I Cut My Finger

by Stuart Ross

Rare Book

Genres: Poetry

103 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2007

About the author

Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like “Writer Going To Hell: Buy My Books,” selling over 7,000 poetry and fiction chapbooks.

A tireless literary press activist, he is the co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair and now a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective. He had his own imprint, a stuart ross book, at Mansfield Press for a decade, and was Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine for eight years. In fall 2017, he launched a new poetry imprint, A Feed Dog Book, through Anvil Press.

Stuart has edited several small literary magazines, including Mondo Hunkamooga: A Journal of Small Press Stuff, Syd & Shirley, Who Torched Rancho Diablo?, Peter O’Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems, and, most recently HARDSCRABBLE.

He is the author of two collaborative novels, two solo novels, two collections of stories, and twelve full-length poetry books. He has also published two collections of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer and Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (both from Anvil Press), and edited the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press) and co-edited Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Mansfield Press).

Stuart has taught writing workshops across Canada and works one-on-one with authors on their manuscripts. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario. In spring 2009, Freehand Books released his first short-story collection in more than a decade, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, to almost unanimous critical acclaim.

Stuart was the fall 2010 writer-in-residence at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and the winter 2021 writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa.

In 2017, Stuart won the eighth annual Battle of the Bards, presented by the International Festival of Authors and NOW Magazine. In spring 2023, Stuart received the biggest book award in Ontario, the Trillium Book Prize, for his memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. In fall 2019, Stuart was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian literature and literary community. His other awards include the Canadian Jewish Literary Prize for Poetry and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. His work has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish, Estonian, Slovene, and Nynorsk.

Stuart is currently working on ten book projects.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked quite a few of these poems a lot. Some I didn't get into. I never know what to say about poetry. At the end of the book are a series of four poems all written on the first of the year for four successive years, I don't know what the purpose of it was, but I liked the idea that I was seeing something different in some skewed way of perceptions for the upcoming year, although there I'm probably reading into something that wasn't there. Nicely unpretentious and I don't know, enjoyable at least to me.

[Ida Thomasdotter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the imagery in these poems, they were like dreams, sort of surreal and fuzzy, you can't really grab a hold of them, you have to just let them wash over you, some of the time they could be absurd, or funny, but they're all honest and very striking.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading I Cut My Finger (and other works by Stuart Ross), I am reminded of John Ashbery's Some Trees. Although Some Trees won the Yale Younger Poets Award, there is evidence that the competition's judge, W.H. Auden, made the decision begrudgingly. The evidence is in his first declaration, that none of the entries should win, and in his second declaration, the preface for Some Trees...

Where Wordsworth had asked the question, "What is the language really used by men?" Rimbaud substituted the question, "What is the language really used by the imagining mind?" In "Les Illuminations" he attempted to discover this new rhetoric, and every poet who, like Mr. Ashbery, has similar interests has the same problem. . . . the danger for a poet working with the subjective life is. . . . realizing that, if he is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions of imagery, singular associations of ideas, he is tempted to manufacture calculated oddities as if the subjectively sacred were necessarily and on all accounts odd.

On first glance, the comparison to Wordsworth and Rimbaud may appear flattering. But Auden later clarified his position on Ashbery's "calculated oddities" and "strange juxtapositions of imagery" in a letter to Frank O'Hara (who had also entered his poems in that year's competition)...

I think you (and John too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any "surrealistic" style, namely the confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.

Auden's advice should be taken with a grain of salt (his poetics being firmly rooted in the British tradition that runs opposite the French tradition of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and the Surrealists). As much as I enjoy the poetry of Ashbery, O'Hara, and Stuart Ross, there are times when they evoke the fatigue that Auden attributes to an imbalance of wonder (not enough) and surprise (too much)...

I Cut My Finger

A mountain was on the ground.
I don't know how it got there, probably a thing
regarding the earth.
I walked up it quick but it was high
and took a long time. I thought
maybe Mom and Dad and Owen would be there,
or at least floating above it.
Oh the adventures I had climbing,
let me recount them (in case I counted
wrong the first time). Numerous
calendar pages flipping by
like in a movie you saw,
and then I was on top.

