Attention Ottawa area poets who have yet to publish your first book!
Enter Arc Poetry Magazine's Diana Brebner Prize!
$500.00 prize plus publication!
Click here for details, or read below:
Call for Submissions for the 6th Annual Diana Brebner Prize Prize: $500
Judge: Stephen Brockwell
Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine invites emerging Ottawa writers to be recognized for their talent through a special award for poets who have not yet been published in book form. The prize is named in honour of the late Diana Brebner, an award-winning, Ottawa-based poet who was devoted to fostering literary talent among new local writers. Entry fee is $14 for up to two poems and includes a one-year subscription to Arc, beginning with the Winter 2007 issue, for yourself or a friend. (If you already have asubscription, you can give your new one-year subscription to a friend. Please include their mailing address.) All cheques or money orders should be made out to the Arc Poetry Society. You can now pay by credit card or paypal as well as by cheque or money order through the Poetry Stand. Length of each poem must not exceed 30 lines (including spaces). Entrant's name, address, e-mail, or phone number must not appear on the poem, but on a separate sheet of paper that also lists the titles of the poems entered. Entrants must be residents of the National Capital Region and not have yet published their poetry in book form. No simultaneous submissions or previously published poems will be accepted. Judging is blind. The winner and one honourable mention will be published in Arc's winter 2007 issue. Arc will host a public reading for both poets in December 2007. Winners will be notified by October 20, 2007. Results mailed only to entrants who enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope, or emailed to those who provide anemail address. No e-mail submissions will be accepted. No entries will be returned.
Deadline: received by September 30, 2007
Send entries to: Diana Brebner Prize, Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine, P.O. Box81060 Ottawa, Ontario Canada, K1P 1B1
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
You know how I know you're gay?
Well, this just seals the deal. Ottawa is officially faggadocious.
Faggadocious is a new word for me (I know, shouldn't it be spelled faggodocious?), uncovered this spring when some City of Ottawa employees got caught sending around a rather silly e-mail, which was about as serious or harmful as the “Do you know how I know you're gay? You like Coldplay” scene from The Forty Year Old Virgin. Some councillors freaked – better to punish employees for sending around a joke e-mail than actually do something to make the city more gay-friendly, I guess.
Anyway, faggadocious. Ottawa's writing community has always been a little bit gay – after all, we've been lucky enough to have Suki Lee (who recently left us for TO), Shane Rhodes, Megan Butcher, Alex Brett, Sean Zio, Mackenzie MacBride and handful of others consistently out there. The Dusty Owl's readings at Swizzles offer a pleasantly bent atmosphere for shows. And of course the Owler's first ever trade pub, last year's Tattoo This Madness In by Montreal cutie Daniel Allen Cox (whose book is a lot like Joey Comeau's first, Lockpick Pornography, come to think of it), was also queer. The good folks at Lambda have been giving us Wilde About Sappho for years and sometimes WAS seemed like the only gay thing Ottawa's literati were really prepared for.
This spring, the Ottawa International Writer's Fest paired up with WAS to give us the launch of Canada's first historical collection of gay men's poetry, Seminal – the work of former Ottawan John Barton and BC's Billeh Nickerson (see his interview with hot gay poet Sean Horlor here). A few months before that, Capital Xtra, where I work, hosted Transgress, an evening of sexy readings by Ivan Coyote, Sky Gilbert, Matt Firth and Marnie Woodrow. I'm happy to say Transgress will be back this October – as it will every October from now on. Stay tuned for the lineup.
We've gotten gayer and gayer. But with Pride this year, we're officially faggadocious. The bloom of queer author appearances – from two last year to six this year – proves it, and this city is only going to get more lube-and-rhinestones fabulous.
Venus Envy is organizing two queer-themed readings; Dusty Owl is organizing two queer spoken word events; rob and the Factory Reading Series will host one queer, one bent, one straight chapbook launch; and, oh yeah, Sky Gilbert is coming (hosted by James Moran).
I really hope the local reading series will take this as an opportunity to recruit regulars to their evenings. After all, gays in this city tend to be free-time-having, disposable-income-wielding lit-loving nuts. And I hope that Dusty Owl, Venus Envy and Factory and the other reading series in town make an effort again next year host somebody faggadocious during Pride.
Details below.
Sky Gilbert.
w/ Marcus McCann and Mackenzie MacBride.
Thurs, Aug 16, 7:30pm.
Collected Works Bookstore.
1242 Wellington W.
A Theory Of Angels.
Spoken word by Sean Zio.
Sat, Aug 18, 5pm.
Mother Tongue Books.
1067 Bank (a wheelchair accessible venue).
A Dusty Owl event.
DeAnne Smith.
Spoken word and standup.
Sun, Aug 20, 5pm.
Swizzles.
246 Queen.
A Dusty Owl event.
Reading Out Loud.
Local personalities read literature that influenced hem while they were coming out.
Thurs, Aug 23, 8pm.
Venus Envy.
320 Lisgar.
Organized by the good folk at Venus Envy.
14th Anniversary Of Above/Ground Press.
w/ Marcus McCann, Amanda Earl and Bill Hawkins.
Thurs, Aug 23, 7:30pm.
Ottawa Art Gallery.
2 Daly (ArtsCourt).
A Factory Readying Series event.
Julia Serano.
Author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman On Sexism And The Scapegoating Of Femininity.
Sun, Aug 26, 6pm.
Venus Envy.
320 Lisgar.
Organized by the good folk at Venus Envy.
Friday, August 10, 2007
The Sparrow, Ottawa's new literary magazine
The Sparrow, Ottawa's new literary magazine, is looking for aspiring, never-before-published writers to help fill its pages. We are calling on all our friends to help support the literary arts in Ottawa.
Spread the word, start thinking about your ideas, and DON'T BE AFRAID TO BE DARING WITH YOUR PEN! We want to continue to define fringe literature, and only you can do that by exercising the right to write, creatively!
What we are looking for:
PROSE -Short, exciting tales of fiction and non-fiction. All genres and topics welcome. Make sure you let us know whether your story is fiction or non-fiction, sometimes it's not so obvious. Truth can be stranger, as the cliche goes (prove me wrong!). Stories should be about 250-1000 words.
CHAPTER ONE WRITING CONTEST!
You've been working on that full-length novel now for years, or you've had this idea tossed around in your head but you've never had the right motivating challenge to get started. WELL, GET STARTED NOW! We want to give aspiring novelists a chance to publish their work. We are currently accepting submissions for the first chapter of a never-before-published full length novel. We are looking for fresh, unique, and exciting fiction. Send us your first chapter now! Winners will be notified by email. There are no set rules on length, but a chapter generally tends to be between 5-10 pages (2000-5000 Words).
POETRY -Prose is the christmas tree, and poems are the ornaments that make that tree shine. If that's not poetic, show me what is!
Submissions cost nothing: please send them as a Word file to the following email address: thesparrowmagazine@gmail.com. Include your name and contact information (mail, email, telephone etc.) on a separate page. Submissions might be edited for size or content. All copyrights revert to the author after publication.
THE FIRST ISSUE IS SET TO LAUNCH IN THE FALL. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR THE FIRST ISSUE IS SEPT. 3, 2007.
Hope to hear from all of you soon!
Mario Jamal, Editor
The Sparrow Magazine
Spread the word, start thinking about your ideas, and DON'T BE AFRAID TO BE DARING WITH YOUR PEN! We want to continue to define fringe literature, and only you can do that by exercising the right to write, creatively!
What we are looking for:
PROSE -Short, exciting tales of fiction and non-fiction. All genres and topics welcome. Make sure you let us know whether your story is fiction or non-fiction, sometimes it's not so obvious. Truth can be stranger, as the cliche goes (prove me wrong!). Stories should be about 250-1000 words.
CHAPTER ONE WRITING CONTEST!
You've been working on that full-length novel now for years, or you've had this idea tossed around in your head but you've never had the right motivating challenge to get started. WELL, GET STARTED NOW! We want to give aspiring novelists a chance to publish their work. We are currently accepting submissions for the first chapter of a never-before-published full length novel. We are looking for fresh, unique, and exciting fiction. Send us your first chapter now! Winners will be notified by email. There are no set rules on length, but a chapter generally tends to be between 5-10 pages (2000-5000 Words).
POETRY -Prose is the christmas tree, and poems are the ornaments that make that tree shine. If that's not poetic, show me what is!
Submissions cost nothing: please send them as a Word file to the following email address: thesparrowmagazine@gmail.com. Include your name and contact information (mail, email, telephone etc.) on a separate page. Submissions might be edited for size or content. All copyrights revert to the author after publication.
THE FIRST ISSUE IS SET TO LAUNCH IN THE FALL. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR THE FIRST ISSUE IS SEPT. 3, 2007.
Hope to hear from all of you soon!
Mario Jamal, Editor
The Sparrow Magazine
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Sharon Harris and Ian Roy
Poet and Photographer Sharon Harris read first at the Factory reading July 19th. The subject was the pataphysics of the science of love. It is based out of love and her Avatar collection of poems. For its launch she painted herself purple. John W's Photo of Sharon Harris catches the spirit of her presentation, in lab coat, explaining in a sort of fringe fest presentation how the basic natural law of science is Love. She showed slides of how Love stretches and connects, in the atom nodes of the word itself as she talks of metaphors of love.
She played with it in so many turns, from taking a bpNichol poem, Blues, converting it into a braille of the same shape, zooming in on one dot, seeing that is is under microscope a quandrant swirl ressembling the brain, and made of the word love. The visual poetry was just delightfully deadpan and quirky.
She demonstrated with all kinds of visuals, including simulated dog-poop that spelled out I Love You, part of her collecting images of I Love You for her I Love You gallery. She showed how the phrase is changing the urban landscape in Toronto and New York. In Toronto a graffitti artist had spray painted it 150 times around the city. The guy in NY was arrested twice but the police hadn't the heart to punish.
It reminds me of how when the tag artists were working near my old workplace. I was told sternly and firmly that I was to report any new graffiti. The tired voice took the report, took a deep sigh and braced herself for the answer to what does the spray paint say? When I said the side of the building was covered with God Loves You, she laughed and said, hm, you know that's kinda nice. Maybe we can just leave it?. Love's the answer.
Ian Roy's reading was more improv. He read from his book Red Bird released only a few months ago as well. He preambled with loads of sidenotes. His poems covered his travels thru the East of Canada and U.S. As well as an assortment of dead animal poems which he remarked, with self-deprecating wit, that he'd continue on since he was on a roll with the dead birds.
One poem written as a letter to the photographer he admired, dialoguing with the image, the portraitist, his future and past selves and the reader or listener cast something of a spell. Not a pin dropped.
One of the attendees remarked on how it really helped him contextualize the poems, to hear more of the spirit of the writer.
Some of his poems from this book are being expanded on through videos. On the first business day of each month Roy is releasing another of his Chapter Project videos. It takes poems from the collection, mixed with music by his friends and combined with images. A recent video had one of his sons in it who wondered if that made them famous.
She played with it in so many turns, from taking a bpNichol poem, Blues, converting it into a braille of the same shape, zooming in on one dot, seeing that is is under microscope a quandrant swirl ressembling the brain, and made of the word love. The visual poetry was just delightfully deadpan and quirky.
She demonstrated with all kinds of visuals, including simulated dog-poop that spelled out I Love You, part of her collecting images of I Love You for her I Love You gallery. She showed how the phrase is changing the urban landscape in Toronto and New York. In Toronto a graffitti artist had spray painted it 150 times around the city. The guy in NY was arrested twice but the police hadn't the heart to punish. It reminds me of how when the tag artists were working near my old workplace. I was told sternly and firmly that I was to report any new graffiti. The tired voice took the report, took a deep sigh and braced herself for the answer to what does the spray paint say? When I said the side of the building was covered with God Loves You, she laughed and said, hm, you know that's kinda nice. Maybe we can just leave it?. Love's the answer.
Ian Roy's reading was more improv. He read from his book Red Bird released only a few months ago as well. He preambled with loads of sidenotes. His poems covered his travels thru the East of Canada and U.S. As well as an assortment of dead animal poems which he remarked, with self-deprecating wit, that he'd continue on since he was on a roll with the dead birds.
One poem written as a letter to the photographer he admired, dialoguing with the image, the portraitist, his future and past selves and the reader or listener cast something of a spell. Not a pin dropped.
One of the attendees remarked on how it really helped him contextualize the poems, to hear more of the spirit of the writer.
Some of his poems from this book are being expanded on through videos. On the first business day of each month Roy is releasing another of his Chapter Project videos. It takes poems from the collection, mixed with music by his friends and combined with images. A recent video had one of his sons in it who wondered if that made them famous.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Bywords Summer Reading-July 15, 2pm
Bywords Summer Reading-Sunday, July 15, 2007, 2pm
Chapters, 47 Rideau St. (upstairs room)
Launch of the summer issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal
with poetry readings by Matt Beanish, Martin Cooney, cb forrest,
Anne Ledressay, Sean Moreland, Guy Simser, Mark Sokolowski,
Carol A. Stephen, and Andrea Wrobel and the sultry guitar
and vocals of John Carroll.
