ottawa poetry newsletter

2012-01-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

A B Series Presents

Cat Kidd

& Kaie Kellough

in performance

Gallery 101

301 1/2 Bank Street

Ottawa, Ontario

8pm

Friday, January 20, 2012

More info: ABSERIES.ORG

2012-01-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

From Icarus to Idi Amin:

A Retrospective Reading by Henry Beissel

7:30pm

Doors open at 7:00pm

Tea and scones served by Laurier House

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Laurier House

A National Historic Site

335 Laurier Avenue East

Ottawa, Ontario

More info: ABSERIES.ORG

Bywords Warms the Night XIV

2012-01-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

Our ninth annual fundraiser for the Cornerstone Women's Shelter Sunday, January 15, 2012
2:00 to 3:00 pm
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffee Bar,
1242 Wellington St. W
with music by
Andrea Simms-Karp
& poetry by
Jamie Bradley, Abby Paige & Luminita Suse
[cover photo by Lee Mousseau]

For every donation to the hat, we will give you a copy of the winter issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal & our thanks.

Cornerstone provides emergency shelter and supportive housing for a diversity of women.

• $21 will feed one woman for a week
• $84 will feed her for a month
• $840 will feed 10 women for a month
• $100 will provide one month of addiction or mental health counseling services for a woman in recovery from the effects of trauma and abuse
• $200 will sponsor a woman in our iSisters computer training course
• $75 will provide a homeless woman with the support of our Housing Worker in her search for safe and affordable housing that she can sustain when she leaves the shelter.

Contact: Amanda Earl - amanda at bywords dot ca; Twitter: @bywordsdotca
Facebook

Christine McNair - Notes From A Cartywheel (Ottawa: AngelHousePress, 2011)

2011-11-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

Notes From A Cartywheel

Christine McNair

Ottawa: AngelHousePress, November 2011

A cartwheel is a strange thing. It implies movement but also return. It is cyclical. It is repetition with change. One arrives somewhere familiar but not quite the same as where one started. The cartwheel, or cartywheel, is an object of interest for Christine McNair. From her cartywheel press, to her notes from a cartwheel blog (“here's the part where we say what we mean & we mean what we say”), and now this chapbook, Notes From A Cartywheel (Ottawa: AngelHousePress, 2011), her exploration of the concept over the last few years has been wide and varied. She is also in the process of editing and producing an anthology focused on cartwheels. Her call for submissions draws attention to the productive capacity of the image:

cart·wheel (kärthwl, -wl)
n. 1. A handspring in which the body turns over sideways with the arms and legs spread like the spokes of a wheel. 2. Slang A large coin, such as a silver dollar.

An open call for cartwheels: poems or quite short fiction relating to the cyclic, cartwheels, cart wheels, or any variation thereof. Loose interpretations are quite acceptable. (For example: cartwheels, but also cart wheels (see: cart, vehicle for transport), cartwheel hats, saint catherine and her wheel, catherine wheels, cartwheel coronal ejections, cartwheel neurons, cartwheel galaxies, cartwheel silver dollars, anything related to the cyclic, etc, etc, etc.)

In what sense are these poems “notes” from cartwheels? The title suggests the poems are written from within cartwheels, that the perspectives are perhaps moving laterally and circularly. These poems are anything but static. The book includes a series of poems built as anagrams:

four

a cloned involution

unlaced violin onto

calved lotion union

unlaced volution on

unclad voile notion

nonactive loud lion

invocation dull one

lilac devotion noun

colonial devout in

continual dove lion

lunatic loved onion

contain unloved oil

a lucid violent noon

a novice dull notion

an uncool violent id

These exercises in rearranging are astonishing. The central line in each is bookended by variations on the initial syllables and letters. The sounds are effectively turning cartwheels around one another. Each subsequent line is familiar but altered. Origins are recalled, but the meanings and perspectives have changed. McNair reduces language to component aural (musical?) parts, and unlocks reciprocal and competing meanings in the process. She takes a simple idea and creates tremendous movement.

Notes is a book of great variety. An untitled poem arranges words and type in a grid, horizontally and vertically, establishing a field of meaning that lacks a fixed referent. “biblio non-grata” catalogues search results for “cartwheel” from amazon and chapters, a list that runs from children’s titles to obscure scientific objects. Other poems, structured as lists, are experiments in contrast: “I am frank, honest, full of vigor and ambition. I am amiable and sociable. / I have problems being open. I accept solitude” (“five”). There are prose sections focused on a character named Catherine (“I Catherine, useless entrust myself to you”). Speakers confront direction and misdirection, knowledge and ignorance: "there’s due course then there’s also a fixed lack of relative position spiral delicious over black angled highway there’s coursework to be done / you lost your maps I pinned them to your black pants you still lost them you didn’t care / I play pick-me-up with bits of this and that and those I can't remember if we'll get there in due course" ("ten").

An important line in the book closes “five”: “I persevere.” The chapbook is committed to generative possibilities and contradictions of the cartwheel. It explores language through this central image, pushing as far as the words, as the letters, can bear. In “how to say sweetheart” the poem breaks down into description of the written marks of letters: “curve sharp curve curve / sharp sharp curve curve” before settling on “dot dot dot dot.” What is most admirable in the chapbook is McNair’s free exploration of a host of component parts of language and communication (sentences, images, words, syllables, written signs). She perseveres through meaning and non-meaning, privileging neither. Playful and free utterance, the joy of sound and image, are the core of Notes From A Cartywheel. The youthful exuberance of cartwheels seems an entirely apt anchor for McNair’s writing.

AngelHouse deserves acknowledgement for the production of the book. As usual, the press uses lovely paper stock and thoughtful, personal design. A series of scanned objects illustrate the poems, ranging from wooden type and coins, to polaroids and jewellery. The images extend the language of the poems, as well as assert the varied dimensions and modes of communication McNair is interested in.

McNair has been successful in recent years. She was shortlisted for the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, she has seen broadsides published by AngelHouse and above/ground, her work appeared in the astoundingly beautiful anthology Dinosaur Porn (Toronto: Ferno House & The Emergency Response Unit, 2010.), she read at VERSeFest, she took part in the most recent iterations of jwcurry’s Messagio Galore (takes VII and VIII), and her first trade collection, Conflict, is forthcoming from BookThug in 2012. She is an exciting poet in Ottawa, and an active member of the community (we cannot forget her hosting duties on CKCU’s Literary Landscapes). McNair is due a trade collection. Conflict will be an exciting book. In the meantime, go buy Notes From A Cartywheel, the poet and the press are deserving.

Notes From A Cartywheel is being launched in Thursday December 1. Full event information here.

Submissions Wanted for In/Words 11.1

2011-11-24T13:46:00.000-08:00

Dear Virginias, Dickens and Twains,

In/Words Magazine, Carleton University’s student-run literary rag for 11 years running, is looking for poetry and fiction submissions for its winter 2012 issue. The issue will be printed in late February, so send your submissions to inwordsmagazine@gmail.com by DECEMBER 31.

Please send up to 6 poems or 2 stories (2000 words MAX). For more detailed submission guidelines, past issues and more information, visit http://inwordsmagazine.wordpress.com

The issue will launch (materially) at VERSeFest 2012 and (metaphysically) on Literary Landscape on CKCU 93.1, where chosen contributors will be asked to read their work on air!

2011-11-18T18:29:00.001-08:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Shirley Bear & Mark Truscott in the A B Series

2011-11-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

A B Series Presents

Readings by Shirley Bear & Mark Truscott

Doors open 7:30pm

Performances at 8pm

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Gallery 101

301 1/2 Bank Street (up the stairs)

Ottawa, Ontario

$7 (students $5)

Shirley Bear was recently named a member of the Order of Canada for her contributions as a First Nations visual artist and cultural activist. She is a multimedia artist, writer, traditional First Nation herbalist and Elder.

Shirley Bear's "Virgin Bones"

Mark Truscott is the author of two books of poetry: Said Like Reed or Things (Coach House, 2004) and Nature (BookThug, 2010). In June 2011, BookThug published a prose chapbook,Form: A Series. Truscott leads courses and workshops through the Toronto New School of Writing. He lives in Toronto.

Mark Truscott's "Said Like Reeds or Things"

More info:

abseries.org

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Gallery 101.

Odourless Press (Ottawa ON): Ladouceur, Blackman, Sinaee

2011-11-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Odourless Press (Ottawa ON) appeared without ceremony in August 2011. The press identifies itself as “a small Ottawa collective.” It has an active web presence, publishing poems near-daily on its blog as well as hosting poetry podcast content from local readings. Odourless chapbooks are single pages, folded or stuffed into envelopes, printed on both sides with a handful of poems. The clean, simple designs are a testament to creativity and restraint. Odourless accomplishes an awful lot with a single page. With a $0.50 price tag on each book, there is a whole lot to like here, and no excuse not to buy them all.

Mutt

Ben Ladouceur

Odourless Press: Ottawa, 2011

Ben Ladouceur has been busy in 2011. He read on the opening night of VERSeFest, published two previous chapbooks (Lime Kiln Quay Road [above/ground: Ottawa, 2011] and self-portrait as the bottom of the sea at the beginning of time [The Moose & Pussy: Ottawa, 2011]), and one broadside (TUKTOYUKTUK [Apt. 9 Press: Ottawa, 2011], not to mention his ongoing graduate studies. It continues to be a pleasure to find new poems from Ben available.

Mutt collects five new ones that walk a fine line between sadness and humour. Ben has remarkable control over his subject matter, managing a bill bissett epigraph, a Kafka reference, a prayer, and bodily humour in the first poem, “Colostomy”:

You have lifted the t-shirt

over your sweet head

to reveal your dark bag of faeces, proof

the body is a sequence of routes that men

can redirect.

These are poems of loss and decay, separation and return. There is a restlessness in Ben’s work, subject matter that roams across cities and countries. “A home has lost its home,” he writes in “Redundancies.” For the displacements of these poems, the reader is rewarded with stunning images: “A lake is a body of water plus / the bodies of hundreds of birds” (“Derwentwater”). Ben has seen enough quality work into print in chapbooks and magazines in the last two years to furnish a staggering debut trade collection. Until that happens, Mutt is a welcome addition to his body of work.

Back to My Old Self

Jeff Blackman

Odourless Press: Ottawa, 2011

Jeff Blackman is one of the hardest working and most underappreciated writers in Ottawa. He has been quietly developing a unique and engaging voice over a series of projects in the last few years. Perhaps, more accurately, he has been developing unique and engaging voices. From his sex-positive work as co-founder and co-editor of The Moose & Pussy, to his devastating Shiva after Shabbas (Horsebroke: Ottawa, 2011), and now Back To My Old Self (Odourless Press: Ottawa, 2011), a series of poems that take on the single greatest video game in the history of video games: Super Mario Bros. 3.

Jeff understands poems—funny poems, sad poems, filthy poems. He knows when to say more, and when to say less:

It helps if you had an older brother

or a best friend who had an older brother

If you grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System, it would be a tragedy not to own this bizarre and wonderful little set of poems. Jeff turns the struggles of Mario into something nearly heroic, certainly human and frail: “so sing a psalm: everyday I’ll make mistakes tomorrow I’ll make most of them” (“Progress”). These poems have been developing publicly for at least a couple years now at open-mics and readings around Ottawa. Attentive crowds understood that something important was happening each time Jeff read from this manuscript. Following the production of a few of these poems as limited edition handmade broadsides last spring, we have something tangible and more widely available. At last.

Royal Jelly

Bardia Sinaee

Odourless Press: Ottawa, 2011

Bardia Sinaee is one of the most exciting young poets in Ottawa at the moment. He is one of four hosts of Literary Landscapes on CKCU, a former editor of In/Words, a recent “Hot Ottawa Voice” at the venerable Tree Reading Series, and a damned nice guy. He is also an intensely literate and articulate poet. He understands syllables, metres, sounds. For a young poet, he has a terrifyingly developed vision. He is well read and thoughtful, and deploys all of these characteristics in the service of serious but funny poems in Royal Jelly.

If a circle, C, is inside a triangle, T, then it entails

that C is smaller than T. The value of C would be unable

to hold its end of the equals sign. If the equation

were a gun-draw at dawn, C would lose by a hair

and buckle to its fate. Its lover and children

would mourn by its torn arms and wonder

why its body was built for bullets. (“The Inevitablist”)

Bardia writes rich poems that demand reading and re-reading. One always has the sense that there is more waiting to be drawn out. These are poems of careful construction that nonetheless appear effortless. The rate of Bardia’s development is difficult to measure, but is astonishing to follow.

Behind him, billboards plus peerless paediatrics

and a dated exhibition of bees. Try to find the queen

among all the workers and drones!

Behind that the ground, stapled with hydros,

won’t even shrug. (“7/4 Gridline”)

Odourless is a press to follow, and a welcome presence in Ottawa’s community. What is most striking and refreshing about these first three books is the presence of humour in each poet’s work. Balancing feeling and humour in a poem is an all too rare ability. Ben Ladouceur, Jeff Blackman, and Bardia Sinaee each accomplish this feat with personality to spare. Go buy these poems, for god’s sake! $1.50 for the set! Ottawa, meet Odourless Press. Odourless Press, welcome to Ottawa.

PETER NORMAN & STUART ROSS in the A B Series

2011-09-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

THE A B SERIES launches its Fifth Season of autumn to spring events with PETER NORMAN & STUART ROSS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011
Doors open 7:00pm
Readings start at 7:30pm (with intermission & cash bar)
Gallery 101
301 ½ Bank Street (up the stairs)
Ottawa, Ontario

Peter Norman’s poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and other publications, including Arc, Industrial Sabotage, Bywords and the first two editions of The Best Canadian Poetry. His first book, At the Gates of the Theme Park, was published last year by Mansfield Press.

