A few weeks ago, while repairing the south deck, I heard a sudden rumble on the front steps and thought it was the neighbourhood kids coming up to tell me something. In a fit of old man agitation I turned to warn them of the fresh paint, only to find Rob Manery, clad in protective cycling gear, holding before him Issue 5 of SOME, which he edits and publishes.
The issue contains fresh work by Clint Burnham, Jeff Derksen, Larry Timewell, a collaboration between Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Chris Turnbull, and a new "voice", Hamish Ballantyne, who, as new voices SOMEtimes do, kinda steals the show.
Ballantyne's ten-page contribution is drawn from a long poem (book-length, because it's italicized) called Hansom, and is an instance of language-centred writing "set" in a place where we assume language is taken for granted, as informational, a means of communication, and by that I am referring to the exurban rural, a place of grunts and sighs, shorthand backhands, where articles like the only soften directives and formalisms return us to a time when resource extraction was wholly Victorian ("upon"), as in the opening line:
place can over there and I'll drop the tree upon it (6)
Who is Hansom? Well, maybe he's an exurbanite too, yet his range, in the nature of things (as Bernhard was fond of refrain-ing), extends world-wide (via social media):
learn from facebook that guy Hansom
threatened to stab
me with a triangle of porcelain
when shouting with my friends he woke
from a nightmare he is dead
a bbq for him (8)
And yes, lots of bbqs in this poem (also refrain-ing), making it seem more like a camping trip than a work camp, where outdoor cooking is not bbq'ing but just plain cooking, and if you're resourceful enough, if there's no accounting for taste, a bbq can double as a funeral pyre.
No comments:
Post a Comment