Forwarding Address

Hey, readers. This blog will be moving to its new home on my website: katekennedyeditor.com

I'll just go on ahead and get things set up.

Ha!

Every year I plan to observe Robbie Burns Day and every year it passes me by. This year, however, we have a supply of Scotch on hand and I have been quietly rehearsing a poem to recite (after, definitely after, the Scotch). I decided on "To A Louse," mainly because although the rest of the lines wandered off shortly after I read them back in high school, that "O wad some Power" has stayed randomly lodged. If it goes well maybe next year will include haggis and a guest or two. Happy birthday, Robert.

Marfa, TX

This interview with Marfa Book Co. owner Tim Johnson, posted yesterday on Poetry magazine's excellent blog, made me wish I'd known about the shop when I was through there a few years ago. Finding a great independent bookstore in the desert is a heady combination I've written about before.

And because I love a good geographic theme, an old poem I have been doing some new tinkering with:

Outside Marfa

Scrub the lives we have had
to now, let the skirmish
of details slither off into
the reaches. For the last
hundred miles it has seemed
unimportant to carry on with this
mastery of the ambitions we've
been telling ourselves we are about.

Let's lie flat and let the wideness
we've funnelled into so many straight
days and weeks loose to bloom
a moment into this sky.

As far as the eye knows
this day and where we lie is all
and who is the eye to deceive?
Now whatever stray reluctance left
on the part of the mind is slipping
off as the sky looms back,
and life till now buckles, slain,
and washes out across West Texas.
Hear, the car has ceased its
cricket ticking, last trace
of how we got here silenced,
and now who am I to say?

You Could Believe in Nothing

I was thrilled to see this almost entirely glowing review of St. John's author Jamie Fitzpatrick's new (and first) novel, You Could Believe in Nothing, in the Globe and Mail's online books coverage yesterday. I had the pleasure of working with Jamie on the manuscript and it's satisfying to see it so well received.

Summer reading

Seven Rivers of Canada by Hugh MacLennan (Macmillan, 1961)

I found this at our neighbourhood used bookstore early in the summer and was really taken with the design. The cover stripes (seven blue ones for seven rivers) I think are a subtle way of illustrating the subject without being too literal or, alternatively, having to choose one river to stand in for all. Can we please have more of this again in cover design?



The interior is equally simple but well thought out. Each chapter start includes a map of the respective river – running to two pages if the river requires it, one page if it’s more compact. The book’s designer was Leslie (Sam) Smart, one of the founding members of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, and whose name I know mainly because of Canadian type designer Rod McDonald’s font Smart Sans, created to commemorate Smart after his death in 1998.

In his introduction MacLennan says: “A knowledge of the Canadian rivers will recover this earlier sense of time in Canada. It will bring the old experience of the people out of the subconscious regions where it lies buried.” And by old experience he means not just pre-air travel but pre-railroad, although I have to say that while I’ve travelled more slowly (by bicycle) cross country, it’s mainly been during long train trips that I’ve felt any real inkling of what the whole project of Canada might mean to anyone at a personal level. Maybe I’m just softheaded about trains.

For each river (Mackenzie, St. Lawrence, Ottawa, Red, Saskatchewan, Fraser and St. John) MacLennan combines his own experiences of it with its history, including some of the earlier explorers to navigate it, the settlers who became dependent on it and what it brought, and the gradually changing role of each one in settlement patterns and economics across the country.

Some of the history was fairly engrained in me, some I was a bit rusty on, but to look at it all through the lens of rivers – the ability to travel them and how speedily and carrying what – is fascinating.

I read this back in July, but writing about it on the edge of fall feels appropriate somehow because for reasons I haven’t quite figured out, apart from trains fall always puts me in a slightly patriotic mood. All in one week I’ve found myself signing out a stack of Glenn Gould cds from the library, roping a bunch of people into going to a Massey lecture and being invited to visit a friend up in Yellowknife. Solomon Gursky lurks on the nightstand. It's getting really disgusting.

Ryga, Vol. 3

I have eight (8!) poems in the latest issue of Ryga. I really respect this journal's editorial mission (which I wrote about in a post last year), so am very pleased to be published here. The issue is on newsstands now, and one of the poems in my set is also available to read online.

Books & Bikes

A little later this month I'll be getting together with a bunch of the cyclists from a cross-Canada trip I was part of ten years ago, and to gear up for our reunion ride I wanted some appropriate reading material. I follow a few cycle touring blogs, some of them quite well written, but I find the focus on day-to-day logistics sometimes overwhelms any sense of the landscapes and communities the writers are riding through. This is partly the nature of blogs, I guess, and I know the updates I wrote for our trip are filled with minutiae that no longer seem at all relevant, if they even were back then. In any case, this time I was looking for something a bit different.

Then I discovered one of Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy's books at the library. South from the Limpopo: Travels through South Africa recounts three solo cycling trips Murphy made: the first in 1993, just prior to the country's first multi-racial election, the second in April and May of 1994 to witness the elections, and the third a few months after Mandela took office. Her books are cleaned-up versions of her journal entries, so there's the immediacy of life on the road, but Murphy's central concern is talking to South Africans about their country's politics and history. A rough night has less to do with a flat tire or food and shelter than with finding people who will speak candidly about their lives and opinions. But by and large she finds them, and has an incredible knack for getting them to open up. More importantly, she has the patience to listen long enough to get past the better-rehearsed versions of their stories, getting closer to the source of some deeply ingrained ideas about racial differences. I've started and deleted a couple of paragraphs about these ideas, but the fact is that for ignorant me, Murphy's book was a bit of a crash course on South African history, so I'd rather let it percolate a while longer and not totally embarrass myself here. Still, I think even readers who do know more of the history than I do/did will find some of their assumptions checked in this book.

What I will say is how much I appreciated Murphy's determination to locate her own prejudices. Although she develops friendships with many black South Africans, and lives for a time in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, she is honest about her involuntary responses in certain situations, and ponders what these reveal about her. There is a moment when she has finished speaking with the driver of a truck and pedalled off, only to realize that in the back of the truck were three black men whose presence she had entirely failed to acknowledge. She forces herself to question whether she would have done the same thing had it been a crew of white men and concludes that it would have been impossible for her not to have noticed them.

Well worth reading. And there are many more. Murphy's first book, Full Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965 and she's written another twenty-odd since then. She's known for being disinterested in publicity, but there's a recent article about her here. She turns eighty this year and is still travelling by bicycle.