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 and sold over 7,000 poetry and fiction chapbooks. In addition to dozens of chapbooks and two sound-poetry cassettes, he is the author of two collaborative novels, two story collections, and six full-length poetry books. He has published a collection of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press), edited Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press), and co-edited Rogue Stimulus: A Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament(Mansfield Press). His story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009) won the 2010 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. In spring 2011, ECW Press released his first novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Stuart Ross

For more information abseries.org

With financial assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts through the Writers' Union of CanadaThe A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and Gallery 101.

Erín Moure & Christopher Dewdney in the A B Series

2011-06-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Reviews - Stephen Brockwell & Ben Ladouceur

2011-05-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment)

Stephen Brockwell

Ottawa: above/ground press, August 2010.

Stephen Brockwell’s “Impossible Books project” (this above/ground book is its second installment) is an ongoing series of individual poems that are presented as excerpts from imagined “impossible” books. The impossible books of this installment range from Prime Minister’s Nursery Rhymes for Insolent Children, to the Evangelical Handbook for Engineers, to Metonymies: Poems by Objects Owned by Illustrious People, and Pindaric Odes to the Objects of Science, among others. This brief collection of ten poems is imaginative and surprising on every page.

“Animal Crackers,” from Prime Minister’s Nursery Rhymes for Insolent Children, is ripe with the pride, violence, and fierce control of image and language that are recognized now as markers of Stephen Harper’s Canadian Government (a newly-majority Government since the publication of this book):

Shrikes impale mice on barbed wire.

Weaning calved keen.

Wild male chimps murder babies.

Silverbacks preen.

The political edge of many of these poems is unsurprising from Brockwell, who co-edited Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament with Stuart Ross during Stephen Harper’s second prorogation of Parliament. The sorts of biting, angry, but smart and focused critiques offered in these poems are vital today, and will be increasingly so over the next four years of Harper’s current majority.

Another recognizable bent in Brockwell’s work is his interest in interrogating the seemingly cold language and images of science for available (and potential) emotional currency:

At least one molecule of you in me

passed through the body of some great person,

in the urine of Josef Stalin, say,

on an October morning in his youth;

it may be one I am passing on now

as a drop of saliva flies from my tongue

over this paper. (from Pindaric Odes to the Objects of Science)

Where language overlaps with the body is a fruitful site for Brockwell:

It is after all a word,

the tongue on the teeth,

the open mouth,

the teeth biting the lips,

until they bleed. (from The Love Poems of ____, Serial Killer)

At these intersections (language/body, language/science), Brockwell points at a handful of the small manners in which people are connected physically, if inadvertently.

The two most exciting poems here, to my ear, come from The Archives of Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance, in the form of two applications for the position of God. In these two poems the reader is offered modest acts of growth and selflessness mixed with fatigue:

1027-3F, December 12, 2024

Dear Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance,

I believe I should be accepted for God

because I have never eaten meat.

I cultivated tomatoes at my window

from a pack of ancient seeds.

I nurtured them to the size

of vitamins with water I filtered

from the rain. That Saturday morning

I prayed for the Sun as I am sure

so many do every day but I prayed

for others not for myself

and the Sun appeared for at least

one minute through the smog.

All my life I have shared the gifts I have received.

But I am so tired – please accept this

application for God.

The success of this book rests in its brevity. None of the “jokes” overstay their welcome, with only one or two poems from each “Impossible Book” presented. These are serious poems that rise above the humour and novelty of their initial idea(s). The first installment of the series was given at the Olive Reading Series in December 2007. I’ve not seen that chapbook, but I imagine in hope that Brockwell is sitting on further installments that we may be lucky enough to see in print someday.

Lime Kiln Quay Road

Ben Ladouceur

Ottawa: above/ground press, May 2011.

Ben Ladouceur has had a wonderful nine months since returning to Ottawa following a year spent working in Suffolk, England. He gave a widely heralded reading on the opening night of Versefest alongside Michael Dennis, in April he read as part of University Night at Tree Reading Series, the chapbook self-portrait as the bottom of the sea at the beginning of time was published by The Moose & Pussy, and now Lime Kiln Quay Road is seen in to print by rob mclennan’s above/ground press, not to mention chapbooks before his departure: Alert (AngelHouse Press, 2010) and The Argossey (published by my own Apt. 9 Press—full disclosure).

Lime Kiln Quay Road sees him working further in serial forms, marrying concise individual pieces with breadth and larger project conception. It is a book concerned with growth (or more accurately, stuttering and failing growth):

There was a rock rumoured to grow

one inch every year.

It was a letdown.

In these poems, set in the countryside around the hostel in Suffolk where Ladouceur was employed, the reader finds stagnation and boredom, as well as questions of intention and consequence:

The indifferent roads collect rain

in depressions caused by tires

and make the drive tricky

but it’s neat

that the depressions exist

that when you go somewhere

everything behind you

is a little bit flatter.

Of course

that’s easy for me to say,

I never did the driving.

In the stagnant (though often beautiful) landscape, the figures of these poems develop sensitivity to the movement of their own identities:

We occupy the eye

in quietude of storm

wet weather soft against our roof

like gavels wrapped in satin

it’s the eye that is moving.

For now we are still.

There is an disconnect between the bodies of the figures and the landscape, one that undermines predictable expectations of poetry located in the rural or pastoral settings, as was an insistence upon the presence of the lower bodily stratum that grounds much of Ben's work in the body itself:

It isn’t as though a tree

will sprout there

a very acidic and thankful tree

made of all the liquids

our bodies didn’t need.

That sort of thing doesn’t happen.

In Ottawa, those paying attention have known that Ben is a poet to follow. We have been lucky to have the opportunity to watch this work develop. Lime Kiln Quay Road makes plain that Ben is already fulfilling his vast promise. He has strong control over the developing momentum of this book, as well as the turns that startle the reader. With above/ground press’s famously large network of distribution, this book will hopefully catch the eye of some new readers around the country. Heads up, folks.

Jaap BLONK + playback

2011-05-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

abseries.org

TOKYO TAIGA world music power trio in the A B Series at the NAC's 4th Stage, May 18/2011

2011-05-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

A B Series presents TOKYO TAIGA, May 18/11, on the National Arts Centre's Fourth Stage

Anne Simpson reading in the A B Series, May 6, 2011

2011-05-08T09:11:00.001-07:00

Metro - Unique group comes to NAC

2011-04-28T16:04:00.000-07:00

Metro - Unique group comes to NAC

Susan Elmslie, Anne Simpson & Colin Morton in The A B Series

2011-04-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Northern Comfort (Commoners’ Press: Ottawa, 1973)

2011-04-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

In November 2010, I published a bibliography of William Hawkins through my own Apt. 9 Press. In my brief introductory note, I wrote “this bibliography will likely be out of date upon the day of its publication. I imagine, and I hope, that once it is in people’s hands it will spark new discoveries of “lost” Hawkins work.” Before the folio was formally launched, rob mclennan wrote a review of the Folio that pointed already to further available material. Specifically, he mentions “that magnificent anthology Northern Comfort, the transcript of a reading in the Byward Market hosted by and dedicated to Hawkins.” This note is to discuss and describe that anthology. I intend to return to this space over the coming months and describe further items that have come to light since that initial bibliography was published.

Northern Comfort was published in 1973 by Commoners’ Press (Ottawa). The title page elaborates on the function of the book: “being a reading of poetry by various people, given in the back yard of the Victoria Hotel 18 Murray Street, the Byward Market, Ottawa, on the evening of June 29^th, 1972.” The text was transcribed from recordings provided by “Peter Lamb of Coon Hollow Films and Mariea Sparks of Ottawa Living Radio.” It was transcribed by “Monk Besserer” – two streets in downtown Ottawa.

An introduction by Neil Whiteman explains that the reading was organized by Peter Geldart, Alyx Jones and Bill Stevenson. The three were co-ordinators of “Market Projections,” a group of artists who primarily did work “of the “happening” variety.” The reading, or at least the book, is dedicated to the loss of the Victoria Hotel Building (built in 1962 at 18-24 Murray Street) as well as to “MR. WILLIAM HAWKINS.”

The text of the book is a transcription of the readings that took place on June 29 1972. The list of readers, speakers, and musicians included: William Hawkins, Alyx Jones, Robert Hogg, Marius, Kociejowski, Christopher Levenson, Neil Whiteman, Jack Nathanson, George Johnston, Ronnie Judge, “Unknown Reader,” David Andrews, The 47 Argyle Street Band, Christopher James and Bill Stevenson.

The charm of the book lies in its apparent faith to the recording. The transcription includes the speakers, the banter, the introductions, comments from the audience, as well as a generous selection of photos of the event. Hawkins, in addition to reading, hosted the evening.

Hawkins: The whole concept of reading poetry is...is rather a strange one. Uh...it sort of got a renaissance or a start back in, I think, ’58, when all the crazy San Francisco...like...Kerouac and Ginsberg, started reading. But, you know, really, when you get down to it...it...

Voice: Southern Comfort!

Hawkins:...it’s a very, very funny thing. It’s somebody talking about what they should feel very personally about and what they should not really want to talk to anybody else about. That’s the way I feel about my poems...and that’s why I don’t read very often. Because...um, they’re private. So I’m gonna start...I got this book you can’t buy at your nearest bookstore...

(Scattered applause. Drumbeats)

because...uh...freaks like Whiteman have already put it out of print.

Hawkins reads some of the early poster poems (including “King Kong Goes to Rotterdam,” and “Two Short Ones”) and Ottawa Poems, as well as reading five new poems. In my own reading and research of Hawkins, I’ve not found these poems or lines elsewhere in his published work. (Please contact me if you have!). After several readers, Hawkins returns to the stage and reads “Wilful Murder,” which was printed as new material in The Gift of Space: Selected Poems 1960/70.

Hawkins' biography modifies his own history: “William Hawkins, 33, lives in Mexico at 182 ½ Dalhousie Street. In 1967 he was voted one of Ottawa’s Finest Young Men.” The reference to Mexico touches on the poems he wrote on a Canada Council Grant in the late sixties and early seventies. The “Finest Young Man” Award was actually an “Outstanding Young Man Award.”

The historical study of literary readings is difficult to undertake. Readings are, by nature, ephemeral. While today we increasingly see detailed audio-visual records maintained by many reading series, it is difficult to reconstruct readings that occurred decades previously. Rather than authoritative texts of events, we have fragmented production and reception histories, primary details, anecdotes, memories and other forms of unreliable evidence. We can find manifestations of audience response and interaction in the wake of events, but we cannot return to the events themselves.

Northern Comfort occupies a unique position in these respects (at least so far as my own reading has turned up). While the text initially appears to offer an unadulterated transcription of the reading in question, numerous editorial comments, as well as an introductory note, make clear that this is a fragment rather than a whole. However, what is most interesting about Northern Comfort is that it was produced in the immediate wake of the reading, rather than at a later date and further distance. It was transcribed and published within one year of the reading. The effect of this, in my opinion, is to create an object that shares the spirit and intent of the initial reading. It is not total narrative, but rather a strange, bizarre, wonderful book-object that mirrors the described strange, bizarre, wonderful reading-event. The fidelity of Northern Comfort is not to the reading, but rather to the spirit of the reading. It is a baffling book but also a “magnificent” one, as rob mclennan described it. It is a nearly-forgotten piece of Ottawa’s literary history that is firmly embedded in the moment it was attempting to describe.

Jen Currin matinee reading

2011-04-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Jen Currin & Jonathan Ball in the A B Series

2011-04-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Coach House Books' most award-nominated authors of 2011 appear in the A B Series, April 16.

abseries.org

gustave morin visual poetry presentation

2011-03-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

abseries.org

Reid, Radmore, Hanson-Finger

2011-03-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

See Apt. 9 Press for more information.

A B Series pre-VERSe Fest EXTRAVAGANZA

2011-02-28T11:35:00.000-08:00

abseries.org

VERSeFest

2011-02-18T18:39:00.000-08:00

VERSeFest, Ottawa's Poetry Festival, is March 8-13th with Pre-Fest events March 5 and 6th.

Peter Gibbon - What I like about Jesslyn Delia Smith

2011-02-15T18:05:00.000-08:00

What I like about Jesslyn Delia Smith:

a survey of her poetry & review of “rescue poems” (In/Words, 2011)

Marble is the cross-section of a cloud.

What, then, if the forms we know

are sections of a full body

whose dimensions are timeless

and bodiless, like poems,

whose unseen dimension is the mind?

Louis Dudek, from Poems from Atlantis (Golden Dog Press, 1980)

In his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (1979), Michael Ondaatje pontificates on a genre coined the “serial poem”—a much-loved form in the 1970s, and most popular among the contributors he anthologized. He addresses some interesting characteristics of his contributors: “In the 70’s some poets talked out loud and some listened. These poets listen to everything” (13). I like the distinction made here because it suggests the work of serial poets is quiet, modest and deeply personal. This is also what I like about the poetry of Jesslyn Delia Smith.

I have no doubt that Jesslyn writes frequently. Her blog (http://jesslyndelia.com/) is updated regularly with new poetry and (more recently) prose. She’s had 4 chapbooks published in the last 2 years, most by In/Words press, one self-published: so it’s the first really warm day (In/Words: 2009), doorhinge (In/Words: 2009), sun, scrambled (self-published: 2010), rescue poems (In/Words: 2011). Their thematic content is constant: love, memory, allegiance. It is the slight shifts in tone between the individual poems that add depth to her body of work and give her poems a remarkable accumulative quality deserving of attention [...]

Read the full article in the February 2011 issue of Bywords here.

David McFadden & Angela Carr in The A B Series

2011-02-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Bywords Warms the Night: Fundraiser for the Cornerstone Women's Shelter

2011-01-30T05:05:00.001-08:00

A B SERIES presents SHERI-D WILSON / ÉLIZ ROBERT / KEVIN MATTHEWS

2011-01-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

SHERI-D WILSON

“Queen of Canada’s Performance Poetry Scene”

ÉLIZ ROBERT

& KEVIN MATTHEWS

Perform in The A B Series

+ Poetry in Three Languages!

