother. I don’t mean something heavy. There is a softness in Long Soldier’s language that is iron. There are roots. How I feel about a word, a vowel or cluster of consonants. Her attitudes convey a depth of experience. Not always experience, not always knowledge. A speculative tempo outward toward the barely as-yet perceived horizon of where I wander. Reading and writing in adjacencies. The page, the day—they blend. Now, I go wash dishes.

9:34 Long Soldier’s writing disrupts self/world in the gesture of speech. Print. Sound. Blank page spaces. Long Soldier is clear about the dispersed histories and presents and futures words carry. The radical gesture of refusal enlivens an outlook that grates against the reality of a North American past—a violent physical and psychic occupation. Of a present occupation. What Robert Duncan called “the raving mania of the nation.” How refuse the weight of the impositions of conquest, servitude, and conveniently organized liberty?

10:00   Last night, I wrote the following. I wasn’t thinking of Long Soldier’s poems. But her words settled somewhere in me. There’s no direct evidence here. What I’m saying is that communion is my understanding of art. A commons of where we don’t forget but do know the urgencies of our feelings. This is perhaps too much of a build-up for the following little observation, a minor coordination of some impulses working out into a poem at an odd moment in a tavern waiting for pizza:

someone said Canada

was a collection of

atmospheres, old

garden, distant tavern

patterns, sovereign

common, mosaic

mosque prayers

I heard outside

the pizza shop

10:20 My kids are home from school, sick. A storm blew through last night with new cold wind. I putter between projects. Essays. Poems. Reading. I don’t really dedicate time to writing unless there’s a deadline. Poems come whenever. Like last night at the tavern where I began writing about an incoming storm and the maple leaves blowing around and a tree branch that fell on Logan Avenue before I came home with pizza for everyone.

10:28 Hoa reads a poem from her computer by Michael McClure for Joanne Kyger (CA Conrad just e-mailed it from a Richard Brautigan conference where, says Conrad, McClure read “honey voiced”). It is lonely and strange to witness the passing of friends. The time grinder thing our bodies are in.

October 17, 2017

7:02                 Up, coffee. Thick wool sweater.

7:03                 counting seasons

                        from Humber Bay

                        where those manic

                        Europeans La Salle and

                        Brulé portaged

                        neat grids arrive

                        now placed

in sovereign time

7:20 Lester Young, “Almost Like Being in Love.” Hoa says, look out the window. Venus and a fingernail sliver of moon to the east ahead of the sunrise.

7:22 “Now / make room in the mouth / for grassesgrassesgrasses” Long Soldier acknowledges an earth of things and actions. Earth of things and the unsaid’s enactments. Invisible lines, permanent trails to the interior of one’s unraveling in the violent determination of the Republic. I wonder about that word—Republic—and the Canadian more common Commonwealth. Instances of sovereignty. “Soldier” from “soldarius.” From “soldato.” One who receives pay. Solidus, a gold, Roman coin. Stamped by the Emperor’s image. Coined. To be lost in grassesgrassesgrasses.

7:41 “Indiana.” Still Lester Young.

9:00               Notes on Writing my Days for Rob

Every day you

look for surprise

in the ordinary

routine of now.

An awakening

through the noise

shows what’s light

and readied

to be known,

your own ongoing

ground. And on

you return like

a musical pattern.

On to the sound.

On in the round

of days to play

in, as if a child

wilded the lost

and the found,

the weird and the

blatant beat.

To be shown

new again.

Dale Smith is a poet and scholar of poetry and rhetorical theory. A book of poetry, Sons, was published last year by Knife / Fork / Book, and two edited volumes appeared with the University of New Mexico Press's Recencies Series: An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson. Recent reviews, essays, and poems have appeared in Brick, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, and The Walrus. He teaches at Ryerson University, Toronto.

photo credit: Waylon Hart Smith

Manahil Bandukwala : my (small press) writing day

I write in the interim spaces between things: on the bus ride to school/work, during work, between class. Sometimes someone will say something and I’ll pull out my phone and type up a note, only to forget about it for months (some gems from this inventory include “ethical vegan poems” and “rewrite Beowulf where Beowulf is a werewolf.”

Ever since I started working a 9-5 in a cubicle, I’ve found more interim spaces to write during. I’ve filled up three notebooks these past three months, with there being a fair amount of salvageable content in there. Writing in a notebook is much more subtle than typing away, and I’ve rediscovered writing by hand. And then I type up my work, tearing it apart as I do.

