News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke

This month reviews of and the Labour of Literary Celebrity , by Lorraine York; Dark Water Songs , by Mary Loy Souter-Hynes, Archive of the Undressed , by Jeannette Lynes, Einstein's Cat by Zoe Landale, and The Boreal Dragon: Encounters with a Northern Land , by Kate Bitney; Previews of Escape Velocity , by Carmelita McGrath and This House is Still Standing , by Adrienne Barrett. The Calgary Women's Centre is moving at the end of September and needs volunteers! . There is a widespread belief that women have achieved equality. However statistics show that there are still many equality gaps that prevent Canadian women from fully participating and excelling in society.

The impacts of poverty on women are significant. Women experience poverty at a greater rate than men. In Alberta, women continue to lag behind men economically, earning only 68% of what men earn for full-time, full-year jobs. Minimum wage earners are far more likely to be women, many of whom are raising children alone. Women are often further marginalized by age, ethnicity, ability or immigration status.

Many injustices are still occurring today, here in Calgary and around the globe. Last year, a youth in our city was the target of a hate crime because of her sexual orientation. Just recently, Pride flags were stolen and burned at a Pride celebration in Fort MacLeod, Alberta. Around the world, policies and practices stemming from prejudices against LGBTQ individuals are the cause of violent trauma, incarceration, exile and death. The current situation in Russia is a prime example of these injustices

http://www.womenscentrecalgary.org/who-we-are/why-a-womens-centre/

The Calgary Women's Centre Movie Night featured "Gen Silent, a critically acclaimed film addressing the challenges faced by aging LGB women and men. Admission was free to anyone who identifies as a woman.

http://blueskiespoetry.ca/react-act-community-together/

Subject: Flood poems for The Calgary Project

Hi Anne, Nice to see you the other day, and hear your presentation. I'm intrigued by your flood poetry work, and wondered if you'd be interesting in submitting anything to our anthology project? It's called "The Calgary Project - A City Map in Verse and Visual". It will be co-published with Frontenac House, and co-edited with Calgary Poet Laureate Kris Demeanor. We've had an amazing response to this project so far. You can read the call for submissions here: http://blueskiespoetry.ca/react-act-community-together/ You can also peruse the Blue Skies site to read the wonderful work that has been submitted. Cheers, Dymphny

Editors: blueskiespoetry.ca forum Dymphny Dronyk

Editors: Frontenac House/House of Blue Skies print anthology Kris Demeanor, Dymphny Dronyk

Previous House of Blue Skies anthologies, Writing the Land (2007) and Home & Away (2009) were both bestsellers. Works from these anthologies were also featured on blueskiespoetry.ca prior to the launch of each print anthology. blueskiespoetry.ca is a forum for emerging and established poets to find a wider audience for their work, with a particular emphasis on writing by Canadians.

Review of Dark Waters, by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2013) 92 pp. paper

The scansion of some of these poems resembles that of George Herbert, a seventeenth- century Christian poet. By this comparison, I do not necessarily mean the obviously Biblical sources from the New Testament and Catholic religious practices, such as the rosary. Whether or not directly influenced, she employs similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in the best of their secular poetry and in religious poetry. She appears to adopt a common poetic style, use of figurative language, and manner of organizing the meditative process or poetic argument.

The "Notes from the Citadel" was written on the occasion of the 2008 annual general meeting of the League of Canadian Poets, in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

She appears to identify as a Caribbean/Canadian woman, with translations from the Spanish, and mellifluous allusions, for example, creole as a person born in the colonies, a committed settler, evolved from a distinct culture in the former plantation societies. Elsewhere, she accounts for her creativity, in her own notes, as “precisely from the space between, that marvellous open space represented by the hyphen”, which she credits to another.

Ephrasis is evident throughout the collection, beginning with Pinturas ciegas , or “blind” paintings. In “Antiphonal Openings”, she remarks,

You’ve been there before — this antiphonal space where poetry is —

She dedicated “In Your Ain Town” to William Soutar, whose Scots' poems she discovered when she was searching the web for genealogical information on her Scottish great-grandfather, Simon. She contemplates “the keeper or lighthouses” who worked “By Force of Habit” and also responds to a rail journey “From Perth to Edinburgh”. She was a fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland, in September 2009, when she worked on this collection.