Contact Info: Amanda Earl
Tel. 613 868 1364
E-mail: editor@bywords.ca
Amanda Earl
Managing Editor
http://www.bywords.ca/
PO Box 937
Station B
Ottawa,On
K1P 5P9
Chapters, 47 Rideau St. (upstairs room)
Launch of the summer issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal
with poetry readings by Matt Beanish, Martin Cooney, cb forrest,
Anne Ledressay, Sean Moreland, Guy Simser, Mark Sokolowski,
Carol A. Stephen, and Andrea Wrobel and the sultry guitar
and vocals of John Carroll.
Contact Info: Amanda Earl
Tel. 613 868 1364
E-mail: editor@bywords.ca
Amanda Earl
Managing Editor
http://www.bywords.ca/
PO Box 937
Station B
Ottawa,On
K1P 5P9
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
ottawa small press book fair preview
span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) & Griddle Grin Productions present:
with readings by Dan Waber (Wilkes-Barre, PA)
Jennifer Hill-Kaucher (Wilkes-Barre, PA)
& Stuart Ross (Toronto)
Friday, June 15, 2007; doors at 7pm, readings at 7:30 at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Parkdale at Armstrong
lovingly hosted by Max Middle
author bios:
Dan Waber is a visual poet, concrete poet, sound poet, performance poet, publisher, editor, playwright and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in all sorts of delicious places, from digital to print from stage to classroom, from mailboxes to puppet theaters. He is currently working on" and everywhere in between." He makes his online home at logolalia.com.
Jennifer Hill-Kaucher is the author of four books of poetry: Questioning Walls Open, Nightcrown (a crown of sonnets in a limited edition lotusbook), Book of Days, and A Proper Dress. A Pennsylvania Council on the Arts roster poet, Jennifer conducts poetry workshops and residencies throughout the state and also in Ireland. Among her other writing exploits, she is editor of Paper Kite Press and owner of Wordpainting, a studio devoted tocreative writing and visual art.
Stuart Ross is most recently the author of the poetry collection I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press, 2007). His other books include Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press, 2003), Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil, 2005), and Henry Kafka and Other Stories (The Mercury Press, 1996). Proprietor of Proper Tales Press, co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, and Fiction & Poetry Editor of This Magazine, he teaches writing to adults and children at schools and through his Poetry Boot Camps. He lives in Toronto, but his online home is hunkamooga.com.
for more information on the event, contact rob mclennan at az421@freenet.carleton.ca
& don't forget the ottawa small press book fair the following day, noon to five pm at the jack purcell community centre, elgin street @ jack purcell lane (near gilmour)....
an ottawa small press book fair preview
with readings by Dan Waber (Wilkes-Barre, PA)
Jennifer Hill-Kaucher (Wilkes-Barre, PA)
& Stuart Ross (Toronto)
Friday, June 15, 2007; doors at 7pm, readings at 7:30 at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Parkdale at Armstrong
lovingly hosted by Max Middle
author bios:
Dan Waber is a visual poet, concrete poet, sound poet, performance poet, publisher, editor, playwright and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in all sorts of delicious places, from digital to print from stage to classroom, from mailboxes to puppet theaters. He is currently working on" and everywhere in between." He makes his online home at logolalia.com.
Jennifer Hill-Kaucher is the author of four books of poetry: Questioning Walls Open, Nightcrown (a crown of sonnets in a limited edition lotusbook), Book of Days, and A Proper Dress. A Pennsylvania Council on the Arts roster poet, Jennifer conducts poetry workshops and residencies throughout the state and also in Ireland. Among her other writing exploits, she is editor of Paper Kite Press and owner of Wordpainting, a studio devoted tocreative writing and visual art.
Stuart Ross is most recently the author of the poetry collection I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press, 2007). His other books include Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press, 2003), Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil, 2005), and Henry Kafka and Other Stories (The Mercury Press, 1996). Proprietor of Proper Tales Press, co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, and Fiction & Poetry Editor of This Magazine, he teaches writing to adults and children at schools and through his Poetry Boot Camps. He lives in Toronto, but his online home is hunkamooga.com.
for more information on the event, contact rob mclennan at az421@freenet.carleton.ca
& don't forget the ottawa small press book fair the following day, noon to five pm at the jack purcell community centre, elgin street @ jack purcell lane (near gilmour)....
News, Notes, Events
The English-language finalists for the Trillium Book Award for poetry have been announced [amongst them Ottawan Anita Lahey]:
* Ken Babstock for Airstream Land Yacht
* Adam Dickinson for Kingdom, Phylum
* Anita Lahey for Out to Dry in Cape Breton
CBC story on the Trillium nominations here.
Rob Winger launches Muybridge's Horse, published by Nightwood Editions, as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series at the Manx in Ottawa on June 9th at 5pm.
& another screening for Heard of Poets
Ottawa Shambhala Meditation Centre
Friday, June 1, 2007
8:00pm
Ottawa Shambhala Meditation Centre
984 Wellington St. West. Where Somerset turns into Wellington.
Yesterday 29 May 2007:
Greg Frankson aka Ritallin performed at the Avant-Garde Bar.
& Grant Wilkins had a birthday.
Future:
It looks like I just might be starting up a reading series this autumn!
* Ken Babstock for Airstream Land Yacht
* Adam Dickinson for Kingdom, Phylum
* Anita Lahey for Out to Dry in Cape Breton
CBC story on the Trillium nominations here.
Rob Winger launches Muybridge's Horse, published by Nightwood Editions, as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series at the Manx in Ottawa on June 9th at 5pm.
& another screening for Heard of Poets
Ottawa Shambhala Meditation Centre
Friday, June 1, 2007
8:00pm
Ottawa Shambhala Meditation Centre
984 Wellington St. West. Where Somerset turns into Wellington.
Yesterday 29 May 2007:
Greg Frankson aka Ritallin performed at the Avant-Garde Bar.
& Grant Wilkins had a birthday.
Future:
It looks like I just might be starting up a reading series this autumn!
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Sylvia Adams and Christopher Taylor reading
Sasquatch on May 27th had 2 guest readers, Sylvia Adams and Christopher Taylor.
Sylvia Adams read first after the open mic, from various books and chapbooks, including Mondrian's Elephant and her latest book, Sleeping on the Moon. Since her voice was coming and going, she brought her daughter to assist with carrying out the booked reading. (What a trooper.)
A set centred around African safari animals with some comic images such as handcuffs coming off a cheetah and luring elephants with tulip beds.
She also read a few word sonnets which Seymour Mayne steadily promotes. One of her word sonnets was about the heart-rending challenges of caring for senior members of family in nursing homes pink door, yellow door, forgotten color of home.
A striking story was in her triolet of painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a romantic in every sense. He wrote love poems to be buried with his favorite model and wife, then exhumed them to regift to his next love. Lesson? Always keep a copy of your poems for yourself.
*
The second reader was Christopher A. Taylor. Taylor was a long-time resident of Ottawa although with nearly 2 decades here, now hails from Victoria, BC.
He read from his book of 2007: Shedding Knowledge. A Steady Diet(p. 35) talks about advice people give for life:
During this reading, he had a great to chance to show his good humoredness in not just the poems as just as he started to read the sax and bass of a band upstairs started. He decided to address it and said he'd roll with the mellow sax with some compatible poem choices.
Competing sound is all part of the live poetry experience. Like people in a movie theatre as opposed to recorded CDs at home, others can provide obstructions, or flavor, depending on how you look at it. Later in the reading, a loud-talker decided to do so in the stairwell. Chris Sorrenti went up to sort that. Taylor joked, you didn't have to get physical with him I trust. Sorrenti said no, he could settle it peaceably.
There was a sweet mediative quality in a number of of his poems including one entitled Festival. It got its inspiration at the Ottawa Folk Festival. It reads in part,
This collection is not only covering some of the geography of the Ottawa Valley and Toronto but is owing to the Tree reading series. Because he was asked to be feature reader there in 2004 by James Moran, he collated up a lot of his poems, then realized he now had a working manuscript. The press he placed it with specializes in writing from north eastern Ontario. Scrivener Press, from Sudbury since 1995, has done a few titles a year including an anthology by the League of Canadian Poets called Spring-Fever a decade ago.
Both poets have works to be had at Collected Works
[cross-posted]
Sylvia Adams read first after the open mic, from various books and chapbooks, including Mondrian's Elephant and her latest book, Sleeping on the Moon. Since her voice was coming and going, she brought her daughter to assist with carrying out the booked reading. (What a trooper.)A set centred around African safari animals with some comic images such as handcuffs coming off a cheetah and luring elephants with tulip beds.
She also read a few word sonnets which Seymour Mayne steadily promotes. One of her word sonnets was about the heart-rending challenges of caring for senior members of family in nursing homes pink door, yellow door, forgotten color of home.
A striking story was in her triolet of painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a romantic in every sense. He wrote love poems to be buried with his favorite model and wife, then exhumed them to regift to his next love. Lesson? Always keep a copy of your poems for yourself.
The second reader was Christopher A. Taylor. Taylor was a long-time resident of Ottawa although with nearly 2 decades here, now hails from Victoria, BC.
He read from his book of 2007: Shedding Knowledge. A Steady Diet(p. 35) talks about advice people give for life:
I have jotted everything down
and now my fridge is plastered with yellow post-it notes
telling me to relax, be careful, wait, stop, go, start now,
breathe, stupid, breathe. Ah, yes.
The light comes on when I open the door
and cold air spills onto my feet.
During this reading, he had a great to chance to show his good humoredness in not just the poems as just as he started to read the sax and bass of a band upstairs started. He decided to address it and said he'd roll with the mellow sax with some compatible poem choices.
Competing sound is all part of the live poetry experience. Like people in a movie theatre as opposed to recorded CDs at home, others can provide obstructions, or flavor, depending on how you look at it. Later in the reading, a loud-talker decided to do so in the stairwell. Chris Sorrenti went up to sort that. Taylor joked, you didn't have to get physical with him I trust. Sorrenti said no, he could settle it peaceably.
There was a sweet mediative quality in a number of of his poems including one entitled Festival. It got its inspiration at the Ottawa Folk Festival. It reads in part,
so lean you would think
she never ate solids
she took out her Tibetan bells
to ward off negativity
then set the air loose
This collection is not only covering some of the geography of the Ottawa Valley and Toronto but is owing to the Tree reading series. Because he was asked to be feature reader there in 2004 by James Moran, he collated up a lot of his poems, then realized he now had a working manuscript. The press he placed it with specializes in writing from north eastern Ontario. Scrivener Press, from Sudbury since 1995, has done a few titles a year including an anthology by the League of Canadian Poets called Spring-Fever a decade ago.
Both poets have works to be had at Collected Works
[cross-posted]
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Haiku Canada Conference
From Friday until this Sunday evening Haiku Canada is holding their conference at Carleton University. Ottawa poet Terry Ann Carter is chairing the events.
Long time member of Ottawa's haiku community, Marianne Bluger could be present this year in the form of tulips from her own garden.
There is a prevailing spirit of camaraderie, with a lot of laughter and conversations as people come from around North America, from Boston and New Jersey, Vancouver to Toronto to Aylmer all for the love of the love of these small form poems. The point was made and taken up on how there is no end point with poetry but it is an ongoing learning of process and language and communication.
Speakers have covered aspects of haiku and other forms, in what constitutes the parameters, the practice, the process and even how it can be used therapeutically.
Philomene Kocher and Marjorie Woodbridge talked about the use of sensory stimulation (Snoezelen therapy) using haiku in particular to reach people with disabilitating dementia. It seems to be a doorway to get back to the person through connection to emotions and senses in a way similar to how old familiar music, aphorisms, scripture and ritual, can tap areas of the brain and memory stored in the body. It could bring a person into focus again, communicative. Patients were facilitated to compose haiku by putting phrases they said on flip charts and then collaboratively written. For example
jumping in the puddle
more water in your boots
than out
Haiku and renga has been used in psychotherapy in Japan for years. Philomene Kocher and Marjorie Woodbridge (pictured), of Kingston, presented their findings to St. Paul's University in Ottawa at a conference recently.
Other forms of poetry have been touched on in the conference including
Tanka was elaborated on by University of Lethbridge Professor Kozue Uzawa.
Angela Leuck (with Maxianne Berger) had edited Sun Through the Blinds: Montreal Haiku Today (Shoreline Press of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec). On opening night Angela Leuck launched a collection of haiku, Flower Heart (Blue Ginko, 2006) and brought up several readers each to read one of their poems. Her last book, Rose Haiku had contributions from 80 poets and 16 countries, got its start with Tulip Heart inspired by a visit to Ottawa. It was published by Shoreline in 2005.
Abigail Friedman did her first book launch. She talked about writing her book The Haiku Apprentice (from Stone Bridge Books, 2006) and how to start a haiku group with a lot of information cycling around the room from the participants.
She herself got into haiku while working in Japan. She was invited to join a haiku circle and was fascinated by the experience. In telling her husband each time how great it was, to get his reply of "you should write a book about that", she wrote the book never realizing there was a living haiku community in the west.
