Rob McLennan and Nicholas Lea lead Ottawa’s literary rise
As an amateur cynic, I always hesitate to trumpet things. So often they arc up like a rocket and plunge elliptically, falling below my expectations. This is almost certainly due to some immense and unforeseen flaw in my own makeup. My point: Whenever I witness something fascinating happen, I usually tend to shy away, but not this time. No, as of late there’s something very interesting happening in Ottawa and it must be fully embraced.
Publishing is on the rise. Words have been rising and falling in higher tides, books circulating like a duel – in the quick staccato of strike and riposte. And while I hesitate to call this the beginning of a new historical period, neither would I rule it out. There is a nucleated gathering, an amoeboid force of people trying to mythologize the intellectual landscape of Ottawa and create a real movement – its output lately has been nothing short of prodigious. Two recent examples of this are Rob McLennan’s The Ottawa City Project and Nicholas Lea’s Everything Is Movies.
McLennan has been living and writing in Ottawa for as many years as I can remember, and his particular love for his home city has finally germinated inside him, sprouting into this present work. Generally speaking, a poet is a very self-centred prism of translation; everything he is exposed to filters through him and emerges refracted, separated and coloured. This holds true for The Ottawa City Project, which uses McLennan’s highly personal, bombastic style of recollection
in an effort to embrace the city as a whole and limn it as a mythological entity. He illumines the city in cardinal points, drawing it out like a map of sacred sites. Take this long excerpt from his poem Number Two Bus: “Through communities, an east end shopping centre & a west/ through chinatown, little italy, westboro, the byward market… through all the hyphenated city sections; a place a place a placelessness; how does a city make; where hyphen holds a memory; a link/ to further shores, little/ glengarry my apartment; little glengarry archive & a little secret.” The Ottawa City Project focuses in on our tiny geographies, moving from the historic and the public and into the domestic with an abrupt grace, juxtaposing them all on the same spectrum of meaning.
Everything Is Movies, by Nicholas Lea (Chaudiere Books)
Lea’s first full book of poems, Everything Is Movies, is the work of a bright young talent. He slots himself into the widely popular genre of Canadian experimental poetry, but he does it with a verve and an ability that set him slightly apart. His skill with language is noteworthy and he is at his best when writing barriers of words that merely hem in an idea, leaving you to bounce around inside its field of effect to no particular purpose: “When this is said to be hymnal in its approach when the/ lock-jaw moment rises and sticks when fall falls but the falls/ unfall.” Sometimes he creates some beautiful moments of very traditional, imagistic reading pleasure, such as, “I never understood the difference/ between object and subject, never/ guessed the gestures that poured floorward like sun.”
His love of these serpentine paths does mean that once or twice in the work you lose your direction. Sometimes the twists can be so jarring that they simply buck you off, leaving you stranded in an ordinary interpretation of what usually remains magical: “Be the grave of mien. Be the goat too close to the toaster.” But these are trivial quibbles about a young poet with huge promise. I’m basically kicking the tires on a Corvette.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – May 24, 2007
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=12169
