ditch,

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.

there is no regular publishing schedule; the site will be updated as new material is received.

sign up for our mailing list (see below) to be notified when new material is posted.

(click on the highlighted poets' names to read their work)

Our featured poet is Penn Kemp

 
Since 1966, sound/performance poet Penn Kemp has taught creative writing and sounding in arts festivals and conferences around the world.  The League of Canadian Poets proclaimed her one of the foremothers of Canadian poetry.  Born and raised near London ON, Penn received her Honours BA in English from UWO, her M.Ed from U. of Toronto, and many Arts Awards for her writing.  Since Coach House published her first book in 1972, Penn has been pushing text and aural boundaries, often in participatory performance and new media.  Among her publications are twenty-five books of poetry and drama, ten CDs of Sound Opera and Sound Poetry as well as several videopoems and Canada's first poetry CD-ROM: sample pennkemp.ca, mytown.ca/pendas/, http://myspace.com/pennkemp and mytown.ca/poemforpeace/. Through Pendas Productions, Penn edits and publishes poetry book/cd combinations, mytown.ca/twelfth/.  Some of these CDs and interviews are archived on her radio show, chrwradio.com/talk/gatheringvoices. Updates are on mytown.ca/pennletters/.

Mark Truscott’s first book, Said Like Reeds or Things, was published in 2004 by Coach House Books. He is at work on his second, tentatively entitled Nature, of which the poems appearing here are part. He curates the Test Reading Series in Toronto. He lives with his wife, Lisa Heggum, and son, Sam.

a.rawlings is a Canadian poet and multidisciplinary artist. The recipient of the bpNichol Award for Distinction in Writing (2001), angela has worked with many arts organizations, including The Mercury Press, Lexiconjury Reading Series, Theatre Gargantua, and the TV series Heart of a Poet. She also instructs text and sound workshops for the Toronto Public Library, Learning through the Arts, and Ryerson University.

Working with derek beaulieu and Jason Christie, angela co-edited Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005). Her first book, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), was featured in The Globe and Mail’s top 100 books of 2006; it went on to receive an Alcuin Award for Design and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Wide slumber was recently translated from page to stage for Harbourfront Centre’s Hatch: Emerging Performance Projects in Toronto.

angela is currently researching sound, text, and movement, with special emphases on vocal/contact improvisation and acoustic ecology. She lives in Toronto.

Erín Moure is one of Canada's most eminent and respected poets, and a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. Winner of the Governor General's Award for Furious, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Domestic Fuel, and the AM Klein Poetry Prize for Little Theatres (which has also been published in Spain in Galician translation as Teatriños), Moure has published twelve books of poetry, including A Frame of the Book, co-published in the U.S. by Sun and Moon Press, and five books of poetry in translation, including Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person by Fernando Pessoa, shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2002 City of Toronto Book Prize. Moure lives in Montreal.

Jay MillAr is a poet, editor, publisher and bookseller. He is the author of The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000), Mycological Studies (2002), False Maps for Other Creatures (2005) and the collection the small blue (2007). Recently he published a collaborative 'novel' written with Stephen Cain titled Double Helix (2006). He lives in Toronto with his wife Hazel and their two kids Reid and Cole, where he currently runs BookThug, an independent literary publisher, and Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, which specializes in the books that no one wants to buy.

 Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) writes l’entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of a dozen books including, The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (Nightboat (US), 2007), its French counterpart, …s’arrête? Je (L’Hexagone, 2007), Touch to Affliction (Coach House, 2006), Je Nathanaël (l’Hexagone, 2003) and L'Injure (l'Hexagone, 2004), a finalist for the 2005 Prix Alain-Grandbois and Prix Trillium. Je Nathanaël exists in English self-translation with BookThug (2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox, 2007). With Nota bene (Montréal, 2007), there is an essay of correspondence entitled L’absence au lieu (Claude Cahun et le livre inouvert), the self-translation of which is forthcoming with Nightboat (US), as Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). Stephens has guest lectured and performed her work internationally, notably in Sofia, Barcelona, Ljubljana, New York and Norwich. The recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a British Centre for Literary Translation Residential Bursary, she was the keynote speaker at the 2006 edition of the University of Alberta's Annual Translation Conference. Literaturen vestnik (Literary Gazette, Bulgaria) has written of Stephens’s work that “If we are to speak of modern prose today, it is, in all probability, of this kind: situated nowhere as a genre, but intentionally omnipresent.”

Geoffrey Hlibchuk recently graduated from SUNY Buffalo where he studied poetics, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in PRICIPICe, Queen Street Quarterly, and Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry; and critical articles have recently been published in Studies in Canadian Literature, and Open Letter. His new collection of poems—Variations on Hölderlin—recently won the 2008 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and is forthcoming from Snare Books in Fall 2008.