Part I “In the Manner of Tides” conveys metaphorical extensions of light and river or sea imagery, from the trope “Dark Water Songs”. The epigraph is from Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997). She is preoccupied by a self- acknowledged “Geography of Voices”, engaging the rhythm of reefs, tides, island pools. A key poem contains “Dispatches From the River”, an elongated “winding path”, encircling coded signifiers, “From tree to/tree to tree.”

In Part II “Close to Home” she combines family history, with dance, storm, story, moving ultimately “from Dark / To Dove”.

She reminds us, with “Island Songs: A Suite”, “beneath all this, / “a deeper tide —“, for which:

The poem’s path breaking line — its canvas

muted blue.

(In “A Way/Around Stones”)

Some of her work appeared in a chapbook anthology, The Long Dash (Toronto: Sixth Floor Press, 2005) and this fact may account for her inveterate use of it, or else, perhaps, simply “serendipities”. Other poems are in the anthology Resonance: Poetry and Art (Toronto: Sixth Floor Press, 2008).

In Part III, “Slippery”, she enshrines observations of natural occurrences which portend incipient significance, for forest, flower, bird, all infused with or “ full of grace ” by an unseen Divine presence. You shall know Him/Her by His/Her works. She assumes a “Prussian blue”, “their crimson certainty”, “memories” are green, “quality” is golden; “black earth sprouting green”, “maple red”; “October’s golden”, and “brick-red”.

In Part IV “Other Gravities”, she admits,

Don’t look now, but I can be undone/by words —

......

These in-between spaces... of language-to-light-on

(“Senza Titolo”)

The poet is rendering drowning by shafts of light and dark, imbued with unidentified and unidentifiable energy, in “The poem, where drowning is easy.” (“On Renderings”) She embraces labyrinthine paths, promises, panicles, petals, and pilgrims; she ponders, pans, probes “their many-/ storied layers.” (“Tread Softly”)

This is an accomplished, polished collection by a mature poet- educator and will be a suitable addition to her previous titles, Travelling Light (2006) and The Fires of Namin g (2001) both published by Seraphim Editions.

Jeanette Lynes is the author of one novel and five collections of poetry. Her novel, The Factory Voice (Coteau, 2009), was longlisted for The Scotiabank Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and has won The Bliss Carman Award.

She has been Writer in Residence at Saskatoon Public Library, University of Manitoba, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, among other places. Archive of the Undressed is Jeanette's sixth collection of poetry. She has taught writing at the Banff Centre and The Sage Hill Writing Experience. She is Coordinator of the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan's Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity and a member of the Department of English.

Review of Archive of the Undressed: Poems, by Jeanette Lynes (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 2012) 78 pp. paper $17.

This collection of new poems were inspired by popular culture, as Lynes explores, in an introduction, “Begin the Slow Peel of Elbow Gloves”; based on conspicuous consumption of cartoons, even the print advertising, in vintage Playboy magazines. What she was seeking is “an alternative world of undress”, not the prefabricated of “All strip, no tease.” For direct rather than vicarious experience, she enrolled in a neo-burlesque class, for exposure, of the Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” type.

I admit to a fetishist attraction to Marilyn Munroe, in some or all of her manifestations. Making love to the camera, on film or in still photographs, she posed for calendar “shots”. I recall, perhaps, my first encounter was at a local gas station. The school bus was late and a few of us used that as a pretext to wait inside and warm-up. Red just happens to be my favourite colour. Her bowed lips, the cherry-nipples, the blood-red drapes, she was on display, utterly composed.

For Lynes, “The Queen’s Bush” is a popular name for a pioneer era of Ontario, applicable to the country and terrain north of Guelph, wink, wink . One of four Playmates, “Brit” is naturally nude, “before she hits the library in her plaid suspenders.” An ageing “Bettie” is advised, “The centre cannot fold” (hold ). The Original wore a boa. Costumes devolve to flesh. Hugh was once a boy, with ambition, The Wife of Bath, one of many pilgrims, an ekphrastic on the horror of Dorothy Stratten’s brutal murder. In sum, “There’s always a body”; “There’s Always a Mansion”. Margaret Trudeau once was a “botanical bride with a brain.” There is a visual poem, “YOU READ IT FOR THE ARTICLES”.

