ditch, the poetry that matters

ditch, n., where you are when you are not on the main road.

ditch, is a Canadian online poetry magazine celebrating the non-conforming, the radical, the alternative, the surreal, the avant-garde, the non-linear, the abstract, the experimental.

Our featured poet is Judith Copithorne

Stephen Cain is the author of three poetry collections—American Standard/ Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005), Torontology (ECW, 2001), and dyslexicon (Coach House, 1998)—and a collaborative series of micro-fictions, Double Helix (Mercury, 2006), written with Jay MillAr. He is also co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (Greenwood, 2006). He lives in Toronto where has been a literary editor at the Queen Street Quarterly and fiction editor at Insomniac Press. His newest chapbook, Word Wards, is forthcoming from No Press (Calgary).

Kemeny Babineau lives outside Brantford Ontario with his wife and two children. He is editor of the occasional literary magazine The New Chief Tongue and also operates the distinguished small press Laurel Reed Books. His most recent collection of poetry is “After the 6ix O’clock News” published by BookThug, 2009. Fortunately both fame and fortune have passed Mr. Babineau by but there is optimism that wisdom could be on its way by transference from the family dog.

Frances Kruk wrote A Discourse on Vegetation & Motion (Critical Documents, 2008) and resides in the sick sunless damp of London, England. She likes John Donne, Otis Redding, hot dogs, and trains.

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006), and God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2009). Her work was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 2006 and the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004 and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, and China. She is an instructor of creative writing at Douglas College where she is Poetry Editor for Event magazine.  She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Robert Swereda was raised in rural Alberta, currently studying creative writing at Capilano University where he has been an editor of The Liar. He has authored two chapbooks. Other work has been published by magazines Flask & Pen, The Liar, The  Monongahela Review, Northshore News Blogspot, and forthcoming pieces are to appear in The Capilano Review. He has a disorganized page of visual art, music and sound art, text and photography at http://www.terminus1525.ca/ along with a Youtube page full of experimental music. http://www.youtube.com/user/burntumber

Christine McNair's work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, ottawater, Misunderstandings magazine, The Bywords Quarterly Journal and a few other places including a recent above/ground press broadside. She won second prize (poetry) in the Atlantic Canadian Writing Competition and an honourable mention in the Eden Mills Literary competition. She tries to pay the bills working as a book conservator in Ottawa.

Sean Moreland vacillates between Kingston and Ottawa, Ontario. His poetry has appeared in Bywords.ca, The Ottawa Arts Review, The Malahat Review, NoD Magazine, and The Peter F. Yacht Club. His chapbook, Lupercalia, is available from the Bywords Press, and Dalhousie Blues, a collaborative book with Christine McNair, Caleb Brassett and Jamie Bradley is forthcoming from Ex Hubris Press. He won the John Newlove award in 2007. He holds a PhD from the University of Ottawa.

gustave morin, a para-literary agent provocateur since his teens – published widely, if obscurely – has been working the associated fields of composition & performance, plying his various written works, graphic constructions & reluctant performances on the page, on the stage and in white cubes above ground and below since the late eighties. His newest book, 79 Little Explosions and Q-Bert Stranded on A Smouldering Mosquitocoil Frozen To A Space Formerly Occupied By Language was published in March 2009 by Stained Paper Archive. Other recent publications include Nein Typos (Tonerworks, 2008), Off the Fly (Griddle Grin, 2008), Les Scribblistes (Produce Press, 2008) and The Etcetera Barbecue (Bookthug 2006). His other titles include the marginalized midnight classic A Penny Dreadful (2003), p.mody’s dada boutique (1997), Sun Kissed Oranges (co-authored with Sergio Forest,1995), and Rusted Childhood Memoirs (1994). Meanwhile, typographic trade secrets gleaned through intensive study of concrete have become personal weapons of choice since 2008... Mr. Morin resides at Chez Gargoyle in an anonymous frontiertown in Canada where he somehow ekes out a modest existence working in the arts.

Louise Bak has authored a couple of books of poetry, Gingko Kitchen and Tulpa (both Coach House Books). Her performance work has appeared in a number of videos and other contexts in North America and Europe. She co-hosts Sex City, Toronto’s only radio show, exploring sexuality in relation to art, politics and culture, on ciut 89.5 fm. She also hosts the Box, a quarterly salon night of readings, performances, screenings, interventions and networking that aims to bring diverse communities and audiences into an environment of artistic and social intermingling. The feature film she co-wrote, “The Ache” is in development. Louise is involved in sexual and cultural investigations weekly with toro, http://toromagazine.com/?q=taxonomy/term/27 

She is working on another poetry collection.

carlyle is usually unavailable, lives hand to mouth, & does ink mathematics.
he is building a new disguise.

Lynn Crosbie is a Doctor of Philosophy who teaches at OCAD University. She writes a column for the Globe and Mail, and has published six books of poetry.

Liz Worth is an experimental writer, performance artist, and freelance journalist living in Toronto. She is the author of Treat Me Like Dirt (Bongo Beat Books), which documents the beginnings of the Toronto punk scene.

Daniel f. Bradley is the author of several books of poems including T=I=D=Y Language (Outland 2008), The Amazing Phobic Subway Phantasmagoria (tapt 2008), A Boy's First Book of Chlamydia - which includes the poem from which BookThug Press takes its name (BookThug 2005), and Before The Golden Dawn By David UU  (curvd h&z 2005).