Matthew Hall has returned to University, this time in the Southern Hemisphere, and is working under the tutelage of one of Cambridge’s architects of modern language. His academic work will cover varying aspects of Russian Futurism as well as the more experimental aspects of the Cambridge School. His poetry has recently been featured in Forget Magazine, The Hudson Review of Poetry, Jones Av. and Fieldstone Review amongst others.

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer who has lived in Canada for over ten years. He has recently been appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) for the forthcoming academic year.

His  collection of poems Digging My Own Grave was published by Dedalus Press, Ireland. An earlier version won Second Place in the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London) was short listed for The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004. He is a past recipient of the Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. A CD of his poetry if it’s words you’re after… was released in 2005. His story Sightings of Bono was adapted into a short film (Parallel Productions) featuring Bono.

Luminita Suse is a resident of Ottawa, Ontario, since 1995 and a member of the OIW - Ottawa Independent Writers, Valley Writers’ Guild, TOPS - The Ontario Poetry Society.

Her poetry has been published in Bywords Quarterly Journal, and in several anthologies from Ascent Aspirations, The Ontario Poetry Society and the Canadian Authors Association.

Sandra Huber is a Canadian poet living, writing and teaching in Vienna, Austria. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and a B.A. in literature from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Sandra Huber has been published in the milieu portfolio/anthology of canadian women writers, idea&s, Word For/Word, The Danforth Review, Philament, and am upcoming in Lexican. Lately she has given performances as part of the London Word Festival (London, England), the Schule für Dichtung (Vienna) and the Labyrinth Poets (Vienna). Her short story "Eels" has been selected as part of a Best of the Web 2008 anthology by Dzanc Press. She has received grants from the Toronto Arts Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council towards her academic and creative work & has presented at conferences in Denver, Colorado and Toronto.

Asher Ghaffar's first book of poetry, "wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music," will be published in the fall (ECW Press). Currently, he is at work on a novel at the Humber School for Writers. Asher's work has appeared in national journals such as Open Letter, Lichen Arts and Letters Review, CV2 & dANDelion.

Tony Nesca was born in Torino, Italy in 1965 and moved to Canada at the age of three. He was raised in Winnipeg but relocated back to Italy several times until finally settling in Winnipeg in 1980. He taught himself how to play guitar and formed an original rock band playing the local bars for several years. At the age of twenty-seven he traded his guitar for a Commodore 64 and started writing seriously. He has published six chapbooks of stories and poems (which he used to sell straight out of his knapsack at local dives and bookstores), four novels, a novella, a book of poetry and has been an active contributor to the underground lit scene for ten years, being published in innumerable magazines both online and in print. He currently writes a monthly article for Poetic Monthly and he resides in Winnipeg.

Laila Haidarali was born and raised in Trinidad & Tobago and now lives in Toronto. She is a feminist historian who teaches, researches and writes on the histories of marginalized others including women, immigrants and African Diasporic people. Since emerging through Diaspora Dialogues, Laila’s poetry has been featured in Tok 1: Writing the New Toronto Narrative; Descant; Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Cahoots Magazine and online in Sentinel Poetry. She is currently completing her first poetry manuscript.

Laila Haidarali's latest book is sunday frowns from Trainwreck Press.

Lin Geary of Paris, Ontario, is a writer and teacher, pleased to have lived for 10 years in Hamilton and Dundas. She won the Hamilton Arts Award for best short story in 2005, took an Honorable Mention in the 2007 Silver Hammer Awards and in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Contest 2008. Lin has just written and performed her first one-act play, Addie, (seven monologues from the private life of Adelaide Hunter Hoodless of Paris and Hamilton) for the Paris Cobblestone One Act Play Festival.

Kevin Craig was born in Toronto; his childhood was split between there and New Brunswick. Now living in Oshawa, Ontario, he writes fiction and poetry when not freelancing. His memoirs have been published in the Globe and Mail as well as recorded for CBC Radio Canada. Kevin’s poetry, which often reflects his tumultuous days as a punk rocker in the early ‘80s, has appeared in Regina Weese, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Jones Av. Journal and Inscribed. His first novel, Sebastian’s Poet, was awarded 1st Place in the 2007 Muskoka Novel Writing Competition and is currently being considered for publication.

David UU (pronounced "double-U") David W. Harris, was born in Barrie, Ontario in 1948. He is considered an accomplished concrete and experimental poet and an important small press publisher. Along with bill bissett and bpNichol, he was a pioneer of the concrete-poetry movement in Canada, and perhaps the first Canadian poet to explore visual collage embodying literary, philosophical and language references. He also wrote and published more conventional poetry, poems and prose for children, two novels, short stories, scripts for theatrical performance and several essays. In addition, Harris founded and operated Fleye Press (1966-67), Derwyddon Press (1972-73), Silver Birch Press (1987-94), and co-founded grOnk in 1967. Harris died in 1994 at a farmhouse near Delhi, Ontario.