Come & witness the fiery instant translation from Sheri-D Wilson’s English to French & Spanish performed by Éliz Robert

An A B SERIES Presentation

at The Mercury Lounge in Ottawa’s Byward Market

Happening Saturday, January 22, 2011

Doors open at 7:30pm

Show starts at 8:00pm

SHERI-D WILSON is Artistic Director of the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival & Director of the Spoken Word Program at the Banff Centre.

ÉLIZ ROBERT is a graduate of the 2010 Banff Center Spoken Word Residency & has toured in Europe & The USA. She lives in Montreal.

KEVIN MATTHEWS has performed his poetry in front of audiences around Canada — from hundreds to handfuls, from symphonic concert halls to correctional facilities.

The A B SERIES is Ottawa’s reading series for experimental, sound & performance poetry. Initiated in the autumn of 2007, The A B Series has quickly become one of Canada’s most distinguished & dynamic venues for performance poetry.

http://ABSERIES.ORG

Contact:

Max Middle

Artistic Director

The A B Series

director@abseries.org

AngelHousePress seeks visual poetry for Nationalpoetrymonth.ca

2011-01-03T06:01:00.000-08:00

AngelHousePress seeks visual poems, assemic writing, collages and concrete poems
for the 2011 nationalpoetrymonth.ca.

Please send high resolution JPGs (1200 pixels on the longest side), a short bio
and a photograph to me by February 28, 2011.

(do NOT send me PDFs or word processing documents.)

Please send only one poem. I will consider both previously published and
unpublished work for publication.

Please send work to amanda at angelhousepress dot com and put NPM in the subject line.

Participants from all countries are welcome.
If you want your poem to be titled, please put the title in the jpg.

Happy new year to all!

Amanda Earl
AngelHousePress
www.angelhousepress.com
the angel is in the house

Sheri-D Wilson, Éliz Robert & Kevin Matthews perform in The A B Series

2011-01-02T11:03:00.000-08:00

+ Poetry in Three Languages! Come & witness the fiery Insta-Translation performances of Sheri-D Wilson & Éliz Robert

+ Poésie trilingue! Venez voir naître sous vos yeux des performances d'insta-traduction entre Sheri-D Wilson & Éliz Robert

abseries.org

Readings by Betts & Lynes + holiday party with door prizes!

2010-12-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

ABSERIES.ORG

ROBERT PRIEST, THE RECIPE, SOBOL & LAVERY

2010-11-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

ABSERIES.ORG

An Evening of Poetry & Music with Robert Priest, The Recipe, John Sobol & John Lavery

Bywords Fall Reading, Sunday, November 21, 2010

2010-11-11T01:19:00.001-08:00

You are invited to the launch of the fall edition of the Bywords Quarterly Journal to take place at 5pm on Sunday, November 21, 2010 as part of the Dusty Owl Reading Series, Swizzles, 246-B Queen St.
Music by Kevin Grant and poetry readings by Frances Boyle, Reid Cooper, Marilyn Irwin and rob mclennan.
Followed by the Dusty Owl's Open Mic.

Contact info: amanda at bywords dot ca

Cover photo by Jayni Bloch

Bywords thanks the City of Ottawa for funding us again this year.

A reminder that we are always looking for poetry by former and current Ottawa residents, students and workers. Deadlines are the 15th of the month.
Go to http://www.bywords.ca/ and click on guidelines for further information.

The next issue of Bywords.ca comes out November 15.

To receive daily updates of literary events, please follow us on Twitter.

2010-11-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

See www.apt9press.ca for further information.
Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=167389499951641

Lisa Robertson & Jeramy Dodds in The A B Series

2010-11-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Transparency Machine with Louis Cabri

2010-10-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

abseries.org

Bywords' 2010 John Newlove Poetry Award

2010-10-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Bywords' 2010 John Newlove Poetry Award Reading
at the Ottawa International Writers Festival
Southminister United Church, 15 Aylmer
Monday, October 25, 2010, 6:30 pm- a free event
contact: amanda@bywords.ca

Launch of "The Glass Jaw" by Marcus McCann, the recipient of the 2009 John Newlove Poetry Award. With readings by this year's honourable mentions and award recipient to be announced at the reading, and music by the Companionship Registry.

"This year’s winner of the John Newlove Poetry Award stood out from a strong field of finalists for its rich execution of focalized perception and its economical rendering of character through the use of terse, gritty idiom." Jason Camlot, 2010 Bywords John Newlove Poetry Award Judge

The annual John Newlove Poetry award, launched in the fall of 2004, commemorates the honest, poignant and well-written poetry of John Newlove, an Ottawa resident for almost twenty years and poet who died in 2003.

Transparency Machine with Louis Cabri

2010-10-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

A B SERIES PRESENTS

a homecoming edition of

THE TRANSPARENCY MACHINE

with Louis Cabri

The A B Series is delighted to present a homecoming edition of The Transparency Machine with Louis Cabri. During the late 1980's and early 1990's, Cabri organized the Experimental Writing Group in Ottawa with Rob Manery. They produced literary events that included The Transparency Machine reading series, then held at Gallery 101. Together, they published hole magazine and chapbook series.

The Transparency Machine is an event in which a poet is asked to give a reading from his or her work, and create, for that reading, a textual collage (of quotations and images) through which to talk about poetry. Pre-readings for Louis Cabri's October 30, 2010 Transparency Machine event have been posted to The A B Series web site.

Louis Cabri is author of —that can’t (Nomados) and The Mood Embosser (Coach House Books). He teaches modern and contemporary poetry, literary theory, and creative writing at the University of Windsor. Wrinkle Press recently published his leaflet What is Venice? (illustrated by Tim de Vries). His new book, Poetryworld, is being published this fall by Capilano University Editions.

* SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2010 *

* Doors open 7:00pm *
* Presentation at 7:30pm *

Gallery 101
301 1/2 Bank Street
(top level)
Ottawa, Ontario

ABSERIES.ORG

MillAr & Rhodes in The A B Series

2010-10-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Arc Poetry Annual 2011 launch

2010-09-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Kemp & Kubota in The A B Series

2010-09-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

Poster design by Kevin Matthews

On Friday, October 1st, Governor General's Award winning artist, NOBUO KUBOTA, and extraordinary sound poetry performer, PENN KEMP, launch The A B Series' Fourth Season of autumn to spring events. Come and see two solo performances by Canadian masters of sound poetry.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Doors: 7:00pm

Performance: 7:30pm to 9:30pm

The Mercury Lounge (Upstairs)

$9 admission at the door

Penn Kemp performs at 7:30pm followed by an intermission followed by Nobuo Kubota's performance.

ABSERIES.ORG

NOBUO KUBOTA was an original member of the Artists' Jazz Band and of the dynamic improvising orchestra, the CCMC, and was one of the founding members of the Music Gallery. His vocal work is grounded in sound poetry, free jazz improvisation and Buddhist chanting. He has been performing as a solo vocalist locally and in Europe for 25 years. As an extension to his vocal work, he also works with visual sound poetry, exploring the strategy of "intermedia". His recent work, "new calligraphy," is involved with the writing of sonic sound scores. He lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Canadian poet, performer and playwright PENN KEMP has published twenty-five books of poetry and drama, had six plays and ten CDs produced as well as a DVD, Canada's first poetry CD-ROM and several award-winning videopoems. She performs in festivals around the world. Her Muse News is renewed monthly on Penn Letters and on Facebook. Penn can also be heard on MySpace and mytown.ca. Penn was the Canada Council Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario for 2009-10. She hosts Gathering Voices on CHRW 94.9 FM, archive on Gathering Voices. Penn will launch Luminous Entrance: a sound opera for climate change action in The A B Series on October 1st. Videos of Penn can be seen at House of Anansi Press and Poetry Visualized.

Bywords Summer Reading

2010-07-09T11:26:00.001-07:00

Launch of the summer Bywords Quarterly Journal

with readings by S.J. Atkinson, Stephen de Paul, Dimitra Xidoux and Marcus McCann and music by John Lavery.

Dusty Owl Reading Series

Sunday, July 18, 2010, 5pm

246-B Queen St.

followed by open mic

further info: amanda@bywords.ca

cover photo for the summer BQJ by Brennan Schnell

Richard Truhlar in The A B Series

2010-06-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Sandra Ridley & Jennifer Londry launch books in Ottawa's Plan 99 Reading Series

2010-06-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

More images from May 29th's launch here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxmiddle/sets/72157624043042935/

Poets Against the War Protest

2010-05-28T07:04:00.001-07:00

ARMS UNFAIR - Ottawa, June 2, 2010, noon till 7 pm

Poets from Montreal and Ottawa will read outside the main gates of Lansdowne Park in Ottawa at noon on Wednesday June 2 to protest the Canadian manufacture and sale of weapons, ammunition and military components. CANSEC is returning to Ottawa City property this spring because last year a majority on Ottawa City Council shamefully overturned this municipality's 20-year ban on hosting arms trade shows.

Readers include:
Hugh Hazelton
Susan McMaster
Jorge Etcheverry
Erika White
John Akpata
Gary Townsend
Czandra
Raymond Filip
Claudia Morrison
Jim Joyce
Paul Tulloch
and others

At 1:30 pm the reading will move indoors to Irene's Pub, 885 Bank St. at Clary and from 5-7 pm back to the main Rally for Peace at the gates of the Park.

CANSEC is a significant symbol of Canada's government-subsidized, military-industrial complex, a significant drain on our economy, as it artificially props unsustainable economic sectors. It facilitates rather than discourages wars, invasions, occupations, orchestrated regime changes and human rights abuses.

By opposing the influx of arms promoters, tanks and other war technologies into our local community, we can press for government policies that respect peace, human rights, democracy, and the environment.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Poets Against War and Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) rally

Gerry Shikatani in The A B Series

2010-05-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

Internationally recognized text-sound performance artist, Gerry Shikatani enacts a multi-media performance on June 3rd at The Mercury Lounge. Shikatani has published several volumes of poetry, a book of fiction as well as writings on gastronomy and travel. He has been publishing and exhibiting visual poetry for decades.

abseries.org

Bywords Spring Reading-Sunday May 16, 5pm

2010-05-14T05:11:00.001-07:00

at the Dusty Owl Reading Series, Swizzles, 246-B Queen St. featuring poetry by contributors to the spring Bywords Quarterly Journal: Emily Falvey, Winter Fedyk, Neal Freeland, Seymour Mayne, rob mclennan, Zoran Todorovic and Asoka Weerasinghe with the music of the Companionship Registry.

Followed by the Dusty Owl Open Mic & Object of Desire competition.

cover photo by Gatineau photographer Alain Lacharite.

Natalie Zina Walschots reads in The A B Series (May 7, 2010)

2010-04-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

abseries.org

Sonnet L’Abbé in The A B Series

2010-04-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Rest Cure by Sandra Ridley (Apt. 9 Press, 2009)

2010-03-29T05:07:00.000-07:00

to begin, a small word about Apt. 9 Press. so far there have been 7 limited edition chapbooks: 6 poetry and 1 fiction; 6 from Ottawa, 1 from Toronto. the quality of the production is excellent: stitched binding, fine paper, cellophane wrapped for the collector. the offerings have been eclectic and representative of the skill and creativity of Ottawa (and a Toronto) writers.

what i want when i read poetry is to be spellbound by images and sound. Rest Cure accomplishes this for me. in minimal and carefully chosen language, Ridley mesmerizes, evoking the character of a poorly woman with language that is reminiscent of a bygone era. each poem pays heed to the senses; when necessary, Ridley troubles syntax , but not in a heavy-handed way, just wee nudges that slow down the momentum. lines are built and broken based on rhythm, image, sound. Ridley has given us mood, tone and enough exquisite detail to allow us to be compelled by this character, but she hasn’t gone overboard. she’s given us space to fill in for ourselves. this is an excerpt from a longer manuscript called Post-Apothecary. Rest Cure satisfies like a curative elixir, yet leaves us craving another draught.

i.
Before running on nightshade & wormwood in a topiary maze.

Before hawthorn punctures her arm : poison tipped.

Before a peck of stones, she handpicks or pockets,
she is camphor-doused
& blinded
by a fold of wool : wet & held tight to her eyes.

Before his screen & clips & the red light & darkening, his hands pressed
forward
to his switchboard & mirror : apparatus of the in-out & charged.

Before her fluoroscopic diapositive &
the smell of two kinds of heat.

Nothing left hidden in her body.

Before & after, there is only this : four corners to a room
& the others pounding at the door.

Gary Barwin in The A B Series

2010-03-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

A B SERIES PRESENTS

GARY BARWIN READING

SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2010

7PM DOORS OPEN
7:30PM PERFORMANCE

MERCURY LOUNGE
56 ByWard Market Square
Ottawa

$7 admission at the door / $5 for people with low income

ABSERIES.ORG

We welcome to The A B Series stage, Hamilton writer, poet and composer GARY BARWIN. He gives a feature reading, which will last one hour. The event takes place in The Mercury Lounge at 56 ByWard Market Square in Ottawa; doors open at 7pm and the reading starts at 7:30. Barwin is a writer well known for giving entertaining and engaging readings of his fiction and poetry. Barwin's readings combine high artistry with a sharp sense of humour.

