 Home Ryga Journal Ryga Chapbooks Buy & Subscribe Submissions Festival Readings Ryga Week & Award About George Ryga Contact  THE RYGA INITIATIVE AT OKANAGAN COLLEGE in association with the Okanagan Institute
|
 A JOURNAL OF PROVOCATIONS Honouring George Ryga's Enduring LegacyNumber 1, Fall 2009TABLE OF CONTENTS Sean Johnston: Introducing Ryga George Ryga's most famous character is Rita Joe, and her place in our world is obvious and damning still. Among the real world examples that informed his writing of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is the story of a young boy taken from his home in northern Ontario to a residential school. He was found during a helicopter search for truants and taken by helicopter to the school. From the air he saw the train tracks that could lead him back to his community. When he could, he followed those tracks and died, frozen, beside them.Metaphors guide us, as artists, and if we're at work at two in the morning when there is milk to deliver at dawn, it's to tell a story to take that young boy home, to bend and break the metaphors, to discover new ones, or new uses for old ones. The railroad is a symbol of our national construction, and of the domination of the centre, but the boy used it for himself. But the young man torn from his community must find his way back. George Ryga knew that. We cannot let the roles we play determine our vision. We cannot become the magistrate from The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, who glimpses briefly the solitary child by the road and then cannot find her again. Claiming to not see the questions of our time does not answer them.  George Ryga wrote about this world now and that currency, that urgency is what we want to carry on here. Ryga will seek the best stories, essays, poems and plays in this tradition – the literature
that our country is so rich in: literature that writes its way home without giving in to nostalgia; literature that celebrates all our competing traditions and resists any safe homogeneity; but literature that refuses to romanticize the voices of the past in a way that denies them a life in the present or the right to presume a central role in the future.We will not look away. This is art that may entertain but more often challenges. It exists in the call centres, in the kitchens, in the studios, the harvests, the factories. It's building a road somewhere, finding a new way into community. As George Ryga wrote: An artist in our time can turn and flee from all this – rush away to some patch of earth reasonably insulated from the drumbeats of ongoing history [ ... ] but that is not the only choice. There is another method of approaching this uncompromising dilemma. And that is to continue on into the desert [ ... ] to allow new language and metaphor to filter into oneself through osmosis of food, climate, pacing, humour, fear. We will avoid art that flees. We will avoid art that describes but does not take a stand. We will celebrate prose, for instance, that contains what Steven Milhauser calls the "secret aggression" to contain the whole world. We will publish poems that, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney, are born from an impulse to answer, and, in that answer, to provoke a continuing response. All art is response. It cannot exist outside the political no matter how hard it tries. If it describes a flower, it describes a flower as the artist sees it, depending on her bravery, her fear, her humility, her arrogance, but she describes it as it must be also. Its place in the world depends upon it. Art responds to the world with its own provocations. It demands new answers. It never ends the conversation. The basic question we will ask is: What is at stake? If we fail, what happens? And here, again, George Ryga is our model. What is at stake is Rita Joe's life. If she fails, she dies, and she does. If the world fails in its response to Rita Joe, what is at stake is our humanity. It is the world as it is in conflict with the world as it should be. We take our name from Ryga, a political writer, to honour his commitment to his art and to his world. His legacy is this: he was a human living in a community and that community was living in a nation, that nation in a world. He wrote without nostalgia about the world that lived around him. He believed the artist had a responsibility to write counter-narratives, to treat the marginalized among us fairly, to challenge the formal boundaries of his art without losing the humanity of the characters that drive it. These characters live and move according to a complex, tentative political agreement that must not be taken as natural, but must be interrogated in every way. S E A N J O H N S T O N , E D I T O R Jake Kennedy: StudiesA New ObjectivityJake Kennedy's poems are informed by an impulse toward truth, despite the erudition and education of the postmodern artist and reader, despite the fact we are told there is no such thing. It's clear the truth is flawed - from the moment of its articulation, at least, but maybe from the moment of its conception. The easy