She has organized a bilingual haiku group in Montreal for 2 years. She explains how that started. "My life has been about doing all these really cool things for all the wrong reasons." After she finished her Haiku Apprentice book the publisher wanted an appendix on how anyone could go out and start a haiku group. She said I've never done it. Give me six months. She started a group and also surveyed every North American contact she could find to pick their brains on how it was done.
insomnia
just me and that cricket
fill the night
Dina E. Cox talked about senryu and pointed out that Senryu was the name of a man who decided to collect the pithy little poems he heard floating about. He collected 2.3 million of them. He started a contest and judged the best ones. He provided a title line and had people form the rest. In 1757 the contest got 207 entries. It ran every 10 days. By 1762 it amassed 10,000 entries. In 1765 the first best of anthology came out of it. One old anonymous poem from Edo was this:
the doctors talk among themselves
she will be a nice window soon
Small press publishers have several tables, such as William Higginson, Dorothy Howard's Proof Press, and Turtle Light Press. Turtle Light Press bookmaker Rick Black is doing a talk on his journey on Sunday morning.
Raffael de Gruttola who founded the Boston Haiku Society in 1987 and is past president of the Haiku Society of America was on hand to give a history of haiku from his years of study and practice. He is pictured here with George Swede.
Gruttola made the observation on how hip-hop is not so different from haiku under the surface. How rappers move from phrase to phrase, across surprising gaps and pivots, pushing the language, playing with the old meanings of words to shift the etymology and form language is the same process people are doing with haiku. One is not trying to write the universal poem that 2000 people have already written but sharpen your perception and create awareness in yourself and in others.
On Saturday evening, perhaps the most recognizable name in western haiku practice, George Swede.
Much still to come as the conference continues.
Long time member of Ottawa's haiku community, Marianne Bluger could be present this year in the form of tulips from her own garden.
There is a prevailing spirit of camaraderie, with a lot of laughter and conversations as people come from around North America, from Boston and New Jersey, Vancouver to Toronto to Aylmer all for the love of the love of these small form poems. The point was made and taken up on how there is no end point with poetry but it is an ongoing learning of process and language and communication.
Speakers have covered aspects of haiku and other forms, in what constitutes the parameters, the practice, the process and even how it can be used therapeutically.
Philomene Kocher and Marjorie Woodbridge talked about the use of sensory stimulation (Snoezelen therapy) using haiku in particular to reach people with disabilitating dementia. It seems to be a doorway to get back to the person through connection to emotions and senses in a way similar to how old familiar music, aphorisms, scripture and ritual, can tap areas of the brain and memory stored in the body. It could bring a person into focus again, communicative. Patients were facilitated to compose haiku by putting phrases they said on flip charts and then collaboratively written. For example
jumping in the puddle
more water in your boots
than out
Haiku and renga has been used in psychotherapy in Japan for years. Philomene Kocher and Marjorie Woodbridge (pictured), of Kingston, presented their findings to St. Paul's University in Ottawa at a conference recently.
Other forms of poetry have been touched on in the conference including
- senryu (the poetry for the people of tragi-comedy of life),
- renga (where party game meets poetry),
- and tanka (a form which now has it's own English language Canadian journal, Gusts).
Tanka was elaborated on by University of Lethbridge Professor Kozue Uzawa. Angela Leuck (with Maxianne Berger) had edited Sun Through the Blinds: Montreal Haiku Today (Shoreline Press of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec). On opening night Angela Leuck launched a collection of haiku, Flower Heart (Blue Ginko, 2006) and brought up several readers each to read one of their poems. Her last book, Rose Haiku had contributions from 80 poets and 16 countries, got its start with Tulip Heart inspired by a visit to Ottawa. It was published by Shoreline in 2005.
Abigail Friedman did her first book launch. She talked about writing her book The Haiku Apprentice (from Stone Bridge Books, 2006) and how to start a haiku group with a lot of information cycling around the room from the participants.
She herself got into haiku while working in Japan. She was invited to join a haiku circle and was fascinated by the experience. In telling her husband each time how great it was, to get his reply of "you should write a book about that", she wrote the book never realizing there was a living haiku community in the west.
She has organized a bilingual haiku group in Montreal for 2 years. She explains how that started. "My life has been about doing all these really cool things for all the wrong reasons." After she finished her Haiku Apprentice book the publisher wanted an appendix on how anyone could go out and start a haiku group. She said I've never done it. Give me six months. She started a group and also surveyed every North American contact she could find to pick their brains on how it was done.
insomnia
just me and that cricket
fill the night
Dina E. Cox talked about senryu and pointed out that Senryu was the name of a man who decided to collect the pithy little poems he heard floating about. He collected 2.3 million of them. He started a contest and judged the best ones. He provided a title line and had people form the rest. In 1757 the contest got 207 entries. It ran every 10 days. By 1762 it amassed 10,000 entries. In 1765 the first best of anthology came out of it. One old anonymous poem from Edo was this:
the doctors talk among themselves
she will be a nice window soon
Small press publishers have several tables, such as William Higginson, Dorothy Howard's Proof Press, and Turtle Light Press. Turtle Light Press bookmaker Rick Black is doing a talk on his journey on Sunday morning.
Raffael de Gruttola who founded the Boston Haiku Society in 1987 and is past president of the Haiku Society of America was on hand to give a history of haiku from his years of study and practice. He is pictured here with George Swede.
Gruttola made the observation on how hip-hop is not so different from haiku under the surface. How rappers move from phrase to phrase, across surprising gaps and pivots, pushing the language, playing with the old meanings of words to shift the etymology and form language is the same process people are doing with haiku. One is not trying to write the universal poem that 2000 people have already written but sharpen your perception and create awareness in yourself and in others.
On Saturday evening, perhaps the most recognizable name in western haiku practice, George Swede.
Much still to come as the conference continues.
Monday, April 30, 2007
a brief note on the poetry of Sandra Ridley
trinity test site
drove a truck from los alamos new mexico
for the view from a rolled down window
kept his dry eyes open behind dark goggles
until a shock sense of fingers burning
outside smell of skin, memories of sparkler sticks
and birthday cakes not distorted white white
flash of magnesium phosphorescence
nowhere a shadow just sway of joshua tree
what he came for he couldn’t find
only melted sand, small hard bubbles
nubs of pale green glass, filled his pockets full
would be gifts for happy children
Perpetually modest and quiet, Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, originally from Saskatchewan ("always a wheat farm girl," as she writes in her bio), has been publishing increasingly interesting poems in more than a few places lately, including Carousel, Grain, Queen’s Feminist Review, Taddle Creek, The Peter F. Yacht Club and ottawater, and the Huntsville Festival of Arts’ anthology, Fringe Festival Poetry, with a chapbook of ghazals recently accepted by prairie publisher JackPine Press scheduled for 2008 publication. After seeing poems there and here for a while, and her recent honourable mention in the Diana Brebner Awards sponsored by Arc magazine, it's always good to see something new by Ridley; however rare that seems to be (although lately less so).
Variation On Last Summer
Their beginning was better than she had planned:
a palm pressed to the pulse in her ankle,
then his lips.
That season tilted with a red leaf in August,
when the moon was still in July.
Buffalo stones darkened among foxtails, and grasshoppers
shifted from path to ditch. His hum,
relentless.
Months have fallen away,
and she wants to re-invent the ending.
That path led through a stand of poplar
to barrels of creosote held down by black tarpaulins
and oiled rope.
She dipped his hand, parsed the wound.
A few weeks ago, Ottawa poet and publisher Max Middle put a few more of his Puddle Leaflets out, including poems by Gregory Betts, Adam Seelig, Gary Barwin and "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway (Two)" by Ridley. Ridleys' poems over the past couple of years seem far more traditional than what she has been working on lately, working a marvellous prairie flow in the tradition of the "prairie long poem" in her "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway" (I look forward to seeing the entire poem when it's finished), that includes the line "Here does not resonate. Here insists." The compactness of the earlier pieces seem to have been pulled slowly apart, in lines just as compact and cutting, but weaving in more of a considered, slow flow, even as they ride off the distances of prairie horizons. There is a lovely kind of smooth rhythm and clean spoken wisdom to her lines, almost weaving her prairie through the rhythms and lines the way Phil Hall works through his Ontario, or in the best of the poems by Saskatchewan poet Alison Calder from her Wolf Tree (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2007); there is a slow kind of quiet wisdom here worth waiting on, and worth waiting for. We know she's quietly working on a full collection, but how long do we have to wait? I could go on waiting forever, although I would prefer not to. Until then, just listen to these lines from the same poem, "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway (Two)," as she writes:
This car won’t push eighty and we can still identify the hurt.
Our choices haven’t yet become the typical blur.
There is a rolling highway line.
There is a wearing away of white paint.
There is an undeniable habit of longing.
Soon there will be acres of night.
~
No one forgets the uncorrectable details of broken promises
or the composite memory of photo booth smiles.
No such thing as subtle discontentment.
We can’t go back. If you really wanted to, you would.
~
We learn to draw out our need for light;
what shadows
and empty spaces imply.
The distant hills hide a threadbare swallow nest;
hoarfrost on barn plank, cracked by the weight of old heaving.
We learn that all that is protected cannot stay flawless.
We could make-believe a home in one of these small towns,
or any place that passes as friendly in the dead of winter.
~
A newborn aurora trembles between words and persuades us.
It might have been easier to give in to what has let us down.
Again. The car is quiet,
but for the drone of four wheels on grey snow.
~
Off the sore lip of horizon is another smoke stack; maybe
a nursery for rockets, or the last rural mythology.
A chain link fence runs parallel to the highway; a remnant of perimeter
remains secured.
A missile silo condo is for sale.
It pushes up from buried silver sage and grass.
Six feet of concrete with corrugated metal offers a cheap gesture of rescue.
We think we could be safe here.
I could feed you sugarplums forever.
drove a truck from los alamos new mexico
for the view from a rolled down window
kept his dry eyes open behind dark goggles
until a shock sense of fingers burning
outside smell of skin, memories of sparkler sticks
and birthday cakes not distorted white white
flash of magnesium phosphorescence
nowhere a shadow just sway of joshua tree
what he came for he couldn’t find
only melted sand, small hard bubbles
nubs of pale green glass, filled his pockets full
would be gifts for happy children
Perpetually modest and quiet, Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, originally from Saskatchewan ("always a wheat farm girl," as she writes in her bio), has been publishing increasingly interesting poems in more than a few places lately, including Carousel, Grain, Queen’s Feminist Review, Taddle Creek, The Peter F. Yacht Club and ottawater, and the Huntsville Festival of Arts’ anthology, Fringe Festival Poetry, with a chapbook of ghazals recently accepted by prairie publisher JackPine Press scheduled for 2008 publication. After seeing poems there and here for a while, and her recent honourable mention in the Diana Brebner Awards sponsored by Arc magazine, it's always good to see something new by Ridley; however rare that seems to be (although lately less so).
Variation On Last Summer
Their beginning was better than she had planned:
a palm pressed to the pulse in her ankle,
then his lips.
That season tilted with a red leaf in August,
when the moon was still in July.
Buffalo stones darkened among foxtails, and grasshoppers
shifted from path to ditch. His hum,
relentless.
Months have fallen away,
and she wants to re-invent the ending.
That path led through a stand of poplar
to barrels of creosote held down by black tarpaulins
and oiled rope.
She dipped his hand, parsed the wound.
A few weeks ago, Ottawa poet and publisher Max Middle put a few more of his Puddle Leaflets out, including poems by Gregory Betts, Adam Seelig, Gary Barwin and "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway (Two)" by Ridley. Ridleys' poems over the past couple of years seem far more traditional than what she has been working on lately, working a marvellous prairie flow in the tradition of the "prairie long poem" in her "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway" (I look forward to seeing the entire poem when it's finished), that includes the line "Here does not resonate. Here insists." The compactness of the earlier pieces seem to have been pulled slowly apart, in lines just as compact and cutting, but weaving in more of a considered, slow flow, even as they ride off the distances of prairie horizons. There is a lovely kind of smooth rhythm and clean spoken wisdom to her lines, almost weaving her prairie through the rhythms and lines the way Phil Hall works through his Ontario, or in the best of the poems by Saskatchewan poet Alison Calder from her Wolf Tree (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2007); there is a slow kind of quiet wisdom here worth waiting on, and worth waiting for. We know she's quietly working on a full collection, but how long do we have to wait? I could go on waiting forever, although I would prefer not to. Until then, just listen to these lines from the same poem, "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway (Two)," as she writes:
This car won’t push eighty and we can still identify the hurt.
Our choices haven’t yet become the typical blur.
There is a rolling highway line.
There is a wearing away of white paint.
There is an undeniable habit of longing.
Soon there will be acres of night.
~
No one forgets the uncorrectable details of broken promises
or the composite memory of photo booth smiles.
No such thing as subtle discontentment.
We can’t go back. If you really wanted to, you would.
~
We learn to draw out our need for light;
what shadows
and empty spaces imply.
The distant hills hide a threadbare swallow nest;
hoarfrost on barn plank, cracked by the weight of old heaving.
We learn that all that is protected cannot stay flawless.
We could make-believe a home in one of these small towns,
or any place that passes as friendly in the dead of winter.
~
A newborn aurora trembles between words and persuades us.
It might have been easier to give in to what has let us down.
Again. The car is quiet,
but for the drone of four wheels on grey snow.
~
Off the sore lip of horizon is another smoke stack; maybe
a nursery for rockets, or the last rural mythology.
A chain link fence runs parallel to the highway; a remnant of perimeter
remains secured.
A missile silo condo is for sale.
It pushes up from buried silver sage and grass.
Six feet of concrete with corrugated metal offers a cheap gesture of rescue.
We think we could be safe here.