I tried calling Dana but there wasn't any phone
and I cut my finger
dialing a rock. The bad thing was
there nobody up there,
and nobody floating above.
Not even a store when I felt like Chiclets.

But I could feel my tired brain wobbling,
and I sat down and got ready to think:
and then I thought: I thought that for me
mountains are big solid things poking into the air,
like a god,
but for people for whom solid
is the absence of solid,
the they've got upside-down mountains
pointing towards earth.

I rested a bit,
then came back down.

* * *

Song


In the night
a gunshot
is in the night.
The bullet ricochets
off the Andes
and enters the brain
of a leaping brown rabbit.

The dogs, which had been barking all night, go silent.

Then they go crazy.
The dogs go crazy
under the dark sky
that fills up the space
above my roof.
In the vineyard,
a man holds a pistol.
As he spreads out his arms,
a song rises from his chest.

* * *

November: Launch


at dark
the highway

between Paris
and Toronto

shimmers

pointing
every direction

Nelson and Barbara
stay home
sit in the kitchen

launching
grey cups
of black coffee
to their pale lips

silent
content

* * *

Haiku


There are bugs
in the wilderness -
with antennae!

* * *

Others Like Me


Sun filled my eyes
and grass warmed my feet.
I pressed my fists
into my chest
to confirm
that I was alive.
Certain things
suggested I was:
for example, the fact
of no answer, no end,
no gas station attendant.
Others like me appeared,
coughing, snickering, crying.
We fought, fucked,
built a society,
and set out
to construct
a sailboat from toothpicks,
books from the wings
of an aphid.

* * *

Frisky


Ron Padgett
flexed his body
in mid-air, turned
and yelped

It was his birthday
and he was sixty-two

* * *

Poem


He ran around in tight circles.
He looked for a way out.
If there was no way out,
how did he get in?

Both out and in
were inside him.
How did they get there?

He stopped running.
He thought hard.
He stopped thinking.
He ran around in tight circles.

* * *

Wealth Kingdom, for Mark Truscott


When Marlon Perkins dies,
he belongs to everyone -
not just those
who cried
or he caught.

* * *

I Open the Lid, after Joe Brainard


I open the lid. A butterfly. Its wings ragged and faded. Its legs scattered.

I open the lid. A dark stain. The tongue of a cow on a cutting board.

I open the lid. A page torn out from a spiral-bound notebook, the size I usually use. The paper is lined. In my own handwriting: "Close the box, you stupid box."

I open the lid. A ginger kitten looks up at me. Its eyes like ju-jubes.

I open the lid. A tangled mass of elastic bands. Some are red, some green, but most are elastic-band-coloured.

I open the lid. A broken clock.

I open the lid. A mirror in a plain pine frame. In it, my brother. My father stands behind him, cups his jaw, kisses the top of his head.

I open the lid. A black sock with thin white stripes. It stirs.

* * *

2 Kootenay Poems


I

one glacier
reaches into the sky
the other
into the lake

when i turn away
they switch places


II

the woodpecker
on my cabin's metal roof
has got a brand new bag

* * *

I Step Off the Plane, after Joe Brainard


I step off the plane. I am buried in heat. It presses against my face.

I step off the plane. I am immediately covered in insects. I cannot feel them, but I can hear them.

I step off the plan. I have seen this country before, perhaps in a film with Edmund O'Brien, directed by a communist with a limp.

I step off the plane. Here the sky pulses. Back home, it just sits there.

I step off the plane. A man in a uniform approaches me, carrying a small purple sack, like the one I kept marbles in as a child. I loosen the yellow cord that seals it, and peer in. A kitten is curled up, its eyes closed: I cannot tel whether it is sleeping or dead. Oh no, sorry - I cannot tell whether I am sleeping or dead.

I step off the plane. I've landed in the wrong country.

I step off the plane. I see that I never should have left in the first place. Without going home, I know that everything had changed.

* * *

"I Speak English, Wall Street English"


In the Métro, at Bastille station,
a bunny rabbit in yellow pajamas
warns against
trapping our hands
in the doors..
The force of the closing doors
is of a mighty power.
It's all we can do
to clamp our palms
between our knees
to resist
the doors' stubborn pull.

[Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ross writes as though transcribing a dream.