Barwin's music and writing have been published and presented in Canada, the USA, Japan and Europe. He has a PhD in Music Composition from The State University of New York at Buffalo. His work has been commissioned and broadcast by the CBC. His third poetry collection from Coach House Books,The Porcupinity of the Stars, will be published later this year. Barwin's chapbook,Inverting the Deer, was a co-winner of the 2009 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Italian Week 2010 – National Literary Contest : Ottawa Festivals d’Ottawa: Ottawa’s Festival Headquarters | Les Informations de Festival d’Ottawa

2010-03-16T21:34:00.000-07:00

Italian Week 2010 – National Literary Contest : Ottawa Festivals d’Ottawa: Ottawa’s Festival Headquarters | Les Informations de Festival d’Ottawa

Poetry at the Writers Festival

2010-03-11T13:18:00.000-08:00

Mayfair Theatre, 1074 Bank St. (at Sunnyside)

Saturday, April 24, 2010

6:30pm: Spotlight on Talon Poetry:
derek beaulieu, Weyman Chan, Frank Davey, George Bowering

8:30pm: House of Anansi Poetry Bash:
Michael Lista, Suzanne Buffam, Steven Heighton

Monday, April 26, 2010

8:00pm: Poetry Cabaret
Rachel Zolf, Jesse Ferguson, Erin Moure, Gregory Scofield

Tickets: $15 ($10 student or senior; free for festival members)
Tel. 613 562 1243
www.writersfestival.org

Gary Barwin gives a feature reading in The A B Series, March 27, 2010

2010-03-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

ABSERIES.ORG

Monty Reid with a guest appearance by Call Me Katie in The A B Series: Feb. 27/10

2010-02-17T20:38:00.000-08:00

http://abseries.org

ROGUE STIMULUS: The Ottawa launch

2010-02-16T22:40:00.000-08:00

Launch of the poetry anthology inspired by the Prime Minister's prorogation of Parliament.

Doors: 5:45pm
Start: 6:00 pm
Gallery 101
301 1/2 Bank Street

EARLIER - Rogue Stimulus on Parliament Hill!
At 2pm, join speakers, poets and performers together in a lighthearted protest against the prorogation of Parliament.
see: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=331179216179&ref=mf

AFTER - the Rogue Stimulus launch, stay on site at Gallery 101 for an A B Series presentation of music by Call Me Katie and a feature poetry reading by Monty Reid!
http://ABSERIES.ORG

Rogue Stimulus
Edited by Stephen Brockwell and Stuart Ross

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament (for the second time in a year!) on December 30, 2009, he punted many vital bills into oblivion. But he also inspired hundreds of poems after Mansfield Press announced this government-toppling anthology. This book gathers a range of responses—from outrage to slapstick—by acclaimed poets (including Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate and several winners of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry), previously unpublished poets and, to paraphrase Stephen Harper, ordinary working Canadians.

Featuring poems by:
Sandra Alland ✺ Larissa Andrusyshyn ✺ Steven Artelle ✺ Tara Azzopardi ✺ Jonathan Ball ✺ Gary Barwin ✺ derek beaulieu & Andrew Topel ✺ Jonathan Bennett ✺ George Bowering ✺ Shannon Bramer ✺ Stephen Brockwell ✺ Mike Buckthought ✺ Alice Burdick ✺ Stephen Cain ✺ Chris Chambers ✺ George Elliott Clarke ✺ Stewart Cole ✺ Claudia Coutu Radmore ✺ Linda Lee Crosfield ✺ Michael Dennis ✺ Ann Diamond ✺ Adam Dickinson ✺ Christopher Doda ✺ Mark D Dunn ✺ Amanda Earl ✺ Hermann Eberl ✺ Amatoritsero Ede ✺ Maureen Egan ✺ Chris Faiers ✺ Laura Farina ✺ Andrew Faulkner ✺ Jesse Patrick Ferguson ✺ Laurie Fuhr ✺ Patrick Gass ✺ yaqoob ghaznavi ✺ David Greer ✺ Gwendolyn Guth ✺ Nathan Hauch ✺ Jamie Hawes ✺ Jason Heroux ✺ Joanna Lilley ✺ James Lindsay ✺ Jeanettes Lynes ✺ Nyla Matuk ✺ clay mccann ✺ Marcus McCann ✺ christine mcnair ✺ Peter McPhee ✺ kevin mcpherson eckhoff ✺ Bruce Meyer ✺ George Murray ✺ Leigh Nash ✺ Lillian Necakov ✺ Fraser Nelund ✺ The Poets of Nova Institution ✺ Vincent Ponka ✺ K.I. Press ✺ Robert Priest ✺ Michael Eden Reynolds ✺ Stan Rogal ✺ Joe Rosenblatt ✺ Stuart Ross ✺ Ingrid Ruthig ✺ Jeremy Sandler ✺ Greg Santos ✺ Brenda Schmidt ✺ Guy Simser ✺ Jim Smith✺ H. Masud Taj ✺ Daniel Scott Tysdal ✺ Priscila Uppal ✺ Steve Venright

http://www.mansfieldpress.net/Titles/rogue_stimulus.html

Christian Bök lecture at Carleton

2010-01-22T20:08:00.001-08:00

Christian Bök

"Be Okay with an Umlaut-(A Grand Tour through the Work of Christian Bök)"

Munro Beattie Lecture 2009-2010

hosted by the Department of English, Carleton University

Thursday, March 4th 7:30pm

360 Tory Building

Free Public Lecture

Reception to follow

ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS: an exercise in poetry

2010-01-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

More info on The A B Series web site

ABSERIES.ORG

Bywords Warms the Night

2010-01-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Bywords Warms the Night: Fund Raiser for the Cornerstone Women's Shelter
Sunday, January 17, 2010-2pm
Dusty Owl Reading Series
Swizzles, 246-B Queen St.
Contact info: Amanda Earl: amanda@bywords.ca tel. 613 868 1364

Launch of the winter issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal with poetry readings by Stephen de Paul, Mike Fralic, Anna Lee, Christine McNair,Luminita Suse and Bywords' editors Jamie Bradley, Amanda Earl, Vanessa Davies, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Carol A Stephen, JC Sulzenko
& music by Anna Lee.

Donors receive a free copy of the BQJ.

photo by Justin Van Leeuwen

ROCKIN' THE BLUES FROM CANADA

2009-12-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

ROCKIN' THE BLUES FROM CANADA

John Barlow & Pearl Pirie read in The A B Series -- December 11, 2009

2009-12-03T21:05:00.000-08:00

The A B Series hosts, on the same bill, a rare reading by Toronto poet John Barlow and a reading by beloved Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Doors open at 7:30pm
Readings at 8 and 9pm

The Mercury Lounge
56 ByWard Market Square (upstairs)
Ottawa, Ont.

$7 admission ($5 students/seniors)

JOHN BARLOW began publishing poetry in magazines and journals in the 1980s. Barlow has authored three collections of poetry, each published by Exile Editions, Safe Telepathy, ASHINEoVSUN and ASHINEoVSUN II. He published a CD/booklet with Balmer Press titled The UFOs of South Toronto and a chapbook with Laurel Reed titled Minus 45: Some Days in Winter and a LYRICALMYRICAL Editions book, Poems and Films.

PEARL PIRIE has been writing for a couple decades, mostly in or around Ottawa. She does haiku and visual, corpus-based poetry, form and formless. She has been published at ditch,, Ottawater and by AngelHouse Press. Her last chapbook bOATHouse came out from above/ground press in 2008. She blogs for the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter and for herself at pesbo and Humanyms.

**

As part of the event, there will be a raffle draw with prizes that include copies of 'The Wrong World: Selected Stories & Essays by Bertram Brooker' edited and with an introduction by Gregory Betts/published by The University of Ottawa Press.

We'll be accepting book donations at this event for Ottawa's Booth Centre and the programs they run to assist homeless and other underprivileged people. Books will be accepted at the door for later distribution at the Booth Centre.

bill bissett performance & birthday party!

2009-11-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

JOE ROSENBLATT in The A B Series / 2 Readings

2009-10-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

The A B Series presents two readings by Governor General's Award winning poet, Joe Rosenblatt.

Reading #1

Doors open 7:30pm
Reading at 8pm

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Gallery 101
301 1/2 Bank Street (upstairs)
Ottawa, Ont.

$5 admission

Books by Joe Rosenblatt will be available for sale and signing
Cash bar

Over the course of a literary career spanning more than four decades, Rosenblatt has authored twenty books and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry. He has received major awards such as the Governor General's Award in 1976 and the BC Book Award in 1986.

Reading #2

JOE ROSENBLATT reads in The A B Series at Gatineau gallery Art-image.

And joining Rosenblatt in performance, Ottawa poet Andree Christensen reads in French from her translations of Rosenblatt's work that appear in the book 'Parrot Fever / Le perroquet fâcheux' (Les Editions du Vermillon).

Copies of 'Parrot Fever / Le perroquet fâcheux' available on site for sale and signing.

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Doors open 6:30pm
Reading at 7pm

Art-image
855 boul. de la Gappe
Gatineau, Québec
t: 819-243-2345 ext. 2528

Free (a hat will be passed)

Bilingual presentation

For more information on this and other events in The A B Series, please visit:

ABSERIES.ORG

Max Middle
Artistic Director
The A B Series
Tel: (613) 237 4309
director at abseries dot org

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for these events.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SOIRÉE POÉSIE de AB Series à Art-image avec Joe ROSENBLATT, récipiendaire du Prix du Gouverneur Général

Également en performance, la poète ottavienne Andrée CHRISTENSEN qui fera la lecture en français de ses traductions du travail de ROSENBLATT, se retrouvant dans le livre « Parrot Fever / Le perroquet fâcheux » aux Éditions du Vermillon. Des copies du livre seront disponible sur place pour vente et dédicace.

QUAND : Le samedi 14 novembre 2009
HEURE : Les portes ouvriront à 18 h 30
La lecture commencera à 19 h
OÙ : Centre d'exposition Art-image
Maison de la culture de Gatineau
855, boul. de la Gappe
Gatineau, Qc
819-243-2325
COÛT : Gratuit (un chapeau sera passé)

Présentation bilingue

Joe Rosenblatt est l'auteur de plus de 20 recueils de poésie et de plusieurs ouvrages autobiographiques. Au cours de ses 40 ans de carrière, ses poèmes ont figuré dans plus de 30 anthologies de poésie canadienne. Il a reçu d'importantes récompenses telles que le Prix du Gouverneur Général de poésie en 1976 et le BC Book Prize en 1986.

Pour plus d'information sur cette soirée et les autres événements de AB Series, veuillez visiter le site web :

ABSERIES.ORG

Max Middle
Directeur artistique
la série A B
Tel: (613) 237 4309
director@abseries.org

The A B Series remercie le Conseil des Arts du Canada pour ces événements.

Congratulations Marcus McCann

2009-10-22T04:11:00.000-07:00

Marcus is the winner of Bywords' 2009 John Newlove Poetry Award for his poem Noise (from "Busy") published on Bywords.ca in February, 2009.

Congratulations also to the three honourable mentions:

A House with the Door Never Locked by Sylvia Adams
My Youth Machine-rolled, Smoked to Its Stub by Leanne Averbach
What I Remember of The Wars by Spencer Gordon

This year's judge was Stephanie Bolster.

For further information on the John Newlove Poetry Award, please go to www.bywords.ca and click on Newlove Award.

Poetry highlights at the Ottawa International Writers Festival Fall Edition

2009-10-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

October 20, 2009 (not part of the festival but close enough), 8pm

City of Ottawa Book Awards and Arc Magazine’s Lampman-Scott Prize
Library and Archives Canada

Two poetry books are up for the Book Awards:
Colin Morton, The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press)
David O’Meara, Noble Gas, Penny Black (Brick Books)

Lampman-Scott Award Finalists are Brenda Leifso for Daughters of Men (London, ON: Brick Books, 2008), David O’Meara for Noble Gas Penny Black (London, ON: Brick Books, 2008), and Monty Reid for The Luskville Reductions (London, ON: Brick Books, 2008).

The Writers Festival events take place at Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 St. Patrick St.

October 21, 2009, 8:30 pm
6th Annual Bywords John Newlove Poetry Award
Launch of Rob Friday’s chapbook, “One Man Parade”
Announcement of winner and honourable mentions with readings.
Music by Call Me Katie

October 22, 2009
2pm-MASTERCLASS: THE POETRY OF COLLISION With Sina Queyras Hosted by Rob Winger ;
Join Sina Queyras for a Masterclass session on tradition and innovation in poetry.
6:30pm -•POETRY CABARET #1: Sina Queyras, Colin Morton, Christian Bök and Paul Durcan;Hosted by Rob Winger.
10:30pm-LATE NIGHT AT THE FESTIVAL -Featuring sound poetry by Christian Bök and music by John Lavery

October 26, 2009
6:30pm-POETRY CABARET #2: John Barton, Barbara Myers, Maurice Mierau and Karen Solie

10:30pm-LATE NIGHT AT THE FESTIVAL-In/Words Open Mic

There are many other excellent events and you’ll find poetry in those too. I’m sure there will be something poetic in David Byrne’s talk on his experiences cycling through New York City or Bram Stoker’s great-grand nephew’s book, Dracula, the Undead. Blood after all is a key poetic theme. There’s also lots of music this year with Call Me Katie, Glenn Nuotio and Sadie Hell playing the late night segments of the festival. I suspect the poetry will flow as well as the wine this year. Santé!

Poetry Past and Soon

2009-10-07T13:38:00.001-07:00

Share some poems randomly this week. This is Random Acts of Poetry Week in Canada. At their blog check out how it unfolds...TA Carter is spreading the poetry at the NAC.

Dusty Owl hosted Danielle Gregoire's CD release. She was assisted by Steve and by her daughter at the mic.

When Steve and Cathy passed the hat, this time a portion went for jwcurry (see a previous post). Capital Slam October 3rd raised $150 to pass along as well.

For more news on Capital Slam, Rusty Priske's journal can keep you up to date. Teaser of news...? 5 female slammers were out the last time.

Recently we had some sound poetry with 5 local writers jumping in with The Be Blank Consort.

Max has some photos here. The Be Blank Consort was at Gallery 101 where the next event will also unfold with Margaret Christakos October 14th. The venue isn't well-signed so if you haven't been before, look for Atomic Rooster on Bank Street. Catch Daphne Marlatt in town on the 21st.

.ism(e):performance cabaret will be Thursday October 8 at Club SAW. Sometimes poetry, sometimes, indefinable, this time will have Living Statues and Chinese instruments among other things. Barry Dempster will be hosted at Tree on the 13th.

Jessica Ruano will read at New Stalgica October 19th.