I could feed you sugarplums forever.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
two erins and a genni
read last night as part of the final poetry cabaret: erin knight, genni gunn and erin mouré. the first poetry cabaret had two georges and a rob. When will we have three of a kind? We actually did have a full house for this reading, thanks to the audience.
Knight read from her first poetry collection “Sweet Fuel” (Gooselane Editions, 2007). She introduced her work by explaining that the title refers to the energy we use when we have no more energy. She also applied the idea to translation, which is an act in her book, that there is an energy that is needed between perception and language and that energy creates new energy.
Her work was interesting, containing a lot of metaphoric abstractions combined with very concrete imagery and some references to mythology. She also included translations from Spanish and also back translations: poems written in English, translated into Spanish and then translated back into English. The variations were quite interesting, such as a translation from “Silver, for words,/for their mercurial flow” to Spanish and then back into English as “A plated word, glossed/with the fluency of mercury.” [Milagro por el nevado in Three Translations].
My favourite bits of Knight’s reading:
The Sight:
“one blue egg/among three or four mottled green.”
“the dial tone, an acquired comfort,/ like sweet cheese, or the smell of burning dust/when you turn on the furnace the first day.”
Little Brown Bat:
“I held the other end of the rope of a small person’s panic.”
“At times I’ve been reminded of a bat’s naked wings./The sun skin stretched across its long fingerbones invites the/violence of an archaic past we don’t claim.”
As I’m flipping through the book hunting for the lines I marked down, I see other lines, other word combinations I admire. I plan to spend more time being energized by the sweet fuels in this book.
Genni Gunn read next from "Faceless," a collection of poems that focuses primarily on a fictionalized version of a woman who had a face transplant. Gunn was born in Trieste, Italy and along with being a writer and former musician, is also a translator. Translation links all three poets.
Erin Mouré, the final reader, works with three languages: English, French and Galician, a language spoken by about three million people today that goes back to the Middle Ages. She read from O Cadoiro (House of Anansi Press, 2007). Mouré explained that she wanted to explore the lyric turn, by which she was referring to the time when poems turned from praising God, a love that claimed to be wholly satisfying and complete, to addressing another, a love never complete or sufficient.
In order to do the research she went to Lisbon to read the troubadour poetry of the
medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, the cancioneiros. Mouré spoke eloquently about the various types of cantigas, including songs of love, and songs of scorn. Some of the of the songs may have been removed from the Vatican Library for being too racy.
I took a few notes about the poems, but alas somehow I ended up buying a different book, O Cidadán (House of Anansi, 2002), the third in a trilogy. Now I’m going to be buying the other two and O Cadoiro. Alas that means I can’t comment on the poems themselves! Mouré speaks eloquently about the poems in a fascinating post-face here.
During the Question and Answer, Stephen Brockwell, who did his usual exemplary job hosting, asked all three about the importance of a second or third language in their work.
For Mouré, this is are crucial. She said that she couldn’t be herself without them. She added that in Europe people are comfortable hearing and not necessarily understanding many languages.
Gunn said that she came from Italy when she was eleven years old and that she didn’t really return to her native tongue until she translated the works of a feminist author, thereby rediscovering her first language through translation.
For Knight being in love with language means being in love with more than one language. She learned Spanish fairly late when she was curious to know about the exciting things she was hearing in Mexico. Knowing other languages helps her to recognize the metaphors occurring in every day speech.
Brockwell asked what is gained and lost in the translation of a poem.
Mouré answered that any reading is a translation. We experience poems through our body, our experience and our own reading. She suggested we take a look at all the translations of Rilke in order to discover the multiple essences of a work.
Mouré finds she is less satisfied to read only in English. She said her mother tongue was silence, that her parents’ voices were a series of blah blahs, unless they mentioned ice cream, but a flower made sense to her. There are times when English does not suffice. We say “the snow fell.” In Galician “it felled the snow,” which sounds more beautiful.
“Je” and “I” are not the same exactly because they have a different cultural context.
The discussion returned to language and the notion that one has to be young to learn a new language, which is something the readers didn't agree with. Mouré said that Galicians believe Galician belongs to the people who love it. Galician is a supressed language that existed in microcosms, the words and expressions varying from one village to another. For example, there are fourteen words for firefly.
Mouré also spoke about the role of lyric in poetry. She believes the poet can’t get away from lyric. She feels that those who want to get rid of the speaking I, still have it there, but it’s suppressed. She recommends people read all ages of literature in different languages, to dive into different moments and places in different languages, even in translation.
Jeremy Dias asked a question about intent and meaning in their poems.
Mouré answered that she tries to see where words go and what they open to her, takes the beauty of the language, that there are so many things language can do; it can be forceful or delicate, can contain ambiguity and contradiction, which are a part of life. She went on to say that we live with contradiction, that resolution comes in different ways or not at all and that we don’t always have a message in life. Every love and death is singular. In the face of multiple singularity there are bound to be contradictions.
I was blown away by Mouré’s words and her poems. She is someone I plan to read more of. What a way to finish off the poetry cabarets!
I’m not blogging events on Sunday. Thanks to all of you who’ve read and discussed these entries with me this time around. Great seeing you at this year’s festival, another joyous celebration of literature. Spring is officially sprung. I'll see you at the numerous events coming up. The Bywords calendar is jam (and peanut butter) packed.
Knight read from her first poetry collection “Sweet Fuel” (Gooselane Editions, 2007). She introduced her work by explaining that the title refers to the energy we use when we have no more energy. She also applied the idea to translation, which is an act in her book, that there is an energy that is needed between perception and language and that energy creates new energy.
Her work was interesting, containing a lot of metaphoric abstractions combined with very concrete imagery and some references to mythology. She also included translations from Spanish and also back translations: poems written in English, translated into Spanish and then translated back into English. The variations were quite interesting, such as a translation from “Silver, for words,/for their mercurial flow” to Spanish and then back into English as “A plated word, glossed/with the fluency of mercury.” [Milagro por el nevado in Three Translations].
My favourite bits of Knight’s reading:
The Sight:
“one blue egg/among three or four mottled green.”
“the dial tone, an acquired comfort,/ like sweet cheese, or the smell of burning dust/when you turn on the furnace the first day.”
Little Brown Bat:
“I held the other end of the rope of a small person’s panic.”
“At times I’ve been reminded of a bat’s naked wings./The sun skin stretched across its long fingerbones invites the/violence of an archaic past we don’t claim.”
As I’m flipping through the book hunting for the lines I marked down, I see other lines, other word combinations I admire. I plan to spend more time being energized by the sweet fuels in this book.
Genni Gunn read next from "Faceless," a collection of poems that focuses primarily on a fictionalized version of a woman who had a face transplant. Gunn was born in Trieste, Italy and along with being a writer and former musician, is also a translator. Translation links all three poets.
Erin Mouré, the final reader, works with three languages: English, French and Galician, a language spoken by about three million people today that goes back to the Middle Ages. She read from O Cadoiro (House of Anansi Press, 2007). Mouré explained that she wanted to explore the lyric turn, by which she was referring to the time when poems turned from praising God, a love that claimed to be wholly satisfying and complete, to addressing another, a love never complete or sufficient.
In order to do the research she went to Lisbon to read the troubadour poetry of the
medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, the cancioneiros. Mouré spoke eloquently about the various types of cantigas, including songs of love, and songs of scorn. Some of the of the songs may have been removed from the Vatican Library for being too racy.
I took a few notes about the poems, but alas somehow I ended up buying a different book, O Cidadán (House of Anansi, 2002), the third in a trilogy. Now I’m going to be buying the other two and O Cadoiro. Alas that means I can’t comment on the poems themselves! Mouré speaks eloquently about the poems in a fascinating post-face here.
During the Question and Answer, Stephen Brockwell, who did his usual exemplary job hosting, asked all three about the importance of a second or third language in their work.
For Mouré, this is are crucial. She said that she couldn’t be herself without them. She added that in Europe people are comfortable hearing and not necessarily understanding many languages.
Gunn said that she came from Italy when she was eleven years old and that she didn’t really return to her native tongue until she translated the works of a feminist author, thereby rediscovering her first language through translation.
For Knight being in love with language means being in love with more than one language. She learned Spanish fairly late when she was curious to know about the exciting things she was hearing in Mexico. Knowing other languages helps her to recognize the metaphors occurring in every day speech.
Brockwell asked what is gained and lost in the translation of a poem.
Mouré answered that any reading is a translation. We experience poems through our body, our experience and our own reading. She suggested we take a look at all the translations of Rilke in order to discover the multiple essences of a work.
Mouré finds she is less satisfied to read only in English. She said her mother tongue was silence, that her parents’ voices were a series of blah blahs, unless they mentioned ice cream, but a flower made sense to her. There are times when English does not suffice. We say “the snow fell.” In Galician “it felled the snow,” which sounds more beautiful.
“Je” and “I” are not the same exactly because they have a different cultural context.
The discussion returned to language and the notion that one has to be young to learn a new language, which is something the readers didn't agree with. Mouré said that Galicians believe Galician belongs to the people who love it. Galician is a supressed language that existed in microcosms, the words and expressions varying from one village to another. For example, there are fourteen words for firefly.
Mouré also spoke about the role of lyric in poetry. She believes the poet can’t get away from lyric. She feels that those who want to get rid of the speaking I, still have it there, but it’s suppressed. She recommends people read all ages of literature in different languages, to dive into different moments and places in different languages, even in translation.
Jeremy Dias asked a question about intent and meaning in their poems.
Mouré answered that she tries to see where words go and what they open to her, takes the beauty of the language, that there are so many things language can do; it can be forceful or delicate, can contain ambiguity and contradiction, which are a part of life. She went on to say that we live with contradiction, that resolution comes in different ways or not at all and that we don’t always have a message in life. Every love and death is singular. In the face of multiple singularity there are bound to be contradictions.
I was blown away by Mouré’s words and her poems. She is someone I plan to read more of. What a way to finish off the poetry cabarets!
I’m not blogging events on Sunday. Thanks to all of you who’ve read and discussed these entries with me this time around. Great seeing you at this year’s festival, another joyous celebration of literature. Spring is officially sprung. I'll see you at the numerous events coming up. The Bywords calendar is jam (and peanut butter) packed.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Troubadours, Shamans & Language Oracles
at the Ottawa International Writers Festival last night.
First there was Catherine Kidd, performance poet and novelist. She performed from "Bipolar Bear" (Conundrum Press, 2005) and read from her first novel, "Missing the Ark" (Conundrum Press, 2007). Here I’ll touch briefly on her spoken word performance.
Kidd is an actress and shape shifter, the nuances and changes in her voice making it easy to believe for an instant that she really is a blind, cave-dwelling Human Fish. To the background of music created for the piece, Kidd spouted rhythms and rhyme of a zoological bent. I’m not a big fan of spoken word with a few exceptions when I become a huge fan as is the case here for Catherine Kidd. She weaved magic with Plato, and creatively riffed on extinction. I was caught up in the joy of her performance. The audience felt likewise. I also really enjoyed her reading from her novel, a very intense and compelling scene about a little girl who rides in a taxi and makes up stories that aren’t fooling the driver, who has stories of his own. As Kidd said later on during the Q&A, when she is writing, the characters tell their own stories. It’s what makes her dialog so believable.
Later in the evening, after Sarah Dearing’s lively conversation with the entertaining and provocative Heather Mallick, former Globe and Mail columnist and “opinionator” as she calls herself, we returned to poetry with Poetry Cabaret 3. David O’Meara hosted the event, mixing serious tributes with humour in his introductions of Barbara Nickel, Dennis Lee and Simon Armitage.
Domain (House of Anansi Press, 2007) is the second collection in ten years for Nickel who likened creating a poem to the process of chipping away at stone and taking days to get to a tiny phrase. rob mclennan asked her during the Q&A about the structure of the book, whether the compact foundational poems throughout the book framed the rest of the poems. Nickel explained that the Crown of Sonnet poems scattered throughout the book and representing the various rooms of a house formed the structure and then poems about circles, cycles, the moon and cobwebs followed. She likened the process of writing poetry for her to the wait in fishing.
I found Nickel’s poems to be mesmerizing, the imagery precise, the cadence and rhythm in the sonnets very delicate and subtle, and the lines powerful and surprising. In "The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife" the “house is a body she’s trapped in.” And there’s a juxtaposition between the domestic experiences and the gruesomeness and sadness of the doctor’s life. “He mounts the stairs. Today/ he touched a bruise, a wart, a man’s eyelids/just dead still warm—he reaches for / his wife.”
What else did I enjoy about Nickel’s poems?
The imagery of white and stillness in poems like "Girls’ Room," inspired by The Veiled Virgin, a statue by Giovanni Strazza.
The echo of themes throughout the poems she read. For example, the line “the only way to touch her is to hurt’” appeared in two poems Nickel read: "Master Bedroom" and "Girls’ Room" and in this form in "The Doctor and Doctor’s Wife": “He touches pain so she can buy the meat.”
The play of syntax in poems like "Girls’ Room": “the heave/down rock of water.”
The repetition from poems like "Athabasca Falls, 8:40 am": “and view, endlessly, ourselves/viewing the view.”
