Dying as Art

I used to write poetry. Or something that resembled poetry, or more accurately, something that resembled poems that other people almost published. It’s important to make that distinction, because I, and two other fellows, started a small literary publication. We published other peoples’ poems and cartoons and short stories of course. But we also published our own stuff, which I always thought was shameless and still think is shameless. Now I just write my own stuff and publish it on my own blog, which somehow is now an acceptable thing and not full of shame. The world is a funny place.

I have since lost contact with these fellows, but they were good men: Chris Pollard and Stuart Konyer. Together, we created and published the magazine in the Ottawa area, with the guidance of Seymour Mayne. I have no reason to believe that any of these aforementioned guys are anything but good and solid men still.

To give you some idea of what we were like, and how the magazine was built, I will tell you how the name of the magazine came to be. We all took a class in creative writing of, predictably, poetry. This was at the University of Ottawa and Seymour Mayne was the professor, a cagey veteran and a lovely example of what the human race can produce. In the class, the subject of a monstrance came up. Except, Chris did not have the precise word in his skull – so out he came with a workaround: host box. Much animated discussion ensued with some classmates lamenting our lack of respect for theological cabinetry, but a sort of entente cordiale developed. After all, Chris stumbled upon a way to refer to a monstrance. Maybe it isn’t the most correct or preferred way, but he got his point across, which is the aim of communication. Check it out on Google if you have lingering doubts about host boxes.

Later, when the search for a name for our magazine was becoming painful and endangering our relationship, we seized upon using host box for no other reason than we just liked how it sounded. It represented a shared entertaining experience and it was something that belonged to all of us and none of us. But we jammed the two words together and capitalized it: Hostbox. And thus it was born. It was in this magazine we shamelessly published our own poetry alongside the poetry of others. And my poem, “Dying as Art,” which I consider my best piece, was in it. We published great cartoon strips and threw in fictionalized biographies of the publishers. We even included what we thought were incredibly witty biographies of people who didn’t have work featured in the magazine at all, like Martin Amis and Mickey Rourke, because we thought it was fabulously entertaining. Whether all the humour would have been stale dated long ago is open to debate of course, but I can still remember Stuart reading a draft of the second volume on his way home and laughing so hard that he walked into the wrong apartment. It was great fun.

We sent 50 copies of the inaugural magazine, published with the great help and resources of my good friend Steve White, to some of our favourite writers. Charles Bukowski, Irving Layton, Martin Amis, Raymond Souster, Leonard Cohen were among those who would have received a copy. Dead silence on all fronts but one: Irving Layton wrote back with his encouragement and congratulations. I could not believe it, but he mentioned that he liked my poem, “Bogeyman”. I was quite chuffed.

But for some reason, a lot of these publications’ worst enemies are the guys behind the scenes; in this case, that would be me, Stuart and Chris. I was more out of step with them than they were with me: numbers are like that. And to prove it, after I dropped out of sight, literally dropping out of sight for a while, Chris and Stuart kept on publishing the magazine. I’m really not sure for how long. Perhaps I was taking the tortured artist in seclusion thing a little too seriously at the time to be healthy. Regardless, they soldiered on with it for a while until, and I’m just totally guessing here, other priorities came to the fore and Hostbox fizzled out.

This is okay. We actually published it: it’s in Library and Archives Canada as all publications must be. I like to think we encouraged some writers to write and to keep writing. In fact, some folks still have Hostbox on their list of periodicals they’ve been published in. I think this is a great thing. We did this totally out of our own pocket (it shows in the production values), but it was a real labour of love and we worked hard to get various stores to carry it. It was exciting to read new material. It was exciting to be involved.

I’ve talked over the years with other folks I’ve known who write about putting together another publication. Some conversations were over beer, some conversations were more serious than others, some half-hearted attempts were made and nothing ever materialized. The whole landscape shifted with how the internet was accessed and online publications and password sites and I think that’s when I shelved the idea for good.

Then blogs came along. Blogs certainly haven’t helped me to decide whether or not to get into the publishing gig again on any kind of level, but it did help me to decide upon publishing one epigrammatic piece, from memory no less:

Dying as Art

The 9.85 dive
into the concrete pool,
slight imperfections
in his execution.