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In an interview published in Broken Pencil magazine, Toronto writer, editor and publisher Jay MillAr talked about his own beginnings as a writer and a small press publisher, saying: "In the early 90s I was living in London, Ontario, and going to Western. I was kind of interested in poetry because of a great English teacher I'd had in my last year of high school, so I was taking a general arts program. My intro to Eng.Lit. course did a segment on Contemporary Canadian Poetry, so of course we read that New Canadian Library pocketbook by that same title, which had a lot of poems in it by people that were still alive, but none of which were actually contemporary. Anyway, my prof mentioned that one of the poets in the anthology would be giving a reading at the public library downtown, so I went to check it out. The poet turned out to be bill bissett, and his reading both frightened and amused me, but it must have amused me more than it frightened me because I went to the university library to look into his work. That's when I discovered blewointmentpress, bill's self-proclaimed publishing empire named after a cure for body lice. I was amazed at the simplicity and often rag-tag production that went into a blewointmentpress book [some were printed sheets just stapled together]. As a result I started scanning the stacks of the Canadian Literature section for books that had no spines - books that had been bound with staples."

Starting to publish poetry chapbooks under the imprint Boondoggle Books in the early 1990s, MillAr predominantly published his own work, even after he changed the name to BookThug. It has only been over the past five or six years that BookThug publications have started publishing beyond its beginnings, and publishing, as Toronto writer, editor and small press publisher Stuart Ross once suggested, "important works" by writers such as Karen Mac Cormack, Gerry Gilbert, Sharon Harris, Phil Hall, Stephen Cain, derek beaulieu, Daniel f. Bradley, David W. McFadden, Victor Coleman and multiple others, while still producing increasingly interesting works by MillAr himself, all of which can be found on his website at bookthug.ca. Part of this shift of larger public awareness, perhaps, has been the increase in print-run, from 26 or 52 copies to 100 for the chapbooks (a number of which have already gone into second printings), as well as the shift into producing trade collections of books in runs of three hundred copies, publishing titles by Elizabeth Bashinsky, Gregory Betts, Bradley and a growing number of others. And somehow, MillAr has even come full circle, with his own third collection of poetry, False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), appearing as the first in a new blewointmentpress imprint of Nightwood Editions, as Nightwood (what blewointmentpress turned into after bill bissett sold the press, and it fell into the hands of Howard White, publisher of Harbour Publishing, who eventually handed the reins over to his son, Silas) also works to acknowledge its own roots. To look at MillAr's publishing, the blewointmentpress influence doesn't easily come through (and if you look at MillAr's own writing, its Gerry Gilbert that comes through far more than bissett; MillAr was also responsible, during his time as an editor at Coach House Books, for the reissue of Gilbert's Moby Jane in 2004), but MillAr certainly does share a number of bissett's interests when it comes to particular authors, whether Venright, Gilbert, Coleman or McFadden. It almost seems funny, in hindsight, that MillAr doesn't seem to have ever published bissett's own work.

Included since in her sixth trade poetry collection, Sooner (Coach House Books, 2005), is Margaret Christakos' "Retreat Diary" (2005), a teaser built out of two longer pieces, "Retreat Diary" and "Waiting." In a series of poetry collections that go back to the late 1980s, Toronto writer Margaret Christakos has been working further and further into her own work, using her own text as a base text and feeding the work of itself, twisting and turning and taking poem after poem from a series of repeating roots, such as in the opening for the poem "Waiting," that writes:

The main feature of a good short story is that
it winds out or will wend not too far off

in the future from when it began to be read
or heard Doesn't matter how long while taken for the

author to write; what matters is quantity time standard
reader will need to donate The ideal short story departs

enthuses and finalizes in under a third of an hour
Can be had happily on lunch breaks along with nutritious

lunch and a walk If the walk is shut out
this should be due to (inclement) weather or a meeting

