11:13 am - Fri, Aug 28, 2015
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A sample of subTerrain’s award-winning art. 

From our beginnings in 1988, subTerrain has always incorporated visual art into our publication, complementing our Strong Words with strong imagery.  

Image credits, in order of appearance:

subTerrain #59: Vancouver 125 Special Poetry Issue. Cover & illustrations by Dave Barnes. Published in the fall of 2011 to celebrate Vancouver’s 125th birthday, featuring 125 poems inspired by the fine city of Vancouver.

subTerrain #35: On Prudery & Perversion. Cover by Vince Klassen; designed by Clint Hutzulak of Rayola Creative Design. Winner, Best Magazine Cover 2003—Literature and Poetry Category—Canadian Magazine Publishers Association.

The Beguiling from subTerrain #70: Outsiders. Cover & illustrations by Lauren Simkin Berke. Accompanying illustration to “The Beguiling,” a short story by award winning author Zsuzsi Gartner

Bingo and Black Ice from subTerrain #69: Meat. Cover & illustrations by Maryanna Hardy. Accompanying illustration to “Bingo and Black Ice,” a creative non-fiction piece by subTerrain’s 2014 Lush Triumphant winner George K. Ilsley

subTerrain #65: 25th Anniversary Special Issue. Cover & illustrations by Derek von Essen of Derek von Essen CreativeTo commemorate a quarter-century of offering Strong Words for a Polite Nation. 

subTerrain #64: Heat. Cover & illustrations by Marlena Zuber. Best Cover finalist at the National Magazine Awards and Western Magazine Awards. Winner of the Western Magazine Awards’ 2014 People’s Choice Competition.

Detachment from subTerrain #61. Cover & illustrations by Carl Wiens. Best Illustration winner at the 2013 Western Magazine Awards. Accompanying illustration to the short story “Detachment” by Lee Kvern, which won in Fiction. Other illustrations from this issue were recognized by American Illustration and American Photography.

subTerrain #27. Cover photo by Vince Klassen; designed by Clint Hutzulak of Rayola Creative Design. Winner of the Graphic Designers of Canada’s Merit Award for Commercial Photography.

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9:34 am - Thu, Aug 20, 2015
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Renee Saklikar of thecanadaproject interviews Shazia Hafiz Ramji, curator of Line Break, the subTerrain blog of art and poetry. 

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9:24 am
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Poets Among Artists: Ray Hsu on “i do not later 5″ by Clint Burnham - Part 1

When I invited Ray Hsu to respond to “i do not later 5″ by Clint Burnham, I knew Ray would come up with a creative and critical “reading” of Clint’s visual text / art / poem. Ray’s concerns with the means and length of the response were clear in our chat: 

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We chatted some more and decided against beginning with interpretation and classification. After a conversation about Fredric Jameson, depth, homogeneity, and surfaces, I noticed that Ray was still drawn to using various apps and/or technologies to “read” Clint’s art. We chatted some more and Ray had the idea of changing the file extension to create another layer, another glitch, another reading…

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I was trying to make Ray’s ideas happen, so I researched apps that would turn images to sound… 

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Ray played with the “readings” to produce one that had the most variation in sound. We joked about making it an eight-minute-long ambient track, and then a symphony, but finally decided to keep the reading to three minutes; the average length of a pop song.

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Time to turn up your speakers: Part 2. 

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9:24 am

Part 2

Poets Among Artists: Ray Hsu on “i do not later 5″ by Clint Burnham

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12:33 pm - Thu, Jul 9, 2015
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Poets Among Artists: “i do not later 5” by Clint Burnham

Poets Among Artists: “i do not later 5” by Clint Burnham

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11:12 am - Wed, Jul 8, 2015
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Poets Among Artists: Jacqueline Valencia on “imperium” by Colin Browne

Visual and concrete poetry emphasizes the power of the word and its placement on a page. Letters and words hold a limitless amount of power in a reader’s mind, but it is in the way they are written and how they digested that a poem can play and posit great meaning.

Take the title of this poem, “ímperíum.” The reader will think of the word “imperial,” therefore regarding the poem’s subject as one of authority or rule. The word also has two curious accents. These “í’s” are found in many dialects of both conquerors and the conquered in languages. The appropriation and absorption of letters from one culture to another, in this case English being the conqueror, takes out the accent, but for statement here, the poet puts it back in. We are reading from the perspective of those taken over by ímperíum. The poet posits the vowel “í” and dots the letter the way he sees fit, maybe as a form of reclaiming its origins.