Note: the work reproduced here first appeared in the Toronto arts magazine (Imp)ulse Volume 3, Numbers 3 & 4, and was then published in book form in the anthology W)here? The Other Canadian Poetry (Press Porcepic 1974). Used by kind permission of the Estate of David W. Harris.

Robert Chrysler is an inspired subway-ranter from Toronto, Canada. He enjoys challenging capitalist property relations, trying to figure out what the post-structuralists are going on about, and dreams of someday living in a tree. His work has appeared in: Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Venereal Kittens, The Concelebratory ShoeHorn Review, The Guild of Outsider Writers, and The City Poetry.
He is also the editor of The StarFish Journal, and a proud member of Discharge 2:

Rebecca Power was born under a Leo sky in a Dragon year and raised in Branch, Newfoundland. With a B.A. in Literature from Memorial University, Rebecca enjoys being a writer, editor, musician and mother. Her poetry and short stories have been published with KoreaBridge, PusanWeb, the Newfoundland Herald, The Current and The Antigonish Review. She has traveled widely, sharing her poetry and songs with audiences around the world, always returning to her beloved Newfoundland purring and brimming with tales.

Rebecca Power's latest book is no thing personal from Trainwreck Press.

Liz Worth writes about her nightmares. She also writes about punk rock, makes zines, and obsesses over the words of Daniel Jones. She recently completed the forthcoming oral history Treat Me Like Dirt, which documents the beginnings of the Toronto punk scene. It made her realize she does not want to live in the future.

Work by Liz Worth has previously appeared in the anthology Strong Words: Year Two, as well as in Exclaim!, Broken Pencil, The Toronto Star, Punk Planet, Eye Weekly, Clamor, Spacing, Fish Piss, The Sentimentalist, H Magazine, and This Magazine.

Anthony Brenton’s forthcoming publications are Morning, Noon and Night in an Apartment; Music for Youngster’s Minds and Greedy Little Animal along with other writings collected over the past years. He is the self-published author of Triskaidekaphobia in St. John’s Muzak and A Book, both reflecting on his environment. Brenton lives in St. John’s Newfoundland where he thinks and loves. 

Anthony Brenton's latest book is Daybreak, Saint City (Trainwreck Press, 2008)

Delia Byrnes is pursuing her bachelor's degree in English at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Existere, and forthcoming publications include filling Station, Misunderstandings Magazine, and Tower Poetry.

Emily Hass is a third year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto St. George campus studying English and Philosophy.

J.J. Steinfeld is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright who lives hidden away on Prince Edward Island. He has published a novel, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press), nine short story collections, the previous three by Gaspereau Press—Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized?, Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown, and Would You Hide Me?—and a poetry collection, An Affection for Precipices (Serengeti Press), along with two short-fiction chapbooks by Mercutio Press, Curiosity to Satisfy and Fear to Placate and Not a Second More, Not a Second Less, and a poetry chapbook by Cubicle Press, Existence Is a Hoax, a Woman in Fishnet Stockings Told Me When I Was Twenty. His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over thirty of his one-act and full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States, including the full-length plays Acting Violently, The Franz Kafka Therapy Session, and The Golden Age of Monsters, and the one-act plays Godot’s Leafless Tree, The Waiting Ends, The Entrance-or-Not Barroom, No End in Sight, Flowers for the Vases, The Word-Lover, Laugh for Sanity, A Murderous Art, Back to Back, Freesias in Whiskey, The Heirloom: An Evidence Play, and God’s Work.

to access the ditch, archive click here

for more alternative poetry on the web, click here

John Grey lives in Providence, RI, and has been published in Agni, Worcester Review,  South Carolina Review and The Pedestal; with work upcoming in Poetry East and Cape Rock.

John Greiner is a poet and playwright living in New York City.  His poetry has most recently appeared in The Chopper Journal, Hecale, Sein und Werden, nthposition, Audience, SubtleTeas, Zygote in my Coffee, The Beat, Tryst, Psychopoetica, The Blue House, All Rights Reserved, The Argotist Online, Moria, Ascent Aspirations, The Green Muse and Inscribed. His theatrical pieces have enjoyed successful runs in New York, Chicago and in Massachusetts.

You can find more of John's poetry at www.baronandcrow.blogspot.com in collaboration with photographer, Carrie Crow.

Karen Neuberg is a former information specialist, public librarian, marketing researcher, and social worker. Her poems have recently appeared or are pending in Boston Literary Review, The Dirty Napkin, SLAB, Clockwise Cat, and Poems Niederngasse, among others. She’s a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, holds an MFA from the New School, and lives in Brooklyn, NY and West Hurley, NY with her husband.  They spend time in Canada whenever they can.

