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A Bouquet Brought Back from Space
by Kevin Spenst (Anvil Press $18)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2024)
Public reader, event organizer, moderator and columnist for subTerrain magazine where he tracks chapbooks, poet Kevin Spenst has authored, or collaborated on, thirteen of these himself. In addition to his chapbooks, his latest title, A Bouquet Brought Back From Space, is his fourth collection with Anvil Press in less than ten years. Clearly, he’s an energetic, hard-working writer.
These new poems resonate throughout with Spenst’s Mennonite and family history. Memory is critical and Spenst’s father, who struggled with mental illness, surfaces repeatedly. There are meditations on Spenst’s ancestral origins, on poverty, on old-school Mennonite pacifist discipline—and on a grandfather who could still wallop the faces of unwary young males. This tough love is juxtaposed in the book’s latter half with the joy of Spenst’s own intimate partnership, and gratitude flows through his many love poems which, strangely, is a genre we don’t see much of anymore.
Spenst is also a technician. His poetics are wide-ranging and employ phrasings from Low German and multiple languages: keep your Google Translate function handy.
A prose-poem, “A Post Mennonite Preface…” articulates Spenst’s concerns: “I can’t stop thinking of petals in the morning light, trying to imagine some wholeness heralded by beauty in a world built out of broken parts, schisms, and histories of fear and violence…What else can I do but acknowledge systems of oppression while decorating mystery in beauty, absurdity and historic flourishes?”
In counterpoint, he reflects on his father’s schizophrenia that he explored in an earlier collection, Ignite. Remembering him as “an iceberg calving father on the lazy-boy who collapsed our home into cold waves...”—it’s bleak. Other memories are like weather reports when it rains “sharp teeth.” There are few good endings. “How many asylum visits assailed/ our no-place-like-home, how many ways/ did you go for broke” he asks. “How many times did/ we ride out your storms?…I’m calling for the one I can no longer trust.”
Yet there’s empathy, too, for a father who’d “gone lunar.” You’d need a heart of stone not to appreciate “Kneeling by the Side of the Bed, He Taught Me to Pray” with its beautiful image from childhood: a father, guiding. Spenst yearns to travel back “with what I know/ now and work on the mechanics of our awk-/ wardness, to stop mid-prayer and tell my dad/ he wasn’t a sin-wracked failure… just different.” That’s a hard moment of recollection. This is what poetry can give us. A small shot at something like redemption, of compassion.
As Spenst’s fellow Fraser Valley Mennonite poet, Robert Martens, has reminded us, you don’t come from the Bible Belt and not know about angels. “This The Day” is a series of tercets on the delight of contemplating angels that are noted in half a dozen exotic orthographies—Burmese, Hindi, Malayalam and Chinese. Back in the day, mothers comforted ailing children with stories of their guardian angels that “fold their wings in unison to hold up our world,” writes Spenst. Here’s a guy who can still recall that lost magic.
The Dalai Lama reminds us that we’re not compelled to follow our parents’ faith teachings, but that we shouldn’t rush to junk them either. “Astrophysical Flowerings”… plumbs Spenst’s faded Christian heritage with an epigraph from the Book of Luke— “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Spotlighting Jesus the carpenter who, in his own agony, still comforts the low-caste crucified thief beside him, it’s a timely tale from a troubled city like Vancouver.
For a nearer taste of our world, now on fire from horizon to horizon, consider “In the Geology of a Moment” that tracks the topology of a scream. With his own troubles, what Spenst craves is to crawl inside what Gabor Maté might call a complex trauma—“the inner sanctuary of/ my scream” to let it go and understand. Think Gaza. Ukraine.
It’s not all edgy relevance. There’s fun as well in Spenst’s surrealist lyrics. “It Will Rain Like Rods on the Hillside in Sweden” showers geographically appropriate precipitation—frogs’ legs rain down in France, plums plummet in Taipei, frontal systems of bamboo fall on Tokyo. Why not? Poetry is a way of looking at the world, something between blarney and prophecy.
