Corrections, April 2025

• I misread Rose Maloukis.
• I barely commented on Lance La Rocque.
• I misread Eileen Myles, resulting in the invention of an anthropomorphized duck unintended by the author, when I wrote “The whale is cussed out by the black duck”; their verse says otherwise: what the fuck / are you / doing here / with your / children & / a black / duck dips / his head / behind / a wave
• I misread Patrick Grace and didn’t realize it till after the fact, rereading things.
• I also have a hunch I misread Dale Tracy’s The Mystery of Ornament, because her response to my review was that I had granted her chap a new perspective of understanding, which is so polite and mannerly I can’t help but feel flattered.
• I asked jwcurry for permission to use his photo for Lillian Nećakov’s review then realized I had already scheduled the post to go out as I was catching a taxi to attend the launch of another writer’s book that same night, which, although the phenomenon is familiar to me, still felt like a considerably large foot-in-mouth moment all things considered.
• In the same review, I could not find out what 3¢ Pulp referred to—Stuart Ross was eager to let me know it was a zine out in BC back in the day.
• Derek Beaulieu was quick to inform me that Lillian Nećakov is not the only Canadian poet with a ć in their name, the other being Nicole Markotić.
• I published a review for Rob Taylor’s Weather (short-listed for the Raymond Souster Award) and mentioned that the last time I was at the Al Purdy A-Frame, all the books from the bedroom had been removed (he informed me that when he was writer-in-residence there, the shelves were stocked, which fits my timeline from when I recalled them having been absent, i.e. they were temporarily moved to clean or repair the shelves between our visits, assuredly).
• Canada Cancelled Because of Lack of Interest was hard to review because I’ve never reviewed a comic strip before, although this is not strictly that, it very much felt like a comic strip with a prose gloss; it was challenging, and I hope anyone who read my review of it did not find it too perfunctory; any oversights are entirely the fault of my desultory literary education, but comics are great.
• I apologize to all hopeful submitters to Technically Writing. I hope to revisit the concept in the future but could not find what I was looking for. I still think it’s a great idea for a zine and might revisit it next year with a handful of subtle changes in approach, including guest editors and grant money. Stay tuned.

These errata often arrived asynchronously such that, this blog also serving as a newsletter, editing the original posts wherein a correction was merited did not seem to be the best approach, since the newsletter missive would remain unrevised had I taken that route.

Any mistakes I missed are entirely unintentional, as were the ones I noticed or was apprised of.

In aim of reducing the number of mistakes I commit to writing, in June I will be reviewing with a new format I have informally dubbed “Dropouts Drop-In” to give people a better way into the book I’m reviewing without my going off on a tangent as soon as possible, like a quantum entangled poetry horse chomping at the multiverse bit, forcing a connection where one doesn’t necessarily exist.

This is not to disparage dropouts, but to include them.

Once upon a time, I was an almost dropout, quantumly entangled with the possibility of following my dreams of becoming some sort of Kafkaesque fever dream alter ego of Joyce and Bolaño by declining my university acceptance to teach English in Russia (the English school turned out to be a hoax designed to boost Nizhny Novgorod’s tourism sector by duping Westerners into fake jobs).

This gave me the opportunity to switch majors from English to Linguistics, but I still ended up taking a lot of lit courses, just in languages other than English.

One of my professors said I would have made a spectacular philologist, if that were a field anymore. I wholeheartedly concur.

Another said, if you’re gonna be a poet, never do a master’s—he then gave an impromptu recital of Borges y yo word-for-word over dinner. Classic Schmosby.

I sometimes lose my train of thought and double down on my turgidity.

This new format will be my attempt to minimize that energy and focus it on something more productive, describing the actual facts of the matter of the books I review so they resemble something closer to a dictionary entry with my tangential ruminations as a sort of footnote, in the spirit of the sense of the word bibelotages.

Thanks for tuning in. See you tomorrow.