Nanette Rayman Rivera, living in New York City and hating it, is a two-time Pushcart Nominee, and the author of the poetry collection, Project: Butterflies, published by Foothills Publishing, and the chapbook, alegrias, published by Lopside Press.  She is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for non-fiction.  Her poem Shoes, 1943 will appear in the Best of the Net Anthology – February 2008.  Publications include Dragonfire, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Prick of the Spindle, MiPOesias, The Worcester Review, Pedestal, The Pebble Lake Review, iddie, Carousel, Barnwood, Lily, ken *again, Farrago’s Wainscot, Arsenic Lobster, The Externalist, Wheelhouse, AntiMuse, Strirring, including Stirring’s Steamiest Six, Wicked Alice, Her Circle, Sein Und Werden, DMQ Review, Carve Magazine, Three Candles, Snow Monkey, Small Spiral Notebook, The Greensilk Journal – Editor’s Pick, Chantarelle’s Notebook – Featured Poet, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Tipton, Red River Review, Aoife’s Kiss, Words and Pictures, 5 Trope, Jack, Grasslimb and Mannequin Envy.  She is shopping her memoir around, a story about the ‘real” deal in regards to New York City’s homeless shelter, welfare, public housing, food stamp system.  The story no one will admit to.  She was Guest Editor for Moondance in December 2007.  She studied at The New School, Circle in the Square, Gene Frankel Studios and the New England Shakespeare Festival.  She played a waitress four times on All My Children, has performed in numerous black box theatres in New York City and Boston and is listed on imbd, Turner Classic Movies and Yahoo Movies for her roles in Stephan’s Silver Bell and Guns on the Clackamas.

Louie Crew has published extensively; has edited special issues of College English and Margins; has written four poetry volumes Sunspots (Lotus Press, Detroit, 1976) Midnight Lessons (Samisdat, 1987), Lutibelle's Pew (Dragon Disks, 1990), and Queers! for Christ's Sake! (Dragon Disks, 2003). His papers are collected by The University of Michigan.

John Moore Williams. Previous manifestations of his work have appeared in Shampoo #30, Jack Magazine, Venereal Kittens and are forthcoming from Ectoplasmic Metropolis. He is also an on-and-off fiction, poetry and book review contributor at Black Heart Magazine.

Juliet Cook is a poet and the editor of Blood Pudding Press. A few of her recent publication credits include ‘DIAGRAM’, ‘OCTOPUS’,’WOMB’, ‘Sein Und Werden’, ‘blossombones’ ‘little red leaves’, and ‘Prick of the Spindle’.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and currently has a poem representing in Sundress Publications Best of the Net 2007 Anthology. A selection of new poetry is also available as the first edition of Volume #2 of COMBATIVES, a single author zine series affiliated with H_NGM_N.  Her latest chapbook, ‘Planchette’, can be procured from Blood Pudding Press at http://www.bloodpuddingpress.etsy.com/. 

J. A. Tyler is founding editor of Mud Luscious. In 2006, he won 1st Place Fiction with Big Pond Rumour & received an Editor’s Choice award from Bewildering Stories. In 2007, J. A. Tyler picked up multiple Editorial Nominations for the StorySouth Million Writers Award & his play At Night was presented as a staged reading with Paragon Theatre. Among other publications, J. A. Tyler has recent work in The Feathertale Review, Thieves Jargon, Underground Voices, & Word Riot. Check out more at http://www.aboutjatyler.com/.

Matina L. Stamatakis resides in a frightfully quiet village in upstate New York, where there is virtually no creative or artistic movement. To compensate for the lack of local creative outlets, Matina turns to the internet, where she manipulates and displays digital artwork, poetry, and the occasional noise track from her one-woman wrecking machine, Viscera[e]. Her most recent poetic/art works can be found in Intercapillary Space, La Petite Zine, Crash Test, The Starfish Journal, PFS Post and others. She is the author of ek-ae: a journey into ekphrastic aesthetics (Dusie, 2007), Harmonious Hogwash (VUGG, 2007) with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Phos (Vugg, 2007), Sensoria (2008), a forthcoming chapbook, Metempsychose (Ypolita, 2008), and forthcoming noise album Tissue Arabesques (Artless Intent, 2008). She believes sleep is overrated.

J.R. Pearson is a International poet living and writing currently ten feet over the Canadian border in Idaho (although that is subject to change at any whim) & his work is forthcoming online and in print from The Indie Underground, The Cherry Blossom Review, & Dogzplot. He is a member of an experimental group of collaborator's called Orzel Transtextual Poetry which engage in, among other things, combining Flarf with real-time emotions. He was born in Michigan and watched his brother, Ben, die there at 28.

to access the ditch, archive click here

Don't worry, your e-mail address is safe.