Compiled and Edited by Jason Camlot
Design and Layout by Deanna Fong
Cover Art by Mohannad Al Katib
Published by Synapse Press, 2011
Introduction
Contributing poets Brian Campbell, Stephen Morrissey and Abby Paige have written about the chapbook on their respective blogs.
- Brian Campbell on After the Mountain: The A.M. Klein Reboot Project
- Stephen Morrissey on Cutting up A.M. Klein’s “The Mountain”
- Abby Paige on “After The Mountain”
The included poets are: Asa Boxer, Todd Swift, Abby Paige, Angela Carr, Gary Barwin, Stephen Cain, John McAuley, Hugh Thomas, Ilona Martonfi, Eleni Zisimatos, Seymour Mayne, Donald McGrath, Antony Di Nardo, Vincent Tinguely, Stephanie Bolster, Concetta Principe, Stephen Morrissey, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey, Philip Moscovitch, Sandrine Renault, Maxianne Berger, Chantal Ringuet, Mary Di Michele, Brian Campbell, Michael Dennis, Katia Grusbic, Kate Eichhorn, Jeffrey Mackie, Sherry Simon, Amanda Earl, Faizal Deen, Erin Moure.
From the preface, written by Jason Camlot:
"To celebrate the launch of their newly co-edited collection of essays, Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Kleein (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2011), Sherry Simon and Norm Ravvin asked me to organize ‘something literary’ for the Montreal launch of the book. Rather than simply stage a reading, I decided to send out a call, an invitation to Canadian poets, for reboots, remixes, rewrites and creative translations of A.M. Klein’s iconic poem, ‘The Mountain.’
The Reboot genre takes iconic text or serial narrative and restarts its operating system from the beginning, in order to create something completely new, yet still affiliated with the original text. The Remix most commonly refers to an alternate version of a recorded song, giving new sound, accent, tempo and meaning to the original version. Creative Translation refers to the translation of a text into new terms of reference and situations of meaning, as well as a different language.
The project I had in mind would apply these transformational activities to the rewriting of A.M. Klein’s poem of early love in an iconic Montreal location. I sent the call out on October 28th, 2011 and set a deadline of November 15th. That’s not a lot of time for poets to respond to a (non-paying) commission! But respond they did, and the result is what you now hold in your hands: a chapbook of poetic reboots, remixes and creative translations of Klein’s strange and beautiful poem that combines a modernist syntax and diction with a heavy dose of nostalgic sentiment in a powerful manner that was unique to him. And now the contributors to this chapbook have remade the poem in a manner unique to themselves.
I am most grateful to them for sharing their creative responses to Klein’s poem, and for daring to engage with it in the first place. I am grateful, too, to Sherry and Norm for inviting me to develop this project, Deanna Fong for her great work in designing and assembling the chapbook, and to artist Mohannad Al Khatib for his visual mash-up (reboot, remix, creative translation) of Thoreau MacDonald’s original illustrations form the Ryerson Press edition of Klein ’s The Rocking Chair and Other Poems.
Some of the poems included in this chapbook were read aloud at the November 23rd launch of Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein, held on the 11th floor of the EV Building (1515 St. Catherine West) at Concordia University.
As a final word, I should note that one of the most rewarding achievements of this project, apart from the poems themselves, is the fact that, for a couple of weeks in the autumn of 2011, some thirty poets were occupied with a poem by A.M. Klein, sounding it out, close-reading it, thinking about it, feeling it, living with it, and engaging with in on their own creative terms. That image of so many gifted poets deeply immersed in Klein all at the same time, well, that’s a gift to cherish for the ages—my own special, Kleinian heirloom.”