Recent Reads: Allison Grayhurst and Shannon Maguire

The River Is Blind by Allison Grayhurst

A Web Of Holes by Shannon Maguire

Both titles published by above/ground press, December 2012.

“He came. He is what everyone needs

But the pavement is thick

the ground beneath is rich

saturated with worms,

moving

thick

with worm motion

moving

at worm speed.”

This stanza, snipped from the tail-end of “In the Thighs”, illustrates an existential curiosity that courses through Allison Grayhurst’s latest collection. We’ll get to the “He” part in a minute. But first, it’s Grayhurst’s physical constraints that comfort us: a box sitting at the top of the stairs, housecats in states of wakefulness and sleep, the “snails and moss” that preoccupy her. Indeed, The River Is Blind situates itself firmly in the familial but imbues those relationships and domestic touchstones with a disembodied calm. Ambition and disenchantment linger along the fences of Grayhurst’s property but she remains candidly in the present:  embracing “the comfort of sweaters and knitted socks” for “First Snow of Winter”, “the child sitting and staring and waiting for the coin” in “Wallpaper Stars”.

In lesser hands, muses such as these might’ve resulted in verses of weak-kneed contentedness. But Grayhurst’s voice remains one of detachment, webbing daily pleasures into greater meditations on love and God – the “He” that churns The River Is Blind’s family soil. Through spiritual lens, poems like “Everything Happens” and “Flies” counteract steadfast faith with insights on the material world, a separate world; a place where people grind flowers for honey. From “Flies”:

“What faith was plucked with the flowers

as all their little tongues reached out to pocket

the short-term scent?”

Naturally it’s a tad intimidating when the first word of a first poem has you running for the nearest dictionary. But “epoché”, meaning to suspend our understanding of the external world in order to relate to phenomena on a purely conscious level, proves more an ideological gateway for Shannon Maguire than a term reserved for Greek philosophy. In A Web Of Holes, epoché operates as a palette-cleanser, an italicized provocation plopped down as if to ready us for enlightenment, however fleeting.

The delight of Maguire’s long verse doesn’t lie at the heart of some mystic truth but in the trail of crumbs by which we readers become seekers. Ringing true to my newfound understanding of epoché, her language prefers a disorienting narrative, one that repeatedly suspends our ability to find grounded context amid visceral and scholarly hurdles.

“external acoustic crunch

undulating forms wet with

reflex

yard line dirt around her waist

dodecahedron kiss

in with clock and guests

climbing desire

elongated, erect seconds”

Besides illustrating her palette for abstract sensuality and Greek imagery, this excerpt identifies A Web Of Holes as acrostic; E, U, R, Y, D, I, C, and E trafficking the bulk of Maguire’s verses in honour of Eurydice, wife of Orpheus. This opens up some juicy parallels between ancient lore and Maguire’s sharp insights on the ownership of femininity. A temperamental breakdown in syntax midway through introduces a conflict in reinterpreting Eurydice’s tale; a commentary on the myth-making roots of Greek literature, perhaps.

You may wish to keep that dictionary handy but A Web Of Holes wouldn’t be nearly as exciting without its obfuscations which, with a bit of a learning curve, unveil ephemeral gems of raw, almost carnal, beauty. To close, here’s an example of Maguire’s hard-fought harmony:

“Evening’s gaze, the limit of voice

Unison of suspension

Ritenuto.

You watch them

Dying

It is a bright and chilly morning

Collapse, there are still not

Enough independent girls

Eglinton at five am, floating

Ukiyoe

Rebuilt from a country road

You watch them dreaming

Date the world from those Cordova Street cherry blossoms

Ink brushes against her forehead

Cassanation of gossiping motors

Eviction notice floating, floating”

Bywords Cornerstone Fundraiser, January 27, 2013

Mark Frutkin: Review of Four Chapbooks from above/ground press

Review of Four Chapbooks from above/ground press

by Mark Frutkin

Selected Canticles by George Elliott Clarke
The Crawdad Cantos (Excerpts from Impossible Books) by Stephen Brockwell
Shikibu Shuffle by Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
Further to Our Conversation – Poems by Robert Kroetsch

A chapbook is by necessity a diminutive taste of poetry. A morsel of a poet’s work – a good introduction to someone you have not previously read or perhaps a reacqaintance, a revisiting with old friends.

I would consider George Elliott Clarke in the ‘old friend’ category, not literally but in the sense that I’ve read much of his poetry over the years (almost all of it, I think) and reviewed previous collections here and there (See http://markfrutkin.blogspot.ca/2011/08/book-review-17-blue-by-george-elliott.html). I would rank his book, Whylah Falls, in my list of top five Canadian collections of poetry, all-time. No other Canadian poet is so lavish with sensual detail and so bold about the physical world and the human body. And in Selected Canticles he delivers again, as he always does, giving us a marvelous slumgullion of a miniature feast, like a serving of appetizers so rich you don’t need to eat the impending meal.