way out, then, is to deny the impulse to move toward it, to give in to the idea that we live in the intellect, which forbids truth, and not in the world, which demands it. As one of the poems asks: "Why not start from belief?" Why not start from what we can hold and work our way outward from there? Each object is its own centre and we are, with Kennedy's poems, caught in its rings, considering our place in the world, not the world's confusion surrounding us. Kennedy begins in the world with these meditations on material objects - grass, trees, bullets, the screen of a drive-in - and moves outward from them into a world that is wild and domestic at the same time, a world that is inclusive enough to include the heart in its intellectual investigation of life. The tiger, to paraphrase one poem, is not concerned if its stalking measures up to other performances of stalking - it's out for blood. It hunts to survive. - Sean Johnston Jake Kennedy is a professor of English at Okanagan College, specialising in modernism and the avant-garde. His poems, prose pieces, and visuals/videos have appeared in over twenty Canadian, American and British journals. His chapbook, Hazard (BookThug, 2006) won the bp Nichol award. He is also on the board of the Alternator Gallery, Kelowna. Sheri Benning: DollhousePhotographs of "Dollhouse," Sinclair, Manitoba by Heather BenningA New Past I know Sheri Benning as a poet, and was immediately drawn to her work - the collections Earth After Rain and Thin Moon Psalm - not because we share a common past, both having grown up in rural Saskatchewan, but because she treats that past in a way I hadn't seen before. As William Faulkner wrote "the past is never dead. It's not even past," and what makes Benning's poetry powerful is its acknowledgement of this idea. This essay, originally published in Theatre Canada Review, explores how place underpins the "living archive" of a present that is never removed from its past. It does so while meditating on the power of Heather Benning's "Dollhouse" - a beautiful and stunning example of "regain[ing] living contact with place itself." - Sean Johnston Sheri Benning grew up on a small farm in central Saskatchewan. Her second book of poetry, Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books, 2007) won the Saskatchewan Book Award's Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award and The City of Saskatoon Book Award. Her first book of poetry, Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press, 2001) also won two Saskatchewan Book Awards - the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award and the Brenda Riches MacDonald First Book Award. Benning is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta and a Research Fellow in the University of Glasgow's creative writing program. Robert Priest: The Sadness of SpacemenA Dream-Like LandscapeThese prose poems, from Robert Priest's 1980 collection Sadness of Spacemen, are still jarring thirty years after their initial publication. They're surreal portraits of a speaker purposefully occupying a position of madness to know the world more fully. The speed of these poems seems at odds with their density, and that's where their power comes from - they include the whole world somehow in a great rush and then slow, suddenly, to offer a small, heartbreaking detail, like the "poor factory father ... made smaller by so many sons." The dream-like landscape seems real, and is perfectly described, until something small and familiar asserts itself, like "the big nothing at the end of the gauge," and the archetype, the symbol, becomes concrete. We realize then how far we've been taken from this quotidian world by our return to it. We find ourselves like the speaker in "On the Assembly Line," surprised to find one of the constructed flowers to be real, the "kind with human blood." - Sean Johnston Robert Priest is a fabulist writer in the tradition of Cortazar and Borges, a composer of lush love poems, a widely quoted aphorist, and the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose. His collection, The Mad Hand, was the recipient of the Milton Acorn People's Poetry award in 1989. His 3rd spoken word CD, Tongue'n'Groove, was released on EMI's prestigious Artisan label in 1998. He has entertained at numerous music & poetry festivals in Canada and around the world. Robert lives in Toronto where he continues to write his "Passionate, cocky alternately adoring and insulting verse." (The Toronto Star). Stephanie Yorke: From a Long Poem Set in a Small TownHonouring a Fictive WorldStephanie Yorke's poem is a narrative sequence that recalls the best examples of the local becoming universal, immersing us in the lives of a small community without explanation. It's an approach that honours the reality of this fictive world with an authority that comes from precise attention to not just details, but the weight they carry, which sometimes becomes unbearable. Characters become themselves and "make love in small apartments, brazen and adequate; / go to church, or don't" after sloughing off the judging adjectives with which