Urban Graffiti Mix #4

Transgressive, discursive, tracks concerned with the struggles of hard edged urban living, alternative lifestyles, deviant culture – presented in their most raw and unpretentious form: music, fiction, poetry, monologues. We are the stories we tell. Yet another avenue for risky, dangerous writing: off the page. For far too long, and far too often literary recitals have been a literary crap shoot, depending on the preparedness and the oratory skills of the reader. At last, the technology has reached the level where individual authors, poets, and fiction writers can produce their own audio works to promote their printed counterparts. As editor, I welcome any and all such audio works for inclusion in the ongoing series of Urban Graffiti Mixes.

Urban Graffiti Mix #4, posted with vodpod

Urban Graffiti Mix #3

Urban Graffiti Mix #3 Cloudcast by Mark McCawley, posted with vodpod

Usually a writer learns more from failure and rejection than from anything else, I suppose, given the tremendous amount of both the writers I know seem to have accumulated throughout the years. That is, except for one particular and peculiar occasion in which I learned more from what at first appeared a writing success.

It was May or June of 1986, the CBC radio program Alberta Anthology had accepted a suite of my poems for broadcast. Along with the letter of acceptance was a standard ACTRA contract which I was required to sign if I wanted to be paid the $140.00 the program was offering for the broadcast of my poems. Being a young and hungry writer, I signed the contract and mailed it back to the CBC.

To say I was dissatisfied with the broadcast of my suite of poems would have been an understatement. The actor the program had hired to recite my poems had no concept of each poem’s unique nuances, inflections, vernacular, tropes and idioms. Even worse was the hokey, mawkish background music which further altered the original meaning of my works.

As final insult, though, the same contract I had signed to get paid had also given them the right to censor language they deemed offensive. Fuck became Frick. Shit, crap. Hell, heck. And so on. To me, it was an early and important lesson I learned in the commodification of Canlit, and how it determines content in Canada’s conformist publishing culture.

That single experience has motivated me through the years as a writer, editor, and publisher to never take for granted what it is the writer says, and how it is they say it, never altering one word without their prior knowledge or approval. As you listen to this and other Urban Graffiti Mixes, imagine just how much their meanings would be altered by the arbitrary changing of a word here, or a phrase there.

Note:

Special thanks goes to CO-OP Radio 102.7 FM and the hosts of the program Wax Poetic from which the works of both Catherine Owen and Evelyn Lau have been excerpted. Click on each writer’s name, respectively, to listen to their entire interviews at length.

Listen to the entire Stuart Ross reading at the Test Reading Series, here.

Pretty Little Birds by C. J. Leon

Urban Graffiti Mix #2

Transgressive, discursive, tracks concerned with the struggles of hard edged urban living, alternative lifestyles, deviant culture – presented in their most raw and unpretentious form: music, fiction, poetry, monologues. We are the stories we tell. Yet another avenue for risky, dangerous writing: off the page. For far too long, and far too often literary recitals have been a literary crap shoot, depending on the preparedness and the oratory skills of the reader. At last, the technology has reached the level where individual authors, poets, and fiction writers can produce their own audio works to promote their printed counterparts. As editor, I welcome any and all such audio works for inclusion in the ongoing series of Urban Graffiti Mixes.

Urban Graffiti Mix #2, posted with vodpod

Urban Graffiti Mix #1

Transgressive, discursive, tracks concerned with the struggles of hard edged urban living, alternative lifestyles, deviant culture – presented in their most raw and unpretentious form: music, fiction, poetry, monologues. We are the stories we tell. Yet another avenue for risky, dangerous writing: off the page. For far too long, and far too often literary recitals have been a literary crap shoot, depending on the preparedness and the oratory skills of the reader. At last, the technology has reached the level where individual authors, poets, and fiction writers can produce their own audio works to promote their printed counterparts. As editor, I welcome any and all such audio works for inclusion in the ongoing series of Urban Graffiti Mixes.

Urban Graffiti Mix #1, posted with vodpod

Excerpt from ‘Uranium City Return’: Edmonton by Tim Beckett

I hadn’t been back to Edmonton in nearly 20 years, not since I’d passed through with my parents at age 15 on my way back to Vancouver. I took the airport shuttle downtown to the bus station then checked in at the Grand Hotel across the street. The hotel looked rundown, but the wooden awning out front and the cowboy bar on the ground floor lent it a frontier feel, made it an apt jumping off point for the journey that would take me to Fort MacMurray and beyond to a North I hadn’t seen since just before I’d last seen Edmonton.

