Kevin Spenst

Jason Heroux : My Life as a Notebook (book trailer, Kingston poet Jason Heroux has produced a book trailer for his latest above/ground press chapbook, My Life as a Notebook (2025)! Either wa...

Jason Heroux : My Life as a Notebook (above/ground press, 2025) (book trailer,
abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2025/09/jaso...

Poetry 2 <p>What is outside the formal properties of the poem? More forms! As writers, we bring forms of attention, memory, imagination, and ideas to the crafting of our poetry. </p><p>In this intensive course...

This asynchronous online poetry course is my pride and joy. I wrote it through the pandemic & it brings together over a decade of studying, teaching, & living through poetry: sfu.ca/continuing-s... There's a little under a week for you to sign up. @pancouver.bsky.social @anvilpress.bsky.social

above/ground press: 2026 subscriptions now available!
, anticipating the press' thirty-third year of activity, / @neonpajamas.bsky.social @russellcarisse.bsky.social @kevinspenst.bsky.social @frankyfrancescannon.com ;
abovegroundpress.substack.com/p/abovegroun...

A Center

You must hold your quiet center,
where you do what only you can do.
If others call you a maniac or a fool,
just let them wag their tongues.
If some praise your perseverance,
don't feel too happy about it—
only solitude is a lasting friend.

You must hold your distant center.
[..] Ha Jin

Woot-woot! Finding a venue for a volunteer-run reading series (with almost no funding) is a big deal! This is cause to celebrate and by celebrate, I mean please come out and join us for the May 11th reading!

Introduction: Something of Moment | Jorie Graham I picked these poems, and, except for a few instances, the editors of Ploughshares picked the prose. I picked these poems for the same reasons most readers linger on poems when they come upon them, reasons similar in spirit, no doubt, to those given by most writers invited to guest-edit these pages. I hope those reasons feel clear to you, as you read. As I like to present a few pieces by each person, so one can get a sense of the range, or the voice, or the temperament, of a given sensibility, I couldn’t pick as many poets’ poems as I would have wished. Poems not only obviously contextualize each other, but they build up a sense of a speaker-in-a-predicament—and an ancillary sense of what they find most urgent, what compelled them to break the silence and ask us to listen in the first place. Asking for another’s time is, after all, quite a large request. In a poem, one is always given, I would argue, a sense of a place that matters—a place one suffered the loss of, a place one longs for—a stage upon which the urgent act of mind of this particular lyric occasion (be it memory, description, meditation, fractured recollection of self, or even further disintegration of self under the pressure of history, for example) “takes place.” And although it is, most traditionally, a literal place—Roethke’s greenhouse, Frost’s woods, Bishop’s shorelines—often, too, a historical “moment”—especially the very conflagatory “now” of one’s historical-yet-subjective existence—is felt as a location that compels action, reaction, and the sort of re-equilibration which a poem seeks. A break in the comprehensible, in the morally absorbable—a fissure in the spirit’s sense of just cause and effect, in a line of thought that can feel “true”—can constitute trigger-occasions, or situations, or kinds of place from which the spirit in language springs forward into the action of poetry. All such moments—where we are taken by surprise and asked to react—are marked places in consciousness, places where a “turn” is required. Even the apparently simple discovery of disorienting “places” in the fabric of language itself—in its nature as a tool—which awaken one to uneasiness with one’s own, or one’s culture’s, desire, for instance, can raise the heat for a soul and make it feel the poetic need to turn and return. Such “places” always feel—in the poems that persuade me to listen—like “real” places, however non-material, or ungrounded in apparent “situation” they might at first appear. One of the side effects of the heated discourse over what constitutes a “sufficient” occasion for poetry—and of the unfortunate frustration some readers have suffered over feeling “left out” of the “secret” occasion of much contemporary poetry (or, worse, the assumption that there is no shared or shareable human occasion behind it—or, even worse, that there is, in fact, no occasion at all behind it, that it is just a self-indulgence, a thing “made of words”) is a wondrous elaboration and expansion of this troubled notion of what, in fact, constitutes a “cry” of an occasion, and what can be transmitted to an other of that “occasion” without an overt naming or rhetorical delineating of it. This is one of the great openings modernism left for its inheritors to explore—and one which, because it so fruitfully links up with the equally “difficult” science and philosophy and music of our era, is evident everywhere in the exciting work of this historical moment—here and elsewhere. So what I hope you find here are poems that represent the complexities of this moment. Poems in which a set of formal procedures, repeated and varied upon, create a mental place, on which actions—human actions—can be gauged as having this or that character, and with which a reader can, in the end, “identify.” As that last term is freighted—as I have indicated—by almost a century’s worth of theoretical debate I like, to simplify matters for myself, to render the process of “reading” as some version of “being allowed and enabled by the craft of the poet to do the emotional and intellectual work the poem is asking me to do.” If there are images being used, for example—not just objects or pictures, but those mysterious chambers of deepening emotive resonance, those meaning-charged clusters that, if undertaken by the senses of the reader, do yield sensorial “content”—for example—then I want to be made able, by the formal virtues of the poem, to undergo them. If I find myself unable to do the work the poet asks for, I can’t proceed with the poem, and it will remain private to the poet. The same applies to the whole rest of the palate of available actions in the poem: the architecture of rhetoric, the ideas, the musical modulation that invokes story, the turns of mind, the acoustic activity—how it generates its own chambers of echoing meaning—and so on. I love poems where I can do what the poet asks. Doing what I am asked to do is deeply different from interpreting what the poet means. In addition, I love being asked to do something I haven’t done before—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, even visually: something—an experience—which already, indeed, exists in the world (and is true, therefore), but which presents a path to itself, or through itself (a “work-path,” I would say, so a “journey”) I haven’t traveled before. And I love, having undertaken the journey of that poem—be it a journey which is a more purely linguistic one, or a plot-driven story, or a leaping, dream-like, associative wandering—I love when it feels bright, alive, full of the quick flashes of discovery. “To be touched” is one of the common ways readers of poetry describe a good reading experience. I like that stripped-down phrase. I like the sensation of something that feels corporeal reaching out to find what is corporeal in me, finding the portals where that sensorial access moves up pathways to mind, and spirit. What a miracle it is, each time a poem takes place: that these phonemes would build up to the flesh of touch, and that someone would infuse that capacity to touch with a good reason to require touch, a necessary, true, and urgent reason to put out their hand, grip one, and say, See here, can you spare a moment, here, here.

