Spring Trances in the Control Emerald Night & Cenozoic Asylum by Christopher Dewdney

The Memorex microcassettes inside were identified as “Steve Venright #1” and “Steve Venright #2.” No other descriptive information was provided or available. He had two microcassettes, “originally recorded at Steve’s house in the mid ’90s and then tucked away forever.” Later that summer, Jay mailed the recordings from Toronto, Ontario to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I live and work. Turns out, it wasn’t a single “tape” at all. That Sunday morning, Jay promised to unearth the “tape” from a basement box-not, however, before warning me that neither he nor Hazel had ever listened to the interview and, thus, he couldn’t say, one way or another, how useful the “tape” would be.īy early afternoon, that very same day, I got a follow-up email from the ever-industrious Jay.

I was intrigued and excited by Jay’s message.Īs the shadow figure behind Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe (“an on-line bookshoppe specializing in the books that no one wants to buy”), Jay had already helped with some of my research for the project, generously locating rare literary zines featuring Venright (e.g., Sin Over Tan, edited by Michael Holmes, Bill Kennedy, and Darren Wershler) as well as other ephemera (e.g., LyricalMyrical’s chapbook edition of Venright’s The Sleepy Turbine, with illustrations by Kerry Zentner). At the time, I was working intensely on the forthcoming volume of Venright’s selected and new writings, The Least You Can Do is Be Magnificent (Anvil Press, 2017). On the morning of June 5 th, 2016, I got a surprise email from poet, publisher, and bookseller Jay MillAr, saying he had in his possession “a little cassette tape” with an interview that he and his partner, Hazel Millar, conducted “circa 1995” with Canadian surrealist Steve Venright.

Spring Trances in the Control Emerald Night & Cenozoic Asylum by Christopher Dewdney