Traditionally, Christakos' poems have worked through love, loss, sexuality, mothering and the domestic, from her collections Not Egypt (Coach House Press, 1989), Other Words for Grace (The Mercury Press, 1994), The Moment Coming (ECW Press, 1998), wipe.under.a.love (The Mansfield Press, 2000) and Excessive Love Prostheses (Coach House Books, 2002). In "Retreat Diary," Christakos extends her movement through similar waves, moving more into the first fumblings of teenage sexuality: fear, the unknown and graphic imagery, writing:

A seventeen-year-old daughter/son somewhere else in the
world (?) while she/he sat hard on her/his soft ass staring at
the economical lake water convey itself to sand then swallow
its thrust and gently spool off to the blue distance it came
from, a loop arriving and rushing away (bad guest) without
"Retreat Diary"

She writes not just through the body but deep inside it. Not just of the heart but she is the heart, pumping blood, writing through facts as others might write only through feelings. Christakos has always been a believer in twisting narrative, working the language through to achieve other ends. In a recent question and answer period after her reading at the fall 2005 edition of the ottawa international writers festival, she cited Erin Mouré and Gail Scott as models, as well as an ongoing interest in the work of her former mentor, the late Toronto writer bp Nichol, and her work shows those influences, through not only the willingness to alter language, but in the intricate music and play essential to her poems. Another thing she shares with her three mentors is the willingness to combine both poetry and writing about poetics, something that both Mouré does and Nichol did so much in their own work, merging the two instead of separating into distinct categories. You can offer an essay inside of a poem (the opposite of an essay by Aritha Van Herk, for example, showing how you can offer a story inside an essay).

According to the biographical information on the back of his trade collection, Mine (New Star, 2001; BookThug doesn't include biographical information in the chapbooks), Stephen Collis is the author of four previous chapbooks, including the chapbook Midden (2001), so the chapbook Blackberries (2005), could potentially be his fifth (I have since found out that another trade collection, Anarchive, with New Star, and an anthology he edited, companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry, with West Coast Line Books, are both out in 2005). Mine is a collection shaped by the coal-mining industry on Vancouver Island, writing a long fragment language poem from working-class roots (with echoes of Peter Culley, also on the island, living currently in Nanaimo). Blackberries, on the other hand, with a dedication "For Susan Howe and Lisa Robertson," writes a sequence of short bursts that could easily have been written from a hand-held computer-device (I know for a fact that Shane Rhodes and Stephen Brockwell both have been known to compose on their blackberries; Rhodes even did a reading from his once, forgetting to bring printed copies of the poems).

everything miracle spore sated geometry
found equinox thrusting words having
no connection into all parts
of every sentence boot jack
for instance taking liberty nothing
and no place ventured gained
to whit the berries abundance
how could any contain scarcity
this many hands picking sense
to gather scrutiny shared provenance

What works in these poems is the sparseness, the direct energy of the pieces in their brevity, and bare language. Are these poems simply a construct of the size of the page, writing poems secretly at the bus stop or in the office from his hand-held, but longing for something more? As he writes, "I hear of service berries / poke weed juniper vines dross / the creaking of the earths / axle where the beauty is" (p 18). You can even feel the tensions between technology and the more human elements. Due out later in fall 2005, I am very much looking forward to his Anarchive, to see where he will go next. Or has already gone, before we knew how to look.

Steve Venright, for a number of years, has been a Toronto institution, from his poetry collection Visitations (Underwhich Editions, 1986), to Strange Wunder (Tortoiseshell & Black, 1996) and Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000), as well as his work through his Torpor Vigil Industries, Mobile Reality Check Lab, an example of which can be found in Rampike 12/1:

On the 30th of October 2000, the Torpor Vigil Industries Mobile Lab, with its extravagantly equipped crew of technicians and inspectors, hit the streets of Toronto to conduct a series of 'reality checks' aimed at determining the density and quality of reality and various institutions, residences, businesses, government offices and public spaces. Thanks to the curious sponsorship of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art's StrangeWays program (curated by the International Bureau of Recordist Investigation), TVI was able to provide this valuable service for free. The following photographic documentation offers a heartwarming glimpse at the technical, personal and mystical adventures of … A Day in the Life of the TVI Mobile Reality Inspection Lab.
       Rampike, 12/1