The way sound patterned and reinforced the poems' moods and subjects. For instance in “Living Room” the melancholy mood of remembrance is echoed in the hollow open o and the lax i sounds which call to mind the pure white waterfall of the opening line: “my brother flicking stones/into the foam, christening me with names I still hiss at the mirror. Where do those stones/exist?”
Nickel’s work, to me, is an example of shamanism, of observing what is real and forecasting what it might mean in the broader sense, with lines line “Climbing depends/ on loving the rock wholly and letting go.”
In a series of poems about Catherine the Great, Nickel opens with epigraphs from Catherine and from others in the era and then creates glossas using part of the quote within the poems. She also had a series of poems on graveyards, explaining that she is a collector of graveyards, writing a series of laments for people she’s lost in her life through breakups and deaths. The poem "Churchyard: Tiefengrund," being a particularly heartbreaking poem about the burial of a baby son and the speaker’s grandmother.
Dennis Lee followed Nickel, reading first from a collection of children’s poems and moving on to Yes/No (House of Anansi Press, 2007), a follow-up to UN (House of Anansi Press, 2003). He advised the audience to treat his reading as a piece of music and to not be too worried if they found it disorienting.
I found it playful and delightfully overwhelming to my ear and brain, engaging my cerebral cortex in ways it likely rarely gets engaged. I admitted to Lee during the book signing later that the last time he came to the Writers Festival, I hadn’t really twigged on to his writing and that now I was finally ready for it. I enjoyed the accumulative effect of the strings of utterances, the side by side placing of unlike ideas like “blunderling underlying”, “extinctions con carne”, “calling all lords of the rigor mort tango”, “quotidianic aha. His reading had a Lewis Carroll Jaberwocky feel to it for me, an absurdity and playfulness with language and still maintained an Aligator Pie cadence, which I also mentioined to Lee.
“Plague of indigenous nada” sounded like something one could yell out at a business meeting. I’ll have to sit down and read both "UN" and "Yes/No" to get more than sound out of this work, but it did remind me of something Steve McCaffery has said in an electronic poetry centre interview with charles berstein, which I can only paraphrase, that sometimes it is good to focus on sound to shift the reader’s attention from the pattern of literal meaning.
Simon Armitage, the next reader, was much more a storyteller, fashioning poems that are easily accessible to the reader yet at the same time still strong in the craft and precision of poem-making. He read from his new collection “Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Cowboy Kid" (first published by Faber and Faber, Canadian edition by House of Anansi Press, 2007) His poems combined humour and wit. This is a return for Armitage who came to the festival two years before. I was particularly pleased to hear him read “You’re beautiful” again. It’s in the current collection. The speaker praises the you in the poem while the I is ugly for things like “saying ‘love at first sight’ is another form of mistaken identity...”
During the question and answer bit, O’Meara asked general questions about how hard it was to start a poem, how the writers knew when the poem was finished.
Lee explained that his first drafts were dull and boring, that they often contained too much chatter and too many bright ideas. It can take him up to twenty five drafts to create a poem. The more the drafts, the more spontaneous sounding the poem would be. The poem, he said, has to find its way out.
For Armitage, a poem often starts as a daydream. Like Lee, Armitage and Nickel both found early drafts to be a form of hard labour. Armitage, whose work relies heavily on sound and rhythm, explained that he’ll start with sacrificial words that have the correct sound and rhythm but not the right meaning. He said that it was different for books, in which he starts to commission poems in his mind, focussed towards a theme. He described the poet’s holy trinity of anxiety as being the title, the first line and the last line. In his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he said he was lucky in that since those were given to him, he could concentrate on moment-to-moment poetics.
Armitage uses long hand to write his poems, believing in conserving the archeology of his own work through written drafts. He said that the word processor tends to make him feel like he’s already got a finished product and many writers delete previous versions. He ascribes to the philosophy of Ted Hughes in that he sees a relationship between crafting letters with the hand and the side of the brain the writer is appealing to.
I particularly liked what Armitage said about how to know when you’re finished. He said that when you feel you’ve created what you set out to make, you’ve failed. Instead you are finished when you’ve outreached own grasp, when the poem has taken you beyond your own capabilities.
An audience member asked about artistic inspirations. Armitage is currently working with the natural sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy; Nickel mentioned Chagall as being one influence, which makes a heck of a lot of sense given the dream-like nature of her work, but also said that it differs for each poem. I anticipated Lee would mention Mark Rothko as an influence, so I gave myself a gold star when he noted Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
O’Meara in a very skilful segue asked about the music that influenced the writers. He mentioned that Lee’s poems had a jazz association, while Nickel’s were majesterial and classical and Armitage was known for his liking of punk music, which made sense given the colloquial nature of his writing. Armitage said that his poetry followed the punk reaction to the Thatcher years and that at the time he had been fascinated by the use of journalese and that British writers had witnessed its effectiveness by people in power.
For his own writing, Armitage doesn’t listen to punk, but rather needs something arythmical to not influence hiss own rhythms. Nickel explained that she needs complete silence in order to write.
The evening went by quickly. I have to admit that it was the most engaging and inspiring evening for me of the writers festival so far. And there are still two more days to go!
Related posts/pics by John MacDonald, Charles Earl and perhaps more to come as the late night owls awake ;)
First there was Catherine Kidd, performance poet and novelist. She performed from "Bipolar Bear" (Conundrum Press, 2005) and read from her first novel, "Missing the Ark" (Conundrum Press, 2007). Here I’ll touch briefly on her spoken word performance.
Kidd is an actress and shape shifter, the nuances and changes in her voice making it easy to believe for an instant that she really is a blind, cave-dwelling Human Fish. To the background of music created for the piece, Kidd spouted rhythms and rhyme of a zoological bent. I’m not a big fan of spoken word with a few exceptions when I become a huge fan as is the case here for Catherine Kidd. She weaved magic with Plato, and creatively riffed on extinction. I was caught up in the joy of her performance. The audience felt likewise. I also really enjoyed her reading from her novel, a very intense and compelling scene about a little girl who rides in a taxi and makes up stories that aren’t fooling the driver, who has stories of his own. As Kidd said later on during the Q&A, when she is writing, the characters tell their own stories. It’s what makes her dialog so believable.
Later in the evening, after Sarah Dearing’s lively conversation with the entertaining and provocative Heather Mallick, former Globe and Mail columnist and “opinionator” as she calls herself, we returned to poetry with Poetry Cabaret 3. David O’Meara hosted the event, mixing serious tributes with humour in his introductions of Barbara Nickel, Dennis Lee and Simon Armitage.
Domain (House of Anansi Press, 2007) is the second collection in ten years for Nickel who likened creating a poem to the process of chipping away at stone and taking days to get to a tiny phrase. rob mclennan asked her during the Q&A about the structure of the book, whether the compact foundational poems throughout the book framed the rest of the poems. Nickel explained that the Crown of Sonnet poems scattered throughout the book and representing the various rooms of a house formed the structure and then poems about circles, cycles, the moon and cobwebs followed. She likened the process of writing poetry for her to the wait in fishing.
I found Nickel’s poems to be mesmerizing, the imagery precise, the cadence and rhythm in the sonnets very delicate and subtle, and the lines powerful and surprising. In "The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife" the “house is a body she’s trapped in.” And there’s a juxtaposition between the domestic experiences and the gruesomeness and sadness of the doctor’s life. “He mounts the stairs. Today/ he touched a bruise, a wart, a man’s eyelids/just dead still warm—he reaches for / his wife.”
What else did I enjoy about Nickel’s poems?
The imagery of white and stillness in poems like "Girls’ Room," inspired by The Veiled Virgin, a statue by Giovanni Strazza.
The echo of themes throughout the poems she read. For example, the line “the only way to touch her is to hurt’” appeared in two poems Nickel read: "Master Bedroom" and "Girls’ Room" and in this form in "The Doctor and Doctor’s Wife": “He touches pain so she can buy the meat.”
The play of syntax in poems like "Girls’ Room": “the heave/down rock of water.”
The repetition from poems like "Athabasca Falls, 8:40 am": “and view, endlessly, ourselves/viewing the view.”
The way sound patterned and reinforced the poems' moods and subjects. For instance in “Living Room” the melancholy mood of remembrance is echoed in the hollow open o and the lax i sounds which call to mind the pure white waterfall of the opening line: “my brother flicking stones/into the foam, christening me with names I still hiss at the mirror. Where do those stones/exist?”
Nickel’s work, to me, is an example of shamanism, of observing what is real and forecasting what it might mean in the broader sense, with lines line “Climbing depends/ on loving the rock wholly and letting go.”
In a series of poems about Catherine the Great, Nickel opens with epigraphs from Catherine and from others in the era and then creates glossas using part of the quote within the poems. She also had a series of poems on graveyards, explaining that she is a collector of graveyards, writing a series of laments for people she’s lost in her life through breakups and deaths. The poem "Churchyard: Tiefengrund," being a particularly heartbreaking poem about the burial of a baby son and the speaker’s grandmother.
Dennis Lee followed Nickel, reading first from a collection of children’s poems and moving on to Yes/No (House of Anansi Press, 2007), a follow-up to UN (House of Anansi Press, 2003). He advised the audience to treat his reading as a piece of music and to not be too worried if they found it disorienting.
I found it playful and delightfully overwhelming to my ear and brain, engaging my cerebral cortex in ways it likely rarely gets engaged. I admitted to Lee during the book signing later that the last time he came to the Writers Festival, I hadn’t really twigged on to his writing and that now I was finally ready for it. I enjoyed the accumulative effect of the strings of utterances, the side by side placing of unlike ideas like “blunderling underlying”, “extinctions con carne”, “calling all lords of the rigor mort tango”, “quotidianic aha. His reading had a Lewis Carroll Jaberwocky feel to it for me, an absurdity and playfulness with language and still maintained an Aligator Pie cadence, which I also mentioined to Lee.
“Plague of indigenous nada” sounded like something one could yell out at a business meeting. I’ll have to sit down and read both "UN" and "Yes/No" to get more than sound out of this work, but it did remind me of something Steve McCaffery has said in an electronic poetry centre interview with charles berstein, which I can only paraphrase, that sometimes it is good to focus on sound to shift the reader’s attention from the pattern of literal meaning.
Simon Armitage, the next reader, was much more a storyteller, fashioning poems that are easily accessible to the reader yet at the same time still strong in the craft and precision of poem-making. He read from his new collection “Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Cowboy Kid" (first published by Faber and Faber, Canadian edition by House of Anansi Press, 2007) His poems combined humour and wit. This is a return for Armitage who came to the festival two years before. I was particularly pleased to hear him read “You’re beautiful” again. It’s in the current collection. The speaker praises the you in the poem while the I is ugly for things like “saying ‘love at first sight’ is another form of mistaken identity...”
During the question and answer bit, O’Meara asked general questions about how hard it was to start a poem, how the writers knew when the poem was finished.
Lee explained that his first drafts were dull and boring, that they often contained too much chatter and too many bright ideas. It can take him up to twenty five drafts to create a poem. The more the drafts, the more spontaneous sounding the poem would be. The poem, he said, has to find its way out.
For Armitage, a poem often starts as a daydream. Like Lee, Armitage and Nickel both found early drafts to be a form of hard labour. Armitage, whose work relies heavily on sound and rhythm, explained that he’ll start with sacrificial words that have the correct sound and rhythm but not the right meaning. He said that it was different for books, in which he starts to commission poems in his mind, focussed towards a theme. He described the poet’s holy trinity of anxiety as being the title, the first line and the last line. In his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he said he was lucky in that since those were given to him, he could concentrate on moment-to-moment poetics.
Armitage uses long hand to write his poems, believing in conserving the archeology of his own work through written drafts. He said that the word processor tends to make him feel like he’s already got a finished product and many writers delete previous versions. He ascribes to the philosophy of Ted Hughes in that he sees a relationship between crafting letters with the hand and the side of the brain the writer is appealing to.
I particularly liked what Armitage said about how to know when you’re finished. He said that when you feel you’ve created what you set out to make, you’ve failed. Instead you are finished when you’ve outreached own grasp, when the poem has taken you beyond your own capabilities.
An audience member asked about artistic inspirations. Armitage is currently working with the natural sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy; Nickel mentioned Chagall as being one influence, which makes a heck of a lot of sense given the dream-like nature of her work, but also said that it differs for each poem. I anticipated Lee would mention Mark Rothko as an influence, so I gave myself a gold star when he noted Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
O’Meara in a very skilful segue asked about the music that influenced the writers. He mentioned that Lee’s poems had a jazz association, while Nickel’s were majesterial and classical and Armitage was known for his liking of punk music, which made sense given the colloquial nature of his writing. Armitage said that his poetry followed the punk reaction to the Thatcher years and that at the time he had been fascinated by the use of journalese and that British writers had witnessed its effectiveness by people in power.
For his own writing, Armitage doesn’t listen to punk, but rather needs something arythmical to not influence hiss own rhythms. Nickel explained that she needs complete silence in order to write.
The evening went by quickly. I have to admit that it was the most engaging and inspiring evening for me of the writers festival so far. And there are still two more days to go!
Related posts/pics by John MacDonald, Charles Earl and perhaps more to come as the late night owls awake ;)
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Nicholas Lea’s Everything Is Movies & Poetry Cabaret (sauvignon) 2
Last night at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Nicholas Lea read from his first poetry collection, Everything is movies (Chaudière Books, 2007).
