Needs Improvement Read online

  aware it’s not interesting.

  The first was draped in pure simulacra –

  the woman’s with wallpaper of a photocopied letter telling of

  an odd dream.

  In which the third was adorned with anachronistic

  Xmas and the last with just one sad halogen placed

  where it’s not interesting.

  The simulacra slayed me – here was this man

  with mad props of bed, books, art. Present in so little,

  dreaming an odd dream

  unaware it’s not interesting.

  THOSE ETHOS IS SAD

  Take one and stall – you want

  an antidote to your

  customs, habits, mores.

  Love to text and other verbs

  in any order, you powder addiction –

  take one and stall all. You want

  restraint, income, imperative

  productivity, tacit ascendancy. You gut new

  customs, habits, mores.

  Have you ever delved gutter depth

  well beyond your shelter level? Dive –

  take one and stall all you want.

  Drag your way toward grown-ups –

  they can’t love you as per their antonymous

  customs, habits, mores.

  Focus. You aren’t the focus of this epistle

  you haven’t the synonymous heart to

  take one and stall. You don’t want more

  customs or habits anymore.

  OPEN SOURCE

  Would like to be open heart

  ready, click-giddy, prepaid and pleased but

  haven’t the firmware

  to chance it. Never ever

  no one like that sad semaphorist who

  would like to be open heart

  willing, instead of flailing dead signals

  at newly commissioned drones that

  haven’t the firmware

  to land a line, or break a phrase, or

  unsettle a simple notion like unfair.

  Would like to be open heart

  able, bogged down in emotive

  drive, unabashed, aware, hinged, yet

  haven’t the firmware

  required for entry or trance, yes, land.

  No, there is no point. I

  would like to be open

  source firm.

  CONCORDIA

  Salvation through harmony

  is a fallacy: skewed, satiric saltire, a

  royal gift

  of cigarettes and dep wine

  and the knowledge that any kind of

  salvation through harmony

  would not require you to learn

  notation but your tone-deaf

  royal gift

  grub, cross-clutch self

  would no longer stand.

  Salvation through harmony

  can only be a sick twinning –

  an abstraction, a don’t, a receipt for a

  royal gift

  unopened. What more do you need in this

  anachronic city of tracts proclaiming

  salvation through harmonious and

  royal regifting?

  BYSTANDER

  Diversity our strength through

  civic shame, vigour on

  stand by.

  Toronto – bold and brackish

  monolithic, lithographic witless

  diversity our strength –

  a platitude poem etched on the QEW

  a blow torch to transport.

  Stand by

  for further failures, greater

  hit and run – our

  diversity our strength

  in number games, or

  faith in prime numbers, so proud to

  stand by

  and see real people scurry as one

  unreal person peddles responsibility – no

  diversity; our strength

  a bystander.

  SALTER STREET STRIKE

  One with the strength of many

  alone in the distant North End.

  People before profit.

  It’s a seemingly endless descent.

  Marlyn’s streets do not resemble

  one with the strength of many

  morbid singularities

  entirely unaware of

  people before profit

  motive or profit projection or

  the very ones who long for

  one with the strength of many

  ways of both ways – Nichol’s heart

  can be ours. H as a door to many

  people before profit.

  Listen, it’s a healthy nostalgia if it owns you

  or at least not the worst thing ever if you are

  one with the strength of many

  people before profit.

  DEDICATIONS

  ‘Summary: Cultural Hegemony’ is for kevin mcpherson eckhoff.

  ‘Summary: The History of Sexuality’ is for Susan Holbrook.

  ‘Blurbists’ is for Darren Bifford.

  ‘Hey, Carol Maker’ is for Christian Bök.

  ‘Moda’ is for Elizabeth Bachinsky.

  ‘Tenants’ is for David McGimpsey.

  ‘Salter Street Strike’ is for John K. Samson.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Evan Munday, Alana Wilcox, Susan Holbrook, Jeramy Dodds and everyone at Coach House Books. Thanks to David McGimpsey, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Maryanna Hardy, Tara Flanagan, Heather Stewart, Jacob Spector, Julie Mannell, Ian Orti, Darren Bifford, Mike Spry, Sina Queyras, Nicole Brossard, Tyler Morency, Jess Marcotte, Emma Healey, Genevieve Robichaud and my parents.

  Special thanks to my writing teachers.

  Very special thanks to Lilly Fiorentino.

  NOTES

  The text from ‘Winnipeg Cold Storage Company’ is appropriated and manipulated (with the most love) from Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative by Judith Butler.

  Some of the text from Tautnotes is appropriated and anagrammed for satiric purposes (and with the most love) from the following texts, their titles and authors, in order of appearance:

  De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

  Mythologies by Roland Barthes

  The Pleasures of Hating by William Hazlitt

  Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative by Judith Butler

  Seed Catalogue by Robert Kroetsch

  The text from ‘Rubric for the Evaluations of Poetry, Dedicated to Ms. Castro’s Sixth Grade Poetry Students at Mater Academy Middle/High School in Hialeah Gardens, Florida’ is appropriated and rearranged from a rubric for the evaluation of poetry, prepared by Ms. Castro for students and teachers at Mater Academy Middle/High School in Hialeah Gardens, Florida.

  ‘The Report Cards of Leslie Mackie’ is a narrative sequence of visual poems that sets out to critique the culture of homophobia, transphobia and bullying in early childhood education.

  ‘Moda’ uses the slogans for Expo ’67 as its refrains. ‘Concordia’ uses the mottos for the city of Montreal and the town of Mont-Royal as its refrains. ‘Bystander’ uses the mottos for the city of Toronto and the town of Burlington as its refrains. ‘Salter Street Strike’ uses the mottos for the city of Winnipeg and the community of the North End as its refrains.

  Earlier versions of some of these poems have been published in the following journals: EVENT, PRISM International, Hobo, Joyland, The Winnipeg Review, Lemon Hound, subTerrain, Contemporary Verse 2, The Toronto Quarterly and New American Writing.

  About the Author

  Jon Paul Fiorentino is the author of the novel Stripmalling, which was shortlisted for the Paragraphe Hugh Maclennan Prize for Fiction, and five previous poetry collections, including The Theory of the Loser Class, which was shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Indexical Elegies, won the 2010 CBC Book Club ‘Bookie’ Award for Best Book of Poetry. He lives in Montreal, where he teaches writing at Concordia University and edits Matrix magazine.


  This ePUB edition produced at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane.

  The print edition is typeset in Albertan and printed in August 2013 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Edited by Susan Holbrook

  Designed by Evan Munday

  Author photograph by Lilly Fiorentino

  Coach House Books

  80 bpNichol Lane

  Toronto, Ontario M5S 3J4

  416 979 2217

  800 367 6360

  [email protected]

  chbooks.com