Easily the inheritor of the work of Christopher Dewdney (especially since Dewdney seems to have abandoned poetry some time ago), merging the explorations of science and language, nonsensical language and invented words, Steve Venright has been (as he says) working in obscurity in Toronto since the 1980s, publishing and performing strange and brilliant accumulated bits of text throughout downtown Toronto. Already into a second printing, his chapbook, The Illustrated Venright English Dictionary, is almost a Venright reader, taking as its source material Venright's own three collections, and even appeared in an earlier incarnation as part of his contribution to the anthology side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Insomniac Press, 2002) under the subheading "Secrets of the Occult Science of Torpor Vigilism (A Brief Lexical Introduction)." Another sub-heading to the same text, under the title "My Meteoric Rise to Obscurity - A Treatise On the Merits of Lexiconjury, Deliromancy and Icelandic Breakfast Foods," is "The Vulgar Thrill of Poetic Expression," where he writes:

Writing is a blast. There's a cumulative neurochemical charge that builds to maximal concentration, saturating the language centre with pure meaningless energy. Its release can be effected by touching pen to paper, or setting fingers to keyboard. Each charge has its own emotional signature, eliciting mental impressions which then draw forth words ready to 'explain' this interior experience - like an animated neurochemical Rorschach test.

Young authors are typically advised to write about what they know. I've always been interested in writing about what I don't know.

It becomes interesting to note, as well, that the ongoing reading series hosted and organized by a. rawlings and Bill Kennedy, among others, has taken Venright's Lexiconjury as its name (easily found on the Coach House Books webpage).

lagamorph a person or thing that can roll itself into a clot of slimy substance in order to avoid duties or strangers
[ …]
lexiconjury any doctrine or religious movement that advocates shameful wickedness with the alphabet

Jay MillAr's own ESP: Accumulation Sonnets (2004) reads as quickly-written sonnets that have simply, as he suggests, accumulated, but without the same hit and miss quality of quick writing from his forebear, Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert (but when Gilbert is on, Gilbert is fucking on). He even starts the small collection with a quote by Gilbert, that reads "I gave up on history and common sense gave up all / over me." Traditionally, the sonnet is much more than a grouping of fourteen lines, but a matter of rhythm and beats (John Newlove's poem "The Tasmanian Devil" is a good example of this, part of a grouping of "last poems" in Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003, published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003). MillAr, on the other hand, works these as a loose sequence of single units, fourteen line groupings that could have been written anywhere, whether on the bus, the office, or on his lunch break, until he had enough that worked.

surrounded would knot
we wait to see the
future utility of passed
military action invisible
day with a cash hose
a conspiracy against the
spirit of great cello moans
uncertain doom of crossed
words puzzle is a donkey
simultaneous experiments
in the germ factory toronto
designed to make me feel
good luck enameled carp
translated from the dawn
glutton of earth of paper

MillAr's writing has become far more interesting lately, starting with his two trade collections from Coach House Books, his The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000) and Mycological Studies (2002), stepping it all up a notch with his recent third collection, False Maps for Other Creatures (Nightwood Editions / blewointmentpress, 2005). MillAr works in a space not quite with the language poets, but certainly close, with a number of other lyric experiments working their way deep inside.

Working from found text as well as other bits, you can even catch, if you look closely enough, some of the influences, such as the William Carlos Williams at the beginning of one sonnet, writing "everything depends / one long trombone ear fall / hope that it doesn't rain," in probably the most often quoted line in North American poetry. Through this, MillAr not only brings through the experience of reading the poems themselves, but through referencing other work, weaving in readings of multiple layers.

So much of the form of the chapbook suggests risk, and experimentation, offering less expensive examples of what larger "small" publishers might not be able or willing to put later into trade collections. BookThug, along with Peter and Meredith Quartermain's Nomados in Vancouver and Calgary's anonymous No Press, have been publishing increasingly interesting and attractive chapbooks of essential Canadian writing over the past couple of years. It is here, in the trenches, where you will find what is really happening.