Sometimes it’s hard to find inspiration staring at grey walls (even though I’ve covered them with paintings). So I read poetry while I’m in here. I’ve read Ben Ladouceur’s “Otter” and Rob Thomas’s “Brood,” along with countless poems online on ottawater, the Puritan, etc. etc. On a side note, I also revamped the In/Words website sitting in this cubicle.

Also on the topic of In/Words – submission periods are honestly one of my favourite times ever. I love opening the inbox and seeing a new submission in. I’ll read submissions and be pushed to write and I’ll have a poem of my own to submit somewhere. It’s a great cycle.

Occasionally on weekends I’ll pull myself towards Black Squirrel or Starbucks (my roommate works there – I get a discount) and let coffee-shop vibes pull words out. I fill pages with rambling before ripping them apart to make a poem. I take away more words than I add. I take poems to writer’s circles and have people tell me what stands out to them. I submit poems to magazines and continue to rework them.

Oh, and I do always sit cross-legged, or with my legs tucked under my body in some way. I hate sitting upright on chairs, so I don’t. Even in a ‘professional’ office cube.

Even when I have zero inspiration and all that comes out is angsty, cliché-ridden post-teenage thoughts, I write those down. Because beneath the angsty, cliché-ridden post-teenage rambling is something I can use in writing. And sometimes there’s nothing, but writing bad stuff that no one reads is better than not writing anything at all.

When the workday finally ends, I make my cup of tea and sip it as I sift through penned down rambles and shape them into something decent.

And the next day starts and I do it all again.

Manahil Bandukwala lives, thrives, and creates in Ottawa. An undergrad student in Carleton University’s English program, she is an editor of In/Words Magazine & Press, run out of Carleton. Her writing has appeared in Bywords, In/Words, the Ottawa Arts Review, re:asian, ottawater and where is the river, among other places. She has work forthcoming in Room Magazine. You can find her artwork on Instagram @manahil_art, and read her inner thoughts on Twitter @manaaaahil.

Sarah Crookall’s (Small Press) Writing Day

My writing desk is one of the first things I should see in the morning. It sits opposite to the bed, facing the north window of my Vanier bedroom. But I don't notice it. Either because I'm too tired, preoccupied by thinking about what needs to be done, or because the furniture likes to blend with the walls after being in a place for a while.

I make coffee. An embarrassing five to six cups that, each morning, I tell myself I will drink throughout the day. Instead, I usually drink 4.5 cups before I leave for class.  As someone with an anxiety-prone peripheral nervous system, it's probably not the best decision in my morning-non-routine. But the black brew is as comforting as it is nerve-racking.

I hop on board the 12 bus and if it's not packed, as it usually is, I sit and read. Lately, I’ve been reading from a collection of essays. When I'm forced to stand, there's always a lot to look at: the winding Rideau River, addicts on the street, or the folks crowded around me on the bus. Occasionally, I thumb in quirky observations on my outdated iPhone 5s.

Before class I mentally tell myself I'll write a couplet, or something, in my blue 108-paged Hilroy notebook. I don't. The fluorescent buzzing and shuffling bags are too distracting. Throughout the day, I mutter through classes, study, eat, and find excuses for coffee breaks. I write an essay on Rossellini's "Rome Open City" for an Italian cinema class. As I type, my fingers faintly shake from caffeine overload.

It's Friday so it's the day I visit my 95-year-old grandfather at The Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre. It's become my favourite day of the week. I’m able to see my super genuine, navy sailing minister of a papa. But being there is also a wonderful exercise in learning, empathy, and a great source for writing. 

I've been a bit self-conscious about not writing professionally very much in 2017. There’s a gnawing background guilt when I write anything else. But it seems to dissipate when cheesy polka music spills into my papa’s room from the nursing home's hallway. Encounters at The Perley are too interesting for a writer not to be motivated. Today the polka music fuses with The Eagles’ “Take It Easy.”

I thumb in what I don't want to forget into the iPhone 5s with its silly case covered in Eiffel Towers and hearts. I get home. I open the curtains behind my desk hoping to fan away the mental cobwebs I brought back from the long journey home.

