How pleasant it would be to live where a farm produced a living, where a man could find warmth and comfort in the companionship of a good tractor, and plants which grew tall and strong, where there was no more fruitless labour in working the soil by hand, or tormenting horses until they were just as weary and sick as the men who drove and guided them, where there were proper schools, and a kid didn't have to begin working the moment he stood upright. Where there was no fear and no want to twist and damage the soul and body of man.

George Ryga, Hungry Hills, 1963

Sean Johnston: Ryga Redux

It's hard because you can't escape your own ego, and part of you knows that whatever you say about Ryga is in defence of your life's work as much as someone else's. However you look at it, somehow it's you up in public saying this thing that I love - you should love it too. And then you write the thing that you think will explain once and for all what matters. It will get to the nub. And if that's the case, and you've written what you felt was the real thing, the exact thing you wanted to say, and you've spoken from it and about it to people who are gathered to hear the actual writers from the journal, and you felt like some kind of shy preacher ... what then?

This is my position as editor; I meant what I wrote in the editorial for our first issue, and I meant it to be the final word. But it can't be. Even supposing it were perfect, the world has changed, we've all changed, and, at the very least, we've succeeded in making it to the second issue. So now I write the editorial for this second issue, and though I imagine it also as definitive, it won't be. This is the position of every artist, too, of course. You don't set out to write your second-best poem. You don't save your best for the next effort. Every poem is the poem. This novel I am struggling to write just now, I struggle because it is the most important thing I will do, until it's through and then it's the next one.

But reading and writing is also a lot of fun, at least to me, and I have always struggled with this. A problem too few people have, surely - that work brings pleasure, and so cannot be work, somehow. I still feel, sometimes, as if I've done nothing all day but listen to music, or hear people speak, or watch people gesture toward each other, or whisper, out of love or anger. Some days I feel this all day long. The awkward stutter, the shaking hands, the bright sunshine of a world that suddenly responds. There are private poems I hear recited that almost make me weep.

Christian Wiman describes it best in his essay "God's Truth is Life:"

One must have devotion to be an artist, and there's no way of minimizing its cost. But still, just as in religious contexts, there is a kind of devotion that is, at its heart, escape. These days I am impatient with poetry that is not steeped in, marred and transfigured by, the world. By that I don't mean poetry that has "social concern" or is meticulous with its description, but a poetry in which you can feel that the imagination of the poet has been both charged and chastened by a full encounter with the world and other lives.

* * *

You wake up every day in a world that argues for its own indifference insistently every step of the way. The commercial blockbuster on the Monday news not because of its content, but because of the money it cost and the money it brought in. The latest political campaign is treated the same.

The basic problem is this. It took me years to admit that art matters. Nobody was waiting for my decision, of course; they'd formed their own opinions and changed their own minds. But I decided after years of working long hours in the middle of nowhere to build roads and pipelines that it was okay to imagine a life in which I wrote stories. That if a poem made me understand something that labour had pushed down deep into my heart, it was okay. That if the old man in the grader takes pride in his work - in blading a wet logging road perfectly without any design or calculation on paper - I can take pride in finding the right word.

And so, I'll write another editorial, describing the kind of art we publish here in our second issue, which we are proud of. And again, it's impossible for me to separate the work from the pleasure as I find the perfect metaphor rewatching a favourite movie.

* * *

In The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier challenges Jorgen Leth to remake his film, The Perfect Human, five times, each time with a variety of obstacles placed in the way of his retelling. The obstacles von Trier sets for one of the versions are designed to remove the distance between the artist and his art, to provoke a human response. For this version, Leth must be the actor, the "perfect human," and the film must be in the worst place he knows, though he is not allowed to show that place.

There is a scene in this version when Leth eats a lavish meal before a translucent screen in the heart of Bombay's red light district. The discussion afterwards centres on whether the translucence broke the rule. That is, was the filmmaker too close to the squalor, the worst place on earth, as he defined it? There was agreement in this way - the film was powerful. But did he break the rules to achieve this power?

Of course, in the end, the rules don't matter. The ideal is to achieve this proximity to the worst things going on in the world. The ideal is to face them, to tell the true story. The message is that people live difficult and horrible lives all over the world, whether our art obscures them or illuminates them. We sit down to our feasts while others starve. Does it take a stronger or a weaker man to be honest about it and do it as the hungry look on?

