Poets and Poetry
  1. Louis Dudek
        The Great Poem
        Moving Image
        Beauty is Truth
  2. Endre Farkas
        Undressing
        Sonata
  3. Artie Gold
        R.W. 17
        R.W.!9
  4. Tom Konyves
        For Leonard
        Lost and Found
  5. Elias Letelier
        The Pier
        The Last will be the First
  6. John Millet
        September Eviction, Bass Harbor
  7. Ken Norris
        Spring
  8. Bruce Whiteman
        Drug Therapy

    Editorial
  9. Editorial
        It's been an interesting month
    Reviews and Letters
  10. Reviews
  11. Letters

Editorial
by Ken Norris

    It's been an interesting month.

By the time issue #2 of the Second Series goes on-line, issue #1 will have been perused by at least 240 "visitors." By going onto the Internet we've already increased our circulation 300% over the First Series. We've been told that Internet use now doubles every six weeks. We don't know if SAB is going to experience that kind of exponential growth in readership, but it sure would be nice.

We now have an agreement with the National Library of Canada for them to archive our back issues. We'll be providing readers with a link to that site.

Elias has been working on putting the magazine into two formats: "hardback" and "paperback". The "hardback" is essentially for screen viewing, the "paperback" format for printing out issues and for use by those with computers and software (like me) that can't handle Netscape 2.0.

    You'll notice a review essay in this issue. We hope to include reviews on a regular basis.
    Yes, there WILL be women poets in issue #3. We promise. It's not that we haven't tried.
    You can look for issue #3, our Summer issue, around Summer Solstice time.

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Louis Dudek

      The Great Poem


    And when it comes to dying
      there will be no one
          (not even you, my darling)

    I will be all alone

      with that stupefying fact
        as in a great poem

    and no one there

      to share the ineffable experience
    of passing beyond existence
          into non-existence

    the awesome emptiness

        of change from being
            into not being

    So the greatest poem has no witness

        it is the memory of a death
            immense, unmentionable

    and we can only speak now

        of our smaller deaths.

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Louis Dudek

      Moving Image

    "See her wiggle her behind, as she walked away?"
    "Yeah!"
    "Well, the wiggle-- that is art."

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Louis Dudek

      Beauty Is Truth

    The greatest beauty I have seen in years
              (I am nearing 80)
    is "Tara Ashtakala, young and soft spoken"
          (see Montreal Gazette, Apr. 16/96).

    Is it the long Botticellian neck, or the hair

            roping down to her elbow,
    or just the Renaissance pose, at the window?
    No, it is none of these. But the fact
      that she has taken a stand, she is committed
            to a truth.*

      *[She is opposed to the proliferation of ground mines

    throughout the world:

      110 million buried land mines, UN statistics--
        10,000 killed every year, 20,000 crippled.

      She is fighting for a moratorium,
          for a clean-up, for
    responsibility.]

    O blessed Lady, with the soft speech, dark deep eyes,

          you are the new woman.
    You are in the right. But do not let it take away
          the happiness that is still in your mouth.

    Live and love also, have children.

        Who knows, at a quiet picnic
    you too may be blown away some Sunday morning.

    And then, it is only your beauty,

          only your truth, that will be remembered.

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Endre Farkas

      Undressing

              Coleman Hawkins

    The jazz that paints the night
    wants to be about love
    but love, worn out
    by the long, hard day,
    has said good-night.

    The steps to your bed
    I know by heart
    but walk no more
    because no I know
    love sleeps alone.

    And the air that was lying quiet
    by the night's fireplace growls
    and sinks its billion fangs
    into my billion parts;
    shakes me into pieces.

    A saxophone pours
    its midnight tears
    onto my heart and spreads
    its art into every cell.
    I become that stranger

    walking out the door.


Endre Farkas

      Sonata

    to sculpt the air around us
    to serenade our eyes
    to seduce the space between us
    to stroke the sounds for sighs
    to slip along sensations
    to slide along the skin
    to swim upstream in juices
    to soak in sweet love squeezes
    to suck between lips
    to circle nipples and hips
    to sense the quiver of tips
    to skim the cream of come
    to spread the sound of sex
    Oh yes, fingers were meant for this.

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Artie Gold

      R.W. 17

    As in that first mouthful of some hybrid
    I am gazing at your new colour you are
    wrapped in tissue like a nectarine
    my bicycle rides on your surface
    I hold my breath
    not like the mouth dealing with celery
    certainly not like the sound of me
    travelling over ordinary gravel
    has it rained between myself
    and life
    to produce you?
    Your weakness embarrasses me,
    displays you in a horrid light
    will I have
    to pass over you
    hand on the mighty dial of this world my neighborhood?