Of course, Clarke always goes for the ear as well as the eye: “not even the squeal of a squall / as waves whacked rock,” or “blossoms blaze a branch.” And he can be humorous too. In ‘À Cristophe Colombe,’ he calls the Spain of Columbus’ day, “a comic-opera Empire”. One can almost picture a Gilbert and Sullivan musical based on Queen Isabella and her famous explorer. 

Of course, no one in Canada comes anywhere near Clarke’s ability to write frankly about sex – raw, graphic and straight-up as home-distilled whiskey. He doesn’t scruple to use the good old Anglo-Saxon sex words: fuck, cunt and anus appear liberally throughout these poems, several of which address the black man’s role as hard-driving lover of white women. In a sense, this becomes a trope of the payback for or escape from slavery. Clarke is always conscious of the black man’s position in our world and in history but these poems are not the least bit didactic. They’re the real thing.

No one joins poetry and science as fluidly as Stephen Brockwell. The Crawdad Cantos contains what has become one of my favourite Canadian poems. ‘A Primer for Drainage’ is from The Evangelical Handbook for Engineers, a wonderful conceit to pull together the world of the spirit and the material world of the engineer, builder, scientist. You could be an atheist and still delight in his take on God as inherent in platinum-iridium bars and krypton-86 emissions. The last few lines are so striking, I must quote them in full: “Among time and distances, he is the absolute constant, / the being that lets being be – and every culvert, / aqueduct, conduit, sluice, grate, trench and duct / merely drains the ephemeral projection of his eternal tears.” I think including the word ‘duct’ in that list is a sure sign of poetic brilliance as it resonates with the last word of the poem, ‘tears’.

There are other excellent poems here, especially ‘Parrots not in Cleveland’ (from Cantos of the 1%). Besides the fact that Cleveland, my birthplace, hardly ever appears in a Canadian poem, this poem has a humorous tone that I very much appreciate. Drinking banana daiquiris in Cleveland in March is odd enough as the subject for a poem but the poet also says he can imitate a parrot’s voice: “I’ll need a trumpet, / a trunk full of Hawaiian shirts, a pair / of holey sneakers spattered with blue paint, / a month of sunlight to give this snow the shaft”. ‘Sunlight’ and ‘shaft’ – once again, a brilliant juxtaposition that plays on the two definitions for ‘shaft’. And again, this poem ends with a striking image. But I urge you to pick up this chapbook to learn what it is.

In Shikibu Shuffle, two poets, Andrew Burke from Australia and Phil Hall from Perth, (who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his fascinating book, Killdeer) have collaborated to produce a collection of fifteen poems based on the five-line form used by the Japanese poet, Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014). Each poem here is ten lines long (with a few variations). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine who wrote what, and exactly how the process worked. In any case, the result is a kind of medieval Japanese jazz with a flowing series of riffs that sometimes connect and sometimes don’t. The musical play here reminds me somewhat of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (which was influenced more by hardcore jazz than what we now consider the blues). There’s a vibrancy and freedom to the images and their links here, in this back and forth ‘shuffle’, and sometimes the results are striking: “a Chinese dragon of smoke / wearing my dead friend’s clothes / above the marina” or “pale cuticle” (for the moon), or the exceedingly strange and suggestive “to weave submerged antlers / breathing blue at their tips”. This is a collection that can be read more than twice.

The very fine poet (and novelist), Robert Kroetsch, died in 2011. This small chapbook, Further to Our Conversation, consists of three letter-poems to friends, interspersed with three very short poems. The first letter-poem, ‘Dear John Lent’, reveals the wonderful line, “Our first cry is a poem that contains everything” and the intriguing phrase “Icarus in a car...” These actually do feel like thoughts that came to Kroetsch after a late-night conversation with a friend, a kind of soliloquy inspired by a dialogue. Kroetsch’s poetry was always wonderfully experimental and refused to hew to the straight and narrow furrows that characterize much of mainstream Canadian verse. I see him running his plough in all sorts of mad geometries across those prairie fields: ovals within ovals, spirals, secret divinatory crop circles of poetry. His sense of the comic is excellent: “Punctuation is a middle-class pretension. So is a toothache. In heaven you have to sit eternally staring at a bright light, so be sure to take your dark glasses.” (‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’) He ends the same poem with the wonderful lines: “I once travelled halfway across Spain to see St Teresa’s bent left elbow safe in a glass jar. We each write poems as we see fit. But then, what poem isn’t a relic?” (It makes me want to ask if St Teresa wrote left-handed!)

Another line in ‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’ makes light of the inevitable, and probably tells us much about what kind of person and poet Robert Kroetsch was. In four words that embody a kind of simplicity, acceptance and peace, he writes: “Death, that necessary pest.”