the community has saddled them. The excerpt printed here promises a moving and nuanced portrayal of a community, as engaging as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but much more generous. The people in Yorke's poem never become types as some of Anderson's do; rather each person negotiates her place in a community rooted organically in its political and physical environment. - Sean Johnston Stephanie Yorke rode her bicycle across Canada last summer. Her poetry has been published in Grain, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, The Malahat Review, Descant, Prarie Fire and other literary journals. Stephen Henighan: Terms of SurrenderInto the Heart of Another DarknessIn Terms of Surrender, Stephen Henighan contemplates the plight of a clean cut, suit-wearing former revolutionary guerilla on the wrong side of town. South-of-the-border literary journeys by non-Latinos are not new. Enigmatic B. Traven - who wrote under a nom de plume and may have been American, but might have written in German - mined the themes of Latino culture in books such as Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as did another cultural wanderer, Joseph Conrad in Nostromo. The move south coincides with a shift to urbanism amongst post-Boom writers grown weary of magic and realism and black beans. In Tinta Roja, for instance, Chilean Alberto Fuguet has a grizzled urban Santiago ambulance chaser offer us the same wisdom Lester Bangs offers in Almost Famous: the real writer must remain outside. Henighan, like Traven or Conrad, has seldom seemed to need this reminder. In a business suit, a revolutionary is not what he once was, no matter his intention. Innovation is similarly restricted by thematically barren taxonomy; explorations outside the canon and outside the continent aren't diversionary. They're essential. - Colin Snowsell Stephen Henighan's fiction includes the novel The Streets of Winter and the short story collection A Grave in the Air. His non-fiction includes the landmark essay collection When Words Deny the World, which went through three printings and was selected as one of the hundred best books of the year by The Globe and Mail.His most recent essay collection, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, praised by The Harvard Book Review for its "intricate and tightly coiled explorations of the questions plaguing literature in a globalized world," was widely reviewed and discussed upon its publication in 2008. Stephen teaches Spanish American literature at the University of Guelph. Alexei Porvin: Kneel at the WaterEnglish translations by Nika Skandiaka and Peter GolubIntroducing Alexei Porvin In his 2004 preface to a new anthology of young Russian poetry, the poet and literary critic Danila Davydov mentions two new generations of authors to emerge after the fall of the Soviet Union: the Vavilon generation which first formed in the later years of perestroika, and the Debut generation which was formed in 1990s and came to full fruition in the 2000s around the Debut Prize. Davydov names the year 1981 as the boundary between these two generations. Alexei Porvin, born in 1982, is on the cusp of this generational shift. His poetry has tinges of the rich Russian modernist tradition, from the Symbolism of Alexander Blok to the Acmeism of Osip Mandelstam. However, the sincerity and almost childlike innocence of many of his poems points to the common mode of the new generations of Russian poets, who prefer honesty to well crafted metaphor and free verse to meter. Porvin casts a wide net in his poems -it is an ambitious project with great potential. - Peter Golub, Translator Alexei Porvin was born in 1982 in Leningrad. His poems can be found in the magazines TextOnly, Neva, Rets, Vozdukh among others. Porvin is the participant of the international literature entity "New Camera" www.newkamera.de. His book of poetry The Darkness is White was published in Moscow in 2009 by Argo-Risk Press within the framework of the Russian Debut Prize. Jim Cliffe: PrequelThe View from a CliffeOne of the inherent paradoxes in the life of a superhero is that his civilian identity (required so a certain healthy psychological balance is maintained) is structured on a bedrock of lies; its facade is exactly that, a mask woven from half-truths and deceit. And though all this is done for the greater good - to protect the hero's loved ones, to ensure the hero can continue to fight the good fight without fear of compromise - the base falsity of it is inescapable. This is just one of the several points touched upon by Jim Cliffe in his masterful take on superhero mythology, Tomorrow's Memoir, a 27-minute short film which can also be seen as a skillfully-crafted look at the twilight of one of DC's icons. Told in noirish voice-over, it's a melancholy tale of bitterness and regret, of the toll the life of the superhero can have on the individual, of the cost to one's self and soul. Cliffe wrote and illustrated a prequel comic to Tomorrow's Memoir a week before screening at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, where the film