The settings range from Nebraska, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, London, England, with comparisons of contexts for America (Canada and the U.S.). The author acknowledges numerous Playboy magazines and several books on the ageing Lothario Hugh Hefner, which she uses to great effect, with a tour de force on Emily Dickinson and a “centrefold” on one of Manet’s famous paintings, “Luncheon on the Grass.” She portrays Hefner through cataloguing his various women and concludes with a riff on “Show me the money”, as “Show him the bunny.” His “Playmates” perform in sync a bump-and- grind, sans ostrich fan, until:

The poet, bare-armed, winks at the reader decked out, as always, in illusion fabric.

This is Lynes’ sixth collection of poetry, after completing a novel, The Factory Voice (2009). She manages the Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

Zoë Landale's writing has appeared in over thirty anthologies and her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry has won signficant awards, including first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition. Einstein’s Cat is her seventh book. She also edited, with Luanne Armstrong, Slice Me Some Truth: An anthology of Canadian creative nonfiction , which was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2011. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines including The New Quarterly , CV2 , The Antigonish Review , The Malahat Review , Chatelaine , and Canadian Living . She is a member of the Writer's Union of Canada and the Federation of BC Writers. Landale lives in British Columbia where she is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Review of Einstein’s Cat: Poems, by Zoe Landale (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 2012) 88 pp. paper $17.

In some of these lyric poems, the poet reorders experience, with a right-hand justified stream of conscious images and a left-hand justified narrative. These synoptic interjections are evidence of synapses in the brain, a network of threads, beads, and deeply buried emotion. The visual landscape shifts into audio, with the calliope going full-blast. The dialogue is reduced to monologue. The dance is indistinguishable from the dancer, in “a range of motion”, nature knows so much “about movement” and, by extension, “alignment” A meditation or contemplation on “home” is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s poem “The Hired Man” (paraphrased here, as home is where, when you need to go there, they have to take you in.”) Similarly, “cedar” is defined by the force of “gravity”.

Einstein’s "Theory of Relativity” revolutionized our perceptions of the universe and our own relation to the every expanding universe in which we find ourselves. The speed of light becomes a signifier, as “stories of light” (“properties of light”). The germ of the title poem was hearing the scientist talk on radio, about the wire telegraph, and how it operates, “except the “only difference is that there is no cat.” A woman, post-coitus, is left wondering about allowing “what [an] enormous ghost cat”.

The kingdom of the universe is the subconscious, in which we dream and are child-like. The night sky is peopled by constellations and animal figures. A movie is interpreted differently by a man than a woman. There are almost monthly appearances of particular ghosts. The spirit of a dog and the angel, marital lovemaking is flawed, because of a lack of trust, until such time as he abandons her.

she felt like a blank sheet of paper when the pen about to write on it is laid down again by someone: all white

(“When He Left, The Air Smelled Like Cold Water and Stone”)

For Landale,

You watch your poems startle like starlings in a field in autumn. They cry, rush

(“Working Until You’re the Thinness of An Ironed Shirt”)

The poet adopts cinematic components of hero, heroine in peril, and villain, which she plays out as if in a pantomime, with shadows projected onto a screen. The plot, with a second act, preceding the climax, can be “fast-forward[ed], as are all our memories.

This is Landale’s seventh book. She is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Katherine Bitney is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry: While You Were Out , Heart and Stone and Singing Bone . Her fourth collection, Firewalk , was published by Turnstone Press in fall 2012. She has worked as editor, mentor, creative writing instructor, arts juror and literary creative director for over thirty years in Manitoba. Most recently she developed the text for Cantus Borealis , a choral piece on the Boreal with composer Sid Robinovitch (premiered April 2011). Katherine Bitney holds a Master’s degree in Religion . Review of The Boreal Dragon: Encounters With A Northern Land by Kate Bitney (Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn, 2013) 168 pp. paper $19.

The ethics of Eco feminism are transformational, a series of epiphanies, along the familiar route to Damascus. What interests Bitney is what she terms “a restor(y)ing”, a healing story, in the shape of a torus , as narrative and restorational model. Her postscript on “Survival” is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood Survival, a thought-provoking textbook on the major theme of Canadian Literature.

The Poem as Geography: “Where is Here? And Are We There Yet?” the title of my paper for a multi-disciplinary conference When Worlds Collide with fellow panelists Cecelia Frey, Vivian Hansen, Michelene Maylor, and Catherine “Cassie” Welburn for whom I intended to read from my “Flooding” Poems, "Where Twin Rivers Meet". Dymphney’s project The Calgary Project is an ambitious undertaking.

