Meredith
Quartermain (Canada)
1950
Born
in Toronto, Ontario, Meredith Quartermain spent her childhood in Ontario and
the remote interior of British Columbia. At the University of British Columbia
she took degrees in English Literature, English Language and Law. After
practicing law for three years and then teaching English for seven years at
Capilano College, North Vancouver, she left the world of paid employment to write
and to run, with husband Peter, Nomados Literary Publishers.
Quartermain sat on the collective at the
Kootenay School of Writing in 2000-2001, and her work has been loosely
associated with the KSW.
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Her first book Terms of Sale
contains both innovative poetry exploring the non-referential music of
language, and poems of place concerned with city life and neighborhoods. Abstract
Relations and Spatial Relations continue her exploration of language and
innovative form, these works being sections of a longer work in progress
shaping itself around the six major sections of Roget's original Thesaurus. The
Eye-Shift of Surface is also highly experimental in its form, being
constructed in verse paragraphs from materials listed under entries for the
letter I and the word eye in the Oxford English Dictionary. The poem included
in the present selection is taken from Wanders, a book that contains 19
poems by Robin Blaser with 19 "translations" or
"transelations" (to use Erin Mouré's term) by Quartermain which
replicate Blaser's syllable count and metrics.
With
A Thousand Mornings, Quartermain combined innovative form and language play
to explore the streetscape she could see from her window. Rachel Blau DuPlessis
describes the book as "a serious-playful and engaging work in which she
weighs and sounds what presents itself outside a real window, inside language,
and through verbal-emotional associations. Written in pointillist phrases,
diaristic, notational, associative, punning, funning and just following any
track, the work sits down to itself: to the world, and to the self in
time."
Vancouver Walking continues her
exploration of city life, using what she calls "historical
surrealism" to explore the power struggles engraved on the city's face.
The book has brought her national attention, with the Toronto Globe and Mail
commenting: "Quartermain's poetic tour . . . reads the downtown's every
street sign and historical plaque to invoke not vagaries of weather or a
sensitive narrator's emotional landscape, but the lived epic of how specific
native soil became appropriated to a condition of contemporary real
estate."
In 2016 Quartermain published a work of
fiction, U Girl.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Terms
of Sale
(Buffalo: Meow, 1996); Abstract Relations (Vancouver: Keefer Street,
1998); Spatial Relations (Boca Raton, Florida: Diaeresis, 2001); Wanders
[with Robin Blaser] (Vancouver: Nomados, 2002); A Thousand Mornings
(Vancouver: Nomados, 2002); The Eye-Shift of Surface (Victoria:
Greenboathouse, 2003); Vancouver Walking (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2005);
Matter (BookThug, 2008); Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008), Recipes
from the Red Planet (BookThug, 2011); Rupert’s Land (NeWest Press,
2013); I, Bartleby (Talonbooks, 2015)
╬Winner
of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
from
Wanders
Whoa
noet,
How
be blasted in the dumb plethora,
where
the beleaguable grounds
to
blurb crowned eel
as
oil or selenery –
zippery,
misbridged with flints,
at
cool juxtance. Do
brittle
chuffles singe our rhizomatics
wither
verbs impurge
for
a carping lurched sideways
as
schist from cockles under vox?
faith
lose song to its ruckle
its
ivy pace mulled to a sea saw
and
pitchy – skip-jump to cuckoo corkscrew
and
feathery vex under hubbub
while
it churns oozy – hey, shebang
for
a whoop teeter
in
salient fumblage.
____
Reprinted
from Fascicle, no. 1 (Summer 2005). Copyright ©2005 by Meredith
Quatermain.
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