Shortly after Writers Fest is upon us. Pre-events have started. One is the 14th, one the 20th and then the 21st to 27th, it's 12 hour days of literary goodness. Watch for the John Newlove Awards, Masterclass hosted by Sina Queyras interviewing Colin Morton, Christian Bok and Dublin's Paul Durcan. There will also be a poetry cabaret with John Barton, Barbara Myers, Maurice Mierau and Karen Solie.

The Tree series will bring Erin Moure on the 27th.

For all the events around town, check out bywords.ca

BE BLANK CONSORT LAUNCHES THE A B SERIES 3RD SEASON

2009-10-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

THE BE BLANK CONSORT

performs ensemble

with local poets AMANDA EARL, COLIN MORTON and SANDRA RIDLEY

+ surprise guests!

Doors open at 7pm
Performance at 8pm

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Gallery 101
301 1/2 Bank Street (upstairs)
Ottawa, Ont.

$15 admission

cash bar
book table

**

After completing two very successful seasons of readings, The A B Series is set to launch its third season. The A B Series began life and its first season with a reading on November 1st, 2007. That first season culminated with a performance by Dutch sound poetry sensation, Jaap Blonk. The A B Series second season, which ran from fall 2008 to spring 2009, was equally auspicious. We witnessed the staging of 'MESSAGIO GALORE', a locally produced sound poetry spectacular. On February 6th, four Australian poets rocked The National Arts Centre's Fourth Stage. And we welcomed, amongst others, poets Clifton Joseph, Penn Kemp, bill bissett, Robert Priest and Christian Bok to The A B Series stage. We're looking forward to continuing this spirited tradition with readings in the third season, which will run between October 3rd and early June 2010.

THE A B SERIES LAUNCHES ITS THIRD SEASON with a performance by American sound poetry ensemble THE BE BLANK CONSORT on OCTOBER 3rd. It takes place in Ottawa's own and very dynamic artist-run centre, GALLERY 101. During the performance, The Be Blankers will call invited local artists to the stage for performance of select works from the Be Blank repertoire.

**

THE BE BLANK CONSORT was born in June 2001 at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, Florida) when all of its core members were part of a literary residency convened by Richard Kostelanetz. Each member is a writer using language in greatly expanded and often completely new ways and contexts. THE CONSORT was formed to perform various kinds of texts and visual texts, many of them created collaboratively, in ways that would reveal new resonances and possibilities. Some pieces in their repertoire are poems written by an individual member and scored for multiple voices by another. A few are entirely written and scored by one person. Many more were written in collaboration between two or more of the performers + others. Scott Helmes, in January 2002, initiated the first poems specifically designed for performance by THE CONSORT and many have followed since, created by all the members. In 2003, they released a CD, SOUND MESS: + OTHER POEMS.

THE CONSORT has performed numerous times with past engagements in Miami, New York, Columbus, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Boston, Roanoke, Prescott and elsewhere in The USA.

October 3rd, 2009 marks THE CONSORT'S first Canadian performance!

**

CONSORT members performing on October 3rd, 2009:

JOHN M. BENNETT has exhibited and performed his word art worldwide, and has published over 300 books of poetry; among the most recent are LA M AL (Blue Lion Press), CANTAR DEL HUFF (Luna Bisonte Prods), LENTES, (Blue Lion Press), and SPITTING DDREAMS (Blue Lion Press). He is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at the Ohio State University Libraries.

SCOTT HELMES' professional activities have been mainly in the fields of architecture and education. Starting in 1972, he began writing experimental poetry and pursuing mail art activities and artistic printmaking/drawings. His writing archive from 1972 to 1997 is in the Avant Writing Collection of the Ohio State University Libraries.

MICHAEL PETERS is the author of Vaast Bin (Calamari 2007). Various manifestations of his written images have appeared in journals like SleepingFish, Word for/Word and Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, among others. With Poem Rocket and the Be Blank Consort, various manifestations of his recorded sounds have appeared on labels such as Atavistic and Luna Bisonte Prods. His visual-poetic manifestations can be found in various libraries and special collections, as well as appearing in both galleries and sound-image anthologies.

**

For more information on The Be Blank Consort and other upcoming events in The A B Series 3rd season, please refer to:

ABSERIES.ORG

An urgent note from Roland Prevost: save jwcurry & Room 302 Books!

2009-09-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

john curry, certainly a world class poet living in our community, is
presently facing almost certain eviction.

Stephen Brockwell alerted me of this precarious situation, by phone, and asked if I would get the word out, most recently at the TREE Reading Series on September 22, where we were able to scare up enough to cover one of his 5 months owed rent & save his telephone service.

currys been in constant production of his own and hundreds of others work since 1979. hes mainly ineligible for grants. His bookstore is mainly an unused resource. His archive documenting the growth of avant-garde writing in Canada is one of the key collections in the country. Nicky Drumbolis has said: curry and his work are the best-kept secret in Canada.

Since time is of the essence, if currys to avoid eviction, there are a few ways you can help:

Start to use his goddamn store!

Room 302 Books is the only bookstore in Canada ever to focusspecifically on the avant-garde and overlooked outsiders, specializing in concrete/visual/sound poetries (mainly Canadian) with a stock of over 20,000 mainly rare titles, including elusive ephemera, and probably the only source of most of jwcurrys various imprints and titles (which number
in the thousands). currys current lists finally focus on his own work as artist & publisher, virtually the first time everything thats (still) available has been made commonly available. You can purchase bookstore IOUs (or set up an account) today in any amount for those whod like to do that.

Subscribe to Curvd H&z, currys serial imprint. donor subscriptions (please indicate) of $100 or more get « the stash in a sampling of available titles from various of his imprints immediately, the remaining « put on account for forthcoming titles.

Donate outright.

I would like to encourage you to donate something so as to keep this excellent bookstore, publisher, archive and artist alive, and at the same time help prevent currys eviction from his apartment. For those whod like to purchase bookstore IOUs, Id ask you to write (#302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7) or call him at (613) 233 0417. Please
contribute as you can.

Roland Prevost (with collusions with curry)

August among Ottawa people

2009-08-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

Some reports on Haiku North America happenings are up including Hexagram launch including a new title from Ottawa poet Grant Savage, a talk on anti-story by Jim Kacian, Patricia Donegan in town talking about peace and haiku and meditation practice, an Painting Project by Claudia Coutu Radmore with music, dramatic monologue and sound poetry by Dorothy Howard as a response to the paintings which were a response to haiku.

A number of Ottawa poets made it to Purdyfest #3. There'll be a new intensive fall workshop series by rob mclennan this fall. His above/ground press is 16 years old now and was celebrated with the launch of new chapbooks by Phil Hall and Roland Prevost.

Haiku North America

2009-07-13T15:32:00.000-07:00

If you write haiku, are curious about it, or fond of it or other short forms like haiga, tanka and senyru, you have an opportunity to explore it.

Coming to Ottawa August 5th to 9th is the 2009 Haiku North America conference. The conference only happens every 2 years and this time will be at the National Library. It was last held in Canada in 1995. This is a rare chance in our own backyard.

As Garry Gay points out,

"This conference is a real opportunity to meet some of the very best of the world’s haiku writers. These are the poets who are at the top of their game. [...] Many of the attending poets will bring poems to share in the form of new books. So if you’re a lover of books as much as I am, you want to bring an empty bag to bring home all the new volumes of poetry.

There will be readings, publishers, book tables, writing workshop, talks on epiphanies, haiku experience, an observation/poetry-writing (ginko) walk as well as an Ottawa River cruise among many other things. People who have practiced the craft locally, nationally and from around the world will be participating. Here is a schedule of events. This blog has posters and will follow the conference with updates.

For those who want to whet their haiku appetites, there will be a Purdyfest will have a haiku day the week before.

Bywords Summer Reading

2009-07-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 19, 2009, 2pm

the Dusty Owl Reading Series

Swizzles Bar, 246-B Queen St.

Launch of the summer issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal. Featuring the poetry of Stephanie Farrington, Shawn MacMillan, Kerri Power, Mark Sokolowski and Dean Steadman and the music of John Gillies.

Followed by the Dusty Owl's open mic.

Contact info: amanda at bywords dot ca

Cover photo by Caroline Gommersall.

Bywords gratefully thanks the City of Ottawa for a 2009 Arts Project Funding grant.

Hope to see everyone at the reading.

Congratulations to Sandra Ridley and Gary Barwin

2009-06-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

who split this year's bpNichol Chapbook Award. Both Sandra and Gary have Ottawa connections in that Sandra is an Ottawa resident and Gary has family here.

The winning chapbooks were Sandra Ridley's Lift: Ghazals for C., Jack Pine Press and Gary Barwin's Inverting the Deer, serifofnottingham.

The award is sponsored by the Phoenix Community Works Foundation. The Chapbook Award was established in 1984, under the guidance of noted Canadian poet bpNichol who was also one of the founding members of PCWF. The award was created in order to inspire, encourage and support Canadian poets and the smaller Canadian presses that publish chapbooks. In 1988, after the tragic death of bpNichol, the award was renamed in memory of the prolific writer and performer. This year, $2000 is awarded to the best poetry chapbook written in English, published in Canada [in this case, the award is split between the two recipients.]

Congratulations to Sandra and Gary and to those shortlisted: John Barlow, Andrew Faulkner and Daphne Marlatt. Further info at Phoenix Community Works Foundation and bpNichol.ca.

Thanks to the Phoenix Community Works Foundation for encouraging and supporting the publication of chapbooks and thanks to the small press industry for bravely continuing to publish and disseminate engaging and original voices.

12 or 20 questions: with Anita Dolman

2009-06-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

Anita Dolman is a writer and editor whose poetry and/or short short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, websites, chapbooks and magazines, and in the anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books, Ottawa, 2006).

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook felt like it validated my efforts as a poet. I had long considered myself a writer, but that chapbook, and the spate of poems accepted for publication in journals around the same time, made me feel that my efforts were warranted, and encouraged me to continue. I would like to think that my work has become subtler, more nuanced since then. I came out of the gate wanting to clobber people with meaning, but now I'm much more interested in the poem as a layered work inviting conversation with the reader, the idea that a single poem, as a single work of art, can, if successful, mean many things to many people.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

In high school and the start of university, I was interested far more in both reading and writing fiction, which was a sort of choice by default. I had been taught by a number of teachers who believed that if their students did not interpret a poem the way the teacher's edition said was the only correct and justifiable interpretation, they had somehow managed to fundamentally get the poem "wrong." Poetry as a test of one's ability to see it through the exact same lens as someone with no doubt a very different perspective and background did not surpisingly completely fail to appeal to me, much as it completely fails to appeal to most other kids whose initial reaction of "Hey, that sounds cool" is almost immediately crushed into the resignation of "Okay, well, I guess I'm just never going to get it" by teaching that will likely keep them from approaching poetry again for most of their lives. I actually had a university English teacher start the poetry section of her curriculum with a warning to the effect that "I never understood poetry, and I imagine you don't either, so I promise to try to get through this section as quickly as possible."

In my third year at the University of Victoria I switched to a writing major. One third of the introductory class was dedicated to poetry, taught by Patrick Lane, and something just clicked for me in that class. I started to read Gwendolyn McEwen, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, to start, and many others after that, with an open approach, thinking more in terms of what the reader brings to a poem to make it the poem that they perceive, rather than dedicating myself to what I still believe to be the largely useless pursuit of trying to figure out what the poet meant to say based on their religion, family situation, house size and what they'd had for breakfast that day. Once I felt that liberation, I was hooked on poetry, on the possibility of it, the infinite opportunity a single poem can hold in a way that fiction, weighed down by its sheer size and need for consistency, can never have.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I usually don't know I've started a writing "project" until I'm well into it. I start dozens of projects that never lead anywhere and I tend to only realize I'm on the right track with one when I notice that I keep coming back to it over and over. Then, I can't leave it alone. I become addicted to it. I worry away at it, compulsively editing and re-editing and then taking that bit out anyway because it obviously wasn't any good in the first place, and then moving on to fight with another bit that isn't doing at all what I want it to. The problem for me is not the writing or the editing, it's knowing when it's done and walking away.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I never start with the idea of "This is going to be a book." I set off down a path and when I look back and notice that it's now covered in poems I think "Huh, well if there are that many of them here, I suppose I ought to see if they want to come live together in a book."

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love readings. I love to go to them and I love to read at them, although I don't get to go to them nearly as much as I used to. For me, readings inspire and motivate me far more than actually reading poems in books, much as I love the words there, too. There's an energy that comes from a group of people together in one place just wanting so very much to communicate, to be heard, to connect with each other using this fascinating device, that I find it impossible to go home after that and not write, not want to keep that dialogue going.

I used to be immensely shy, both in general and specifically about sharing my work, but you just can't watch other people, especially the ones who don't necessarily have any background in it or the tools they really need, get up there and just give it their all and then allow yourself to not contribute, too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don't go into my writing setting out to tackle a certain issue or to approach the work from a particular theoretical perspective or with a certain style in mind. All of these tend to emerge based on what the poem wants to be, what it requires as it begins to take shape, either on the page or in my imagination. The result, though, is often narrative poetry that, for better or worse, has, for wont of a better word, a moral. And those stem from whatever is of concern to me, conciously or subconciously, at the time.

I can't speak to what the current questions are for everyone else, because that depends on individual perspective, the expression of which is the very thing that makes poetry so fascinating to me. My own work lately has been full of the idea of personal happiness and personal responsibility, how these things get lost along the way and how we can get back to them, for our own and for the greater good.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

A writer is an interpreter of reality and the voice of possibility. The role of the writer, like the role of any artist, should be, to my mind, to offer up one more perspective through which to view the world, and with this offering, provide one more way that we could move ahead. The artist is the articulator of human imagination, and we as a society can't go anywhere without him, since he's the one holding the map.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

As an editor, I'd say editors are absolutely essential to the writing process, to ensure that the writer doesn't, in knowing so fully the meaning or the sound they meant to articulate, become blind to whether they have actually effectively conveyed it. As a writer, I'd say editors are a scourge on society, the level of irritation they create matched only by an episode of Oprah's book club, classics edition, and their usefulness roughly on par with that of telephone cleaning crews.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Lighten up.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I normally have the approximate attention span of a rabid squirrel, so poetry and postcard-length fiction tend to be more satisfying for me, simply because they're bite-sized. I'm also a compulsive editor; I keep going back to and fiddling with my work, which makes longer fiction a challenge, because the first thing I want to do when I sit down to continue a story is go back to what I wrote last time and spend the whole day tinkering with it instead of moving ahead.