Jan Zwicky recently spoke in Kelowna about poetry's political power. I am paraphrasing her when I say the proper role of the artist is to honestly attend to the world around her. You cannot listen when you're shouting. Zwicky said that if we really attend to the world, the only response is empathy. Empathy is political. What does it mean to be that person who I have never seen? What does it mean to need?

Since we first started putting together the material for Ryga, many people have submitted. The difference in submissions is shown most tellingly, I think, in the authors' notion of the political in art. This is where we differ - art does not succeed very often when it shouts. It rarely succeeds when its primary audience is in the room, at the artist's feet. The scale of our world doesn't always allow us to work beside those who are suffering because of our material wealth, but they still suffer. We still feast. The true artist's imagination must keep those who suffer in the room with him.

It's easy to mock those with this ambition. It's easy to splash paint for the pleasure of the children in the room. It's easy to resort to the sort of work that we see in elections down south - to get the slogans from our party and shout; it's easy, as well, to pretend we are different up here. It should be clear by now this is a contest that diverts energy from the real task.

All the work that lasts, and that rewards our return to it, attends to the details of our world in a special way, as Don McKay points out when he writes "I suspect that the quality of attention surrounding a poem is more important to me than poetry. A species of longing that somehow evades the usual desire to possess. Or, I should add, to use." The meal scene in The Five Obstructions separates the rich from the poor, the sated from the famished, with a barrier that is neither clear nor opaque, to illustrate the point beautifully: we share this world; all that we properly own is our response to it.

What we want is art that provokes empathy. The difference is in the metaphor. Nothing moves us in a schematic diagram, a chart of the wiring, even if what's shown is the engine that powers everything. What we want is a hole punched through the drywall somewhere, the metal exposed, wires live with copper ends sparking in the air, or balled like a tumor, like a body miswired, until some well-intentioned amateur starts snipping. The artist works with live wires and a street somewhere darkens, then is lit, quickly, in some new light.

- Sean Johnston, Editor

You are floating on your back in Kalamalka Lake. At the edge of your vision is the shoreline. You watch the sun drop with a final benevolent glint behind the far mountain. You hear children splashing and the distant drone of a helicopter scanning the mountains for wildfire.

Far beneath you, shadows are held motionless, weighted to the floor of the lake.

They are rising now, breaking the water's surface, finding air in the wide-open sky. They shift, break apart, form shape, take on colour, drift into line, chatter, and rise further. They are unremorseful children, thumbing their noses at gravity.

It is impossible to deny their invitation, their beckoning, so you let go, feel your body lift and rise above the surface of the water. There now. You are airborne.

- Jude Clarke, July 2007

Midnight Over Kalamalka and other works by Jude Clarke are available for purchase by contacting her at judeclarke@uniserve.com

Ed Allen: When Everybody Was Upset

I heard Ed Allen read this story a few years ago in South Dakota and was captivated by the voice and its combination of sincerity and playfulness. Introducing it, he spoke of a goal he was working toward at the time: to write a story that was 100 per cent digression. He described "When Everybody Was Upset" as somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent.

What strikes me most about Allen's writing, aside from its effortless eloquence and precision, is its attention to the minute movements of the human consciousness. The sensitivity to the significant details of the physical world is never an end in itself. Instead, Allen captures the way they wound or soothe his characters, or just trigger a beautiful digression. In this way, Allen captures the real story, which is always in the digressions, in the tentative and improvised nature of life.

- Sean Johnston

Chris Hutchinson: Not Unlike

I first encountered Chris Hutchinson's poems in his second book, Other People's Lives. Now, when I read his "Notes for a Talk on 'How to Write a Poem,'" I am reminded of "Game," one of the first poems I flipped to after picking up his book. It ends with the speaker asking if poetry doesn't seek "not the centre, but life's ironic fringes - / obsessed not with words, but with their hinges?"

What strikes me as I reread the poems that follow is the way Hutchinson honours both the "centre" and the "fringes" - his work has the inclusive, searching, authority of Jorie Graham coupled with Heather McHugh's nimble and playful attention to sound. He's in the desert exposed to the elements one moment and stick-handling in a phone-booth the next.