Consider the overall shape of the poem. Is it a hat, a literal crown, or is it reaching out to the reader? As an asterisk it is an emphasized point in an argument. If the poem is seen as a bench, it offers a place for the reader to pause and listen to the poem’s lesson. If the reader sees the poem as a person spreading their arms out wide, the poem is taking up as much space as it can. It commands attention in an odd three-dimensional form that goes in various directions on the page.

Within the lines of the poem, the reader will be directed to its centre where “crown” resides. “Crown” is the dominion and holds the reader’s gaze, trumpeting its own presence. Regality is given or taken over. There is nothing beyond “crown,” but what it commands and what it assumes by its existence.

“Stolon” is the key here. It can be mistaken for “stolen,” meaning the crown or the space it inhabits has been taken without permission.  However, “stolon” is the word for the shoot that comes out of a creeping plant, like a strawberry that spreads out to form an independent plant of its own. It is a plant’s colonizing appendage. Since stolon grow from just underneath the soil’s surface, they are unexpected and unpredictable in action. They are thieves. The active stems burst out wherever it is most convenient for the plant to thrive and take over.

The poem is a sequence of word stems that leapfrog upon one another. Browne has placed “crown” in the middle column where it begins at the top and ends at the bottom. All the other sides are tipped with “stolon,” allowing the poem to continue extending itself beyond its written limitations.

Botany can be the poet’s allegorical feast where bestiaries originate. Plants are highly organized beings, like a marching imperial army. The way plants breathe and the way they feed might seem alien to some. Yet their survival tactics are purely instinctual and natural. The act of claiming foreign space as its own is not new to the human mind. When a dominion takes land, it eradicates what’s already there.

In this poem, Browne exhibits the immense tension of war in his lines and gives centre stage to displaying the conqueror. The plant world is beautiful, the crown may be bright, but it will still take, steal, and suffocate. Be warned, there is cruelty rule and in all of nature.

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1:49 pm - Tue, Jul 7, 2015

How a Poem Reads: Heidi Greco on “Candy” by Russell Thornton

It’s difficult to write about a poem in isolation, especially one from a collection as terrific as Russell Thornton’s The Hundred Lives. I’m not the only one to think highly of this book; it was a finalist for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize.

Thornton’s work is disciplined, often conforming to traditional structures, even if doing so in inventive ways. For example, his poem “Cells” is built upon stanzas that grow – not unlike actual cells – from a five-line stanza to one of six lines, the next of seven, followed by an eight-line stanza, before closing with an echo of the first, with five lines.

Poems in the section “Lazarus’ Songs to Mary Magdalene” (based on the Bible’s Song of Songs) are sonnets, though with their own structure: two stanzas of four lines each (reflecting, I suppose, the octet) followed by two stanzas of three lines each (the sestet).

And this brings me to the poem I want to discuss, “Candy”.

Constructed of three parts, it is a poem of supreme sadness, yet also one of ultimate joy. As with the Lazarus poems, it is built of disguised sonnets, each revealing a subtle shift at the end of the eighth line. It is almost as if Thornton has devised a new mode of expressing the sonnet, as the sections can also be read as breaking slightly at the end of each quatrain, with the final couplet providing another shift in the way of closure.  

Consider the poem.

The first time I read it, my knees began to shake involuntarily. I remembered another time I’d experienced such a reaction – watching a film from long ago, The Illustrated Man, with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. They too had played out a story in which parents must make the most difficult decision: to spare their offspring from a more hideous death by giving them poison.

The “candy” in the first part, the suicide pill, is a bitter one, taken (and given) as a necessity in a time of terrored threats. Yet by the end of the poem, the “candy” has been transformed into the mystical sweetness of the expression of their love: “…they were the candy / and the way they had known the touch, the candy.”

This, as is true of so many of Thornton’s poems, is one that is built – mainly of simple words (though the occasional deliciously complex word, viridescent, is inserted, and says so much in only a few syllables). Words that might be considered ordinary are paired and placed strategically to construct the solid foundation of love the two characters in the poem hold for one another: “and the day they lay there and their last day / were one and were what they knew now of days”.

But this is not the only way he employs repetition of words and sounds to positive effect.

He extends that long-A sound, effectively echoing it throughout the piece. Singling out such words from even just the first section produces almost a found poem in itself: they, gave, saying, they, interlaced, tasted, taste, weighted, capability, they, they, aimed.

This awareness of sound and internal rhyme carries the reader into zones that would be unexplored if the ‘story’ conveyed in the poem were revealed in prose, for it is cadence and sound that transports us to that plane where poetry exists.