The book’s title arrives via the old Mennonite capacity to regard even suffering as a blessing. Depicting a winter’s indisposition, “Another Gift of a Migraine” portrays its creeping aura as “a psychedelic porcupine,” “a jagged halo” that shades “the border of consciousness” between light and darkness. But there are moments, Spenst hopes, that may be shared— of “concocted angels,” of “reprieve,” or of a sacredness that “he can hold out to others.” From such exhaustion may come, he affirms, “a bouquet brought back from space.” Even anguish, we see, can have value if we trust. 9781772142259
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver.
***
You can't keep a good poet down.
Having undertaken a 100-venue, cross-Canada reading tour in 2014, Kevin Spenst of Vancouver undertook a 50-venue, all-in-B.C. tour to promote his collection Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil 2015). The whirlwind tour began in Vancouver at the Hogan's Alley Cafe on April 13 and culminated on May 15 with a reading at the Alaska Ferry Terminal in Prince Rupert. Stops along the way included White Rock, Surrey, New Westminster, Cumberland, Courtenay, Victoria, Nelson, Prince George, Smithers, and Prince Rupert. The most high-profile event was held on April 23 at The Railway Club in Vancouver with local poet Jeff Steudel (Foreign Park) and Montreal's Melissa Bull (Rue). The line-up of locales was posted at: http://tinyurl.com/omfb3cnReadings
Kevin Spenst represents a new generation of poets which incorporates the digital world into their writing routines. In 2003, he wrote a new story, online, every day for the entire year. In 2004, Spenst again wrote daily, this time in the form of flash fiction inspired by contemporary art. Another project involved writing and emailing stories to numerous people around the world who would in turn print and hide the writings so that others would find them. Each piece had Spenst's email address and a plea for the finder to identify their whereabouts.
In 2007, Spenst self-published Fast Fictions, a sampling of the stories he had previously emailed out. In 2008 he revisited his story-a-day-for-a-year challenge to himself, this time using a different pseudonym for every piece. Reader feedback ranged from fan mail, to requests for medical advice, to hatemail when Spenst wrote under the pseudonym Yann Martel.
According to publicity materials, Kevin Spenst's debut collection of poetry, Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press, 2015) opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver's suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop and "post-Mennonite" culture.
We are told, "Language is at play with sit-com sonnets, soundscapes of noise, videogame goombas, an Old-Testament God, teenage longing within the power chords of heavy metal and the complicated loss of a father to schizophrenia. Jabbering with Bing Bong chronicles the heartbreaking and slapstick pursuit of truth in the realms of religion, mental health and poetic form itself."
While tracing his dating history in Vancouver to find the love of his life, Spenst simultaneously probes the historical form of England’s love sonnet in his 2020 collection of poems, Hearts Amok (Anvil $18). Journeying from the Middle Ages to contemporary times, Spenst intermixes hobo slang with the diction of an ancient troubadour to describe the caprices, woes, and triumphs of the human heart.
Spenst's poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, Rhubarb Magazine, Capilano Review, dANDelion, filling Station, Poetry is Dead, Moonshot Magazine, The Maynard, illiterature, The Enpipe Line, V6A and Ditch Poetry. He was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, his manuscript Ignite was a finalist for the Alfred G. Baily Prize, and in 2011, pieces from Ignite won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.
Kevin Spenst is also a founding member of Thursdays Editing Collective at Carnegie Center, a group that assists writers in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
CHAPBOOKS:
Pray Goodbye (Alfred Gustav Press, 2013)
Retractable (Serif of Nottingham, 2013)
Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012)
What the Frag Meant (100 têtes press, 2014)
Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press, 2014).