- Sean Johnston

March Hutchinson & Leila Peacock:
A Modern(ist) Proposal

This selection from their book The Cannibal's Cookbook is co-authored by two ladies of excellent taste. Leila Peacock finished her home economics training at The Sidcup College of Society Dining before taking up residence at the magazine Can You Cook It? March P. Hutchinson completed a BA in tablecloth design before going on to illustrate for Housewifery Monthly. She is presently in-house designer at The Digested Reader. The pair met in the summer of 2006. After acknowledging a mutual love of cannibal cooking and a shared frustration with the lack of cookbooks catering to the gourmet cannibal, they resolved to write their own. Since then, the authors have searched far and wide to bring you these unique recipes, meeting and speaking with many gourmands in order to discover just what the modern cannibal requires of a cookbook.

March Hutchinson is a painter, illustrator and designer. She grew up on music and horses, thanks to the Caravan Farm Theatre. March studied Art History and Studio Arts at Concordia University and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2007. Her interests lead her to several wonderful collaborations with musicians, performers and authors. She co-authored The Cannibal's Cookbook with Leila Peacock, illustrated James Irwin's The Famous Explorer of the 21st Century and co-founded Little Bang Creations in 2007 with Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and James Irwin. March lives in Montreal, and is on the web at marchhutchinson.com

Václav Havel: The Need for Transcendence

"My conscience is clear, I did what I could." - Fistula in Havel's Temptation

The former President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel was a founder of the human rights movement Charter 77, an activist in the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted, a prisoner of the communist state, and he is a playwright and political essayist of the first order. Havel's life has encompassed exclusions (the Academy of Performing Arts), demotions (the Army) and rejections (Charles University) as a consequence of his class, his stance on human rights and his interest in the ways in which language is wielded as a weapon by those in command. The language in his The Garden Party (1969) presents us with a taste of Havel's incisive humour: "the pseudo-familiar inaugurational phraseology ... finally and necessarily led the Inauguration Service into the position of one who undermines the positive endeavor of the Liquidation Office toward consolidation." It is a delightful call to move beyond bureaucratese in a return to the human conversation.

Havel first presented this speech as his Liberty Medal Acceptance Speech at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994, as "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World". The text was provided by the Czech Embassy in Ottawa.The speech encapsulates Havel's desire for a new worldly order, as well as for its definitional clarity. Perfect. A President, especially a former one, is 'careless' enough to deal with ideas and issues of substance; he is pushing beyond the contemporary stasis and its superficial sheen.

From the opening lines of his piece, the echoes of Yeats and Gramsci are apparent. We inhabit an interregnum; morbidity is prominent. Reject the rough beasts, Havel suggests, as we identify the need for a humble awareness of our position(s) and its(their) effect. The alternative is the maintenance of difference in religion, in culture, in ecology, a proroguing of the current interregnum.

- Craig McLuckie

Suzanne Buffam, Rona Altrows, Meghan L. Martin:
3 Voices

Suzanne Buffam's poems explore the loneliness of the poet and the ambivalence of the world towards the poem. "Nothing matters in an ideal world" and the poem is a gesture towards this "ideal world," so its success may render it invisible. Still, it "burn[s] coldly / Through all the foggy mornings."

As she tells us "the facts of life in this family as we know them today," Rona Altrows' hard-done-by narrator reveals the complex love at the family's heart. The story's power is in its seemingly effortless rendering of the voice of a helpless and inarticulate mother fighting for her daughters against a world that sees her clumsy actions as wounding.

In this poem The Book of Fallacy, Meghan L. Martin grapples with the ancient problem of the existence of evil, but does so in a way that doesn't let any of us off the hook. We are all complicit, with "other peoples' pain carefully balanced against / our own."

- Sean Johnston

Rona Altrows' first collection of stories, A Run On Hose (Thistledown 2006) won Calgary's W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in several journals, including The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire and Montreal Serai.

Meghan L. Martin was born and raised in Hyde Park, New York and currently lives in Kelowna, British Columbia. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University and is the recipient of a Theresa A. Wilhoit Fellowship. Her poems are currently available or forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, The Fiddlehead and an anthology called Paradigm.