Note that the other feature at the event was Dusty Owl published author, Daniel Allen Cox, Tattoo This Madness In. All I'll say about that is Jehovas' Witnesses, surveys and smurf cakes. Thanks Dusty Owls :)
When introducing the book, Lea mentioned, I suspect in response to the previous poetry cabaret’s Q&A session, that he, himself, doesn’t write much about geographical place.
Lea’s poems beg to be read aloud, so rich are they in sound play. He opened with the poem Dummies wonder which is an exercise for the tongue and the mind: “careening into sleep’s/cabbage-role afghan.” I would have laughed more at this pun, if I’d seen it on the page!
Midrift: “dislodge the hodgepodge of love” is a wonderfully playful yet earnest imperative.
Poems like Posture show Lea’s skill with imagery: “Find the nerve of the peach.”
His poetry is a combination of word play and word skill, real and surrealistic imagery, colloquial and formal language. He refers not only to the masters of poetry like Dylan Thomas and John Ashbery, but also popular musicians such as the Tragically Hip and its poet-musician, Gord Downey.
Above all, Lea’s poems are precise and he gets to the heart of things using this precision as we see in the poem Avatar: “Throwing hay from barn roofs is no/consolation—/the rain-veined knoll, the gold that shoots/through everything,/is water on your eardrums—“
There’s an absurdity and an earnestness to Lea’s writing that I haven’t seen with a lot of writers coming from his background these days in Ottawa. In his back-of-the-book blurb, Kevin Connolly says that these poems have “an ecstatic recklessness” and “an unfakeable spontaneity.”
Lea mentioned the collection had a lot of yoga references, yet he doesn’t do yoga himself. I’d say the book has a yogic tone: meditative, flexible and muscular. If I could read my own drunken hand-writing, I’d say more.
Later in the evening, after still more alcohol...
the poetry cabaret, featuring B.W. Powe, Sandra Alland and bill bissett. What I remember most is both Alland and bissett’s sounds, Alland repeating words orgasmically, bissett chanting “a long way from love” with his maracas, as he does. Alland read from or talked about her book, Blissful Times 63 poetic translations of one poem from Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. One cool thing she did for the book was to alphabatize all the words, which she read out to us, joyfully.
Both of these writers and performers reminded me that it’s all about playing and risking. That’s what they did.
If I had organized the program for last night, I would have put Lea with Alland and bissett. The thread of experimentation weaved through the work of all three writers.
I don’t have anything to say about B.W. Powe except I didn’t think his style, which was of a more narrative nature, fit in with the playfulness and experimentation of the other readers.
I wish I could say more, and perhaps if I hadn’t had that last glass of wine, I would be able to. see rob's blog for a more coherent and informative description. also john's great photo of Sandra Alland.
Note that the other feature at the event was Dusty Owl published author, Daniel Allen Cox, Tattoo This Madness In. All I'll say about that is Jehovas' Witnesses, surveys and smurf cakes. Thanks Dusty Owls :)
When introducing the book, Lea mentioned, I suspect in response to the previous poetry cabaret’s Q&A session, that he, himself, doesn’t write much about geographical place.
Lea’s poems beg to be read aloud, so rich are they in sound play. He opened with the poem Dummies wonder which is an exercise for the tongue and the mind: “careening into sleep’s/cabbage-role afghan.” I would have laughed more at this pun, if I’d seen it on the page!
Midrift: “dislodge the hodgepodge of love” is a wonderfully playful yet earnest imperative.
Poems like Posture show Lea’s skill with imagery: “Find the nerve of the peach.”
His poetry is a combination of word play and word skill, real and surrealistic imagery, colloquial and formal language. He refers not only to the masters of poetry like Dylan Thomas and John Ashbery, but also popular musicians such as the Tragically Hip and its poet-musician, Gord Downey.
Above all, Lea’s poems are precise and he gets to the heart of things using this precision as we see in the poem Avatar: “Throwing hay from barn roofs is no/consolation—/the rain-veined knoll, the gold that shoots/through everything,/is water on your eardrums—“
There’s an absurdity and an earnestness to Lea’s writing that I haven’t seen with a lot of writers coming from his background these days in Ottawa. In his back-of-the-book blurb, Kevin Connolly says that these poems have “an ecstatic recklessness” and “an unfakeable spontaneity.”
Lea mentioned the collection had a lot of yoga references, yet he doesn’t do yoga himself. I’d say the book has a yogic tone: meditative, flexible and muscular. If I could read my own drunken hand-writing, I’d say more.
Later in the evening, after still more alcohol...
the poetry cabaret, featuring B.W. Powe, Sandra Alland and bill bissett. What I remember most is both Alland and bissett’s sounds, Alland repeating words orgasmically, bissett chanting “a long way from love” with his maracas, as he does. Alland read from or talked about her book, Blissful Times 63 poetic translations of one poem from Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. One cool thing she did for the book was to alphabatize all the words, which she read out to us, joyfully.
Both of these writers and performers reminded me that it’s all about playing and risking. That’s what they did.
If I had organized the program for last night, I would have put Lea with Alland and bissett. The thread of experimentation weaved through the work of all three writers.
I don’t have anything to say about B.W. Powe except I didn’t think his style, which was of a more narrative nature, fit in with the playfulness and experimentation of the other readers.
I wish I could say more, and perhaps if I hadn’t had that last glass of wine, I would be able to. see rob's blog for a more coherent and informative description. also john's great photo of Sandra Alland.
Monday, April 16, 2007
George Murray, rob mclennan, George Bowering
Notes from Poetry Cabaret #1 of the Ottawa International Writers Festival
George Murray used to be an actor but gave it up because he realized he didn’t like speaking other people’s words. His previous poetry collection, The Hunter(McClelland and Stewart, 2003) was inspired/influenced by his having experienced 9/11 up close and personal in New York City. He moved from Manhattan to Guelph to St. John’s, Newfoundland where he lives now. [His photo taken by Charles yesterday is here.]
I had the pleasure of speaking to Murray for the “Building a Better Blog” event that preceded the Poetry Cabaret and found out all about Bookninja.com, the literary-and-so- much-more site you must visit right now and daily.
After our conversation, Murray took off his bookninja outfit and donned his I’ve-just-released- a-new-collection-of-poetry attire. Both costumes suit him admirably.
“the rush to here” (Nightwood Editions, 2007) [not the rush to hear, which is what I thought it was, for some reason] is a collection of sonnets with idea rhymes instead of sound rhymes. The idea rhymes reflect traditional sonnet rhyming schemes and when you figure it out you feel quite pleased with yourself. A rhyme for night could be dark or day, its antonym, or its homonym knight or the prefix mid.
Murray uses his constraint to inspire creative interpretation rather than letting it limit him. The fact that Murray is a cryptic crossword enthusiast should come as no surprise to you when you read his work.
“the rush to here” is dedicated to Murray’s mentor and good friend Richard Outram, a poet who died “knowingly and willingly” on January 20, 2005, after the death of his wife, artist Barbara Howard. Murray explained that the couple were so close and so much in love that he modeled his own marriage after theirs. Murray misses his friend very much.
What I liked about Murray’s poems was the mixture of formal with informal, metaphysical with day to day. Made for a kind of magic, such as in the opening of “Rearview Mirror,”one of the poems he read:
The wind comes in and startles hair and scarves,
blowing them shitcrazy before letting them lead
with the controlled attention of snapping flags.
or the poem “Half-a-Wit”:
“but in the heart of the yolk is red moment/that turns my stomach inside out.”
Later in the Q&A session, brilliantly hosted by Stephen Brockwell, Murray responded to a question about the role of place in his poetry by saying that he felt his place was on earth, in the mind and in the body. His influences have been primarily foreign: Russia, Poland and England for instance. This made sense to me. His writing evoked some of the Eastern European poetry I’ve read such as Vasko Popa in the way he brought the abstract into the world and dealt with the big picture metaphysical issues.
At the same time there’s such strong emotion in Murray’s poems. I can already see that this collection is one that I will return to over again many times, dog-earing the pages much to the chagrin of next reader rob mclennan, who cannot stand the fact that I dog-ear book pages. (!)
rob mclennan read from his freshest collection, The Ottawa City Project (Chaudière Books, 2007). The poems all had to do with the city where rob was born and has spent so much of his life. What always strikes me about mclennan’s poetry is its cadence, the mesmerizing rhythm of his lines, their spare beauty and his wit. He’s told me that he doesn’t practice reading his poems aloud and that when he reads them in public it is often the first time he has read them aloud. Given how much sound and rhythm is a part of these poems, this is an incredible thing, the rhythms so internalized and then articulated on paper.
All three poets at the reading imparted small bits of world view/observation/wisdom through their words. in ottawa poems (blue notes) #3, this bit stood out for me: “personalities are charted/by naming” or in #4 “ottawa,/an insult meaning politic.”
mclennan’s poems are paintings with original vision and the physical is very much apparent in his poems, all leading to something very personal that you can feel. for instance #8 “glassy stare of hull,/ the gatineau hills//my own hand/goes trembling into” feels shimmery somehow and i can see it and understand it, even though and maybe because it works only on a figurative level.
mclennan read from other sections in the book, including the address book (erasure) about places which had been torn down after his mother moved out, or places where he can no longer go (“the less said about that, the better”). The poems are titled with the addresses of these places, so he suggested it would be an interesting exercise to map them. Sounds like a treasure hunt plan to me. I suggest we combine it with a pub-crawl.
He also read a series of quick ghazals from the book.
For Brockwell’s question about the role of place in his poetry, mclennan mentioned identity as being his motivation for delving into place in his work. He feels this is something he may now move away from.
It is understandable that mclennan writes quite a bit about place. In response to Brockwell’s question about tradition, mclennan explained that he came to poetry by reading the Canadian poetry collections in both the Ottawa Public Library and the University of Ottawa library. One of the biggest influences on mclennan’s work has been the poetry of next reader, George Bowering.
I had never heard or laid eyes on Bowering before, had only heard of him through reputation and hadn’t read much of his writing. He was what I expected and more: bombastic, controversial, intelligent yet completely approachable.
The poems he read ranged from the joyfully silly Opening Day and Heap o’ Trouble to the still playful yet deep Q&A. He read from Vermeer’s Light (Talonbooks, 2006). Note that the books for sale were the soft cover books because the hard cover had sold out.
Most of all, I enjoyed hearing Bowering’s stories and his insights into poetics. In answer to the question on place in his poetry, he talked about how he and fellow TISH members wrote Vancouver at a time when Canadian poets weren’t writing about their own geography. He played with the concept of Charles Olson’s objectivism, referring to it as objectism, the concept of treating oneself as an object, of the act of placing. He said that “place” is a verb.
Later in the discussion of tradition, he poo pooed the notion of a writer being in a tradition based on his heritage. He quoted the great Canadian writer Sheila Watson who referred to tradition as trade. He said that you make your own tradition by reading, that if you read Japanese, African and Russian poetry, that is your tradition. I wanted to punctuate much of what he said with Hallelujah and Amen, brother.
The audience also made some interesting comments. Discussing the idea that Canadians had no tradition of our own, a gentleman in the front of the room quoted something Bowering wrote in the 70s about Canadian poets lamenting the empty hand. Bowering said that without the empty hand, there would be no desire.
I walked out into the rain with a desire to read more of all three writers’ words, to continue the wonderful conversation and to go home and write.
George Murray used to be an actor but gave it up because he realized he didn’t like speaking other people’s words. His previous poetry collection, The Hunter(McClelland and Stewart, 2003) was inspired/influenced by his having experienced 9/11 up close and personal in New York City. He moved from Manhattan to Guelph to St. John’s, Newfoundland where he lives now. [His photo taken by Charles yesterday is here.]
I had the pleasure of speaking to Murray for the “Building a Better Blog” event that preceded the Poetry Cabaret and found out all about Bookninja.com, the literary-and-so- much-more site you must visit right now and daily.
After our conversation, Murray took off his bookninja outfit and donned his I’ve-just-released- a-new-collection-of-poetry attire. Both costumes suit him admirably.
“the rush to here” (Nightwood Editions, 2007) [not the rush to hear, which is what I thought it was, for some reason] is a collection of sonnets with idea rhymes instead of sound rhymes. The idea rhymes reflect traditional sonnet rhyming schemes and when you figure it out you feel quite pleased with yourself. A rhyme for night could be dark or day, its antonym, or its homonym knight or the prefix mid.
Murray uses his constraint to inspire creative interpretation rather than letting it limit him. The fact that Murray is a cryptic crossword enthusiast should come as no surprise to you when you read his work.
“the rush to here” is dedicated to Murray’s mentor and good friend Richard Outram, a poet who died “knowingly and willingly” on January 20, 2005, after the death of his wife, artist Barbara Howard. Murray explained that the couple were so close and so much in love that he modeled his own marriage after theirs. Murray misses his friend very much.
What I liked about Murray’s poems was the mixture of formal with informal, metaphysical with day to day. Made for a kind of magic, such as in the opening of “Rearview Mirror,”one of the poems he read:
The wind comes in and startles hair and scarves,
blowing them shitcrazy before letting them lead
with the controlled attention of snapping flags.
or the poem “Half-a-Wit”:
“but in the heart of the yolk is red moment/that turns my stomach inside out.”
