Following last year’s year-end post, here is a self-centred accounting of 2015 as a doctoral candidate, poet, and publisher.
As of last week, I have now completed drafts of all four chapters of my dissertation on bookselling and the small press in Canada after the Second World War. It is sitting at some 200 pages and 60,000+ words. There is a long way to go yet, but there is something to work with anyway. I published an article at Amodern on the Canada Council and the history of funding for poetry readings in Canada. A second article is due back any day now from the printer in the Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes about Raymond Souster and the Contact Poetry Reading Series (1957-1962), a long overdue piece based on my 2009 M.A. research. I also wrote an entry on Contact Press for the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, set to appear online sometime in 2016 so far as I know. I presented only a single conference paper (on William Hawkins at ACCUTE), instead focusing my energies on the dissertation and teaching responsibilities. 2016 should see extensive revisions on the dissertation with true optimism to submit in September, and hopefully at least one conference paper along the way.
On the poetry side, the big news was the publication of The Collected Poems of Williams Hawkins by the fine and hardworking team at Chaudiere Books. It launched in June, and we were even able to get Bill out to read from it in November. Watch the footage of his astonishing reading here. Bill and I also appeared on CBC’s All in a Day to talk about the book, and it was received well, garnering a number of reviews and other bits of media.
Apt. 9 Press had the great fortune and privilege of publishing new chapbooks by Marilyn Irwin, Lillian Nećakov, Nelson Ball, and Michael e. Casteels, and dragging our wares to book fairs in Ottawa and Toronto. A chapbook is forthcoming in 2016 from Lea Graham, followed by a hiatus for the remainder of the year in order to finish the aforementioned doctoral degree.
I published a new chapbook, Consider Each Possibility, with London’s always-excellent Baseline Press. I had a manuscript on the shortlist for the John Lent Poetry-Prose Award from UBC Okanagan’s Kalamlka Press. Bardia Sinaee wrote an unbelievably kind essay about a handful of my earlier chapbooks. I gave readings in Kingston (The Interim Reading Series, with the Accord of Poets), Toronto (Baseline Press Launch), and Ottawa (AB Series, Factory Series, Chaudiere Press Launch, OAR), published poems in or at Industrial Sabotage, Flat Singles Press, The Steel Chisel, Peter F. Yacht Club, and the Matrix Ottawa Dossier (ed. by Jason Christie), had a little poem broadside come out from above/ground press, and was interviewed at Ottawa Life Magazine and the Town Crier. I’m also in the roster to appear in this series of painted portraits of Canadian poets by Melanie Janisse Barlow. The full-length manuscript, as ever, continues to develop.
Whatever I am forgetting at the moment, I apologize! My great thanks to all of the editors, poets, organizers, students, professors, and supporters along the way that made each of the above possible. I can’t wait to see what happens in 2016!
Cameron Anstee 