was awarded 'Best Comics-Oriented Film'. He has revised it for this appearance. - Robert MacDonald Jim Cliffe is an award-winning artist and filmmaker with a diverse background as a professional illustrator, photographer, and animator, whose talents have been recognized by Disney Studios. He has worked professionally as an artist and animator with companies such as Kellogg's, Fox, and Anagram Pictures ('The Delicate Art of Parking' and 'Fido'). Jim's 27-minute short film 'Tomorrow's Memoir' has received wide attention since awarded Best-Comics-Oriented Film at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, garnering rave reviews from various media sources. Jim's feature-length screenplay, 'Donovan's Echo' (co-written with his writing partner, Melodie Krieger) won the Bronze award in the 2007 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards and made quarter-finalist in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 2007 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. 'Donovan's Echo' has since found interest and is currently in development. For more on Jim, please visit www.jimcliffe.com J.R. Carpenter Three StoriesEnduranceCarpenter's quietly moving stories are about endurance in the wake of tragedy. They're about the impossibility of fully understanding the world we live in. Bodies of water dominate the stories and the constant, rhythmic movement between the literal and the figurative undersurface emphasizes the fragility of human life. The narrator in "Truth, Dare, Double-Dare, Promise to Repeat," for instance, longs for the inevitable sexual knowledge of adulthood, but the sinister nature of the impaired vision, the silty water where she and her friends swim, makes the future dark and dangerous. - Sean Johnston J. R. Carpenter was named a Montreal Mirror Noisemaker for 2009 and is the winner of the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition (2003 & 2005), and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, published by Conundrum Press in 2008. Her electronic literature has been exhibited internationally and can be found on www.luckysoap.com. Air Holes was Winner of the CBC/QWF Québec Short Story Competition, 2005, and anthologized in In Other Words: New English Writing from Québec, Véhicule Press, Montréal, QC, Spring 2008. Peter Dale Scott: For Maylie Scott(KUSHIN SEISHO DAIOSHO)March 29, 1935 - May 10, 2001 One of Our Greatest Poets I first read Peter Dale Scott when he published the first of his Seculum trilogy, Coming to Jakarta, a book Robert Hass praised as "the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time." Hass went on to describe it as "immensely ambitious and mostly unparalleled." Its ambition is what drew me to his poetry, and his work is always ambitious. The poem that follows contains the world as it celebrates a life, and beauty, and stillness. An introduction to this poem must fail; the noise of my voice seems counter to what follows. Still, I am honoured to try. Peter Dale Scott is one of our greatest poets. This poem is from his new book, Mosaic Orpheus (McGill-Queen's University Press). - Sean Johnston Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry includes his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta (1988), Listening to the Candle (1992), and Minding the Darkness (2000), and also Crossing Borders (1994). His work was featured in Agni 31/32 (1990) and Chicago Review 44/3&4 (1998). With Czeslaw Milosz he translated the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (Penguin, 1968). In 2002 he received the Lannan Poetry Award. His most recent prose book is The Road to 9/11 (2007). You can read some of his poetry at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/B-II.html. Mark Rucker: Phantom Graphite DrawingsThe Graphite ImaginationIn the late 1970s Mark Rucker embarked on creating a series of graphite drawings, we he entitled the 'phantom' series, which grew out of two fascinations. The first was with graphite, which is more commonly called pencil lead. The second fascination was with combining images from different places and times, to create believable situations, which never could have happened. He worked on this series for about a decade, employing pictorial material found in magazine advertisements, stereo views, Victorian cabinet photos, old postcards, and grainy newspaper photos. A few compelling ideas led him to start this project, ideas which kept him interested during the months of doing the intricate and demanding work. As Rucker explains, "The coordinates in time and space in which photographic images are recorded exist but momentarily. As soon as coordinates are established they disappear to be replaced by a new set, which in turn is gone, and then replaced by another, and so on. Within our capability of understanding, there is thus no real point isolated in space and time, but a thread of coordinates, which in turn intersects with other threads, which in turn form web-like patterns so complex that they cannot be isolated or completely recorded in any way. Photographs lock on one point, movie film locks