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Artie Gold

      R.W. 19

    A nest of gleaming silver on the jet wing
    below is land or coastline or solid ocean
    blue white silver white magnesium white

    clouds exhaust without vehicle I dream
    each is a dolphin happy chasing after us
    dry half; bodies warm as I am snug inside

    tangent to Magellan dotted lines axes
    hardly moving slow earth turning over
    like a tractor rotor gainer handstands

    sweet hard candy lens knocked shuddering
    hands drill cigarettes all lengths to screw ashtrays
    flaps pound we shake we travel through what we make

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Tom Konyves

      For Leonard

    How do I love her--
    when I got this
    you know
    mustache headache.

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Tom Konyves

      Lost and Found

    Boy meets dog. Boy loses dog.
    Boy finds god. Boy loses faith.
    Boy finds job. Boy loses job.
    Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl.
    Boy finds freedom. Boy loses innocence.
    Boy finds man. Man loses boy.
    Man finds love. Man loses self.
    Man finds home. Man loses song.
    Man finds children. Man loses wife.
    Man finds gold. Man loses gold.
    Man finds time. Man loses hair.
    Man finds dream. Man loses dream.
    Man finds laughter. Man loses time.
    Man finds meaning to life. Man loses life.

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Elias Letelier

      The Pier

    And in the universe
    the curve of time is so much greater than an apple:
    it appears a straight line
    that man does not want to understand.

    There,
    before the existence
    of your eyes,
    "God,"
    Coca-Cola,
    and the telephone,
    the universe had sense:
    it was a lamp, an apple,
    a brake factory;
    it was a song poured into a cup.

    Nevertheless, man,
    parasite under the empire of the sun,
    not being able to decipher his origins,
    calls himself the son of "God,"
    in order to convince himself
    he has inherited the universe.

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Elias Letelier

      The Last will be the first

    The cat jumped onto the table,
    ate the bread and licked the tablecloth.
    Then we sat down at the table
    and ate the cat.
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John Millet

September Eviction, Bass Harbor

    Last Sunday, when autumn
    announced
    itself--like a cleaning lady

    suffused in Pine Sol--
    it slid its solutions
    in a bucket across the floor;

    preoccupied, autumn announced,
    TIME TO MOVE OUT!
    with the bristles of steel wool

    as I sat on the pier
    and waited for fifteen
    dollars' worth of fried clams

    above a glut of lobsters in their cold, salty oxygen.

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Ken Norris

    Spring

    In Spring
    the high school girls
    with their awkward grace
    walk from school to home
    like water traversing bends in the river,
    and crocuses poke out
    all purple and yellow. Even
    the broken and tangled bushes--
    the trash of winter--sprout buds.
    Suddenly
    a wind from the North
    isn't chilling anymore. Love,
    having lived as a hidden flame in the heart,
    finds forms for its desire,
    and the ghosts of past springs
    for an hour are seen walking the rivuleted streets.
          from Ibycus

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Bruce Whiteman

      Drug Therapy

    In the desultory innocence of anti-depressants we wander from room to room, barely touching the surface of our broken lives. The drug therapy is a half a year's course of daily brain manipulations designed to stay the hand from random violence. We are caught up in tattered feelings and incapable of ratiocinative certainty. The medication was altered once to prevent priapism, a common side-effect.

    The killers haul their gun-metal phalluses from hurt to hurt, promiscuous as snow and ready for systemic silence. History is full of their pointless erections, blood-induced like most of the world's horrors. The pharmocopoeia of obsessive sex slowly winds the world down to point zero, where there is quick knowledge of death and then nothing.

    Death is in the bloodstream.

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The Last Postmodernists
by Ken Norris

                        The Last Word
                        Edited by Michael Holmes
                        Insomniac Press, 1995.

    According to editor Michael Holmes, The Last Word represents the fruit of a decade of poetic striving. In his introduction, Holmes starts the timeline for this "new poetry" of the nineties, this third wave of what we now affectionately call Postmodernism, in 1985, with the publication of Dennis Lee's important anthology The New Canadian Poets 1970-85. In canonizing the work of those fifteen years, Holmes suggests, Lee closes the book on them, making way for the new.

    So this is the truly contemporary world we have here in this anthology, and, to me, it certainly looks like the contemporary world. It is fast-paced and edgy, hopelessly urban and street wise, scattershot, exhilarating, and often degraded and degrading. When Louis Dudek reviewed the "other" seminal anthologies of the previous generation--Canadian Poetry Now and Anything is Possible--for The Canadian Forum in 1985, he called his essay "Poetry at the End of Things." I can't help but wonder what he would think of the work in The Last Word, which so clearly goes beyond what Dudek perceived, at the time, to be "the end of things."

    In fact, compared to The Last Word and its sister anthologies (Word Up and Breathing Fire), Canadian Poetry Now, Anything Is Possible and The New Canadian Poets 1970-85 were, in many respects, quite timid. I tend to think of them now as Canada's last white heterosexual poetry anthologies. In comparison, the nineties anthologies are all ethnically and racially diverse and sexually various. Make no mistake about it: these are interesting times.