That said, fiction is very attractive to me, because it allows for a greater scope, the opportunity to delve more fully into a multiplicity of perspectives and ideas within one work. I'm starting to move towards fiction now because of that. Much of my poetry to date has been very short, and my fiction tends to be of the under-500-word variety, so I'm setting myself the challenge of just seeing what happens when I pan out a bit and tell the broader story around the story. There's an element in that of giving up my obsession with the perfection of individual lines and words, in exchange for the ability to convey a wider story. Of course, this means buckling my inner squirrel firmly into her seat, hiding all the shiny objects and giving her a good tallking to before I get started each time.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I used to be regimented, and then I got a day job, and then I had a baby, so now I grab writing time where and when I can. My son is just over a year old now, and I'm finally starting to come back to writing with more consistency (so far just a quick writing session at about 6 a.m. on the weekends, before everyone is up, and then again on a week night or two), but I find the return daunting. I feel much more obligated to have something significant to show for the time I've taken away from my family, my chores, my sleep, etc. I feel I need to be accountable for that time.

I've been asked before why there aren't as many publishing female poets, particularly older female poets, as there are male poets (although I'd be curious to know the actual percentages), but I believe it's because women are far quicker to be convinced that the world will end if they don't do the dishes, or the laundry, or the dusting, instead of writing (or painting or entering politics, for that matter) than most men could ever be. As compelling and addictive as writing is for me, I will always feel I'm cheating someone else out of something I should be doing for them (regardless of whether they tell me I'm an idiot for thinking this) by doing something that really isn't for anyone else. Writing is an immensely selfish act. And it takes a significant amount of ego to think that what's in your head is so bloody important that you should stop everything and write it down before the world is forever robbed of your singularly genius observation.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Music, poetry, galleries, readings. Anything that calls me out to play. I used to return to specific favourites (Michael Ondaatje and Anne Sexton, for example, or Nina Simone and Billie Holliday), but any type of art that gets a reaction from me will make me want to grab a pen or my computer and return the favour.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Freesias trigger the strongest childhood memories for me, although they remind me of my grandmother's house in Amersfoort, rather than of my own home. She seemed to have a vase full of them every time we stayed with her, and in my mind's eye they imbued her otherwise dark little house with light as well as fragrance.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music has a deep and motivating effect on me, especially blues and jazz. A few minutes of listening to Nina Simone do her thing and I feel an overwhelming urge to go write something, anything, just to play along.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I've mentioned a few of the poets already, although the list could go on and on. I'm a sponge when it comes to writing and my influences would include everyone from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Michael Ondaatje to e.e.cummings to Atwood, Sexton, Plath, Woolf (now that would be a dinner party!) to Douglas Adams and all stops in between and beyond.

More directly, you, rob, have been endlessly influencial in your encouragement of my work, and inspiring in your constant encouragement of other writers. Stephen Brockwell has been enormously helpful and encouraging to me, as well, as was Patrick Lane when I took his poetry workshops at UVic. jwcurry, too, of course, as well as so many of the poets in Ottawa's writing scene. My husband, fiction writer James Moran, started out as my editor (and I as his) and his support is the main reason I'm still writing today. I have been enormously fortunate in the places and people to which poetry in particular has led me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Learn to let go of things, including my writing. And travel more.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

My other job is as an editor, but if I hadn't become either of these things, I imagine I most likely would have become a real estate developer, or at least someone who refurbishes old buildings. I love building things. If it hadn't been poems and stories, I think it likely would have been actual buildings.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was the first saleable skill I realized I had. Isn't that romantic? Why I kept doing it, though, is an absolute, fundamental need to express the thing that's just behind the thing we normally talk about.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I'm reading and very much enjoying Gore Vidal's Lincoln right now, and I recently read A Room of One's Own for the first time, which was a lot more fun than I would have thought. I've seen a lot of rather awful films recently, but I did like Revolutionary Road, and the new Star Trek. The last film I saw that really stuck with me for a long time after, though, was a Quebec film called C.R.A.Z.Y.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Fiction, which doesn't come as naturally to me but which I'm finding a lot of fun to explore nonetheless.

12 or 20 questions archive (second series);

When Poetry Leads to Poetry: New Stalgica Launches Dalhousie Blues Tonight

2009-06-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight the Newstalgica Reading Series at Café Nostalgica will be hosting the launch of a new book entitled Dalhousie Blues. It’s a stunning and compelling poetry collection published by a collective of unique voices --Jamie Bradley, Caleb Brassett, Christine McNair and Sean Moreland and skilfully designed by Christine McNair with artwork by local artists. I’m particularly excited and happy about the existence of this book for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that all of these authors have been published by Bywords and by my small press, AngelHousePress.

I’m not suggesting that Bywords is the instigator of the collaboration, but I have to say that this is the main reason that Bywords exists and also the main reason why I launched AngelHousePress: to help and to promote talented emerging writers on their path and to act as an impetus for more poetry. Bywords is not the only local press or organization that encourages and supports an active writers community. There is rob mclennan, of course, the dynamo promoter of the small press world. There are the fantastic reading series, other local journals and creative writing workshops, the Ottawa Writers Festival and more. The point is that when you have a good and strong active literary community, creativity and collaboration will ensue.

Since this is my main mandate with Bywords, I can’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction when our published authors spread their wings and fly. I would say all this tonight at the reading itself, but I’ll be too choked up. I do plan on drinking copious toasts to these talented and enterprising writers. These are brilliant young writers and I hold them in the highest esteem. I urge you to come to the launch and buy at least one copy of this excellent book.

Bywords may have books available through our on line store if the books haven't sold out yet.

Monday, June 8, 2009, 8pm
Cafe Nostalgica, 603 Cumberland St.
Open Mic followed by featured readers with music by Tia Akhse

Ottawa Open Mic Ops & Tips

2009-06-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Whether you write poetry or prose, tell stories or perform spoken word, there’s a place for your words to be heard in Ottawa.

To read at an open mic, you usually have to arrive early and sign up.
Look for a list by the door or ask someone where the sign up sheet is.
Usually there’s a maximum amount of time allotted per open mic reader.
Make sure you know what it is and don’t go over the time limit; that includes any intro.
Remember if you need a long intro to describe a poem, it's probably not the right poem to read.
If you have merch: poetry chapbooks, cds etc, see if you can put them out on a merch table or let the audience know.
Open mics are usually followed by a feature reader, or sometimes preceded by.
If you come to share your work at the open mic, also be respectful of the feature. Don't yack thru their set.

Here’s a list of reading series that include an open mic. Further information about the series, including contact information, times and web sites can be found on the bywords.ca calendar of literary events or by clicking on the links below.

Mondays

2nd Monday of the month-but not during summer: the New Stalgica, 603 Cumberland, 8pm. Hosts Sean Moreland and JF Lafleche-sign up sheet is at the bar.

Tuesdays

2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month-Tree Reading Series, Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, hosted by Rod Pederson-sign up sheet is by the door. one of Ottawa’s longest running reading series.

2nd Tuesday of the month-Voices of Venus, Umi Café, 610 Somerset St. W. Hosted by Amazon Syren and Faye Estrella, a series to celebrate the spoken word and women writers, but not exclusive to women.

Thursdays

Every Thursday-Café Nostalgica Poetry and Music Open Stage-603 Cumberland, 8pm. Hosted by Kevin Grant. Primarily a music open stage, but amenable to poetry and prose.

1st Thursday of the month- the Creative Act, Cuppedia, 97 Main Street. Hosted by Christopher.

1st Thursday of the month; 7:30 pm. Story Swap-hosted by the Ottawa Storytellers Association.

Last Thursday of the month-In/words open mic, Montgomery Legion (downstairs Hall), 330 Kent Street-hosted by an In/Words editor

Saturdays

1st Saturday of the month-Capital Slam, 56 Byward Market, spoken word poetry-those who participate get free admission. Hosted by Capital Slam.

Sundays

2nd and 4th Sunday of the month, except July and August, Sasquatch Writers Performance Series, Royal Oak II, 161 Laurier East, downstairs-sign up sheet on a table by the fireplace. Hosted by Lynne Alsford. one of Ottawa’s longest running reading series.

two Sundays a month and sometimes more!: the Dusty Owl Reading Series, Swizzles Bar and Grill, 246-B Queen Street-sign up sheet on a clipboard by the door. open mic follows feature.

For other literary events taking place in Ottawa and area, please consult http://www.bywords.ca/ and click on events; for literary news, contests, workshops, conferences and more consult the news section of the site.

If you are involved in an open mic or a reading series that you don't see on the bywords.ca calendar of events, please contact me at amanda at bywords dot ca

Completion of The A B Series Second Season & Looking Ahead to Season Three

2009-05-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

Four upcoming events promise to make for a very exciting completion to The A B Series second season (autumn 2008 to spring 2009). The first is a reading by Christian Bök taking place today at 5pm in The Canadian Tulip Festival's beautiful Mirror Tent.

bill bissett reads on May 23rd at The Mercury Lounge. On the evening's program is a set of readings by a varied cast of performers to be given in bill's honour.

Paul Dutton reads on June 6th at The University of Ottawa and on June 7th at Galerie Montcalm in Gatineau, Quebec.

Following a pause for the summer, The A B Series is back on October 3rd for the commencement of season three (autumn 2009 to spring 2010) with a performance by American sound poetry ensemble, The Be Blank Consort.

ABSERIES.ORG

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CHRISTIAN BÖK in The A B Series
Presented in association with The Canadian Tulip Festival
Saturday May 16 at 5pm
Host: Max Middle

Tulip Festival - Mirror Tent
Festival Plaza
110 Laurier Avenue West
Ottawa, Ontario

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On Saturday, May 16th, The A B Series presents CHRISTIAN BÖK's first reading to take place in Ottawa since 2002! Produced in association with The Canadian Tulip Festival, the event starts at 5pm in The Festival's beautiful Mirror Tent.

BÖK is the author of Eunoia, Coach House Books' bestselling work of experimental literature, and winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. The book is a is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Last year, Eunoia was published in the UK where it quickly went to the top of best selling lists for poetry. His first book, Crystallography, was published by Coach House Press in 1994 and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

BÖK has created artificial languages for two television shows, Gene Roddenberry’s 'Earth: Final Conflict' and Peter Benchley’s 'Amazon'. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the ‘Ursonate’ by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit 'Poetry Plastique'. He is working with scientist, Stuart Kaufmann, to compose "living poetry" whereby short verse is encoded into a sequence of DNA to be implanted into a bacterium. He plans to document the progress of the publishing experiment and make related artwork for subsequent exhibition in galleries. Bök is Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

BÖK's reading will be followed by a brief Q&A.

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The City of Ottawa and The Canada Council for the Arts.

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For more information, see The A B Series web site at ABSERIES dot ORG or contact A B Series Artistic Director, Max Middle, by telephone (613) 237 4309 or email: director at abseries dot org.

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TICKETS available at the Mirror Tent Box Office

Adult $16

Student $12

Reserved Section $28

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a reading by bill bissett followed by a tribute in bill's honour!

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Doors open 7:00pm

Performance at 8:00pm
Venue: The Mercury Lounge

Cost: $10 at the door

Host: Max Middle

originalee from lunaria a far distant planet way past venus 312 bill came 2 eryh on th first childrns shuttul from ther ovr 400 yeers ago in lunarian space time kontsrukts hes bin sent as an impressyunist onlee altho he wud love 2 undrstand erthling wayze he askd wudint yu 2 ths end he has alwayze wantid 2 xploor langwage in all its wayze at leest in poetree n wantid alwayze 2 spell mor n mor closelee on th page how each word sounds in that pomes ear a life time at leest devosyun most recent book sublingual 2nd most recent book ths is erth thees ar peopul both from talonbooks n from red deer press deth interrupts th dansing a cd with pete dako followd by ths is erth thees ar peopul also with pete dako musician extraordinaire n luddites 86- 91 remix cd just releesd also a paintr most recent show upstares galleree toronto summr 09 now a doktor from tru universitee n resipient uv th george woodcock life time acheevment award hes working now on nu book n nu paintings evree 6 months or sew th lunarian assemblee remoovs th filld tapes uv impressyuns from bills hed n he starts agen emptee hedid 4 a whil

"I know who the great poets are. William Bissette of Vancouver. An Indian boy. Bill Bissette, or Bissonnette." (Jack Kerouac, 1967)

Margaret Atwood's "astral twin" and James Reaney's "one-man civilization", living legend bill bissett comes to Ottawa for a feature reading in The A B Series.

bill's READING WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A POETIC TRIBUTE to be made BY SEVERAL SPECIAL GUESTS READING FROM bill's OEUVRE and from the anthology, 'radiant danse uv being: A Poetic Portrait of bill bissett' edited by Jeff Pew and Stephen Roxborough.

radiant danse uv being and books by bill bissett will be available for sale.

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for this event. This event is also made possible by The Writers' Union of Canada.

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The A B Series is looking forward to hosting two performances by Paul Dutton. The first performance will take place on the evening of June 6th, and will be presented in association with The University of Ottawa English Department.