He also has produced numerous volumes of visual poetry including Return To The Valley Of The Chrome Plated Megaphone (Produce Press 2008) and Maybe You Could Please Return My City Now (Live Matter 2007).

He has written and published in the Toronto small press scene for the last 20 plus years and remains an uncompromising spanner in the works of local litterati agendas. Recently, his magazine, fhole concluded a run of 15 issues in 4 years.

Other recent projects have included acting on the board of governors of the Blackflies Language Experiments and the notorious lit crit e-list BILE. He had been interviewed for Open Letter on the Toronto Small Press explosion in the 1980s and also for an independent film on the mysterious graffiti artist known as P.Cob.

He lives in Toronto with his girlfriend and their child. Rumblings can be monitored at fhole blogspot. 

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Bob Heman's prose poems have appeared in Sentence, Quick Fiction, Paragraph, Caliban, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, First Intensity and Lost and Found Times, and online at Otoliths, Mad Hatters' Review, Clockwise Cat and Action, Yes.  They have been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Hungarian.  Two of his collections are available as free downloads from the Quale Press.  He lives in Brooklyn (New York City) where in the late 1970s he was an artist-in-residence at The Brooklyn Museum.  He has edited CLWN WR (formerly Clown War) since 1971.

Kate Bernadette Benedict, of New York City, is the author of the full-length poetry collection Here from Away and the editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose. Recent online credits include Wheelhouse, BigCityLit and qarrtsiluni; recent print credits include The New Plains Review and Anon.  Her home page is http://www.katebenedict.com/

Laurie Rosenblatt is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. She teaches poetry at the Harvard Extension School. Her poems have been anthologized in The Alhambra Poetry Calendar and in Poems in the Waiting Room (a publication for the British National Health Service). Individual poems have appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Salamander, Fulcrum, The Bellevue Literary Review, Per Contra, and Harvard Review among others. 

Peter Specker lives in Ithaca, New York. He has had poetry published in MARGIE, The Indiana Review, Amelia, California State Quarterly, RE:AL, Pegasus, First Class, Pot-pourri, Art Times, The Iconoclast, Epicenter, Subtropics, and others.

L. Ward Abel lives in rural Georgia, USA. Poet, composer of music (Max Able / Abel, Rawls & Hayes), lawyer and spoken-word performer (Scapeweavel), he has been or will be published at The Reader (UK), The Yale Anglers’ Journal, Versal, The Pedestal, erbacce, Kritya, OpenWide, and many others.  He is the author of  Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006) and the recently released The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008).

Elaine Kahn is currently working towards an MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A longtime resident of San Francisco, Elaine graduated from the California College of the Arts with a BA in Visual Studies. Upon graduation she worked as an intern at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley and then spent two years at City Lights Books as the store Poetry Buyer.  
  
Elaine Kahn has two chapbooks out – Radiant Bottle Caps (Glasseye Books, 2008) and Convinced By the End Of It (Big Baby Books, 2009), a split with Canadian poet Valerie Webber which was recently featured in Arthur Magazine.  More of her work can be found at shampoopoetry.com, and at moisttowelette.blogspot.com. 

Philip Byron Oakes lives in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Otoliths, Switchback, Cricket Online Review, Sawbuck, Moria and Taiga. He recently published his first volume of poetry, Cactus Land (77 Rogue Letters).   http://philipbyronoakes.blogspot.com/

P.S. Kolek is an MFA poetry candidate at the University of Miami and has recently had a monologue presented in The Krane’s production of Monologues Lingus and will have two poems published in the upcoming edition of RECONTRUCTION: Studies in Contemporary Culture.

Michael Leong was educated at Dartmouth College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers University.  His poems have appeared in journals such as Bird Dog, jubilat, NFG Magazine, Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, and Tin House.  He is the author of a collection of poetry, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, forthcoming), and a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All (blazeVOX [books], 2009).  He currently lives in New York City and can be found on-line at http://michaelleong.wordpress.com/.

Joseph Veronneau resides in Burlington, Vermont. He runs Scintillating Publications, which publishes chapbooks and the non-academic literary journal AGUA. His own works have appeared or will in such journals as Counterexample Poetics, Oarystis, Lost and Found Times and Offerta Speciale. His latest chapbook "Within The Grand Scheme" is out now from Propaganda Press.

Michael James Martin superball’d around the US, from Northern/Southern California to New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi where he was born. Recent and not so recent work appears or will appear in Dogzplot, BlazeVOX, Caveat Lector and Mythium. Author of two obscure, limited-run chapbooks and an unpublished book, he’s currently writing a new book of poetry… among other projects.

Gail Gray, grew up in Lowell, Mass but now lives in Greenville, SC, USA. She is the author of three books of poetry, The Hazard of Waking Up, Spirals in Copper, and Planetary Tension. She is the owner of Shadow Archer Press and the editor of Fissure, a magazine of experimental art and writing. Her poetry has been published or is upcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, Counterexample Poetics, Deep Tissue Magazine, Cokefish, Exquisite Corpse, Eviscerator Heaven, Being, Big Swollen Toe, Sisyphus, Zygote Abstract Libertine, Gloom Cupboard, Main Street Rag, sein und werden, Clockwise Cat, Shoots and Vines, and the anthology, America! www.shadowarcherpress.com          http://www.myspace.com/fissuremagazine      

brian prince is an art director in southern California. previously published on the now-non-exisitng-Skitzo-Lit online zine as well as the first issue of Eviserator Heaven.

explore more Canadian and International poets in the ditch, archive

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