    If for no other reason than that they cast a very different kind of shadow than the anthologies that preceded them, I have to disagree with Philip Marchand's recent assessment in the Toronto Star (March 23, 1996) that these anthologies reveal their poets to be "marking time". It seems to me that the entire social situation of poetry in Canada is currently being renegotiated, and it is the young poets of the nineties, whether they realize it or not, who are doing the renegotiating.

    In his piece, Marchand provides us with some useful tools for investigating the new poetry. He discusses the work of the poets of the nineties in terms of anecdotal poetry, spoken word, and language poetry. These are interesting preliminary categories to be thinking about. I personally tend to look at this work in terms of how it negotiates its way between the poles of reference and utterance. When, for instance, Marchand complains that Breathing Fire contains too much anecdotal poetry, it seems to me that what he is possibly objecting to is a poetry that is too tightly bound to referentiality.

    Of late, in response to the relative media dominance of spoken word poetry, there seems to have arisen a perceived conflict between Spoken Word and Written Word. This kind of a polarization strikes me as being particularly unfortunate. That some poets currently place a premium upon performance values is true; that others focus upon the poem as a written text is also equally true. But I would hate to have to live in a universe where I was forced to make a choice between the two. I think an argument can be made that some of the most interesting younger poets around today are those who combine powerful performance values with a skilled manipulation of text (I'm thinking here of poets like Michael Holmes himself, and Adeena Karasick, both lamentably and mysteriously missing from all three of the anthologies that attempt to define their generation). I might also add that, despite Michael Holmes' protestations in his introduction to the contrary, there are often more similarities than differences between the "spoken word" poets included in Word Up and the "written word" poets included in The Last Word.

    Each of the three new anthologies follows a different set of procedures of course. In The Last Word, Holmes presents us with 51 poets with a maximum of three poems each. Some make very brief appearances, and no one holds the stage for very long. The effect is, to say the least, somewhat psychedelic. I wish there were more poems from the poets I like and fewer from the poets I don't, but there is a very democratic aesthetic at work here. Holmes presents his poets as 51 equals, in marked contrast to Lee's earlier The New Canadian Poets, where twenty poets were presented as the "stars" of their generation, with twenty-five others serving in the capacity as back-up singers.

    If the poets in The Last Word tend to race by, there, are, nevertheless, poems that leave strong lasting impressions. Lynn Crosbie's passionate "Paul Teale, Mon Amour" tends to shake up a sensitive reader (and perhaps even a not-so-sensitive one); Sky Gilbert's "Confession number one" is astute and charming; Sonja Mills' "My First S+M Experience" is a real conversation starter; Steven Heighton's "Eating the Worm" impresses and moves; Louise Fox's "She Evaporates with Drops of Water Flung from her Hair" finesses its way into relevance; Darren Wershler-Henry's "Amoi(i)re" beautifully extends and elaborates upon the work of our beloved bpNichol. Each of these poems has its own particular significance that enriches Canadian poetry. My own personal favorite in The Last Word is Death Waits' "Towards a Contentless Society":

        it is content that abhors a vacuum
        when the dove smacks into the wall
        and in doing so is redeemed

        content that cannot show its face within the storm
        when the split second between stations
        becomes the only time allowed for thought

        and trying to write the saddest poem
        humanity could possibly write
        (but what would it contain?) a nothing,
        a nothingness: evolution's definition of humanity

        my heart is beating faster
        than a thousand cracking whips
        I bleed from every orifice
        and not a single drop of blood
        is sacred

    For me, that last stanza tragically captures the essence of this historical moment.

    The Last Word, then, is flashy, hip, and, for the most part, effective. There are bound to be numerous quibbles about its containing too many poets from Toronto and its not being definitive. Anthologies always contain too many poets from somewhere, and they are never definitive.

    Between them (and with almost no overlap) The Last Word, Breathing Fire, and Word Up introduce 90+ new poets to the Canadian scene. Long may they run.

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Letters

Dear Ken

Thanks for putting up "Somewhere Across the Border" on the Web. It is a great resource for those of us in the States frustrated by lack of access to the wild language experiments happening in Canada. All the best to you from--

Kevin Killian
San Francisco, California


Hi:

Nice list of contributors, but your web page is (frankly) a mess. I assume you are seriously under construction and things will get better.
My sincerest best wishes with your project.

Ken Stange
kens@faculty.unipaing.ca


    I need some information regarding the electronic publication, Somewhere Across the Border. What follows is a National Library form entitled: Canadiana Information Sheet: Publication for listing in Canadiana. We use this information for a variety of purposes: for inclusion in Canadiana (the bibliography of all published works in Canada) ; for cataloguing and for creating a receipt for your journal.

    Thank you for your help,

    Karen Krzyzewski
    Canadiana Acquisitions Division
    National Library of Canada
    karen.krzyzewski@nlc-bnc.ca

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              ISSN 1204-9204