Poeta Doctus

Aside from the pages of little magazines and those of certain, indulgent anthologies, by poems really first made their way in the world in the form of chapbooks. I hadn’t yet published a full-length trade edition, when I went on a “European tour” in 1996, reading in Munich (twice), Heidelberg, and Amsterdam, two self-published chapbooks, Gloze (1995) and On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery (1995), my calling cards.

Joachim Utz, the sponsor of my reading at Heidelberg University’s Anglistiches Seminar, observed that my chapbooks reminded him of William Blake’s. This new category of post takes its inspiration from his remark. “Hell’s Printing House” will showcase my chapbooks, describing them, detailing their contents, linking poems that have already been published at Poeta Doctus, and presenting a new recording of one of their poems.

It is hoped these posts fill the lacunae between full-length collections, assuring those (apparently) few (and valued) readers who follow my production with interest that I am hard at work, going my own direction, at my own pace, trusting those intrigued might be charmed enough to tarry along….

It was July 1991 I sat down one morning in a more relaxed compositional mood and wrote the following poem.

It was only after I had written these lines that I remarked there were fourteen. This unconscious compositional chance was fortuitious, for, as I’ve previously remarked, the sonnet sequence was all the rage in Canadian anglophone poetry circles at the time. Recently, I’d read, too, Charles Bernstein on Ted Berrigan’s sonnets along with the sonnets themselves, and I remembered having read much else about the history of the form, all of which was brought into focus by William Carlos Williams’: “all sonnets say the same thing.” What this vortex suggested to me was a nonintentional, chance-governed satirical practice: I wouldn’t set out to write “sonnets” or poems of fourteen lines (which many of the “sonnets” written at that time amounted to) but, rather, when I by chance wrote a poem of fourteen lines, I’d dub it a “sonot,” “soughknot,” or “soughnought” (‘sough’: the high or low long sound that something such as the wind or sea makes as it moves”)…

Over time, these sonots accrued. Some appear in the chapbooks to date, two are collected in Grand Gnostic Central (DC Books, 1998), and two dozen (as soughknots) in Ladonian Magnitudes (DC Books, 2006). I don’t know how many more I have written since. In the publishing lull following Ladonian Magnitudes, that fashion for sonnet sequences unabated, I was moved to gather twenty-five soughnoughts in a chapbook under the punny title A Crow’n’ o’ Sough Noughts. The collection is prefaced by a short epigraph: “A place to stand / A corner to loiter // To listen to the small / Sounds around.” Those not unacquainted with the etymologies of ‘sonnet’ will understand. On a visit to Ottawa at the time, I gifted a copy of the chapbook to one of Canada’s most prolific poet/reviewers, on whom, sadly, the joke—of both the epigraph and the collection as a whole—was lost, a too common reception…

Below, the table of contents. An asterisk marks those soughnoughts collected in Grand Gnostic Central, two, those in Ladonian Magnitudes. Those already shared here at Poeta Doctus are, of course, linked.

• “A piss…”**
• “Church bells ring loud…”**
• “Clear nights I look up…”**
• “Come out of the cave…”**
• “Comn home th’other afternoon…”**
• “As I delighted with the enjoyments of torment…”
• “Every afternoon I lie on the couch…”
• “Grave as Spring is green…”**
• “I HATE POETRY”**
• “I know the ‘aurora borealis’…”*
• “20:02 20.02.2002” (“Inside / dark out…’)**
• “I watched…”**
• “Master of many styles…”**
• “My brother the dr called today…”**
• “Gloze”*
• “20:02 20.02.2002″ (Not a right word…”)**
• “Lizard Song”**
• “Colleague Didactics”**
• “if you wanted to put yrself thru phd torture – mcgill or suny?”**
• “The great works…”*
• “The Kings and Queen of Qawwali chants”**
• “An Apology to François Hubert”**
• “When every hand is styled”**
• “With…”
• “‘you can pick up yr share…'”**

There are a number of these soughnoughts I’m moved to share: “Master of many styles…,” a favourite of Rui Chafes, an eminent sculptor from Portugal I met at the Villa Waldberta in Summer 1997, or “if you wanted to put yrself thru phd torture – mcgill or suny?” my friend the Munich-based novelist and publisher Georg Oswald lauded for its modernity, but one, published in Grand Gnostic Central, has proven to be “a fan favourite,” “I know the aurora borealis…,” which you can read, and hear, below:

Next month: Tanchaz!