Later in the Q&A session, brilliantly hosted by Stephen Brockwell, Murray responded to a question about the role of place in his poetry by saying that he felt his place was on earth, in the mind and in the body. His influences have been primarily foreign: Russia, Poland and England for instance. This made sense to me. His writing evoked some of the Eastern European poetry I’ve read such as Vasko Popa in the way he brought the abstract into the world and dealt with the big picture metaphysical issues.
At the same time there’s such strong emotion in Murray’s poems. I can already see that this collection is one that I will return to over again many times, dog-earing the pages much to the chagrin of next reader rob mclennan, who cannot stand the fact that I dog-ear book pages. (!)
rob mclennan read from his freshest collection, The Ottawa City Project (Chaudière Books, 2007). The poems all had to do with the city where rob was born and has spent so much of his life. What always strikes me about mclennan’s poetry is its cadence, the mesmerizing rhythm of his lines, their spare beauty and his wit. He’s told me that he doesn’t practice reading his poems aloud and that when he reads them in public it is often the first time he has read them aloud. Given how much sound and rhythm is a part of these poems, this is an incredible thing, the rhythms so internalized and then articulated on paper.
All three poets at the reading imparted small bits of world view/observation/wisdom through their words. in ottawa poems (blue notes) #3, this bit stood out for me: “personalities are charted/by naming” or in #4 “ottawa,/an insult meaning politic.”
mclennan’s poems are paintings with original vision and the physical is very much apparent in his poems, all leading to something very personal that you can feel. for instance #8 “glassy stare of hull,/ the gatineau hills//my own hand/goes trembling into” feels shimmery somehow and i can see it and understand it, even though and maybe because it works only on a figurative level.
mclennan read from other sections in the book, including the address book (erasure) about places which had been torn down after his mother moved out, or places where he can no longer go (“the less said about that, the better”). The poems are titled with the addresses of these places, so he suggested it would be an interesting exercise to map them. Sounds like a treasure hunt plan to me. I suggest we combine it with a pub-crawl.
He also read a series of quick ghazals from the book.
For Brockwell’s question about the role of place in his poetry, mclennan mentioned identity as being his motivation for delving into place in his work. He feels this is something he may now move away from.
It is understandable that mclennan writes quite a bit about place. In response to Brockwell’s question about tradition, mclennan explained that he came to poetry by reading the Canadian poetry collections in both the Ottawa Public Library and the University of Ottawa library. One of the biggest influences on mclennan’s work has been the poetry of next reader, George Bowering.
I had never heard or laid eyes on Bowering before, had only heard of him through reputation and hadn’t read much of his writing. He was what I expected and more: bombastic, controversial, intelligent yet completely approachable.
The poems he read ranged from the joyfully silly Opening Day and Heap o’ Trouble to the still playful yet deep Q&A. He read from Vermeer’s Light (Talonbooks, 2006). Note that the books for sale were the soft cover books because the hard cover had sold out.
Most of all, I enjoyed hearing Bowering’s stories and his insights into poetics. In answer to the question on place in his poetry, he talked about how he and fellow TISH members wrote Vancouver at a time when Canadian poets weren’t writing about their own geography. He played with the concept of Charles Olson’s objectivism, referring to it as objectism, the concept of treating oneself as an object, of the act of placing. He said that “place” is a verb.
Later in the discussion of tradition, he poo pooed the notion of a writer being in a tradition based on his heritage. He quoted the great Canadian writer Sheila Watson who referred to tradition as trade. He said that you make your own tradition by reading, that if you read Japanese, African and Russian poetry, that is your tradition. I wanted to punctuate much of what he said with Hallelujah and Amen, brother.
The audience also made some interesting comments. Discussing the idea that Canadians had no tradition of our own, a gentleman in the front of the room quoted something Bowering wrote in the 70s about Canadian poets lamenting the empty hand. Bowering said that without the empty hand, there would be no desire.
I walked out into the rain with a desire to read more of all three writers’ words, to continue the wonderful conversation and to go home and write.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Bywords Spring Celebration, Sunday April 1
To celebrate the start of the fifth year of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, this event will feature our Ottawa-based editors, plus contributors to the spring BQJ. We'll also hear the music of Kristin Bell Murray.
Sunday, April 1, 2007, 2pm
Chapters, 47 Rideau Street (inquire at info desk if you can't find us)
Contact: Amanda Earl, editor@bywords.ca; (613) 868-1364
Readers include Kelly Clarke, Amanda Earl, Andrew Faulkner, Heather Ferguson, Kathryn Hunt, Marcus McCann, Christian McPherson, Lesley Strutt, Victoria Vernell and Betty Warrington-Kearsley
We'll have copies of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Ottawa Arts Review and other goodies on hand. Afterwards come join us as we toast year 5 with a pint or six at the Highlander Pub.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Arc Poetry Magazine Launches Portage: A Map to the Poetry Ecosystem
Today, March 21st, is World Poetry Day, as championed by UNESCO.
A day for poetry daring. What will you do? Looking for ideas? The online home of Arc: Canada's Poetry Magazine, has added a new window onto the world of poetry. Portage, on preview since December, is a routes map to the poetry ecosystem in Canada and around the world.
Through over 500 online links, the Portage map outlines educational resources, professional tracks, academic debates, underground movements, historical and/or indigenous legacies, book and magazine trades, new media innovations, and grassroots community initiatives. By no means comprehensive, this map attempts to offer a cross-section of the players advancing the craft, the critical discourse, and the public appreciation of poetry in its many forms, written or performed.
Portage points out the sometimes tucked away, and sometimes wide open, profusion of poetry and spoken word happening in Canada and in other countries. The emphasis is on poetry in English or translated into English. But as with traditional portage routes where explorers, traders, and indigenous people carried their canoes over obstacles to new waters, the goal is exchange.
Visitors can start their journey by picking one of the navigation routes listed on the right-hand side of the page. These include bookstores, fairs and festivals, poet websites, publishers, reading series, and workshops and writing groups. Regional links allow users to explore by country or by Canadian province. The National Capital Region, home to Arc, has its own list, and we are scouting for links with a bioregional emphasis. Visitors may also navigate by using tags, which indicate the poetry form, style, theme, subject matter or medium to be found in a certain site.
Try out the selective search to find, say, bookstores or workshops in a given area. Arc webmistress and Portage designer Stacey Munro admits the Portage map met its current shape in "a somewhat adhoc way, routes improvised from personal experience and finds from the Internet with the inkling of a 'poetry ecology' as beacon." As such, the map is designed to be interactive. Some routes have been linked to interactive forums or polls open for comment. Thoughts on this project, cartographic suggestions, additions, corrections, and recommendations for web traces to poetry heartlands are welcome at our guestbook or through our Portage contact form.
Tell us how you put Portage to use. It's no accident that World Poetry Day is celebrated on the same day as the day for the elimination of racial discrimination. How's the progress since the 1999 proclamation? Tell us, if you like, what you propose for the future or what you dared to do on World Poetry Day.
Tip the canoe. Enter the conversation. Rewrite this map.
A day for poetry daring. What will you do? Looking for ideas? The online home of Arc: Canada's Poetry Magazine, has added a new window onto the world of poetry. Portage, on preview since December, is a routes map to the poetry ecosystem in Canada and around the world.
Through over 500 online links, the Portage map outlines educational resources, professional tracks, academic debates, underground movements, historical and/or indigenous legacies, book and magazine trades, new media innovations, and grassroots community initiatives. By no means comprehensive, this map attempts to offer a cross-section of the players advancing the craft, the critical discourse, and the public appreciation of poetry in its many forms, written or performed.
Portage points out the sometimes tucked away, and sometimes wide open, profusion of poetry and spoken word happening in Canada and in other countries. The emphasis is on poetry in English or translated into English. But as with traditional portage routes where explorers, traders, and indigenous people carried their canoes over obstacles to new waters, the goal is exchange.
Visitors can start their journey by picking one of the navigation routes listed on the right-hand side of the page. These include bookstores, fairs and festivals, poet websites, publishers, reading series, and workshops and writing groups. Regional links allow users to explore by country or by Canadian province. The National Capital Region, home to Arc, has its own list, and we are scouting for links with a bioregional emphasis. Visitors may also navigate by using tags, which indicate the poetry form, style, theme, subject matter or medium to be found in a certain site.
Try out the selective search to find, say, bookstores or workshops in a given area. Arc webmistress and Portage designer Stacey Munro admits the Portage map met its current shape in "a somewhat adhoc way, routes improvised from personal experience and finds from the Internet with the inkling of a 'poetry ecology' as beacon." As such, the map is designed to be interactive. Some routes have been linked to interactive forums or polls open for comment. Thoughts on this project, cartographic suggestions, additions, corrections, and recommendations for web traces to poetry heartlands are welcome at our guestbook or through our Portage contact form.
Tell us how you put Portage to use. It's no accident that World Poetry Day is celebrated on the same day as the day for the elimination of racial discrimination. How's the progress since the 1999 proclamation? Tell us, if you like, what you propose for the future or what you dared to do on World Poetry Day.
Tip the canoe. Enter the conversation. Rewrite this map.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
The Four Horsemen Project at the Great Canadian Theatre Company
Settling into your theatre seat at GCTC (910 Gladstone, Ottawa), you notice that the set design is minimal. More than minimal - the backdrop and floor are as white as two blank sheets of paper. A writer's nightmare? Relax. As the performance begins, words on film flit across the stage, interacting with the four performers who, in the multi-media spirit of the show, dance and sing as they recite poetry, singly or as an ensemble. And the poetry? Sometimes it is simply one phrase repeated over an over (like the opener, "a drum and a wheel"), or a list of words, spoken in chorus or all at once in a whirl of sound and light. Sometimes, it's a song written by the late bpNichol for the 80s TV show Fraggle Rock. A recurring motif throughout the show is bp's classic piece "What is a poem (is inside of your body)."
All the poems, in fact, were written and/or performed by Nichol and his fellow members of the Toronto sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen. The group had a great run, creating both new work and a climate of experimentation that helped many other innovative writers flourish. But in the two decades since the death of bpNichol their work has been somewhat neglected, so that when the creators of the show staged at GCTC first heard one of their pieces played on CBC radio, they assumed it was "A) brand new; and B) created elsewhere." In fact they had been listening to a 30-year-old recording made in their home base, Toronto.
Ross Manson, director of Volcano theatre, and Kate Alton, director of the Crooked Figure dance company, set about to revive interest in the Four Horsemen, and sound poetry generally, by creating this visual feast. They enlisted the animation company Global Mechanic to take the Horsemen's visual poetry and set it in motion on stage, and found four dancers from the Crooked Figure company who bring vocal talents as well as grace and beauty into the intermedia mix. This shouldn't be surprising, since the Crooked Figure company says that it "exists to create absorbing and socially relevant text-based dance creations."
Of course, the four performers - Jennifer Dahl, Graham McKelvie, Naoko Murakoshi and Andrea Nann - don't play the roles of Horsemen Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, Rafael Barreto-Rivera and bpNichol. They bring their own charm and the directors' interpretations to the word-fair. Nearly everything about the performance is slick and professional. Yet there's something missing - the raw energy that the original Four Horsemen brought to their improvisations. The second-by-second edginess of poets exploring the resources of the language, and of their bodies, always innovating, always on the verge of some new discovery that might set off new ideas among the four collaborators. As Kate Alton says, "I don't know that anyone other than the poets themselves could truly do justice to this work, but my choreographic interpretations are all created in the spirit of play, admiration and tribute."
The Four Horsemen Project is not so much a reasonable fascimile as an admiring tribute, and it is a lot of fun. It may well succeed in bringing sound poetry and intermedia performance to the attention of audiences and artists in a variety of media. To fully appreciate the Four Horsemen's work and its aesthetic underpinnings, poets will need to go back to the original sources, or go talk to Paul Dutton who continues to work as a solo sound poet in Toronto. More likely, poets will leave the theatre thinking, "Just imagine what dancers could do with my poems."
The Four Horsemen Project continues in Ottawa until April 1. And if you can't get there, the production is prepared to travel to your town.
All the poems, in fact, were written and/or performed by Nichol and his fellow members of the Toronto sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen. The group had a great run, creating both new work and a climate of experimentation that helped many other innovative writers flourish. But in the two decades since the death of bpNichol their work has been somewhat neglected, so that when the creators of the show staged at GCTC first heard one of their pieces played on CBC radio, they assumed it was "A) brand new; and B) created elsewhere." In fact they had been listening to a 30-year-old recording made in their home base, Toronto.
Ross Manson, director of Volcano theatre, and Kate Alton, director of the Crooked Figure dance company, set about to revive interest in the Four Horsemen, and sound poetry generally, by creating this visual feast. They enlisted the animation company Global Mechanic to take the Horsemen's visual poetry and set it in motion on stage, and found four dancers from the Crooked Figure company who bring vocal talents as well as grace and beauty into the intermedia mix. This shouldn't be surprising, since the Crooked Figure company says that it "exists to create absorbing and socially relevant text-based dance creations."
Of course, the four performers - Jennifer Dahl, Graham McKelvie, Naoko Murakoshi and Andrea Nann - don't play the roles of Horsemen Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, Rafael Barreto-Rivera and bpNichol. They bring their own charm and the directors' interpretations to the word-fair. Nearly everything about the performance is slick and professional. Yet there's something missing - the raw energy that the original Four Horsemen brought to their improvisations. The second-by-second edginess of poets exploring the resources of the language, and of their bodies, always innovating, always on the verge of some new discovery that might set off new ideas among the four collaborators. As Kate Alton says, "I don't know that anyone other than the poets themselves could truly do justice to this work, but my choreographic interpretations are all created in the spirit of play, admiration and tribute."