The title urban/rural: women, writing & place (Living Archives Series 1995 ) is an obvious reference point for the Poem as Geode, Writing the Land, poetry and place, whether urban, suburban, or rural, for this topic permeates Literature. And it is difficult to imagine William Wordsworth’s work without his encounter with “a host of golden daffodils” and without his sister Dorothy's recollections.

Margaret Atwood wrote about “What, why, and where is Here?” in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). Some of her topics are apt chapter titles: “Survival”, “Nature the Monster”, “Animal Victims”, “First People”, “Ancestral Totems”, “Family Portrait”, “Failed Sacrifices”, “The Paralyzed Artist”, and “Ice Women versus Earth Mother.”

Northrop Frye in The Bush Garden, from his selected essays on Canadian Literature, wrote: It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed by the famous problem of identity...It is less perplexed by the question, “Who am I?” than by some such riddle as “Where is here?”

In Atwood’s Introduction to Survival, she writes , in part:

But in Canada, as Frye suggests, the answer to the question “Who am I” is at least partly the same as the answer to another question, “Where is here?” In an unknown territory, where is this place in relation to other places?” How do I find my way around it? and he wonders how he got here, to begin with, tracing his steps. What here has to offer–whether he survives or not.”

Atwood pursues this theme at length by analogy, the character Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a young Man , looks at the flyleaf of his geography book and finds a list he has written there.

She writes : What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind . Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map, desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge, we will not survive.

Bitney’s recent book deserves a place in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism and The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: from Antiquity to the Present. Natural Supernaturalism involves the spiritual autobiography, in historical and philosophical as well as literary forms.

The present compilation is ordered chronically by season and month, with a cycle from spring to second spring. “The Green Dragon: Writing the Boreal (Section One) deals with the issue, “Does Nature Have Rights? Ethical Implications in Ecology.” Section Two considers “Eating Other Bodies: Some Ethical Considerations.” Section Three describes “Retelling the Story of Nature: How to Restore an Ethos.” In “Winter”, there are “The Water Project” and some “Questions Toward an Ethics of Violence”. The collection concludes with “Forest Diary, Falcon Lake, Manitoba.”

The monthly entries or acutely sensitive observations scan like prose poetry, using poetic devices, such as figurative language, auditory, visual, and other sensory imagery. The emphasis is on natural world observations and contemplations, inspired by events she has known or witnessed. Drawing on private diary or journals, a record of thematically related events, the memoir emerges, as in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu . The Eco awareness becomes transmuted as profound spiritual autobiography, an otherwise secular account, centred on recovery and conversion to the natural world. Kate Bitney is the author of While You Were Out , Heart and Stone , Singing Bone , and Firewalk (Turnstone Press, 2012).

Alternate versions of some of these essays appeared as “Kate’s Boreal Blog”; as “Notes from the Boreal Forest”, in Prairie Fire , in The Journal of Faith and Science Exchange , and with the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion Congress at the University of Manitoba in June 2004.

She developed the text for Cantus Borealis , a choral piece with Sid Robinovitch (April 2011). “ It was a beginning, an opening of the voice of the forest to the ears of the cit y.” (p. 107) She is interested in the narrative as a telling, a story, as restoration, a relating of continuous events whose themes seek to set right, revive, bring back to right and health and vigour something lost, stolen or taken away. (p. 113)

Review of Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity, by Lorraine York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) 224 pp. Indexed paper $29.95.

This is a companion volume to Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Lorraine York is the Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture and Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Herein we discover how the advent of second wave feminism coincided with the rise of Atwood's international celebrity, from penurious graduate student to one might say lionized eminence grise . Early on, this visual spectacle and cloaked invisibility was incorporated as "O.W. Toad", in 1976, or Atwood Inc., an anagram of her own name. Atwood's cultural currency was not built haphazardly and is not maintained without due care. The Atwood-fueled industry consists of academia, translators, publishers, publicist, agents, filmmakers, and many others. In sum, a personal assistant helps with research, correspondence, banking and bookkeeping.

According to York, publicists, assistants, and editors who work on behalf of publishers and authors are integral components of the business world. Office staff (industry relations) are all cultural workers experiencing an alienation between labour and product. Using this Marxist analysis of capitalism and adapted from cinema or reality television programs, their counterparts are actors, editors, sound technicians, set designers, script supervisors, prop masers, and carpenters.