Smart & Pirie in A B Series at Raw Sugar January 10 2012

abseries.org

A B Series Presents

Pearl Pirie & Carolyn Smart

Reading
8pm
Thursday, January 10, 2012

Raw Sugar Café
692 Somerset West
Ottawa, Ont.

Pearl Pirie has poems in a number of chapbooks and in 2 poetry collections, Thirsts (Snare) and been shed bore(Chaudiere). She has 2 more looking for a good home where they will be fed and watered and taken for walks. She makes mini chapbooks with her micro press Phafours. She been organizing the Tree Seed Workshop Series for the Tree Reading Series since 2009. She tweets, photographs and verbs about Ottawa, the luckiest town for literature in most anywhere.

Carolyn Smart's fifth collection of poems, Hooked - Seven Poems was published in 2009 by Brick Books. An excerpt from her memoir At the End of the Day won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging writers, and since 1989 has taught Creative Writing at Queen's University. Her work-in-progress is a series of poems about the Barrow Gang entitled 'Careen.'

bill bissett, Glenn Nuotio & friends - an A B Xmas Party!

abseries.org

A B Series presents its 2nd Annual Xmas Party with bill bissett! 

Featuring a musical set by Glenn Nuotio and friends!

With prizes to be won!

8pm

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Raw Sugar Café

692 Somerset West

Ottawa, Ont. 

bill bissett's charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate chanting, sound poetry and singing, the verve of which is matched only by his prolific writing career: over 70 books of bissett's poetry have been published. An energetic "man-child mystic," bill bissett is living proof of William Blake's adage "the spirit of sweet delight can never be defiled." 

Combining chamber music and folk, Glenn Nuotio delivers unnervingly complex pop. As Ottawa Xtra! notes, "he channels it through an indie musician's paper heart and the results are invariably stirring." 

KATALIN LADIK & GERRY SHIKATANI

ABSERIES.ORG

On November 21 at Arts Court Theatre, join us for a multimedia extravaganza featuring the Canadian premiere of Budapest artist, KATALIN LADIK! Presented by A B Series, Ladik comes direct from Hungary for this exclusive engagement. Her performance will incorporate voice, multimedia and on-stage action.

GERRY SHIKATANI, Canadian innovator of multimedia poetry, joins Ladik on the program. Shikatani screens excerpts from his film, 'Kokoro is for Heart' as part of the event.

7:30pm

Weds, November 21, 2012

Arts Court Theatre

2 Daly Avenue

Ottawa, Ont.

Tickets available through the Arts Court box office in person at 2 Daly Avenue, by phone at 613 564 7240 and online at artscourtottawa.ca/en/events/

A polymath artist accomplished in theatrical, literary and visual disciplines, Katalin Ladik’s appearances incorporate voice, multimedia and on-stage action. Author of more than twenty poetry collections, Ladik’s work has been translated into a dozen languages. She is the winner of numerous awards including the bestowal this year of the Laurel Wreath of Hungary. Since her ground-breaking performance at the 10th International Festival of Sound Poetry in Amsterdam in 1977, she has been at the forefront of Europe’s vibrant sound-poetry scene. 

Gerry Shikatani’s most recent poetry collection, The Port's Seasonal Rental, was published last year by Mercury Press/Teksteditions. Shikatani’s diverse writing projects include poetry, prose, text-sound performance, concrete poetry as well as collaboration in experimental film. His journalism has involved sports, travel and international culinary criticism.

**

A B Series - Ottawa's Nexus for Global Poetry

BQJ Fall Launch & Editors' Reading

Sunday, November 4, 2012, 2-3pm

Collected Works, 1242 WellingtonW.

with music by Jesse Rose,

poetry from contributors

Sylvia Adams, Andre Narbonne,

Myrna Rootham & Matthew Walsh

& local editors Amanda Earl,

Claudia Coutu Radmore & Carol A Stephen.





Pearl Pirie w/ Donato Mancini, Beatriz Hausner, Steve Zultanski and bill bissett | Grey Borders Reading Series, Saint Catharines, ON

There’s a lot of history in the scuffed, wooden floorboards of the Niagara Artists Centre. The organization, now in its 43^rd year of serving Niagara’s artistic interests, has hosted countless literary heroes through its Grey Borders Reading Series alone, including the likes of Phil Hall, Catherine Owen, Stuart Ross and Dennis Lee. That eclectic venue in the heart of St Catharines’ fragile downtown earned a few more stripes last Wednesday when Donato Mancini, Beatriz Hausner, Steve Zultanski, bill bissett and Ottawa’s own Pearl Pirie convened for a celebration of wide-ranging poetry.