"What a miracle it is, each time a poem takes place" - Jorie Graham www.joriegraham.com/prose_graham... (Old but new to me :)

Look who's on bluesky: (their next reading is May 11th!)

Take your manifest destiny and stuff it up your ________. (all are welcome to join in the anti-imperialist fun!) #NoWayEh #Canadian

A Bouquet came out almost a year ago @anvilpress.bsky.social . It's nice to see that the poems are still finding their way to new readers. @sfuenglish.bsky.social

Thanks for helping put my words into the world, Kathryn. (Hey and anyone listening in, join Kathryn's substack!)

Cross & Crows Books East Vancouver's independent queer-owned destination bookstore

Dead Poets come to Cross & Crows! Sunday March 9th, 2025 @ 3:00PM - 4:45PM w/ Jen Currin (reading John Ashbery), Arleen Pare (reading Don Domanski), Melanie Siebert (reading Osip Mandelstam) & Ali Blythe (reading Jean Valentine)
crossandcrows.com/events
(masks are mandatory :)

About — Nate Nate Nainers

It's hard to squeeze someone into a rectangular space, but Nate is great and fits most everywhere: "I believe creating art in a grounded and heart-centred sense of playfulness is a social good." Check their stuff out: www.natenatenainers.com/about

Anstruther Press Chapbook and broadside press based in Toronto, Canada. We publish an array of emerging and established poets and writers.

There's so much grief & joy to write about; this time I get to have art on the cover from my good buddy who I've known since junior high in Surrey. Behold the work of Kerry Vaughn Erickson in a photo of two of his paintings in a window (yes, it's a windowful) www.anstrutherpress.com#/windowful-b...

We’re Meant To Work With Our Hands: Robert Colman and Christina Shah in Conversation Robert Colman and Christina Shah in Conversation

Hey now– it’s out!

We’re Meant to Work With Our Hands: an interview in conversation with my editor Robert Colman, featured in The Miramichi Reader. A great conversation– thanks Rob!

miramichireader.ca/2025/01/were...

Too true! :) :(

Roses are red.
Violets are defiant.
Poetry is sweet,
And some things will not change no matter who tries to take over, and may Claude McKay, Harryette Mullen and other American poets of brilliance and sensitivity will be taught because they are the bloom of the people.
Happy belated Valentine’s Day!

Days are dark but I'm fortunate to have a book by Byung-Chul Han in my hands that reads: “The ultimate purpose of language is praise.” Even through this exceptionally imperfect medium, I'm able to say that your eyes are miracles as you read these words that root you towards some future celebration.

Poetry (and all its ambiguities and imagery) will help us through:

Dorito Mussolini's stream-of-pompousness:

Q: How does a demagogic clown make it to the top?
A: US exceptionalism born again in a babyman president who wins by b(r)awling incomprehensibly.

Dorito Mussolini's hard to understand because he talks with his mouth full of big macs, broken pacifiers, & BS. Our politicians' job is to try to negotiate & deal with him (keeping this avarice and mendacity in mind for plan Bs), but our job is to tell it like it is (as crazy as it is.)

Feeling blessed to have inspired such lovely blurbs!!
Make sure to catch “Jerald the Bear” Feb 8 + March 8 (East Van) & April 6 (New West) @ Nainers Story Time House Show Series!

I pray Dorito Mussolini’s Manifesto Destiny to Make North America One Great Big Mac Attack again gives the inglorious glutton indigestion. #takeoffeh #handsoffmyfellowhosers

I'm ambushed by tears. Considering the words of Elif Shafak in a CBC interview with Tom Powers, this is the dream of emotional intelligence and wisdom. This is my moment to bring back - however obliquely - into literature. 2/2

Sometimes journal writing is drilling down into the past to get to the place where tears weren’t released. I write about yesterday. I write and write about the past couple of days and suddenly 1/2

Thanks for reposting, Jessica! I'm glad this poem found its way to you :)

One of the first literary events of 2025 that I'm excited to be co-hosting: #DeadPoetsReadingSeries Since this is our first reading in our new home at Harbour Center at SFU downtown, please help us spread the word. @ubcpress.bsky.social @vmiprogram.bsky.social Most importantly: hope you can make it!

Where is Michael Smith? Michael Smith, 17 missing since December 30, 1967. Last seen at his North Vancouver home. Canada’s Missing website RCMP case #2014003272 #coldcasecanada #truecrimepodcast

Mike Smith, 17 was last seen on December 30, 1967 when he left his #NorthVancouver home after a fight with his family. It's quite possible that Mike is still alive and in his 70s. His family would like him back. Story: evelazarus.com/where-is-mik... #missingperson #coldcasecanada #truecrimepodcast

This photo gets me thinking of January's namesake god: Janus, the two-faced god over doorways. We look ahead through the skewed times into more books that will set us to rights. May all your 2025 reading be glorious! @anvilpress.bsky.social

Need a place to submit your chapuscripts? Look no further: "We'll be open for submissions throughout 2025..."