York wonders about the day-to-day business of being Margaret Atwood. She deals with the collective of editors and publishers who have formed a long and loyal working relationship with Atwood over the years. Ms. Atwood has her agents, her book tours, awards, archives, new media, digital publishing, email, Facebook, texting, twitter, television, and visual art.

Some of Atwood's publishers are Anansi Press, Bloomsbury, Coach House Press, Conradi/Arnulf, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Jonathan Cape, Knopf, McClelland and Stewart, Nan A. Talese, Oxford University Press, Random House, Simon and Shuster, and Virago. In the "court" of Awood are the favourites: assistant Sarah Cooper, agent Phoebe Larmore, Vivienne Shuster (Atwood’s British agent); Ellen Seligman (Canadian editor), Nan A. Talese (American editor); Marly Rusoff; and German publisher, Arnulf Conradi.

There are 40 volumes of "Atwoodiana", among them studies, anthologies, and journals; 107 website downloads, due to the author's celebrity status, with an ongoing archival project revisited annually, by the Margaret Atwood Society, in part about her various publications, e.g. her books, from , The Animals in That Country , , Bluebeard’s Egg, Bodily Harms , Cat’s Eye , The Circle Game , Dancing Girls and Other Stories , Days of the Rebels , , , and Simple Murders , The Handmaid’s Tale , The Journals of Susanna Moodie , , , , Morning in the Burned House , Moving Targets, , Negotiating with the Dead , , Payback , , Second Words , Snake Island, , , True Stories , , , and .

York is interested in the author's rise of obscurity from her Ph.D. Studies, in Acta Victoriana , situated in that distant era when there were no fax machines, or email, somehow Atwood managed her own correspondence. Later, there was Atwood's periodic intervention, when necessary, in such matters as publicity and the effective marketing of her book. The author as ultimate agent, for whom writing is the livelihood, and the abiding concern, gives way to that coterie of editors (developmental, copy, etc.) who compose her editorial team. All three of her key editors are women whose core duties are distinguished from those of male editors, such as Robert Weaver and William Toye. The advent of pregnancies, childbirth, and post-partum depression affect her agents as much as they once did the author.

York plumbed the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Room, read interviews with agents, focused on Atwood's biographers Rosemary Sullivan and Nathalie Cooke, and worked collaboratively with Atwood herself in preparing an apparently authorized account. She is interested in both private and public performances of authorship, art, and commerce. Successful editing is the teaching of the writer to self-edit, that is to internalize his or her editor.

In this account of “Atwood 4 Mayor”, the scholarly treatment of cultural workers and sex trader workers concludes with a postscript which comes full circle, from dismissal by Toronto politicos and doomed to invisibility.

What do we mean by civic realm, An Apology for Poesie (1595) by Sir Philip Sydney, or Sir Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in A Defense of Poetry (1840), a poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world?

As for social efficacy:

a) Do we need to know that she borrowed a card table (from Jane Rule and her partner) on which she wrote The Edible Woman , 1965, and was the author of Desert of the Heart a crucial mentor?

b) a literary agent’s job description, Calgary Herald strikers (Conrad Black); Henry Beissel editor of Edge: An Independent Periodical (at the University of Alberta) which I indexed. c) her trusted editorial readers thinking that the character of the landlady in Alias Grace was fat; because she had not really intended for that to be the case, she altered the text to make it abundantly clear that the character was not overweight. d) Atwood editing summits gathered together in hotel rooms, the agents know more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. The author-editor relationship is professional and personal, so they move to new publishing houses together. “We’ve got the Atwood” memo at a publishing conference.

Escape Velocity Paperback 88 pages 9780864929068 $19.95 Pub date: May 21, 2013 Rights: World Goose Lane Editions - ice house poetry

Carmelita McGrath is a poet, editor, anthologist, short story writer, and novelist. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including two previously published collections of poetry. In addition to the Atlantic Poetry Prize, she has won the Newfoundland Book Award for her novel Stranger Things Have Happened , which was also shortlisted for the Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award. She lives in St. John’s. .

The house is still standing Paperback 88 pages 9780864929044 $19.95 Pub date: May 21, 2013 Rights: World Goose Lane Editions - ice house poetry

Adrienne Barrett is a writer and bricklayer. A graduate of Trent University and the University of British Columbia, she has seen her poetry published in Arc, Prairie Fire , and The Fiddlehead . Her work has also appeared on the longlist for the 2011 Montreal Prize. Born in Hamilton, she kicked around Peterborough, Vancouver, and Toronto before settling in Woodstock, Ontario.