Paul Dutton evening performance
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Doors open 7:30pm / Performance at 9:00pm
Venue: 1848 - University of Ottawa Campus Bar
$10 at the door (free for U of O English Dept students)

Paul Dutton matinee

2pm
Sunday, June 7, 2009

Venue: Galerie Montcalm

Free (a hat will be passed)

Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist, and oral sound artist who is internationally renowned for both his literary and musical performances. Throughout the last four decades he has published, recorded, and performed his work in various contexts, solo and collaborative, in print and film, on TV, radio, and the Web. He has taken his art to festivals, clubs, concert halls, and classrooms throughout Canada and across the United States, Europe, and South America. Dutton’s artistic focus continues to be the exploration of consciousness and perception through the creation of multisensory works, employing written poetry and prose, visual poetry, and the sonic dimensions of language and oral expression. He was a member of the legendary Four Horsemen sound poetry quartet (1970–1988), along with Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery, and the late bpNichol. He joins his soundsinging oralities to John Oswald’s alto sax and Michael Snow’s piano and synthesizer in the free-improvisation band CCMC (1989 to the present). He recently formed Quintet à Bras in company with two French poets and two French instrumentalists. The most recent of his six books is a novel, Several Women Dancing (Mercury Press, 2002), the latest of his five solo recordings is the CD Oralizations (DAME Records, 2005).

For a taste of what they might expect of at the performance, the following Web sites provide samples of Paul's published writing and of his sound recordings, plus commentary on other of his published works:
http://www.chbooks.com/archives/online_books/aurealities/
http://www.ubu.com/sound/dutton.html
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/dutton/ldutton1.htm
http://www.actuellecd.com/en/cat/am_130/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dutton.html
http://www.unlikelystories.org/dutton0107.shtml

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for this event.

The incomparable Robin Blaser

2009-05-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

ROBIN BLASER 1925-2009. One of the progenitors of the "open form," an ongoing poem sequence not necessarily written with specific end-boundaries in mind, Robin Blaser first came to a wider public attention through editor Don Allen's seminal anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-60 (1960). Quoted in his early 1960s "Vancouver Lectures" from The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), the late Jack Spicer said that "Robin Blaser once said in talking about a serial poem that it's as if you go into a room, a dark room, the light is turned on for a minute, then it's turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off."

Full obit by rob mclennan at xtra.ca.

Some Notes on the Print History of William Hawkins’ Ottawa Poems

2009-05-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

"Give this meaning as you may, or must,"

William Hawkins, #27 (from Ottawa Poems)

I’m a newcomer to Ottawa poetry, but by no means a newcomer to Ottawa. I was born here, and raised, and am presently on the verge of completing my “higher” education in the city. I’ve been working to catch up on our literary history, as well as present, and am fascinated by anything that makes an effort to write Ottawa in the way that other cities seem to have been written with greater regularity. Naturally, the first time I came across the title, Ottawa Poems, I set out to find and read it. I’m not going to attempt a critical reading of the poems here. Suffice to say, I love the book and think its poems wonderful. My concern here is with the bibliographic history of the book, and the various incarnations of the poems in Hawkins’ published books. I think that these are fascinating notes from the perspective of book history, and I will resist drawing conclusions from them. I think the print journey of the poems themselves more than justifies a brief account here.

The book was published by Nelson Ball’s Weed/Flower Press in July 1966 (and reprinted in 1967). Weed/Flower had been created the previous year, 1965, and ran for the following eight. Jack David wrote an annotated, descriptive bibliography of the press that was published in Essays on Canadian Writing (Number 4, Spring 1976). According to David, Ball purchased a “pre-WW II mimeograph machine [...] for $35” (34), and proceeded to mimeograph everything produced under the name. Along with Hawkins, Ball published the likes of George Bowering, bp Nichol, John Robert Colombo, Victor Coleman, John Newlove, himself, and a score of others.

Like many others produced by Weed/Flower, Ottawa Poems has a wonderful cover design by Barbara Caruso. A series of overlapping, thick black lines look like poorly laid out streets, and two hands offer the only recognizable point of reference on a thick, brown cover stock. The interior pages are mimeographed from a typewriter proof onto brown paper. Hawkins is credited simply as WM HAWKINS.

The book is a set of twenty-eight relatively brief lyrics in a mere thirty six pages. Roy MacSkimming, in his introductory essay to 2004’s Dancing Alone: Selected Poems, writes “because they belong to a loosely linked sequence, these are more abstracted and discursive poems than the tighter, imagistic, self-contained pieces in Hawkins. And perhaps because they often look outward to the surrounding society, they’re also more anxious and fearful, occasionally a touch paranoid” (15). This sequence is disrupted and broken differently in all future appearances of parts of the book.

His first selected poems, The Gift of Space (new press, Toronto, 1971), would reprint only twenty four pieces from the book. The twenty four retained would be renumbered sequentially, suggesting a new, coherent and complete edit. The pieces removed were #8 (POEM IN RED INK), #20 (THE LAST POEM FOR PEOPLE), #24 (CHARACTEROLOGY), and #26 (ALMOST A POEM). Interesting, if accidental, #21 (SORRY, THIS IS IT) in the Weed/Flower edition is printed 19^th in The Gift of Space, but numbered 21, only to be succeeded by a second #21 (HELLO FROM THE SHADOWS), #23 originally.

A further iteration of the poems comes in 2004 in Dancing Alone: Selected Poems (Broken Jaw Press, Fredericton, Cauldron Books 5). In this edition the original numbers are restored, and the excised poems are left as gaps. This time twenty two poems are printed, removing six. Those cut are: #8 (POEM IN RED INK), #9 (A STUPID CANASTA POEM), #13 (So much of me is not), #20 (THE LAST POEM FOR PEOPLE), #24 (CHARACTEROLOGY), #26 (ALMOST A POEM). The four removed in The Gift of Space are still absent, #9 and #13 have been freshly cut.

As has been widely documented, 1966-67 were landmark years in Hawkins’ publishing career. On top of Hawkins (Nil Press) and Ottawa Poems, he was anthologized in Raymond Souster’s seminal New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (Contact Press) as well as in the A.J.M. Smith edited Modern Canadian Verse (Oxford University Press).

New Wave Canada came first in 1966. Hawkins appeared in its pages alongside early work from Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt (then still Daphne Buckle), Robert Hogg, bp Nichol, Fred Wah and Victor Coleman among others. Hawkins' biography in New Wave Canada appeared in quotation marks, and is reproduced in its totality below:

What’s to say in a biography? All my life I’ve worried about the propriety of our definitions. Because the times are as they are I’ve lived in fear, movies my only escape, economics keeping me from more drugs, booze & girlies than I was able (meagre, really) to steal. I have stolen every single idea I have heard, transposing them into my own terms. A wife & two children share my scene & seem happy. I write poems because I like to.

Living now in Ottawa. (171)

Whether selected by Souster or by Coleman (who aided Souster in the editorial choices of the anthology), Hawkins is afforded 11 pages in the book. The poems included are drawn from Hawkins and Ottawa Poems. However, reproductions from both are marked by changes in numbering. For example, from Hawkins, “Mysteriensonaten” #1, #3 and #4 are reprinted as #6, #10 and #7 respectively. In the case of Ottawa Poems, #5 (how can I describe the anger) is reprinted as #7, #11 (your hair electric) is reprinted as #17, #13 (so much of me is not) is reprinted as #24, and #16 (“BEAUTY WILL NOT WAIT”) is reprinted as #25.

New Wave Canada itself has a convoluted print history (see Bruce Whiteman’s “Raymond Souster’s New Wave Canada: A Bibliographical Note”). His appearance in New Wave CanadaModern Canadian Verse did not reprint any of the Ottawa Poems, but did print three from Hawkins; “Spring Rain”, “A New Light” and “The Wall.” directly resulted in his appearance in Modern Canadian Verse, when A.J.M. Smith “happened upon the page proofs [of the book]” (MacSkimming 15) as a result of Coleman’s work at Oxford UP at the time. These poems are listed as “uncollected” (xxi) in the acknowledgements.

Some of the poems also saw periodical publication before the book proper. #24 (CHARACTEROLOGY), often excised from later versions, was printed in 1966 in IS one, edited by Victor Coleman in Toronto, and signed “William Hawkins, ‘WM’ ”. #26 (ALMOST A POEM) was printed in Volume 63 (edited by Nelson Ball), number 5 (Summer 1966). This is approximately coincident with the publication of the book. Interestingly, in both these cases, the poems are not numbered but rather stand alone, resisting any allusion to the larger sequence. Volume 63 also printed 5 of the “Mysteriensonaten” poems in the Winter of 1965, numbered up to 8, suggesting that a larger sequence existed prior to the edited four poem set that appeared in Hawkins; this potentially solves the problems posed by the “Mysteriosonaten” poems in New Wave Canada discussed earlier.

#5 (how can I describe the anger) was printed as #7 in issue 19 (July 1966) of the magazine El Corno Emplumado, published out of Mexico City. It appeared in a group of thirteen Canadian poets in the issue (alongside George Bowering, Fred Wah, John Newlove, Nelson Ball, Daphne Buckle and Red Lane among others).

Alphabet, edited by James Reaney, apparently printed one, or some, of the poems according to the credit in the book itself, though I have not been able to find the excerpt(s) in question. However, I did find the wonderful ad below for “Poster Poems by the Fabulous WM. Hawkins” that appeared in Alphabet number 5 (December 1962) before a selection of four “King Kong” poems.

I do not have access to WEED magazine, stopping me from chasing down that reference as well. If you do have a set, or know which poems appeared, and when, sent me a note (cameron.anstee@gmail.com) and I will amend these notes. Equally, any information relating to other editions of these poems would be very much appreciated (for example, did any of the Ottawa Poems appear as Poster Poems?)

I think that these sorts of incongruities and inconsistencies make a strong case for the need to pursue bibliographic work on modern Canadian poetry. I think that they make clear the greater arc of a poem, or book’s, life. Certainly, the Weed/Flower Press edition of 1966 is the authoritative printing, but later editorial choices, as well as earlier little magazine publication help to illuminate the development of the poems over a span of forty years. I think that this is especially true in the case of book-length sequences, or longpoems, where small changes alter the whole. The Ottawa Poems did not end conclusively with their first collected appearance. Hopefully they’ll continue to be read and won’t end anytime soon.

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Works Cited

David, Jack. “Weed Flower Press.” Essays on Canadian Writing 4 (Spring 1976): 34-41.

Hawkins, William. Dancing Alone: Selected Poems. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 2004.

--. The Gift of Space: Selected Poems 1960-1970. Toronto: new press, 1971.

--. Hawkins. Ottawa: Nil Press, 1966.

--. Ottawa Poems. Kitchener: Weed/Flower Press, 1966.

Smith, A.J.M. Modern Canadian Verse. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1967.

Souster, Raymond. New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry. Toronto:

Contact Press, 1966.

Whiteman, Bruce. “Raymond Souster’s New Wave Canada: A Bibliographical Note.” Papers of

the Bibliographic Society of Canada XX (1981): 63-65.

(Mostly Poetry) Highlights of the Ottawa International Festival

2009-05-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

Here’s what stood out for me as the most unique, bold and memorable:

Garry Thomas Morse, Death in Vancouver (Talonbooks, 2009), a selection of short prose bits with crazy compelling characters, tight, precise and breathtaking language and imagery and opera! The man can sing. call what he brought to the festival stories, call them poems. i don’t really care. they’re just damn good. i’ve started his book and am enthralled by its originality. His writing reminds me of local writer John Lavery’s work; they both are adept at linguistic acrobatics and are skilled in painting memorable and unusual characters.

Martha Baille, The Incident Report (Pedlar Press, 2009)-Baille presents a series of stories from the point of view of a librarian about the eccentric dramatic personae who frequent a library, including Rigoletto. the prose is tight and precise with lovely arcs and rhythms that sounded like poetry to me.

Jeremy Dodds, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books, 2009)-Dodds is someone who can play adeptly with language. In his first poetry collection he contorts everyday expressions much in the way Robert Priest does with his aphorisms in Time Release Poems (Ekstasis Editions, 1997.)

Matthew Tierney, the Hayflick Limit (Coach House Books, 2009)-inventive and precise.fun to see the relationship between science and the everyday in Tierney’s poems. the poetry masterclass that Dodds and Tierney participated in was interesting in that there were physicists in the audience and people who wanted definitions of terms like anti-matter. the whole thing was as wonderfully absurd as poetry events should be.

rob mclennan, Gifts (Talonbooks, 2009)-i’ve read these poems as drafts and also there’s one in there for me so i’m clearly biased, but i always enjoy hearing rob read. his poems have a delicious cadence and wonderful images.

Adeena Karasick-Amuse Bouche (Talonbooks, 2009)-a friend told me i would enjoy her language play and punnery and i did, so much so that i wanted to claim one of the poems as my own. i wish i’d written it. the subtitle of this book is “Tasty Treats for the Mouth” and i concur heartily. i enjoyed every bite. the book is a joy with colourful bits clipped from those air flight safety cards. i love all the linguistic twists and turns in this book and in Karasick’s reading.

Marcus McCann, Soft Where (Chaudiere Books, 2009)-once again, i am very biased here. not only is Marcus a dear friend but we are also in a poetry group together; however, i am not the only one who is gaga over the wit and language shenanigans McCann uses in his work.

The main thing all of the above writers had in common in their work is that they seem to be willing to take risks, to push a line beyond predictability. They aren’t sentimental; they don’t wax poetic over the heart or a white horse or a big mangy dog or say condescending things about the working class. Their rhythms are their own and not evocative of Edgar Allen Poe.

I found their presence and their work inspiring and appreciated the opportunity to hear them and to meet them. This is what I love about the Ottawa International Writers Festival…it exposes audiences to new and bold writing.

BC Scene Literary Events

2009-04-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

www.bcscene.ca

Al Purdy Day, A-Frame Fundraiser

2009-04-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

The Al Purdy A-Frame Fundraiser had an event as part of Pre-Writers Festival on Al Purdy Day April 21 in Ottawa.

Sean Wilson did the initial introductions of the 8 readers to share their favorite Al Purdy poems thru the decades and a sample of their own as part of Al Purdy Day.