Consider the soothing long-O sounds: “knowing it was time” uttering “over and over, stroking his hair” as the mother lulls the child to eternal sleep. Or the long-I sounds in these lines: “of the sky, the sky a door open wide / a white cloud floating by”. Or the lushness of these sounds: “where they turned together and were ushered / into the original flesh of pure faith.” He doesn’t offer the prosaic original sin here, rather, the purity of luscious flesh.  

At the end of the first section, the poet grants the reader some solace from the vision of sadness, allowing some relief at the fact that at least there really were “men with guns” – some reason for the couple’s decision. At the end of the second section, he leaves us contemplating what it might be that exists “beyond division of future and past” and then provides an answer in the rapturous third stanza with its description of the lovers being “taken up in wild waiting / a desiring outside all categories”.

What Thornton has created here – purportedly from a family story about distant relatives finding their own way of escaping the Holocaust – stands, to my mind, as much more than a story that’s worthy of remembrance. In the telling, he summons a modern day version of those long-ago psalms.

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12:24 pm - Fri, Jul 3, 2015
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REVIEW: Trevor Carolan reviews Allen Ginsberg’s photographs at Presentation House Gallery

“We Are Continually Exposed to the Flashbulb of Death”: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (1953-1996). Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver.

by Trevor Carolan

In Chinese, there is a Tang Dynasty maxim: “Every poet a painter, every painter a poet.” We have comparatively few such examples in Western culture—William Blake springs immediately to mind, but it thins after that. With this outstanding exhibition, perhaps it is no surprise that Allen Ginsberg, certainly America’s best-known, if not best-loved poet of the 20th century (Carl Sandburg set a high bar)—often declared that he received his poetic spiritual transmission in a vision from Blake.

For more than forty years, the poet packed a small Kodak Retina camera practically everywhere. Ginsberg never pretended to be a photographic artist, although with friendships that included Richard Avedon and filmmaker Robert Frank (images of both in the show), he had opportunities to sharpen his skills. Did he take photography seriously? You bet. Where he differs from another shutterbug stenographer-of-the-moment like Andy Warhol is in the fundamental grounding of his creative sensibility. Ginsberg termed the aesthetics of his decades-long fascination for photo-documenting meetings and public occasions with friends and colleagues a “snapshot poetics” and published a collection of this same title (Chronicle, San Francisco, 1993) in which a number of the photographs in this show appear. Ginsberg spoke of his interest in taking pictures as “sacramental documentation,” and came to recognize that the images he created were “valuable and historically interesting—maybe even art.”

Familiar Beat faces run right through the exhibition. There is an abundance of images of novelist William Burroughs, from the earliest days of his romantic friendship with Ginsberg, through periods of The Yage Letters, his time on the lam in Tangier, and later at Naropa University where he often taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg photographed Burroughs for almost 40 years.

The exhibition also features images of other friends—poet John Giorno, Herbert Huncke looking strung out and cadaverous; many of filmmaker Robert Frank, ethnographer and music archivist Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, Brit poet Basil Bunting (1973), punk pioneers Jello Biafra and Kathy Acker, Yevgeny Yevtushenko at his dacha outside Moscow (1965), Robert Creeley, controversial psychologist R.D. Laing, on and on.

Less well known are the family photographs of Ginsberg’s Russian grandmother and schoolteacher, fellow poet, and dad, Louis, ill with cancer in ’76. Homoerotic shots of youthful boyfriend and subsequently life partner Peter Orlovsky appear from across the years—on the road in Mexico with his brother, Lafcadio; in North Africa, India, with his own ill-starred family, and aging together with Allen in various U.S. locations

Ginsberg’s “sacramental friendship” with Jack Kerouac is celebrated with some vintage images we’ve come to expect. There’s an iconic photo of Kerouac with railroad brakeman’s rule book, probably taken in 1953, at time of Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans with its verboten theme of interracial love. Ginsberg captures Kerouac looking exactly like the kind of fella who could take the heat for falling in love with Mardou Fox, his Afro-American lover of that time. and a rarely-seen image of her appears too. Kerouac, like his mythic On The Road buddy Neil Cassady turns up a lot. There’s more than a little of both men in James Dean and Hollywood’s commercial hustle in carving off a slice of renegade Beat independence for popular cinematic consumption becomes clear through Ginsberg’s portraits.