Except for a guy who tried to bum five bucks off me in the hallway, the hotel was empty and quiet. I was tired from getting up at dawn and catching the flight from Montreal, but when I lay down on the bed, I was too agitated to rest. I felt my childhood all around me in the quiet streets stretching out beyond the window, the brilliant blue sky directly in front of my line of vision that just seemed to go on and on. It was more a shock than I’d expected to be back. For most of the time I’d been away, I’d suppressed my memories of Edmonton. Or lost them, I’ve never been sure which. I’d been thinking about Edmonton in a roundabout way, as part of that whole first 15 years of my life that involved the North, rebuilding it all piece by piece in my mind until I felt like I could enter it at will. Now here it was, memory made life. If I shifted position, I could just see the neon red CN logo, atop the hi-rise with the vertical black and white lines running down its sides. The CN Tower had been my favorite hi-rise when we’d lived in the city, and just seeing it again felt like a minor miracle and made me as anxious to walk Edmonton’s afternoon streets as I’d once been, in my drinking days, to hit the bars as soon as possible whenever I arrived somewhere new.

Arm’s Length by Laurence Klavan

It started with the terrible urge to go—to pee, to piss, what was he, six? to go—to urinate, which awoke him at odd hours, when he wasn’t expecting it (it was a few years early for this, wasn’t it? He was only forty-six, not in his fifties and the I-gotta-go-every-hour situation he’d heard so much about—and at night, after fifty, forget it, four or five times at least, that’s what he’d been told, too), and it shook him up, coming on him all of a sudden.

A Specimen In A Petri Dish by Sonia Saikaley

As a publisher, I have found there to be nothing more gratifying than the opportunity to observe a writer develop, sometimes from their earliest initial publications in which one can see their obvious talents emerge and blossom. Urban Graffiti has published many such talented writers and poets throughout the years who have gone on to have successful careers in their own right, and I am pleased to have played a small role in their success. One such writer and poet is Sonia Saikaley, whose short fiction piece, “A Specimen In A Petri Dish” first appeared in Urban Graffiti #7 in Autumn of 1999. I am pleased to reprint Sonia’s story here, now, for your critical enjoyment. Enjoy.

I look through the peephole, my heart pounding like the drums at a First Nations pow-wow. I quickly stop looking through the hole and comb my fingers through my short, brown hair. “What the hell is she doing at my door?” I whisper to myself.

She knocks at my door again, louder this time. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I call out, frantically shoving the tits and pussies magazine under the chesterfield.

House of Unfulfilled Dreams by Stephen Morrissey

The prose poem has always been a welcome form of poetry in the pages of Urban Graffiti from the very first issue of the litzine. It allows the poet to freely explore sometimes extremely difficult territory unhindered by form. The prose poem also allows the poet to rise beyond metaphor and begin to speak with an allegorical voice. I don’t know of a single major Canadian poet that hasn’t written in the form. Many appear in one of my favourite anthologies of prose poems, The Lyric paragraph : a collection of Canadian prose poems, edited by Robert Allen, published from Montreal’s DC Books in 1987. In the inaugural issue of Urban Graffiti, the very first prose poem I happily accepted for publication was a poem entitled, “House of Unfulfilled Dreams” by Montreal poet and small press publisher, Stephen Morrissey. In this poem, he explores those dark spectres of anger and rage which sometimes haunt and kill a marriage. I’m pleased to reprint it here for your enjoyment.

House of Unfulfilled Dreams

Details of events aren’t necessary; it is enough to say that a madman involved with religion murdered a woman. Then there was the murder house, a door left open by the police, and my curiosity about the murder. There was also my own hell; slowly parts of myself were being shut down: I was a house with most of the rooms shut and locked, and those still used were barely furnished. I accept the blame for everything. What else was there to do? What was left but resignation? I would leave my house not saying where I was going and enter the murder house by the back door. It was quiet there, no restless ghost of the murdered woman came to bother me; I was the only restless spirit in that house. I would enter the house and sit near the living room window which had almost the same view as from my own living room window. I would watch cars and trucks passing on the highway. It was cold, February cold, but not uncomfortable in this unheated house; frozen vines and plants in the house seemed almost alive. I would think how strange it was that the only place I could find quiet and peace was in this house where there had been a murder only a few hundred feet from my own house. Each visit I would go through the murderer’s papers, his mad writings about God and religion. Then I would look at his pornographic magazines and consider the absence of sex, loving, caring and tenderness in my own marriage. Meanwhile, at night, I was being tortured: secretly parts of my body were being removed: one finger tip, a toe nail, a bit of flesh on my upper arm; I would awake the next day in pain and wonder about this loss. Gradually my body was being dissected. For several months I would visit the murder house and feel relaxed, at peace with myself, before returning to my home where anger was increasing to the amount of peace I found elsewhere, in the world where people love and hate, go mad and murder each other, or find a lover for the peace and quiet and love they can’t find in their own homes.UG