BOOKS:
Hearts Amok (Anvil, 2020) $18 978-1-77214-149-8
Ignite (Anvil Press, 2016) $18 978-1-77214-053-8
Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil, 2015) $18 978-1-77214-014-9
[BCBW 2020]
by Kevin Spenst (Anvil Press $18)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2024)
Public reader, event organizer, moderator and columnist for subTerrain magazine where he tracks chapbooks, poet Kevin Spenst has authored, or collaborated on, thirteen of these himself. In addition to his chapbooks, his latest title, A Bouquet Brought Back From Space, is his fourth collection with Anvil Press in less than ten years. Clearly, he’s an energetic, hard-working writer.
These new poems resonate throughout with Spenst’s Mennonite and family history. Memory is critical and Spenst’s father, who struggled with mental illness, surfaces repeatedly. There are meditations on Spenst’s ancestral origins, on poverty, on old-school Mennonite pacifist discipline—and on a grandfather who could still wallop the faces of unwary young males. This tough love is juxtaposed in the book’s latter half with the joy of Spenst’s own intimate partnership, and gratitude flows through his many love poems which, strangely, is a genre we don’t see much of anymore.
Spenst is also a technician. His poetics are wide-ranging and employ phrasings from Low German and multiple languages: keep your Google Translate function handy.
A prose-poem, “A Post Mennonite Preface…” articulates Spenst’s concerns: “I can’t stop thinking of petals in the morning light, trying to imagine some wholeness heralded by beauty in a world built out of broken parts, schisms, and histories of fear and violence…What else can I do but acknowledge systems of oppression while decorating mystery in beauty, absurdity and historic flourishes?”
In counterpoint, he reflects on his father’s schizophrenia that he explored in an earlier collection, Ignite. Remembering him as “an iceberg calving father on the lazy-boy who collapsed our home into cold waves...”—it’s bleak. Other memories are like weather reports when it rains “sharp teeth.” There are few good endings. “How many asylum visits assailed/ our no-place-like-home, how many ways/ did you go for broke” he asks. “How many times did/ we ride out your storms?…I’m calling for the one I can no longer trust.”
Yet there’s empathy, too, for a father who’d “gone lunar.” You’d need a heart of stone not to appreciate “Kneeling by the Side of the Bed, He Taught Me to Pray” with its beautiful image from childhood: a father, guiding. Spenst yearns to travel back “with what I know/ now and work on the mechanics of our awk-/ wardness, to stop mid-prayer and tell my dad/ he wasn’t a sin-wracked failure… just different.” That’s a hard moment of recollection. This is what poetry can give us. A small shot at something like redemption, of compassion.
As Spenst’s fellow Fraser Valley Mennonite poet, Robert Martens, has reminded us, you don’t come from the Bible Belt and not know about angels. “This The Day” is a series of tercets on the delight of contemplating angels that are noted in half a dozen exotic orthographies—Burmese, Hindi, Malayalam and Chinese. Back in the day, mothers comforted ailing children with stories of their guardian angels that “fold their wings in unison to hold up our world,” writes Spenst. Here’s a guy who can still recall that lost magic.
The Dalai Lama reminds us that we’re not compelled to follow our parents’ faith teachings, but that we shouldn’t rush to junk them either. “Astrophysical Flowerings”… plumbs Spenst’s faded Christian heritage with an epigraph from the Book of Luke— “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Spotlighting Jesus the carpenter who, in his own agony, still comforts the low-caste crucified thief beside him, it’s a timely tale from a troubled city like Vancouver.
For a nearer taste of our world, now on fire from horizon to horizon, consider “In the Geology of a Moment” that tracks the topology of a scream. With his own troubles, what Spenst craves is to crawl inside what Gabor Maté might call a complex trauma—“the inner sanctuary of/ my scream” to let it go and understand. Think Gaza. Ukraine.
It’s not all edgy relevance. There’s fun as well in Spenst’s surrealist lyrics. “It Will Rain Like Rods on the Hillside in Sweden” showers geographically appropriate precipitation—frogs’ legs rain down in France, plums plummet in Taipei, frontal systems of bamboo fall on Tokyo. Why not? Poetry is a way of looking at the world, something between blarney and prophecy.
