Zymergy Literary Review

In 1986, Montreal was tight-roping its way across a deepening economic mire. North America’s 1982 recession had slithered into Quebec on the heels of a massive, English-speaking, mostly middle-class exodus from the province, following the Parti-Québécois’ landslide election of 1976. The self-satisfied patina of post-World War II utopian fantasy was dissolving at an alarming pace. At the same time, an expanding global awareness was helping to scrape away the last vestiges of middle-class convictions. Ronald Reagan’s “family values” agenda only highlighted the insane proportions of news from once unfathomable corners of the globe. Incoming refugees relayed the first-hand horrors of Ethiopia’s famine, Chile’s “disappeared” and Somalia’s civil war, while activist Michael Callen summarized that decade as “The AIDies.”

Montreal, unlike Toronto or Vancouver, offered a live and let live environment for any “Anglo” nurturing literary aspirations, the bilingual city’s lowly financial status providing a primary inducement. The main arteries that defined this once-glittering “Paris of the North” were then pickled with à louer signs whose accompanying high vacancy rates translated to a glut of cheap rents. Bistro proprietors rolled out the welcome mats, encouraging their artsy post-punk patrons to settle in for hours on end (regardless of the single bowls of au lait that constituted the average order), wooing organizers of poetry readings and book launches. To the outside eye, Montreal appeared to have picked up where ’60s hippie culture had left off: everyone shared a common cause—everyone could be a star.

If Modernism and post-Modernism shared one main attribute—i.e., preserving the very best of past cultural achievements, while simultaneously hacking away at the stasis incurred by adherence to aging cultural factions— there were indications at those bistro literary events of a growing determination to destroy the past, present and future. This nihilistic element was one acute defining characteristic of the neo-ephemeral: the society of the late 20C also seemed to be immersed in a global free-for-all. There were inevitable clashes between self-proclaimed Neoists and those whose incessant genuflections to the Beats and other past rebels were reflected in the tediously imitative product being churned out by “graduates” of the Bukowski school: drink hard, write fast, leave a beautiful corpse of a poem. Where one “Spoken word” performer espoused the purity of the unrehearsed rant, another insisted on reciting a sonnet whose calcified contours might have been more at home in the Romantic age. Erupting like wary hot springs between revelations of middle-class hypocrisy, injustice and relationship angst were entreaties by those who had fled life-threatening circumstances in their homelands. Could anything of lasting value emerge from such disproportionate cross-hatchings?

Within the next two months of the Prag gathering, my discovery of an antiquated Gestettner machine triggered a spark: visions of Contact Press glory danced in my head as the scarred oak stand was dragged into my apartment. By the time a repairman declared the machine a total write-off, I had already solicited enough material to put together a slender inaugural issue. Murmurs of a new magazine had caused a small yet palpable anticipatory ripple within the literary community. I delved into the new challenge with a sense of adventure and strait-laced determination. My perception of the Montreal literary scene was further expanded by my own participation in readings, personal correspondence and a growing library of international literary magazines.

By virtue of the material, each issue of Zymergy more or less guided its own momentum. Given the increasing number of submissions, the editorial challenge became more intricate with each issue: by my own estimation, about sixty percent of incoming texts could be classified as being emotionally resonant and soundly constructed. About fifteen percent consisted of religious or commercial evocations of love, nature and friendship. Twenty percent of poems could be perceived as above average, and less than five percent were what one might consider extraordinary. In 1990, the year before the last issue rolled off the presses, I wrote an overview of Zymergy’s editorial policy for a magazine called Hole, in which I compared the editor’s role to the act of fishing: “You never know what you’re going to catch. Iridescent octopi, shimmering starfish, oysters crammed with delectable flesh and the occasional, perfected pearl [. . .]. How to harvest the crammed net, how to make the painful decisions of what to keep, what to toss back?” (Spring 1990, 62).

The “confessional” era continued to extend its apparently indefatigable shadow. Much like the material being featured in local readings, the majority of incoming poems tended to be autobiographical, centered on everyday life— from relationships to alienation, city vistas, nature scapes and political commentary. One moment, readers could find themselves immersed in Claudine Bertrand’s breathless, colloquially-teeming tribute to Rue Saint Denis, “La rue réclame sa propagande”— in the next, Stephen Brockwell’s first-person exposé of “Pullet Carnivore,” before making the shift to knife wounds of a more surreal nature in van Toorn’s dream-walking “Mountain Ash.”

Zymergy’s first controversy came in the form of an interview with Ann Diamond: “How I Became a Terrorist, Or Humour As a Terrorist Weapon.” The author’s “Terrorist Letters” comprised a series of poetic narratives exploring Canada’s puritanical tendencies. In sending these “letters” Diamond hoped to call attention to “an organization based in Toronto which for some reason claims to represent poetry in this country”).

Controversy of a distant nature presented itself in the memoir submitted by an elderly artist from England, which I immediately decided to include in the seventh issue. Trevor Thomas, Sylvia Plath’s former downstairs neighbour, and the last person to see the poet alive, was in the process of being sued by Ted Hughes. Because of the resulting court order, I had no choice but to cut key paragraphs from the Thomas memoir. Despite the excisions, Thomas’s text was a fascinating read, calling attention to the insurmountable barriers faced by a woman whose talent miraculously transcended her circumstances.