onto a thread of coordinates, but neither can go beyond these inherent limitations. These points, isolated as they are, act like phantoms, here and then immediately gone. The phantom recording of light in time is the camera's job. "I wanted to take the record of light one step further in some spooky drawings, which if successful, would serve as ideograms. I found that by placing characters from an 1880 photo into a decidedly different, e.g. art deco, photographic background, a further quality of the phantom could be achieved, and by combining photographic images, properly scaled, and unifying them in a graphite-on-paper medium, a new visual continuity could be created. Through photographic technology the photomontage can allow multiple images to be combined into a single image, but the effect seldom reaches a visual level beyond a intentionally constructed confusion, or an anomaly. By transferring the image combinations into another medium, in this case graphite, a believable continuity occurs in surface appearance and strange things happen to the depicted scenes. "There is a special life in graphite, and when you work with it a lot, you become sensitive to its possibilities. 9H graphite is so hard you can cut the paper surface with it, while 9B graphite is so soft that it melts like butter onto the page, building up a deep, reflective surface. The qualities of the graphite itself helped breathe life into the phantom series, but the drawings look entirely different in person than printed on a page. I can only hope that seeing these accompanying reproductions as ink on a page enhances rather than diminishes the phantom effect." - Robert MacDonald Mark Rucker is the author of numerous books, including The Beer and Whisky League: The Illustrated History of the American Association, and Detroit Aces: The First 75 Years. Rucker received the Tony Salin Award in 2007 from the Baseball Reliquary for his contribution to preserving the history of the game. He operates a publishing and picture agency since 1986, and his collection has attracted the attention of collectors, publications ranging from the New York Times to children's books, to Ken Burns' Emmy Award winning 1994 documentary Baseball. A tiny fraction of his photographic and lithographic collection appears on his website www.theruckerarchive.com. Judith Pond: Endangered SpeciesOur Secret HopeJudith 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. The multiple voices and allegiances that are contained in every single person are represented formally in Pond's story by its constant movement between speech, thought, textual references and parenthetical asides. We feel the uneasy insinuation of Grace into her quirky new family. What makes "Endangered Species" exceptional is Pond's affection for each character. Though the young woman, Grace, is the protagonist, each character is generously drawn in this short story. Somehow, in this short space, we know them all, though Grace remains the centre, and we secretly hope she's not tamed. - Sean Johnston Judith Pond's fiction and poetry have been featured on CBC Radio and in a range of Canadian literary magazines, including Malahat Review, Grain, Prairie Fire, and Event. With Oberon Press, Ottawa, she has published fiction (Coming Attractions) and three collections of poetry. She is currently completing her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and working on a collection of short stories. She teaches English in Calgary. Doppleganger: LenFalkensteinHistory's Current ManifestationsThe spirit of "Doppleganger," by Len Falkenstein, and its unflinching portrayal of history's current manifestations, reminds me of George Ryga's "Captives of the Faceless Drummer." Falkenstein's play portrays the current western war and its underpinning economic and ideological causes by examining its human face. Introducing "Doppleganger," I cannot help but fall back on Peter Hay's preface to Ryga's published play (Talon 1972). In this play, Falkenstein "takes the clichés of class struggle and gives them an actuality, a context - above all, a humanity." He is "searching for the truth, and the tension is derived from the clash of two opposing world views, both of which are given full exposition." What makes "Doppleganger" an important and moving play is its "complete rejection of dogma in favour of seeking out the complex meaning of certain contemporary events." - Sean Johnston Len Falkenstein is Director of Drama at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where he teaches theatre, drama, and playwriting. He is Artistic Director of the NotaBle Acts Theatre Company, whose mandate is the development and production of new plays by New Brunswick dramatists, and Bard in the Barracks, a company that produces outdoor summer Shakespeare. His plays include Doppelganger (produced at Summerworks Theatre Festival, Toronto, and Fringe festivals in Halifax, Montreal, Edmonton, and Vancouver) as well as Futures, Free/Fall, and Happy City, all of which premiered at the NotaBle Acts Summer Theatre Festival and have played at Fringes across Canada. |