With bright snow reflecting a strenuous light on my desk, I scrawl rough notes in the blue 108-paged Hilroy notebook. I translate the image of a lifelike-in-a-dead-way stuffed orange tabby on an elderly lady’s lap into thin lines of paper. In the evening, I add more precise sentences on my outdated MacBook Pro. Eventually, I’ll compile both the rough and precise thoughts on the MacBook.

I close the notebook, Macbook, and curtains. I turn in, thinking in bed. I’m not writing professionally right now, but I’m generally satisfied with being able to get a feeling down. It’s how it all started for me, and it’s how I hope to continue stockpiling ideas.

Sarah Crookall is a writer and poet originally from Toronto. While living there, she was involved with Bänoo Zan’s Shab-e She’r poetry nights and occasionally wrote freelance for minor publications. She is a journalism graduate from Durham College and currently studies psychology at UOttawa while monitoring her radar for writing opportunities.

Heather Sweeney : My (small press) (non) Writing Day

The day begins with two crows streaming across my 6th story windows.  Across a dull, Southern California sky.  The marrow of a Monday morning.  I wish I could say that I kept going.  That I wrote a stunning, lyrical line.  I am on winter break and have time away from teaching.  My husband and I walk our dog to Starbucks for our morning coffees.  We take Dexter inside and no one cares.  He noses at the barrel of stuffed teddy bears.  On sale.  I toy with the idea of getting him one, but know he would ruin it within a 30 second time frame.  It has happened before, dismembered stuffing and thread.

I return.  And sit at the wooden table that once belonged to my grandparents.  I have not yet begun.  I am interrupted by thoughts of. I am not.  No. By thoughts of doubt.  Seeping in.  I am a wall of static.  A compost of fragments, unhinging. 

For some reason, I have three notebooks going at once.  Reason is overrated.  I try to move forward.  Even my succulents have died. I look around to locate myself.  Disarray.  Is this the lesson?  I take notes on my perimeter:  raw light, rock salt lamp, ghosts in wooden frames, blue slate window trim, a framed black and white drawing I did in high school.  Refraction.  Serrations of time. I become brittle with coffee.  I randomly open my nearest notebook: Do not drink whiskey with a man who cannot swim.

Here I am drifting.  I reach for the closest book, What Replaces Us When We Go by Julie Doxee. I just mistyped “go” as “god.”  Replacements are never subtle.  I open to page 35 and continue: “In the practice peephole a memory shook.”  I replace a memory with time.  And try to keep going.  Within splintering moments.  The wall, a graph of clouds.  Did I eat today?  This is not how this day was supposed to happen.

I weave between reading and writing.  For a time.  Beneath winter.  I scrape together the small phrases at the back of my throat.  I am a slow writer.  It’s ok to be slow.  I write:  We hover above the unbreaking waves on hooks of air.  The sea becomes us.

I pace, then put on some music:  Widowspeak.  The lyrics reveal:  “I start looking for you…”  Distraction.  Temporality.  I tweet a joke about Sex and The City.  I consider texting a friend.  Between isolation and oscillation.  I stop.  I am burdened with hunger.

I try to move on.  I burrow into this moment and breathe deep.   There are white hydrangeas dying and limp in a short vase on the table.  I should throw them away but don’t.  I have written exactly two sentences.  I sit here in the pause. 

Heather Sweeney lives in San Diego where she writes, does visual art, and teaches yoga.  Heather also does one-on-one Consciousness Coaching.  Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Hunger, La Vague, Porridge, Moonchild, Bad Pony, Shanti, Bombay Gin, Summer Stock, and Dusie.  You can also find her at:  http://theshineblog.com/ 

Ken Sparling : my (small press) writing day

I get up at six. Put on some coffee. Pee. I go into the living room and open the laptop. I go to the piece I’m working on for Rob, for his series about the typical writing day. I figure if I can get at it early, before I’m tired and irritable, I can make some progress.

But I seem to have woken up tired and irritable.

I start reading what I have so far for Rob. I move some words around. Delete some words. Add some words. Move a paragraph up. I look at the top of the screen and watch Google Docs save what I’ve changed. When it says, “All changes saved in Drive” I close the laptop.

There’s noise upstairs. I think it must be Mark. He got a new SAD light yesterday and I imagine he’s sitting up in his room with it shining on him.

Eventually he comes downstairs. He has the light under his arm. He plugs it in and puts it on the table beside me. It’s like daylight.

Mark makes oatmeal. He makes oatmeal every day.