Lee Maracle: Raven Can Do Anything

I first read Lee Maracle's work when I taught her novel, Sundogs, at First Nations University in Saskatchewan. I remember feeling challenged by her writing; something in me both shrank from and recognized the characters' rage. Maracle has an unflinching voice, a commitment to expose the destructiveness of the "throw-away" culture that has imposed itself on this land. In her essay, "The Lost Days of Columbus," Maracle writes, "There is no such place called 'away ...' I grant no one the authority to destroy anyone's life or toss it away. I extend permission to no one to throw away stone, flora or fauna in dumping grounds, which are no longer places. There are a growing number of people in Canada who share this attitude, who sit next to me and push back on the throwaway culture." In "Raven Can Do Anything," she writes with profound affection for the salmon, who have an intelligence about their homeland that far surpasses that of the two-leggeds.

- Frances Greenslade

Maracle was born in North Vancouver and is a member of the Sto: Loh nation. Maracle is a mother of four and grandmother of seven. She has served as the Distinguished Visiting Professor at both University of Toronto and Western Washington University. Maracle is an award winning author, an award winning instructor and a gifted orator. Upcoming works include: Memory Serves: and other speeches (Newest Press 2012), First Wives' Club and other stories (Theytus 2010).

Maracle currently teaches in the Aboriginal Studies program at the University of Toronto and the Centre of Indigenous Theatre.

How to Induce Sleep

Search Lights on Health, Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice to Maiden, Wife and Mother, Love, Courtship and Marriage, written by Benjamin Grant Jefferis and James Lawrence Nichols, was first published in Toronto in 1894, went through 41 printings and sold over one million copies. Although the authors had high-minded intentions to tackle the "problem" of sex within the often desperate limitations of the time, it is now inconceivable that such boring and overstated claptrap could have been printed and read. Among its multitude of sins, it puts the woman on a exceedingly uncomfortable and untenable pedestal and castigates the unfeeling, harsh and rough sexual behavior of men. Among its more strange explorations is the following section on - for whatever reason - inducing sleep. These panels are from a series of experimental mediated reading environments.

- Robert MacDonald

Colin Snowsell: The Fat Man and the Quail

In this essay, Colin Snowsell explores the problem luxury creates in a moral being. As the authors of "A Modern(ist) Proposal" write, "surely the more civilized the man, the more civilized his meat." Snowsell dissects the civilized man's dinner party and the world that burns around him with language that is slightly unnerving; its register at times mimicking the ritualized performance of the public feast that is its subject. The difference is, of course, that the richness of his language deprives no one of the same.

- Sean Johnston

Renee Sarojini Saklikar: from thecanadaproject

Renee Sarojini Saklikar's thecanadaproject explores the complexity of identity construction through the making of a documentary poem. The speaker's search for her identity, for a solid place where she can stand "I was born here," is compelling in its movement between the objective and the subjective. At times the evidence is present and persuasive, but memory intrudes. This excerpt from thecanadaproject is appropriately called "exhibits and interjections" but these categories are never clear. The real world corrects the memory just as the memory corrects a record of the world - the ambivalence with which the speaker records her project is a moving human response to the contradictions around her, as she cannot abandon "a made up name by a man now dead."

- Sean Johnston

Judith Pond: Jazz

Judith Pond has been publishing sharp, perfectly rendered lyrics for years - her book Lovers and Other Monsters is a beautiful exploration of the difficulty of negotiating the boundaries of self while remaining open to the people we are closest to. In this story the heroine is desperate to reassert herself in the world in order to survive her grief. She finds her new centre in her body, as a dance class entered as a gesture of defiance leads her to a renewed understanding of herself. The aggressiveness of the second person narration gradually softens as we learn the source of her grief and appreciate her defiance as an act of celebration.

- Sean Johnston

Sally Stubbs: Centurions

The loner at the centre of Centurions is Mark, an adolescent more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. The play explores the increasing impossibility of controlling one's identity after cheap technology has democratized the ability to capture events and images from the world around us. Despite its sinister undertones, what's compelling about Mark's interrogation by Detective Wright, is his endearing fragility - even his memories are mediated through cameras and commercial fantasies. In the end, solving the crime is less important to us than seeing Mark live fully in the material world around him.

- Sean Johnston