At one point Chilean exile and Canadian poet Elias Letelier-Ruz announced that he was leaving for Managua, and asked whether I was interested in an interview with Ernesto Cardenal. During their meeting, Ruz had to make his way through a constant labyrinth of soldiers, students, bureaucrats, “workers requesting poetry readings for their unions” and “peasant women bringing him flowers” (Letelier-Ruz 58) .

Poet and essayist David Solway would cause the liveliest commotion. Through his essay “Fellatio, Depth-Analysis, and The Experience of the Surface,” a discussion of textual analysis vis-à-vis pornography, the thinker warned of the dangers inherent within the too-facile swallowing, so to speak, of deconstructive reticence: “The act of perception which guarantees our experience of the world has been gradually reduced to the status of an intention which proposes to accomplish that which already exists.” (16). A few readers cancelled their subscriptions solely on the basis of the essay’s title. However, it was Solway’s commentary in regard to Margaret Atwood, during an interview I conducted with him in the sixth issue, that most rankled the public: “I think she’s a second-rate, a very mediocre poet, who happened to be in the right place at the right time— in Toronto, during the media-onslaught of the Sixties” (55). These comments earned Zymergy its first and only newspaper headline, in the Montreal Gazette’s Thomas Schnurmacher column, in which Schurmacher decried Solway’s attack on “one of Canada’s foremost contemporary authors” as “sour grapes”. (Monday Oct 2 1989, page?). Solway’s comments regarding Canadian literature were no less searing: “You’ve got to publish a book a year, maybe a book every two years, if you want the League of Canadian Poets to remember you, if you want to get Canada Council grants, if you want to appear on CBC radio” (55).

After five years of intensive focus exacerbated by distribution gaps, feeble sales and a lack of publicity, I could now better appreciate the experiences of those whose devotion to publishing a literary magazine had also come full circle. Aileen Collins expressed this succinctly:“Looking back, I feel that the decision to forego mimeograph for print led to the demise of CIV/n; and as anyone associated with a little mag knows, the time and energy expended, the financial burden, and the decreasing enthusiasm slowly erode the burning faith in the cause” (10). Fifteen years later I am more acutely aware of the impermanence that delineates our existence as my eyes trace the names of those ‘Zymergists’ who have passed on: Louis Dudek, Manuel Betanzos-Santos, Shulamis Yelin, Ted Joans, Mike Leneghan, Mona E. Adilman, William Davey, David Lawson, Ralph Gustafson, Gerald Doerksen and Muriel Bédard.

Sonja A. Skarstedt,
Founder and Editor of Zymergy,
January 2006

Excerpted from "Zymergy: from the Neo-Ephemeral to the Occasional Imbroglio," an essay which appears in an essay collection, Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century, which explores Montreal literature of the 1980s [edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift, published byVéhicule Press in 2006].

Excerpted from *The Chronicle,* Pointe Claire, Quebec,
Wednesday, September 7, 1988
By Joy Carroll
Zymurgy – the branch of applied chemistry dealing with the science of wine making, brewing and distilling. Mix the brewing and fermenting of 'zymurgy' with the imagination of imagery, and you get Zymergy, the literary review owned, edited and produced by a former John Abbott College student. Sonja Skarstedt, 27, started Zymergy in 1985. She publishes 500 copies of the literary journal twice a year, and it is now distributed across Canada. It combines poetry and prose by new and established authors in a compact, book-sized volume. Skarstedt has been hooked on poetry since she was a 14-year-old at Beaconsfield High School. There she was caught by the enthusiasm of teacher John Whitman. The romance with poetry continued in CEGEP under the tutelage of professor Endre Farkas, who has since contributed to Zymergy. “He was an inspiring force,” Skarstedt said. At Abbott she worked on the committee to choose poetry for Locus, the college’s literary magazine. There she found that her views on what was good poetry differed vastly from the views of the other students. Now, as the editor of Zymergy, she has complete control over submissions. Editing the review is mainly her hobby, and she tries hard to keep it a part-time venture. She writes and submits poems to other magazines, and thus has experienced both ends of the magazine business. She tries to treat the writers who submit work to her with the same respect she likes editors to show her. She uses work from well-known authors like Phyllis Webb and Mohamud Togane of Somalia, as well as first-time authors. Poems by John Abbott professors Peter van Toorn and Kenneth Radu were included in the last issue. Her only restriction is that the pieces have a spark of their own instead of being run-of-the-mill and clichéd. “There is nothing wrong with roses, but make it different,” she tells writers. Zymergy is not a money-maker. Skarstedt has sunk a lot of her own money into it. Although 500 copies of the magazine are distributed, Zymergy only has 25 subscribers. “You give a lot of yourself and your piggy bank,” she said. To keep costs down she does all the typesetting herself on an old machine in her Montreal apartment. She chooses the poems and designs the magazine herself, so she can spend her money on good paper and quality printing. But what matters most is the poetry. Skarstedt wants to put out a review that people will keep, and that even will revive people’s interest in the written word. “Poetry on the page has an intimate, permanent nature all its own.”