Mary gets up. We let the cats out of their room in the basement. We feed them. They yell.

I feel like I’m sitting at the top of a tall, pointed tower. If I move in any direction, I’ll fall. I’m conflicted about everything. Every little thing that happens, from Mark making oatmeal to cats yelling, I’m conflicted about it. I think one thing, then I think I should be thinking something else. Then I try not to think at all.

“There’s water on the counter behind the coffee maker,” Mary calls out. “Is it leaking?” She’s been asking this question since we got the coffee maker a week ago. I want her to stop asking. I also want to not care that she keeps asking.

“It’s just water I spill when I’m filling the tank,” I tell her. “I always miss with some of it.”

We talk about the dreams we had last night: I had a dream that I was on some kind of writing tour and my sister was taking care of the logistics. I couldn’t find something that I wanted to take along, but we were running late so I left without it. Mary had a dream that the new string of lights she put up in the kitchen, snowmen lights that were on sale after Christmas, fell down and were lying in water.

“Is Moge throwing up?” Mary asks.

“No,” I say.

“I thought I heard the throwing up noise.”

So far, that’s my day. Is it typical?

I guess the point here is that there is no typical writing day. If you poll a bunch of writers about their typical writing day, they’ll each tell you a completely different story. But this atypicality isn’t just from one writer to the next. If you are a writer and you talk about your own typical writing day -- and really, if you are anybody talking about any sort of typical day -- what makes the story interesting are all the little atypical moments that invade your typical day and threaten to knock it completely off balance.Typical is a state of mind that patterns your day, allowing you to travel safely among the daily anomalies that threaten a state of mind that rests in the typical pattern of a day that tends toward restating itself over and over as a prototype of every other day.

Typicality blends into itself and disappears, leaving all the unexpected moments shining like stars in the night sky. But then it shows itself again, like clouds that you can’t see at night but you know they are there because you can no longer see the stars.

All the little differences that make your arrival here today interesting -- and it is interesting because today isn’t yesterday -- don't change the core typicality of your writing day if you characterize your writing day as typical. But if you try to find what’s typical in your day, everything that actually is typical will disappear beneath the chaos of moments that are like words in a sentence trying to make sense of each other.

When you talk about a typical day, you're moving in the direction of a prototype, an example from which the typical day might be extrapolated. But the core of a strong writing experience is a sort of ongoing atypicality that results from a hunger to experience your engagement in writing, each time you experience it, as though you have never experienced it before.

I think every writer feels his routine as atypical relative to the routines of other writers. That’s what makes it fun to hear a series of writers talk about their typical writing day. But to call forth your day as routine, or even as an example that could stand as the basis for an extrapolated routine, is already to understand your personal narrative as typical -- typical, not in relation to other writerly narratives, but in relation to itself.

To call your writing day typical is to compare yourself to yourself as a means of finding yourself again in the patterns you inhabit from one day to the next.

I do have a typical day. It's a weekday and it starts just before five in the morning. It includes a cup of coffee and a ride on a bicycle and eight hours at a desk at Toronto Reference Library. There are other characteristics in that typical day that I could inventory, but none of them would provide you with much of an understanding of what it means to me to be a writer. The moments that I would be inclined to share as examples of what circumscribe my life as a writer are not part of my typical day. They come as a surprise, their character as writerly moments arising from their lack of typicality relative to other, much more predictable, moments in my life.

If there is anything typical about my day, relative to my experience of myself as a writer, it has to do with arriving, at various points in the day, in front of groups of words and beginning to wonder about how they find themselves organized. And then continuing to wonder how they continue to find themselves organized. There is nothing typical about when this might happen. It could happen at any point throughout the day. At work or at home. On the bus or the subway. Even sometimes when I’m on my bike. And these groups of words could come in the form of a communication plan, an email, or a friend’s short story.

How does typicality find itself, or assert itself, or even recognize itself within this sentence I am writing right now, for instance?

Maybe the idea of typicality shows itself within a group of words in the way the words resist each other; in the way the words group themselves as resistant to the tendency to become something typical; in the way the words spool across the page, anticipating, obfuscating, rebelling against their antecedents, as they lurch forward into the blank space ahead of them, attempting again to escape everything they are right now in this moment.



Ken Sparling is the author of seven novels and the creator of a bunch of handmade books. Check him out at Toronto Public Library. Or contact him at dadsayshesawyou@gmail.com