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’s appropriate that this final (for the time being) installment of Hell’s Printing House, like the first, should be of a book published not by myself.

I’m uncertain, now, if the editors at Cactus Press solicited a chapbook or merely opened the door to my submitting. At any rate, I found myself sorting through that big pile of unpublished poems for a selection that might, in some manner, cohere. As I’ve been fortunate enough to be both gainfully employed and to be married to a woman born in Germany, I’ve often found myself visiting various locales in North America and Europe, so collating the poems and sequences often written on these jaunts proposed itself.

The chapbook’s title alludes to a poem of Hölderlin’s “Wie wenn am Feiertage…” The book opens with an epigraph from the the Old English Widsith or Traveller’s Song: “Swa scriþende : gesceapum hweorfað / gleomen gumena : geond grunda fela” (Wandering like this, driven by chance, / minstrels travel through many lands). The book’s contents are:

• “SONOT: Lakeside Estate”
• “Made in Germany” un carnet de voyage
• Farnad Songbook
• Toronto Suite
• Qu’Appelle Valley Elegies

Though not even two-dozen pages of very short poems, those poems are often dense with reference and allusion (as if the title and epigraph didn’t already make that clear…). Readers of a certain education or reading, in the opening cantos of Qu’Appelle Valley Elegies might detect nods to Rilke (as remarked, below), Petrarch, Eliot, and Yeats, whose “Wild Swans at Coole” is echoed in the sequence’s second canto, “White Pelicans on Pasqua.” The chapbook poems’ brevity is quite intentionally balanced at times by just such a depth of what all-too-often is clumsily termed “intertextuality.” Nevertheless, more generally, the truncated expression is governed by a strict, metonymic economy.

The collection is book-ended by poems inspired by stays at my best friend’s home on the shores of Pasqua Lake, Saskatchewan. My times there have been so herrlich, that I’ve felt at times like Rilke staying in Duino Castle, hence the title of the book’s closing sequence. The second sequence recounts a trip overseas made in 2012, the year student demonstrations—the Maple Spring—filled Quebec streets. Farnad Songbook is a sequence composed during a summer stay at another friend’s European digs. And Toronto Suite was likewise composed during a long weekend getaway to the cultural capital of Canada (or, at least, its centre of power…).

Many excerpts from As on a Holiday can be read and heard on Poeta Doctus: from “Made in Germany,” “Waiting on a train…” and “http:// arctic-news.blogspot.de…” (both of which you can hear, here), and “London intermezzo;” the opening poem from Farnad Songbook (recorded, here); from Toronto Suite, “In the Royal York’s Library Bar…,” “Toronto Spring 2018 Getaway Takeaways,” and “Literary Life in the Capital” (recorded, here).

To mark the chapbook’s launch, I read its entirety, here.