The book’s title arrives via the old Mennonite capacity to regard even suffering as a blessing. Depicting a winter’s indisposition, “Another Gift of a Migraine” portrays its creeping aura as “a psychedelic porcupine,” “a jagged halo” that shades “the border of consciousness” between light and darkness. But there are moments, Spenst hopes, that may be shared— of “concocted angels,” of “reprieve,” or of a sacredness that “he can hold out to others.” From such exhaustion may come, he affirms, “a bouquet brought back from space.” Even anguish, we see, can have value if we trust. 9781772142259
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver.
***
You can't keep a good poet down.
Having undertaken a 100-venue, cross-Canada reading tour in 2014, Kevin Spenst of Vancouver undertook a 50-venue, all-in-B.C. tour to promote his collection Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil 2015). The whirlwind tour began in Vancouver at the Hogan's Alley Cafe on April 13 and culminated on May 15 with a reading at the Alaska Ferry Terminal in Prince Rupert. Stops along the way included White Rock, Surrey, New Westminster, Cumberland, Courtenay, Victoria, Nelson, Prince George, Smithers, and Prince Rupert. The most high-profile event was held on April 23 at The Railway Club in Vancouver with local poet Jeff Steudel (Foreign Park) and Montreal's Melissa Bull (Rue). The line-up of locales was posted at: http://tinyurl.com/omfb3cnReadings
Kevin Spenst represents a new generation of poets which incorporates the digital world into their writing routines. In 2003, he wrote a new story, online, every day for the entire year. In 2004, Spenst again wrote daily, this time in the form of flash fiction inspired by contemporary art. Another project involved writing and emailing stories to numerous people around the world who would in turn print and hide the writings so that others would find them. Each piece had Spenst's email address and a plea for the finder to identify their whereabouts.
In 2007, Spenst self-published Fast Fictions, a sampling of the stories he had previously emailed out. In 2008 he revisited his story-a-day-for-a-year challenge to himself, this time using a different pseudonym for every piece. Reader feedback ranged from fan mail, to requests for medical advice, to hatemail when Spenst wrote under the pseudonym Yann Martel.
According to publicity materials, Kevin Spenst's debut collection of poetry, Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press, 2015) opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver's suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop and "post-Mennonite" culture.
We are told, "Language is at play with sit-com sonnets, soundscapes of noise, videogame goombas, an Old-Testament God, teenage longing within the power chords of heavy metal and the complicated loss of a father to schizophrenia. Jabbering with Bing Bong chronicles the heartbreaking and slapstick pursuit of truth in the realms of religion, mental health and poetic form itself."
While tracing his dating history in Vancouver to find the love of his life, Spenst simultaneously probes the historical form of England’s love sonnet in his 2020 collection of poems, Hearts Amok (Anvil $18). Journeying from the Middle Ages to contemporary times, Spenst intermixes hobo slang with the diction of an ancient troubadour to describe the caprices, woes, and triumphs of the human heart.
Spenst's poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, Rhubarb Magazine, Capilano Review, dANDelion, filling Station, Poetry is Dead, Moonshot Magazine, The Maynard, illiterature, The Enpipe Line, V6A and Ditch Poetry. He was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, his manuscript Ignite was a finalist for the Alfred G. Baily Prize, and in 2011, pieces from Ignite won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.
Kevin Spenst is also a founding member of Thursdays Editing Collective at Carnegie Center, a group that assists writers in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
CHAPBOOKS:
Pray Goodbye (Alfred Gustav Press, 2013)
Retractable (Serif of Nottingham, 2013)
Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012)
What the Frag Meant (100 têtes press, 2014)
Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press, 2014).
BOOKS:
Hearts Amok (Anvil, 2020) $18 978-1-77214-149-8
Ignite (Anvil Press, 2016) $18 978-1-77214-053-8
Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil, 2015) $18 978-1-77214-014-9
[BCBW 2020]
