the green notebook,

, further notes from spring: reading Diane di Prima's 1985 Charles Olson lecture, and Grant Faulkner’s The art of brevity. crafting the very short story,

I’m sitting an hour or two at The Royal Oak Pub at Kent and Slater Streets in Ottawa’s downtown, waiting to meet up with Calgary poet Colin Martin, in town for a conference. As ever, deliberately early, with a book and a notebook and pen. I’m moving through Diane di Prima’s Charles Olson Memorial Lecture, delivered in 1985 at SUNY-Buffalo, a title published as “Old Father, Old Artificer” (2012). Ana Božičević and Ammiel Alcalay are listed as editors for the collection, but the introduction and biographical notes seem uncredited, something perhaps as a collaboration between the two. As the introduction opens: “In March of 1985, Diane di Prima traveled to Buffalo, New York, to give the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures, a series instituted by Robert Creeley in 1979. Having already featured two of di Prima’s lectures in Series II, it is important for us to continue since so much of her thinking—on structure, language, history, and poetics—emerges in lectures, yet few have been published.” The second paragraph, a bit further on, begins: “By making more texts of the Olson lectures available (the one by di Prima here, two by Ed Dorn in this series, and one by Robert Duncan in Series II), we are providing a unique opportunity to experience how key figures of the New American Poetry told the stories of their relationships to Olson’s legacy, and processed the past, in the dramatically different conditions of the 1980s. It was a time when critical theory either permeated the vocabulary and practice of poetic thought or was banished from it; when divisions between ‘creativity’ and ‘knowledge’ were exacerbated, as professionally sanctioned practices emerged through the proliferation of academic approaches or degrees in creative writing. But such trends did not go uncontested.”

I’m fascinated by the idea of a lecture series, and potentially delivering one. I’ve been curating an annual series of lectures as part of our poetry festival, VERSeFest, since it began back in 2011, “The Factory Lecture Series,” existing as an extension of The Factory Reading Series. Each year, I solicit two poets to build a lecture of some twenty to thirty minutes on the subject of their choice, whether on writing generally, on a particular writer, or on their own writing and poetics. I can’t think of too many other venues for lectures across Canada, although Phil Hall does curate The Joanne Page Lectures at Queens University in Kingston. There’s also the lectures delivered as part of the Annual General Meetings of both The League of Canadian Poets and the Writers Union, or even the Margaret Lawrence Lecture Series, held annually through the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Doesn’t the Saskatchewan Writers Guild hold annual lectures as well? Established in 2002 and named after the Saskatchewan poet and mentor Anne Szumigalski (1922-1999), The League of Canadian Poets’ lecture series offers “an annual lecture from a distinguished Canadian poet on craft, culture, and community.” And of course, the CBC Massey Lectures, five sequential evenings of annual lectures on important cultural topics and large ideas by Canadian writers and thinkers, each of which are annually put together into volumes through House of Anansi Press. There could always be further, of course. And I like the idea of a poetics lecture, whether around an individual and their influence such as Charles Olson, or someone other, else. Someone further. Why aren’t there further?

The Charles Olson Lecture series still occurs, restarted after a break, currently held through the Gloucester Writers Centre. The series restarted in 2010, when Diane di Prima, once more, was the first in the series. Should there be further? The George Bowering Lectures might be pretty cool, or The Anne Carson Talks. Peter Quartermain? Warren Tallman? So many of my reference points seem to point west for such things. Is there anyone geographically closer? I’d always thought it would have been interesting to name an award after the late Ottawa poet William Hawkins (1940-2016), but that might have to be some sort of troublemaker award. The good trouble, of course.

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I’ve started on Grant Faulkner’s The art of brevity. crafting the very short story (2023), a book I saw mention of on social media a while back, curious to see what such a book might prompt. I am thinking, again, of the short story, of prose. I am wondering at the possibilities. I was curious to see, as well, a treatise on the form not just by a practitioner, but by someone who has thought deeply on the mechanics of the very short story.

It always reminds me of a line by Toronto poet and editor Dennis Lee, infamous for Alligator Pie (1974), that I am probably misremembering: “For a devotee of silence, he sure goes on.”

And from Faulkner, once again, his own reference to the ubiquitous Plath:

Sylvia Plath called poetry a “tyrannical discipline” for the tightness of its boundaries. “You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”

It is an interesting distinction. Is a short story a boiling down, or simply not writing to excess? In my mind, the exact right words, in the exact right order. Provide only what is essential.

Last week, I was zoom-interviewed by Canadian writer and editor Hollay Ghadery for her literary podcast, in which we discussed On Beauty. We spoke of density, and public responsibility; we spoke of how stories are told, and how they might occur: not a narrative around a major event or a sequence of major events, but of smaller moments, equally important but less obvious, for how those characters might respond. In a minor key, possibly. I wonder if that might be a suggestion for a book-title, of the short story collection percolating at the back of my attention these past few months: “In a minor key.” On Beauty has been in print for seven or eight months; “Very suddenly, all at once” (I haven’t fully decided on whether or not to keep the comma) was submitted to University of Alberta Press around that same time. Since then, scraps of fiction but little more. A scratch at the back of my thoughts. Over the past eight months, sketching out notes towards further short stories the same way I’ve been attempting scraps towards poems, towards my book of objects, perhaps as a furthering of a thread from the book of smaller (2022) to the book of sentences (2025) to the as-yet-unpublished “Autobiography,” this new line of thinking through “The Museum of Practical Things.” I am thinking on poems that stretch out, both across the page and across pages. How long can I go. Once this particular journal manuscript behind me, as well as “the genealogy book,” perhaps these will become my next two major projects, across the next year or few years. Perhaps.

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They say the northern lights will be visible again next week. Elbows up.