What is a box garden, if not rooted rootlessness? And what else might a prose poem be, but a box for seeding the language of flowers? In this shorthand account of self-consciousness, in which lanky lines à la sestinas slalom a chain of chockablock text, the speaker is swathed in a Québécois troupe from whom he’s also excluded.
Interview by T. Liem with Ockert Greeff // Winner of the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award (No. 39)
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!
T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in “A Letter from The Sea” with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?
Announcing the publication of A Mass Choir of Little Things by 2024 Vallum Chapbook Contest Winner, Ockert Greeff!
A Mass Choir of Little Things seems sculpted by decay. Poet and percussionist Ockert Greeff examines physical evidence of impending disaster and recent loss, from leftover clothes to leathery faces. Bodies and landscapes bear wounds of time and the promise of finality. In one poem, his mother giggles like a girl; in the next, she cannot recognize him. But Greeff’s sparse, vivid language also finds life within endings. He imagines his elderly mom as a baby turtle wading into the water; he chronicles organisms that persist. An orange pickup truck in the desert, a swimmer lifting his arms to the sky. Greeff’s preoccupation with “the dark mass that is taking us all” reveals a gentle attention to existence — the rhythms of a haircut, the silences of a funeral — figuring death as one part of the story.
Announcing the winner of the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award:
Ockert Greeff, for his chapbook: “A Mass Choir of Little Things” Excerpt from chapbook: * * * I let go of my yellow lunchbox Watch it swirl away in the dark water Past the boy who cannot give up He is swimming, lifting his arms up High out of the water, […]
Maya Clubine | River Bug on the Black Sea
from Life Cycle of a Mayfly, the winner of the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Award The sun sinks down toward the thin horizon. The weary peacock falls asleep inside its crowned flask. The Philosopher sits on a rock and jots a few brief observations about a river bug above the Black Sea. The river bug flies, […]