Publishing Editor's Note

December, 2011

Isn't it deliciously exhausting to be a literary publisher today? Months go by and issues work their way to the surface. Are they clawing their way outward? Might they push through your screen? The tickle of it, the tug and persistent bar humming its tune over and over. Memento mondo. Is that Joy or are you just happy to text me? Strands of ideas, opinions, wakeful urgentings, middle-of-night shadowplay. It's going on all the time, this labour of raising spaces for poetry conversation. 

On behalf of all of us here at InfluencySalon.ca, I am thrilled to offer for your reading pleasure Issue 4 of InfluencySalon magazine, entitled "Giving It Up," co-edited by the radically contemplative and attentive team of Paula Eisenstein, Joan Guenther and Liz Howard. This issue takes as its triple-headed focus some of the books of poetry that were discussed and interrelated during the Influency Salon session of Spring 2010. 

Along with our brilliant feature essays by John Barton, Susan Holbrook and Jacob McArthur Mooney, we are proud to present a long slate of current Measurists. These critics, some of whom are publishing responses for the first time, offer unique and thought-provoking perspectives on books of poetry that deserve to be taken up from multiple angles and to incite conversational plurality. We wish to sincerely thank all of these writers for their generosity and engagement: David Alderson, Siona Drummond, Eric Foley, Margot Lettner, Ben Nolan, Deena Shaffer, John Stout, Amy Taylor, andRuth Zuchter.

For enthralling Outflow texts, we are grateful to Sonja Greckol, Margot Lettner and Shannon Maguire. 

I offer special thanks to Ralph Kolewe for his audio excursions with our featured poets, his ubercapable and unflappable production expertise, his own contributions as Influency Salonist, and that undercurrent of deep caring about poetics he brings to all of his gestures here. 

As we go live with Issue 4, several other texts in our other sections arrive in company. Notably we appreciate the sensuous poem sequence by Stefhany Fabrizi, which appears here in relationship with one of Ralph Kolewe's wonderful "Frames." Julie Joosten has contributed a "Like" on Cabinet Magazine, and Brandy Ryan's unique suitably elliptical "Taste" on [and of] Lise Downe's new poetry collection This Way joins our reviews section. 

InfluencySalon.ca is a vision of poetry culture that foments among a group of us; my thanks to all the founding and current editors of this project and especially to the newer contributors who are bringing fuel and inquiry to this generating apparatus. Many thanks to those who've been working hard on behalf of the magazine this year, including Chris D'Iorio, Paula Eisenstein, Sonja Greckol, Joan Guenther, Liz Howard, Ralph Kolewe, Margot Lettner, Lois Lorimer, Lynn McClory, Ben Nolan, Ruth Zuchter.

Our most resonant, inexhaustible thanks we save for the three poets whose work has inspired us all to read a little more closely, to consider and reconsider our assumptions about poetic form and lyric effect: Exponential thanks, then, go to Susan Holbrook, Gregory Betts and Ruth Roach Pierson for sharing their work on the page, in the Influency Salon classroom, and through their voices for our audio segments. Additional thanks to the publishers and editors of these beautiful, surprising books of poetry. For Pierson's Aide-Mémoire, gratitude to BuschekBooks; For Betts's The Others Raised in Me, we thank Pedlar Press; For Holbrook's Joy is So Exhausting, perpetual-refill kudos to Coach House Books. 

— Margaret Christakos, Publishing Editor

Here for capacious reference is a guide to what's in Issue 4!

Influency Salon Issue 4: GIVING IT UP

featuring nodes on HOLBROOK, BETTS, PIERSON

Paula Eisenstein, Joan Guenther and Liz Howard, Issue Co-Editors

Ralph Kolewe, Web Editor; Margaret Christakos, Publishing Editor

CONTENTS

• “Introduction to the Issue” by Paula Eisenstein, Joan Guenther, and Liz Howard, Issue Co-Editors

Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting Node

• Audio MP3 file of Author reading poems from the text

• “Products of Choice: Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting and the Veil of Automation,” a Feature Essay by Jacob McArthur Mooney

• “Looks heads wedge can’t way she”: Desperately locating Susan,” an Introduction to Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting Node by Paula Eisenstein

• “Holbrook’s Subversive Humour,” a Measure by John Stout

• “Ha! An aside to Holbrook’s Joke-Making in Joy is So Exhausting,” a Measure by Joan Guenther

• “Tampons and Technical Writing,” a Measure by Amy Taylor

• “Re-Informed,” a Measure by Deena Shaffer

• “Probing Monsters and Soldiers Before Dinner,” a Measure by Margaret Christakos

• “Fielding the Austere in Holbrook’s Joy,” a Measure by Ben Nolan

• “En-lite-en-ment Revealing Itself?” a Measure by David Alderson

• “pleasure be consequently arduous,” an Outflow by Shannon Maguire

Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me Node

• Audio MP3 file of Author reading poems from text

• Selected pdf files of pages of text from book

• “A Festival of More: Gregory Betts’s Plunderverse in The Others Raisd in Me,” a Feature Essay by Susan Holbrook