Each person's brought out a different aspect, facet and tone of the poet from quiet wonder to story telling drama, the comic mystic of what the beavers know and aren't telling to self-deprecating humour. (I'll mostly only describe the Purdy ones but if anyone else wants to provide missing titles or details, please complete the picture.)

Books were on hand for sale as well as a donation box to contribute to the keeping and upkeep of the A-frame as a writer's retreat. A total of $285 was raised for the cause.

Luna Allison read from The Dead Poet and a used bookstore find, an anthology with one of his poems.

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh...

Stephen Brockwell read Purdy's poem of Helen and Menelaus and Agamemnon, a less often read one of Purdy's, unfortunately. An absorbing retelling of the story.

Michael Dennis read a poem of Purdy's early drafted soldier days, being entrusted even with a wooden gun being a foolhardy idea. Even the pigeons learned it was safe to not fly away from him on patrol. And he read from his own, one set in a mining camp at Christmas and the brawl that ensued.

Gwendolyn Guth described going to try to find the A-frame and finding Purdy's grave. (If you missed it, you should ask her for the story.) She read her tribute poems on him from The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy. In it 17 writers, scholars, critics, and educators appraise and reappraise Purdy’s contribution in essays in tributes, as part of a 2006 conference on him.

Kathryn Hunt, reading from the Last Picture in the World.

little point of land
like a small monk
in a green monastery
meditating

Jim Larwill read a Acorn tribute to Purdy and from the argument between Milton Acorn and Al Purdy while they lived in the A-frame. He is rallying for an Ottawa contingent to go to Marmora's people's poetry fest, Purdyfest, on Aug 1. The other picture is Jim Larwill performing The Raven, a bird associated with Purdy and Acorn.

Rob Winger read from Hockey Players and one about a pub brawl and beer like daisies called A Sensitive Man.

Sean Zio read a Purdy poem dedicated to Margaret Laurence and his elegy poem, Be Good.

Here's a 1978 Interview with Purdy and vid links to CBC Archives on Purdy.

Carleton University's Poetry Night at the MacOdrum Library

2009-04-20T11:53:00.001-07:00

Left to right: President Rosanne Runte, David O’Meara and Rob Winger

Patti Harper, the Department Head of Archives and Research Collections sends in this report and photos about the event on April 1. Room 503, the Rare Book Room is open to the public and has a great collection, including old broadsides, zines and first editions of books such as Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems.

MacOdrum Library held its inaugural poetry reading night on April 1st to promote the Modern Poetry Collection within the Archives and Research Collections, bringing together the Carleton and Ottawa communities. Carleton’s own Rob Winger was Master of Ceremonies with President Rosanne Runte and local poet David O’Meara presenting selections of their work. The evening also included David presenting some of his favourites from the Collection as well as participating in a Questions and Answer session with the audience. The evening also showcased some of the gems from the collection including broadsides, magazines and books.

Stay tuned for another poetry night in the fall.

A Strong Week in April

2009-04-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Daily for poetry month there has been even more than usual lit events.

Last night Wayson Choy read as part of the year round writers festival. Meanwhile Jason Camlot read at Tree. (The next Tree is a Tulip Tree - All Open-Mic on April 28, followed by Stephanie Bolster May 12th but we're getting ahead of the month.)

AngelHouse Press, which now has an essay series going, is presenting a poem a day at National Poetry Month.

Tonight is chock-full of options in Ottawa Lit. To name just 2: The Oneness Poetry Showcase features Ian Keteku a.k.a. Emcee E with Erin Felepchuk on piano at the East African Restaurant. The Ottawa Arts Review hosted a panel discussion at Ottawa U. [Details at the bottom here]

Tomorrow is the penultimate of the Canal Mug Series. It will be Anne Le Dressay and Stephen Brockwell at the Sunnyside Library. April 23rd it'll be Nadine McInnis and Glenn Kletke.

There's a Plan 99 reading with Stephanie Bolster this Saturday and a Capital Slam.

On Sunday the 19th there's a Dusty Owl at the regular Swizzles bar but it's a double-header with it also being the partnership with Bywords to launch of the new Bywords Quarterly Journal.

Meanwhile over at Sushi 88 on Somerset, there's another Dusty Owl event, it's the first of 3 of the season's workshops. Pearl Pirie will do Firestarters, inspiration prompts. You can buy 2 workshops for the cost of 3. The next two will be Oni [link autoloads sound] teaching social action slam poetry, and in June, Ian Roy will expand horizons with drawing out short stories.

To look ahead to the 22nd, The A B Series features: Clifton Joseph, John Sobol and Robert Priest at The Mercury Lounge. On the following Sunday, April 26, Claudia Coutu Radmore will be at Sasquatch to launch her new chapbook: Ode to a Rubber Duck: An Explanation of the Whole World. People are invited to bring their rubber duckies and own odes.

Including the Writers Festival and BC Scene -- some highlights are in the previous post -- there are 3 to 7 lit events on daily for most of April. Check the full listings.

Carleton and the Writer's Festival

2009-04-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

A brief amendment to Amanda's excellent and thorough post below on the Writer's Festival:

A reminder to all Carleton University students that all events in this edition are free with a valid student card (unless otherwise noted). In the Fall, 500 tickets were made available to Carleton students and that number has been boosted this time around. This is hopefully an indication of a developing and ongoing relationship between Carleton and the festival (with several faculty members hosting events again). If you're a Carleton student, attend and make us of this wonderful opportunity. This program will hopefully continue to be a part of the Writer's Festival in the future, but it clearly must be a success in order to encourage repetition.

I lament that I will no longer hold a valid card come the Fall edition...

Poetry Events at the Ottawa International Writers Festival

2009-04-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

The festival begins on April 22 and goes until May 2 and marks its first official season at the new Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 St. Patrick St near the Byward Market. There are lots of great events taking place this spring at the festival. The best deal is the festival pass, which you can buy at $85 until April 21. The programmes are scattered all over town and the full schedule complete with bio and youtube links is over at www.writersfestival.org.

Nicholas Hoare Books will be on hand to sell you copies of books to have signed by the authors.
There are 3 poetry cabarets, a masterclass writing workshop and two other poetry events taking place at the spring edition. Here’s what’s happening poetry wise.

Saturday, April 25, 2009
Dusty Owl Presents Urban First Nations Poetry with Mosha Folger, Rob Friday and friends; hosted by Steven Zytveld-6pm

Mosha Folger is an independent writer/photographer and spoken word artist.

Rob Friday is the 2008 recipient of the Bywords John Newlove Poetry Award for his poem “Manatee”.

Poetry Cabaret # 1: Jeanette Lynes, Marcus McCann and Molly Peacock, hosted by Stephen Brockwell-8pm

Jeanette Lynes is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems (Freehand Books). She is also the author of a novel, forthcoming from Coteau Books. Jeanette has been a writer in residence at Saskatoon Public Library and Northern Lights College in Dawson Creek, B.C. She teaches at St. Francis Xavier University and co-edits The Antigonish Review.

Marcus McCann is a poet and journalist. He is the editor of Capital Xtra, Ottawa’s gay and lesbian newspaper. Soft Where (Chaudiere Books) is his first full-length collection.

Molly Peacock is the award-winning author of five volumes of poetry, including Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Her poems have appeared in such leading publications as The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Among her other works are How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle and a memoir, Paradise, Piece By Piece. Before she emigrated to Canada in 1992, she was 1 of the creators of Poetry in Motion on the Buses and Subways in New York City, and she served as an early advisor to Poetry on The Way. Recently she toured with her one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge produced by the London, Ontario based company, Femme Fatale Productions. Peacock is currently the poetry editor of the Literary Review of Canada and the general series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael Groden, an English Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Her website is: www.mollypeacock.org.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Poetry Cabaret #2: Spotlight on Talonbooks with Garry Thomas Morse, rob mclennan, Adeena Karasick and bill bissett-8:30pm

Garry Morse is a Vancouver poet and writer with two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007). He has created more than thirty chapbooks of poetry and is the chief editor of an online read-only hyperclack of fresh writing called Lexican Radio. His work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, filling Station, The Vancouver Review and West Coast Line, and his manuscript Go Medieval was selected as a runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2008 Morse received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist. When not pursuing literary endeavours, he is the lead developer for estudent.ca, and he sings in the chorus for OperaProCantanti.

rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa (since 1989), even though he was born there once (1970). The author of a dozen poetry collections, most recently The Ottawa City Project and a compact of words, as well as a collection of essays, subverting the lyric: essays and Ottawa: The Unknown City. As an editor, he is putting the finishing touches on collections of essays on the works of Andrew Suknaski, John Newlove and George Bowering, as well as There Is No Mountain: new & selected poems by Andrew Suknaski. Editor/publisher of above/ground press and STANZAS magazine, rob regularly posts essays, reviews and other writing at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of six books of poetry and poetic theory, The House That Hijack Built, The Arugula Fugues, Dyssemia Sleaze, Genrecide, Mêmewars, and The Empress Has No Closure. Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production, and engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. Karasick has lectured and performed worldwide and regularly publishes articles, reviews and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural/semiotic theory. She is Professor of Literature and Cultural Theory at BMCC, City University of New York. Forthcoming is Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth.

bill bissett, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award first garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the counter-culture movement in Canada and the UK. Author of over 70 books of published poetry, bill is a pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry—eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (“proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling. bill composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry. He writes and paints out of studios in Vancouver and Toronto.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Poetry Cabaret#3: Carolyn Marie Souaid, Zoe Whittall, David O’Meara; hosted by Rob Winger-6:30pm

Carolyn Marie Souaid is a poet, teacher, and book reviewer for The Montreal Gazette. The author of four books, she has appeared at many literary festivals across the country, and was part of a Canadian delegation of poets sent to Paris in December 2005 to participate in an international forum on the inhumane treatment of prisoners of conscience. She is the co-producer (with Endre Farkas) of two major Montreal events: Poésie en mouvement / Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project, 2004) and Cirque des mots / Circus of Words, a multilingual cabaret of performance poetry (2005, 2006). Three of her books have been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize. A French translation of “Snow Formations” was published by Les Éditions Triptyque in 2006.

Zoe Whittall’s first novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, was named one of the best books of 2007 by The Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire magazine. She won the 2008 Dayne Ogilvie award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Now Magazine awarded her the title of Best Emerging Author of 2007. She has published three books of poetry, Precordial Thump (Exile, 2008), The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books, 01) and The Emily Valentine Poems (Snare Books, 06). Her work has been anthologized widely, with poems appearing in Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s Best New Poets edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane and many others. The Globe and Mail called her "the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler…”. Her second novel, Holding Still For As Long as Possible, is forthcoming from House of Anansi press in fall of 2009. Born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, she’s lived in Toronto since 1997.

David O'Meara was born and raised in Pembroke, Ontario. He lives in Ottawa, where he tends bar at The Manx Pub. His first book of poems, Storm still, was published in 1999 and was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award. His second collection, The Vicinity, was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Award.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Poetry Masterclass-Why Poetry Antimatters: Metaphor, Entanglement and Particle Poetics with Jeremy Dodds and Matthew Tierney, hosted by David O’Meara-noon

Jeramy Dodds lives in Orono, Ontario. His poems have been translated into Finnish, French, Latvian, Swedish, German and Icelandic. In 2007 he held a residency at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators on the island of Götland, Sweden. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award in poetry. He works as a research archaeologist and co-edits for littlefishcartpress.

Matthew Tierney's poetry has been published in many literary journals in Canada and Ireland. He was born Kitchener, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto, where he now lives. Several years ago, he spent some time in Japan teaching English, and returned home by way of the Trans-Mongolian Express, an offshoot of the Trans-Siberian Express, one of the last transcontinental train routes. This journey and others around Asia and Europe form the experiences in Full speed through the morning dark. A second manuscript, The Rocket Scientist, is an epistemological tour of hard and soft sciences: cosmology, quantum physics, neurology, psychology and economics, among others. In particular, it grapples with the idea of intelligence—what it means to be an intelligent species, an intelligent person. The manuscript was awarded the 2006 K.M. Hunter Award for Literature.

BC Scene Poetry Night with Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Evelyn Lau and Robert Bringhurst-hosted by Alma Lee-8:30pm

Patrick Lane is the author of 21 books of poetry, and has received many awards for his writing, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (1979), the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry (1988), and two National Magazine Awards. Lane lives near Victoria, British Columbia, with poet Lorna Crozier.

Lorna Crozier’ Crozier's work has won numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, and the First Prize for Poetry in the CBC Literary Competition. She has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently, Whetstone. Crozier also edited Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she teaches at the University of Victoria.

Evelyn Lau has written seven books, including the bestselling short story collection Choose Me. Her bestselling first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, was published when she was 18 and adapted into an award-winning film for television by the CBC. In 1992, Evelyn became the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the Governor General's Award, for her collection Oedipal Dreams. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Robert Bringhurst is a poet, typographer and linguist, well known for his award-winning translations of the Haida storytellers Skaay and Ghandl, and for his translations of the early Greek philosopher-poet Parmenides. His manual The Elements of Typographic Style has itself been translated into ten languages and is now one of the world’s most influential texts on typographic design. Among his most recent publications is a pair of essay collections, The Tree of Meaning (2006) and Everywhere Being is Dancing (2007). Bringhurst lives on Quadra Island, off the British Columbia coast.

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Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

2009-04-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

To celebrate National Poetry Month and get a daily dose of poetry, visit the following sites:

AngelHousePress’s National Poetry Month features 30 poets from around the world celebrating the nation of poetry.

the League of Canadian Poets' Poetry Planet Blog, a different poem each day by Canadian poets, representing each province.

Seen Reading’s 30 in 30. Poets read one of their own poems aloud and cover a favourite poem of another writer.

The Afterword, National Post Interviews Canadian Poets Daily

the New York Review of Books is posting daily poems that they’ve published over the years.

Daily Lit in conjunction with the magazine Poets and Writers will e-mail you the poetry of late great poets in a series called Masters of Verse

And if you'd like to celebrate in person as well as virtually, check out www.bywords.ca for all the poetry events happening this month.