The Four Horsemen Project is not so much a reasonable fascimile as an admiring tribute, and it is a lot of fun. It may well succeed in bringing sound poetry and intermedia performance to the attention of audiences and artists in a variety of media. To fully appreciate the Four Horsemen's work and its aesthetic underpinnings, poets will need to go back to the original sources, or go talk to Paul Dutton who continues to work as a solo sound poet in Toronto. More likely, poets will leave the theatre thinking, "Just imagine what dancers could do with my poems."
The Four Horsemen Project continues in Ottawa until April 1. And if you can't get there, the production is prepared to travel to your town.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
poetry month in ottawa; the league of canadian poets
Ottawa's national poetry month reading will be:
7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 26, at Cube Gallery, 7 Hamilton North, near the Parkdale market, featuring Michelle Desbarats, Michael Dennis, Laura Farina, Colin Morton and David O'Meara.
Unlike the Toronto reading, we will require a metaphor as the price of admission (although the poets will not be required to use them).
Info: Colin Morton at cmorton@sympatico.ca
7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 26, at Cube Gallery, 7 Hamilton North, near the Parkdale market, featuring Michelle Desbarats, Michael Dennis, Laura Farina, Colin Morton and David O'Meara.
Unlike the Toronto reading, we will require a metaphor as the price of admission (although the poets will not be required to use them).
Info: Colin Morton at cmorton@sympatico.ca
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Ottawa's Plan 99 Reading Series, End of Winter Schedule
Ottawa's renowned Plan 99 Reading Series announces its End of Winter Schedule 2007
In April of 2001, Peter Schneider of the Ottawa Xpress wrote that the Plan 99 Reading Series had "established itself as the local gold standard.In a few years, it's likely members of the literary set will be bragging of being present at the Manx when a celebrated author took the microphone."
Now in its seventh year, the Plan 99 Reading series continues to bring the best of Canadian writing to the Manx Pub. Our alumni readers have won or been shortlisted for Giller Awards, Governor General Awards, Griffin Poetry Prizes, Trillium Awards, Atlantic Poetry Awards and many others, but awards or not, the Plan 99 Series prides itself on choosing the best writers across the country.
Located in the cozy Manx Pub, well-known for its connection and sponsorship to culture and arts (not to mention its great food and single-malt scotch list), the Plan 99 series is pleased to announce its End of Winter line-up of five great readings. This series is especially exciting as we will be hosting the book launches of three local authors.
*Sunday, March 18th: Roy Miki
Saturday, April 14th: Book Launch-Shane Rhodes and Steven Ross Smith
Saturday, April 28th: Book Launch-Ian Roy
Saturday, May 12th: Mark Frutkin
Saturday, May 26th: Book Launch-Joanne Proulx
All readings take place at the Manx Pub (370 Elgin St; 613-231-2070) on Saturdays (*note exception) at 5:00 pm. Seating is not guaranteed. Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, Alexander Keiths Pale Ale, and the Manx Pub.
Readers' Biographies:
Roy Miki is a poet and critic, and the editor of West Coast Line. His books include Surrender (winner of the 2002 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry), Broken Entries: Race, Writing, Subjectivity (Mercury), Random Access File (Red Deer College Press), Saving Face: Poems Selected 1976-1988 (Turnstone) and Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (with Cassandra Kobayashi; Talonbooks). Miki lives in Vancouver, B.C., and teaches at Simon Fraser University. There, the follow-up to the award-winning Surrender, extends Miki's exploration of the margins joining social and individual language.
Shane Rhodes is the author of The Wireless Room, which won the Alberta Book Award for poetry, and Holding Pattern, which won the Archibald Lampman Award. He has published chapbooks, poetry, reviews, articles, and essays in magazines, anthologies, and newspapers across Canada. He has also worked as an editor with filling Station, The Fiddlehead, and Qwerty. His third poetry collection is The Bindery. Rhodes lives in Ottawa. An interview with Rhodes appears in the third issue of ottawater.
Steven Ross Smith was born in Toronto and raised in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. Smith's previous books of poetry include blind zone, Transient Light, Sleepwalkers, which was co-authored by Richard Truhlar, and Reading My Father's Book. Smith has also published fiction and non-fiction, and has written for many periodicals and anthologies. In addition to this, Smith creates, records, and performs sound poetry. This is the fourth book in Smith's fluttertongue series. He currently lives in Saskatoon, SK.
Ian Roy was born in the province of Quebec in 1972. His last book, People Leaving, was short-listed for both the Upper Canada Writers' Craft Award and the City of Ottawa Book Award. Red Bird is Ian's third book. Ian currently lives in the province of Ontario.
Mark Frutkin has published seven books of fiction and three books of poetry, including Atmospheres Apollinaire (shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award (fiction) and Trillium Book Award), Iron Mountain, and Fabrizio's Return (recently shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book ). His work has appeared in Canada, the U.S., England, Russia, Poland, Holland and India. He has written on art and books for The Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca, Harper's, The Ottawa Citizen, and others. His poetry and fiction have been published in numerous Canadian and foreign journals. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and son.
Joanne Proulx, a graduate of Humber College's creative writing mentorship program, has had short stories published in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Exile: The Literary Quarterly, and Upstairs at Duroc, a literary magazine out of Paris. Her debut novel, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet, will be published by Penguin Canada in May 2007, and by Picador (UK) and Soho Press (USA) in early 2008. Joanne currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
For more information on the series, email Chris Swail at chrisswail@rogers.com
In April of 2001, Peter Schneider of the Ottawa Xpress wrote that the Plan 99 Reading Series had "established itself as the local gold standard.In a few years, it's likely members of the literary set will be bragging of being present at the Manx when a celebrated author took the microphone."
Now in its seventh year, the Plan 99 Reading series continues to bring the best of Canadian writing to the Manx Pub. Our alumni readers have won or been shortlisted for Giller Awards, Governor General Awards, Griffin Poetry Prizes, Trillium Awards, Atlantic Poetry Awards and many others, but awards or not, the Plan 99 Series prides itself on choosing the best writers across the country.
Located in the cozy Manx Pub, well-known for its connection and sponsorship to culture and arts (not to mention its great food and single-malt scotch list), the Plan 99 series is pleased to announce its End of Winter line-up of five great readings. This series is especially exciting as we will be hosting the book launches of three local authors.
*Sunday, March 18th: Roy Miki
Saturday, April 14th: Book Launch-Shane Rhodes and Steven Ross Smith
Saturday, April 28th: Book Launch-Ian Roy
Saturday, May 12th: Mark Frutkin
Saturday, May 26th: Book Launch-Joanne Proulx
All readings take place at the Manx Pub (370 Elgin St; 613-231-2070) on Saturdays (*note exception) at 5:00 pm. Seating is not guaranteed. Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, Alexander Keiths Pale Ale, and the Manx Pub.
Readers' Biographies:
Roy Miki is a poet and critic, and the editor of West Coast Line. His books include Surrender (winner of the 2002 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry), Broken Entries: Race, Writing, Subjectivity (Mercury), Random Access File (Red Deer College Press), Saving Face: Poems Selected 1976-1988 (Turnstone) and Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (with Cassandra Kobayashi; Talonbooks). Miki lives in Vancouver, B.C., and teaches at Simon Fraser University. There, the follow-up to the award-winning Surrender, extends Miki's exploration of the margins joining social and individual language.
Shane Rhodes is the author of The Wireless Room, which won the Alberta Book Award for poetry, and Holding Pattern, which won the Archibald Lampman Award. He has published chapbooks, poetry, reviews, articles, and essays in magazines, anthologies, and newspapers across Canada. He has also worked as an editor with filling Station, The Fiddlehead, and Qwerty. His third poetry collection is The Bindery. Rhodes lives in Ottawa. An interview with Rhodes appears in the third issue of ottawater.
Steven Ross Smith was born in Toronto and raised in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. Smith's previous books of poetry include blind zone, Transient Light, Sleepwalkers, which was co-authored by Richard Truhlar, and Reading My Father's Book. Smith has also published fiction and non-fiction, and has written for many periodicals and anthologies. In addition to this, Smith creates, records, and performs sound poetry. This is the fourth book in Smith's fluttertongue series. He currently lives in Saskatoon, SK.
Ian Roy was born in the province of Quebec in 1972. His last book, People Leaving, was short-listed for both the Upper Canada Writers' Craft Award and the City of Ottawa Book Award. Red Bird is Ian's third book. Ian currently lives in the province of Ontario.
Mark Frutkin has published seven books of fiction and three books of poetry, including Atmospheres Apollinaire (shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award (fiction) and Trillium Book Award), Iron Mountain, and Fabrizio's Return (recently shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book ). His work has appeared in Canada, the U.S., England, Russia, Poland, Holland and India. He has written on art and books for The Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca, Harper's, The Ottawa Citizen, and others. His poetry and fiction have been published in numerous Canadian and foreign journals. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and son.
Joanne Proulx, a graduate of Humber College's creative writing mentorship program, has had short stories published in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Exile: The Literary Quarterly, and Upstairs at Duroc, a literary magazine out of Paris. Her debut novel, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet, will be published by Penguin Canada in May 2007, and by Picador (UK) and Soho Press (USA) in early 2008. Joanne currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
For more information on the series, email Chris Swail at chrisswail@rogers.com
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Making Tracks-A University of Ottawa Anthology
Making Tracks, A University of Ottawa Anthology, Friday Circle, 2007 is the eleventh in a series of class anthologies by participants in Seymour Mayne’s Creative Writing Poetry Workshop at the University of Ottawa (ENG 3264).
To my knowledge this marks the final ENG 3264 poetry class to be taught by Seymour Mayne. Let’s hope I’m wrong. This year Professor Mayne is teaching the advanced workshop, ENG 4398.
Making Tracks features the poetry of Kelly Clarke, Wojtek Copija, Marley Davidson, Isabella Drzemczewska Hodson, Andrew Faulkner, Lindsay Foran, Joe Hickey, Adam Maloney, Shanthi Minor and Janice Thurston.
This year is the first of Friday Circle’s perfect bound publications. The design and layout by Ottawa Arts Review editor Andrew Falkner is clean and literary journalish rather than ziney.
Here’s some stuff about some of the poems:
Clarke’s writing is a mix of sensuality, heartfelt confession and humour. There’s a hint of surrealism in lines like: “She sings little sounds that drip like honey,/ and I stir them into my wine for one.” Little Sounds
Copija’s pieces are lyrical and passionate with references to mythology and the Spanish poet, Neruda. Nocturnes has a delicate and subtle eroticism.
Davidson writes in a spare style and gets to the point with a minimal of histrionics. The poem “happy-hour” opens with force: “pour me something dark/that curdles the blood.
Hickey’s poems contain strong and original imagery. The poems are lyrical and spare. There’s a seductive rhythm to lines like “I was rolling the rocks all day.” and “my arms are stuffed with embers/and my eyelashes have become/little lead sinkers.” from The Best Sleep There Is.
Minor’s poems vary from light-hearted humour in Cowboy Hate to sadness in her prose piece “it’s a fallen world that cries at the sight of a second blue line”
Previous folk in these anthologies have won awards, are working on their first poetry collections or are taking creative writing, doing PhDs or involved in publishing. Let’s hope the writers in this collection make tracks in the literary limelight. The potential is definitely there.
To my knowledge this marks the final ENG 3264 poetry class to be taught by Seymour Mayne. Let’s hope I’m wrong. This year Professor Mayne is teaching the advanced workshop, ENG 4398.
Making Tracks features the poetry of Kelly Clarke, Wojtek Copija, Marley Davidson, Isabella Drzemczewska Hodson, Andrew Faulkner, Lindsay Foran, Joe Hickey, Adam Maloney, Shanthi Minor and Janice Thurston.
This year is the first of Friday Circle’s perfect bound publications. The design and layout by Ottawa Arts Review editor Andrew Falkner is clean and literary journalish rather than ziney.
Here’s some stuff about some of the poems:
Clarke’s writing is a mix of sensuality, heartfelt confession and humour. There’s a hint of surrealism in lines like: “She sings little sounds that drip like honey,/ and I stir them into my wine for one.” Little Sounds
Copija’s pieces are lyrical and passionate with references to mythology and the Spanish poet, Neruda. Nocturnes has a delicate and subtle eroticism.
Davidson writes in a spare style and gets to the point with a minimal of histrionics. The poem “happy-hour” opens with force: “pour me something dark/that curdles the blood.
Hickey’s poems contain strong and original imagery. The poems are lyrical and spare. There’s a seductive rhythm to lines like “I was rolling the rocks all day.” and “my arms are stuffed with embers/and my eyelashes have become/little lead sinkers.” from The Best Sleep There Is.
Minor’s poems vary from light-hearted humour in Cowboy Hate to sadness in her prose piece “it’s a fallen world that cries at the sight of a second blue line”
Previous folk in these anthologies have won awards, are working on their first poetry collections or are taking creative writing, doing PhDs or involved in publishing. Let’s hope the writers in this collection make tracks in the literary limelight. The potential is definitely there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)