• “A Map of Measures on Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me,” an Introduction to the TORiM Node by Joan Guenther

• “The Metal Shadow,” an Afterword by Gregory Betts

• “Considering Betts as Conceptual/Allegorical Poet,” a Measure by Eric Foley

• “A Very Little Book of Verse,” a Measure by Margot Lettner

• “Selfography of the elegiac intertext,” a Measure by Liz Howard

• “Key Points and an Experiment,” a Measure by Ruth Zuchter

• “AlphaBett[sic] Mir/Oracles,” an Outflow by Margaret Christakos

Ruth Roach Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire Node

• Audio MP3 file of Author reading poems from the text

• “Time at a Standstill: Ruth Roach Pierson, History, Autobiography, Ekphrasis and The Archive of Memories,” a Feature Essay by John Barton

• “Pierson and The Paradoxical Memory Artefact,” an Introduction to the Aide-Mémoire Node by Liz Howard

• “Part of, and Apart: Pierson’s Art of Memory-Writing,” a Measure by John Stout

• “Noticings of Nature in Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire,” a Measure by Deena Shaffer

• “On Angels and Agency in Pierson’s Self-Narrating Poetic,” a Measure by Ben Nolan

• “Pierson’s Recollections of the Real in Aide-Mémoire,” a Measure by Siona Drummond

• “Duchamp Dukes It Out With the Angel of History,” an Outflow by Sonja Greckol

PLUS

• “Reflections on the Great Pond: Influency Editors’ Retreat, Wasan Island,” an Outflow by Margot Lettner

• “Influency Poetry Walk at Wasan Island,” A chapbook pdf with site-specific poems by Joan Guenther, Liz Howard, Margaret Christakos, Ben Nolan, Lois Lorimer, Margot Lettner, Paula Eisenstein, Sonja Greckol, Ruth Zuchter and Lynn McClory

• “If Indelible: On Lise Downe’s This Way,” a Taste by Brandy Ryan

• “2 ways out three” by Stefhany Fabrizi, an InfluencySalon Frame

• On “Cabinet Magazine,” a Like by Julie Joosten

Previously:

April 18, 2010—Welcome to influencysalon.ca! We publish full issues quarterly. Our first three issues will be a kick-start triumvirate, appearing here in a more compressed succession than will become our rhythm. Today, April 18, 2010,  you’re finding Issue 1 on our home page. In mid May Issue 2 will appear, followed in early September by Issue 3. These three inaugural issues will set this vivid poetry salon’s commitment firmly at your wrists. Poetry matters. To us, to you, to cities, to air, to culture.

Our founding editorial group of fifteen has formed to extend the engaging poetry conversations that first emerged in the lecture-reading context I began in 2006, called “Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon.” This course, presented through the program support of the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies’ Creative Writing program, is an idiosyncratic forum in which, each session, eight guest poets appear twice: reading their own work and delivering a sustained essay on a colleague. In eight sessions to date, over sixty poets have taken part, offering talks that simply don’t occur elsewhere in Canada: poets become essayists, listen to each other, deeply measuring the importance of their work, among a salon of registrants who have also read the work and are writing responsively to and into it.

Each of our issues will feature three hefty original essays by Influency guest poet-essayists, accompanied by audio readings by the poets under discussion, and introduced by the issue’s editorial group. You’ll also find shorter writings called “measures” on our feature books. Comb through the issue you find here and course its currents. We’re quite sure there are few conversations about Canadian poetry that rollick and manoevre, dare and dig like ours do. We want there to be more, to build more engaging reception for Canadian poets and their poetry.  

Influency Salon online is a new project, evolving in relation to four years of the Toronto-based course’s community. We’ll not mimic the course, nor document it. Instead, influencysalon.ca is a virtual parallel to the course’s in-person depths, and while it will bring into much wider public view some of the writing that was initially produced within the course, this online salon is and wants to be its own hungry room, curious about new readers and writers who might visit, comment, critique, and become engaged with us in thinking through contemporary poetry’s effects and impacts.

Alongside our ambitious issues, new offerings will frequently flow into our magazine’s streams—more brief reviews of poetry books in Tastes, new longer essays in our Outflows section, intelligent chit-banter on developing flora, trading poetry resources tips on Likes, and additional kinds of content as we find new frames for it.

Join the conversations here by logging in and imprinting our site with your own responses. Wherever possible, we’ve built comment lobbies into this salon. Subscribe for free and make this your bar, your divan, your book club, your writing circle. At 4:00 am, talk poetry. Come dawn, have a coffee with us. Steal time at the office——be a poetry pirate. Read books of contemporary poetry alongside our editors and reviewers, and join a widening community of readers who think critically and generously about poetry’s relevance, its bright excursions, off-centre whisperings, its measurable noise.

We’re leaping into virtual time; but poetry’s always had that figured out. Reap what you read.

Margaret Christakos
Publishing Editor
mchristakos@influencysalon.ca