Stephen Morrissey, poet and teacher, was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1950. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Vehicule Poets, a group of young poets (Ken Norris, Endre Farkas, Tom Konyves, Claudia Lapp, Artie Gold, John McAuley, and Stephen Morrissey) who published and organized poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery in Montreal. Morrissey’s first book of poems, The Trees of Unknowing was published by Vehicule Press in 1978. Morrissey also published two literary magazines of poetry, “what is” (1973-1975) and “The Montreal Journal of Poetics” (1978-1985). Since 1976 Morrissey has taught English and Humanities at Champlain College, where he is still employed. In 1983 Coach House Press in Toronto published Morrissey’s second book of poems, Divisions. The book was accepted for publication by bpNichol and edited by Frank Davey. Family Album (1989) was published by Caitlin Press in Vancouver. Morrissey has also published five chapbooks of his poems, Poems of a Period (Montreal, 1971), The Divining Rod (Edmonton, Greensleeve Editions, 1993), The Beauty of Love (The Poem Factory, Vancouver, 1993), The Carolyn Poems (The Poem Factory, Vancouver, 1994), and 1950 (The Poem Factory, Vancouver,1996). Stephen Morrissey has one son, Jake Morrissey, born in 1979. He married poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995. In 2000, they founded Coracle Press, in Montreal, Canada.

Photograph which begins this post is entitled “Urban Winter: I” by Devin McCawley. For prints, contact him through his website.

The Mad Girl Dreams of Cleaning Women by Lyn Lifshin

Since it’s inception in July, 1993, Urban Graffiti has always received far more poetry than it could ever possibly use — rejecting almost 95 percent of the poetry submitted over it’s eighteen years as a paper-based litzine (largely due to the UG’s specific mandate). That said, ever so often a poem submitted would not only stand out as both an excellent poem in its own right, but an excellent example of the litzine’s overall mandate as well. Such a poem was Lyn Lifshin’s poem, “The Mad Girl Dreams of Cleaning Women” first published in Urban Graffiti #6 in February 1998. I am pleased to reprint it now for your critical enjoyment.

The Mad Girl Dreams of Cleaning Women

She’s burned out,
down on her knees, a
supplicant who could
be kissing some
savior’s feet
only it’s the floor,
stretching out in
front of her, an
enormous penis
that won’t be
satisfied, a
beach she has to
smooth over
with a toothbrush.
Her knees are
raw as someone giving
head 24 years. She’s
bent over. Under
her hair dirt
yelps more with a
switch. If she
stood up she’d have
the bends. She’s
heard of women in
India crawling
on hard floors. At
least when they’ve
spread them
selves, are avail-
able and prone
and open as O,
they have flower
designs to show for
it. For the
mad girl, the
best she can hope
for is no dirt
under her nails no
scuzz on stairs
or paw prints
on tile, all she even
has to show for her
sweat and stress
is nothing.UG

After Lyn Lifshin heard that in the Eskimo language, the word for “to breathe” and “to make a poem” are the same one, she no longer worried, as she had in graduate school, she’d never be able to write enough. Born in Barre, Vermont, in 1942, Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A, and has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction “Queen of the Small Presses.”

Recent books from Lyn Lifshin:

THE LICORICE DAUGHTER: MY YEAR WITH RUFFIAN, Texas Review Press,
ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME, Black Sparrow at Godine.,
COLD COMFORT, Black Sparrow
BEFORE IT’S LIGHT, Black Sparrow
DESIRE, World Parade Books
92 RAPPLE DRIVE, Coatlism Press

Also out recently:
NUTLEY POND, PERSEPHONE, BARBARO: BEYOND BROKENNESS, LOST IN THE FOG, LIGHT AT THE END, JESUS POEMS and BALLET MADONNAS, KATRINA, LOST HORSES, CHIFFON, and BALLROOM. And just out: ALL THE POETS WHO HAVE TOUCHED ME, LIVING AND DEAD. ALL TRUE: ESPECIALLY THE LIES.

Forthcoming books include TSUNAMI AS HISTORY from POETRYREPAIRS.COM.