the green notebook :

, fragments of a work-in-progress

I am seeking my copy of Robert Kroetsch’s The Crow Journals, wherever that might be. I’ve been dismantling my home office for nearly two months, given our young ladies are getting too big to share a bedroom. I’ve packed and moved fifty boxes of books out into other corners of the house and into our storage but am barely half-through emptying the space. I am seeking my copy of The Crow Journals, seeking to remind myself about tone, how he wrote about what he was writing, but most of my non-fiction shelves are still packed, and haven’t been completely relocated along our downstairs north wall. In an essay by George Bowering, he plays a similar structure, composing an essay simultaneous to his composition of Caprice, the second of his western novel trilogy. I have been sketching a short story about crows, specifically the gathering of daily crows along Innes Road, just by Christine’s work. I’ve been poking at this short story for weeks, attempting to carve every moment and motion.

It is interesting to realize that I’ve crows scattered throughout more than a couple of short stories. More than orioles, blue jays, red-winged blackbirds or sparrows, birds that collectively punctuated my farm-youth. Apparently there were other birds, including cardinals, but I don’t recall seeing too many of those until recently. Now, one finds its way to the crabapple tree in our front yard. I hope the bird finds what it needs, before the tree finally crumbles, beneath its own weight.

*

Yesterday, Rose spent a day home from school, having thrown up repeatedly the night prior, including around 3 in the morning. We were just back from a long Easter weekend at Christine’s mother’s cottage in the Laurentians. On Thursday, Aoife had a bout of the same, prompting our drive to the cottage on Saturday morning instead of Friday, as we’d originally hoped. Three days and two nights with mother-in-law, where I spent much of my time reading, and the children felt fine. Every morning, the same three deer, coming up from the lane. Once we were home, Rose wasn’t feeling well, but we didn’t think much of it until she coated the hallway. The circle of barf, I said. And repeated.

Christine says: Please stop calling it that.

*

Today is a second round of copy edits for On Beauty. Rose is still asleep, and we’re letting her.

*

I return to the opening of Emmanuel Hocquard’s prose poem “HOW,” as translated from the original French by Norma Cole: “To write an elegy, you have to know how an elegy is made. And to find out how an elegy is made, treat it just like an engine.” Hocquard, turning the form of the poem over to study the sides. Cole’s volume, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000), changed the way I looked at how I approached writing poems, prose poems and the sentence itself. I keep a copy close to my desk at all times, as there is always something else, something new, to discover. I must have at least half a dozen copies kicking around the house.

I spend an hour seeking a copy of Lucy Ives’ The Hermit from our poetry shelves, for the sake of verifying a quote in my short story collection, before abandoning the search and sending the author an email. Have I got this right? I can’t see our driveway for the fresh length of snowfall. The new issue of Grain magazine holds a poem by Serena Lukas Bhandar, a writer I hadn’t heard of prior, but apparently a student at the University of Calgary, that immediately catches my attention. The poem so expansive it is nearly explosive. Ka-pow.

Ten centimetres of snow over the past eighteen hours, following three months of winter that barely arrived. We’re already nearly a week into April. This whole season confuses.

*

There are multiple volumes I keep near my desk, so that I may return to them. Rosmarie Waldrop, Driven to Abstraction (2010): “Is there such a thing as silence? And do I have to listen to it?” Etel Adnan, Seasons (2008): “So where are we? Counting leaves, blades of grass, pebbles, / snails, is better than counting words. It’s a matter of murdering / abstractions.” Guy Birchard, Only Seemly (2018): “Sometimes it seems there’s nothing to be done / but retail hearsay.” Ariana Reines, A Sand Book (2019): “Into which a thing, invaginated // Dissolved [.]” Robert Kroetsch, Letters to Salonika (1983): “Form. I want to talk to you about the relationship of the erotic to form. But I fall silent.” There are easily twenty or thirty further examples, books I find engaging enough for them to be truly generative, allowing new ways to think or to see with each reading. What might I learn today? What might be sparked? The inherent value of going over the same lines, the same poems or paragraphs, time and again. Not the book become new but the difference of the you that is reading.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Almost Everything (1982):

I’ve always been impressed by the ability some people have to remember everything, things from a long time back, the name of a first grade teacher, whatever.

            What I have instead is page after page of random notes to remind me.

*

I’m rereading notes sketched out in November, responding to the death of Prince George, British Columbia poet Barry McKinnon. Christine and I, along with our young ladies and mother-in-law, headed to Florida for the sake of finally taking the children to Disney, a trip delayed due to the onset of the Covid era. Apparently the goal was to catch the trip before Rose turned ten, which would then have her charged as an adult. I carried my Red Deer College Press reissue of Barry’s I wanted to say something (1990) across Universal Studios, suburban Orlando and Walt Disney World, capturing photos of his book from our hotel deck, in the Cantina, by the Millennial Falcon, a Tie-Fighter, by a fire-breathing dragon in Harry Potter’s Hogsmeade. I amused myself by carrying a book by my late friend Barry across a ridiculous series of outings, mere days after he’d died.

Working through my many pages of rough drafts, I’m realizing my poem-sketches are closer in tone and structure to John Newlove’s “Ride Off Any Horizon,” utilizing variations of the phrase “I wanted to say something” as a repetition, from which poem-fragments might return to leap from. As Newlove once said of his own poem, originally using his phrase as a compositional tool that he’d remove from later drafts, which he ended up being unable to strike out. “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall / where it may— [.]”

In his Paris Review interview (1968), Robert Creeley responds: “I’m really speaking of my own sense of place.” This is the sensibility that Barry McKinnon brought to Prince George when they moved there, what I also absorbed across my twenties and into my thirties from those British Columbia poets. The very notion of Robert Creeley invited up north to read, into McKinnon’s local. What might that have sounded like.

*

The earth moves, through parts of New England. A rare New York earthquake. Come Monday, the solar eclipse. Some say we’re in end-times. Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival (2024) speaks to wildfires, the British Columbia interior, the coast. Matt Rader’s FINE (2024). The poetry, that makes nothing happen.

I spend half an hour tweaking three short stories at RedBird, a music venue in Old Ottawa South, as Aoife attends her weekly ukulele lessons. She couldn’t find her pink ukulele, so she has borrowed my lime green ukulele, the one Sharon Harris gifted me during their move from apartment to house, back in 2010. I am working on stories.

There is a certain point of the editing/copy editing process that is less improving upon and is simply changing. This story isn’t any better, but it sure is shorter, or longer. Or different. The idea of spending thirty years working a self-portrait in oil to keep up with the changes. It might never be done.

There were tales of the late Steven Heighton, attending revisions and reworks of his prose to the point of checking in with the printers of his books, which his publishers and editors were not necessarily happy about. At some point, one has to let go. Or pull it back, I suppose.

I had hoped also to look at poems this morning, but naturally, they remain in my office, freshly printed.