Whether it’s New York or San Francisco, red brick walls and back-alleys are leitmotif in Ginsberg’s world and work. Architecture, mood and light are constants, and likely unintended elements in the photographs. Curiously, one of the most powerful additions to the work is Ginsberg’s own unmistakable handwriting in the captions beneath each black and white image.  The history and information the captions impart provides superb context for appreciating each photograph, and prompt the viewer’s own free associations with names and places, restaurants and locations encountered in Ginsberg’s poetry.  An example is “View From My Kitchen Window”. Taken in August, 1984 from his beat, rent-controlled Stuyvesant Town apartment in lower Manhattan, it’s a shot of grimy brick tenements, weathered fire-escapes and an enclosed courtyard of wet ailanthus trees. This is where the great poet lives? Then the caption-note: “I had tea every morning almost a decade looking out my kitchen window before I realized it was my world view.”

That’s the poet at work.

In San Francisco, where the Beat Generation phenomenon really kicked into overdrive when Ginsberg and his Big Apple confrères encountered the S.F. Bay Area Renaissance poets, Ginsberg’s camera-eye kicks into overdrive. His passion for Denver stud Neil Cassady is reflected in a series of blue jeans and T-shirt portrayals: Cassady browsing for used cars, handsome Neil with wife Carolyn who would soon welcome Neil’s friend Kerouac into a historic ménage à trios, Neil with LSD-promoter Timothy “Easy Travel to Other Planets O’Leary” during the Merry Pranksters’ famous Electric Kool-Aid tour. More importantly, there’s the simple Montgomery Street apartment where Ginsberg wrote Howl after his attempt to live the straight life for a while—working as a copywriter and dating girls. This, the photographs tell us, is where the work gets done, the history made. In the everyday moments—in places that look a lot like our own ordinary life.

Other Beat pantheon heroes turn up too. Gregory Corso, with his appetite for the dark side is caught in superb side-profile at the Beat Hotel on Rue Git-le-Coeur in Left Bank Paris, 1957. It’s one of the best images in the show. This was when Corso wrote his incendiary poetry in Gasoline, while Ginsberg worked on Kaddish down the hall and Kerouac banged away at Satori In Paris, all in the same cheap digs that today is a tony boutique hotel off the Rue St. Andre-des-Arts. What a remarkably productive period for modern literature in lean times! Corso also figures in one of the many shots of Ginsberg naked, the pair of them giggling, veering their willies with their hands, and we see how John and Yoko might well have borrowed from such work during their “Two Virgins” episode. Lennon never shied from paying homage to the Beats and followed the path Ginsberg had led out to India five years before; but then look at the name he gave his band—The Beatles, right?

Ginsberg talks a little about that India journey in this exhibition and we can see why. It’s 1962; India is quieter, less frantic than today. Ginsberg, who’d hit big with his long poem, Howl, had done the unthinkable thing in U.S. consumer culture: he’d dropped out at the height of his celebrity (notoriety?). Having seen how fame was eating up his closest friend Kerouac, he hit the road with Orlovsky, winding up for a long year in India. It was a transformational experience (see Indian Journals, City Lights Books). Joined by fellow poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger (both in show) he travelled widely, lived India deeply and spent months in Benares meditating on the burning funeral ghats along the Ganges. He learned to sing, to chant like the Bengali street poet Bauls, he incorporated mantras in his work. He begin playing the harmonium. He adopted the loose Indian cotton clothes, bells, beads and long hair/beard that identified him throughout his years of public opposition to the Vietnam war. India transformed Ginsberg profoundly; from poet with Old Testament prophetic strains he became bard, chronicler and agent provocateur for a global generation. Returning to the world via Japan and Vancouver’s 1963 Poetry Conference at UBC (some essential photographs are here) he’d emerge as the poet that spooked both the Pentagon and the Kremlin.

From the Hindu and Buddhist forms of meditative practice he encountered in India, Ginsberg evolved his poetic concept of “Aesthetic Mindfulness”—what he frequently explained as “Writing our own mind. Writing down what we see when we see it, what we feel when we feel it.” Partly a return to the Romantic roots of Wordsworth and Blake, it was also a concrete, practical way of building spontaneously on his long-time friend and ally Gary Snyder’s observation that “poetry suddenly seemed useful in 1955 San Francisco.” No longer would it be the dreamy stuff of Sunday afternoon campus tea parties. Poetry and poets had a job to do. From this would come Ginsberg’s epic Howl and all that would follow it—September On Jessore Road, Plutonian Ode, “I Beg You Come Back And Be Cheerful” and the rest. This tremendous photographic exhibition demonstrates Ginsberg’s continual act of mindfulness as poet, friend and political and social activist—the gift of a compassionate augury as antidote to the crisis of meaning and purpose in our time.


Trevor Carolan is the author of Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock (Banff Centre Press, 2001) recounting his studies with the poet at Cortes Island.

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