I was mostly drawn to the event because of Pirie, a familiar face in the crowd of bespeckled wordsmiths and enthusiasts, whose prolific output has always intrigued. After some time for book-buying, booze-finding and a fond eulogy for Raymond Souster, hosts Eric Schmaltz and Craig Dodman gave the brick-backed stage to the evening’s guests.

Establishing an unpredictable tone that would colour the whole event, Donato Mancini dropped a heady gauntlet of philosophical ideas, political buzzwords and household names in self-described “lists” that built up in momentum until they threatened to collapse at any moment. His compendium on Death Row inmates’ last meal choices and Dr Pepper – Texas’ beverage of choice – devolved into a lengthy list of doctors (some real, some imaginary). Flipping haphazardly through pages of his notebook, it was the uncertainty of Mancini’s sporadic jumps that ensured a vital, if occasionally bewildering, reading.

Beatriz Hausner followed with a selection of essay meditations and poetry inspired by her lover “Raccoon” and their nocturnal rites of passion. With her sensual approach to wordplay, Hausner won appreciative nods from many in attendance with “Loneliness of the Fashionista”, a rebuttal on the black leather and metal-pronged ugliness that seeks to identify bondage.

Steve Zultanski offered two rapid-fire examinations during his oft-comedic time onstage: the first, of yawning and its space-time relationship to those who know him most intimately, and the latter entertaining the cause-and-effect possibilities of pushing his friend into a pool. In reaching for outlandish strands of logic, Zultanski’s sly use of repetition and speed-reading unveiled tiny shards of brilliance that rendered his doubts, while dysfunctional, wholly relatable. Knowing laughs from the audience seemed to verify that everyone was strapped in for the ride.

To the untrained eye Pearl Pirie looked the relaxed participant, listening and taking the odd photograph. But speaking to me during intermission, Pirie admitted she was just as actively listening for the crowd’s reactions and amending some poem choices along the way. Her ensuing plan of attack, a loosely tied knot of rogue poems – some new and unpublished – provided a freewheeling test-drive of a unique literary voice.

Whether describing isolation and conversational fever in “We’ll Leave At Night For Thunder Bay” (from her mini-chapbook Sprockets Away) or an evocative landscape that flexes between the earthy and bodily on “River-High” (from been shed bore), Pirie’s language shined especially when read aloud, her rhymes emerging in stuttering successions that countered any straightforward pacing. One of the evening’s highlights was surely a poem (from Where There’s Fire) inspired by SlutWalk, capturing the air of sexual freedom spilling through a metropolis’ etiquette of suits and cigarettes. But just as intriguing were poems assembled from games of Scrabble and snippets of Hollywood dialogue, spun in reverse, which highlighted her creative playfulness. All of the five poets showcased their inventiveness with finished poems but Pirie’s willingness to discuss her work’s origins added to the event’s refreshing openness.

Although I was due to meet friends on the other side of downtown, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear bill bissett read from his previously out-of-print, post-modernist/ collagist manifesto Rush: what fuckan theory. It was a joy to behold. And as he chanted syllables around his essay of “the artist as a young man, an outsider” with a shaker in hand, I smiled at the thought of bissett’s revolutionary calls emanating through the NAC’s outdoor speakers and ricocheting down St Catharines’ chilly storefronts. With regards to each of last Wednesday’s poets, I can’t think of a better way to announce the latest chapter in Niagara’s understated literary history.

Andre Alexis, David O'Meara & Cameron Anstee

Thursday November 1, 2012, 7:30pm
Ottawa Art Gallery, Arts Court
University of Ottawa Writer-in-residence Andre Alexis, with David O'Meara and Cameron Anstee
No Cover

Apt. 9 Press Presents: Phil Hall, Rachael Simpson & Claudia Coutu Radmore

Apt. 9 Press presents:

Phil Hall – A Rural Pen
Rachael Simpson – Eiderdown
with special guest Claudia Coutu Radmore

Saturday 24 November 2012
Readings at 2:00pm
Raw Sugar Café (692 Somerset St. W.)
No Cover

Apt. 9 Press is overjoyed to celebrate the publication of two new chapbooks with a reading by three fantastic poets. Phil Hall will launch A Rural Pen, Rachael Simpson will launch Eiderdown, and Claudia Coutu Radmore will belatedly celebrate her Apt. 9 chapbook Accidentals winning the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. We're spoiled by the quality of these books, and you'll be miserable if you don't get one before they're gone.

Raw Sugar Cafe, the best venue in town, is once again gracious enough to host us for an afternoon poetry. Be early, settle in, have a pint or a cup of coffee depending on the weather. Readings to start at 2:00pm.

Phil Hall is the 2011 winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in English, for Killdeer, published by BookThug. His is also the 2012 winner of Ontario's Trillium Book Award for Killdeer. This book of essay-poems also won an Alcuin Design Award, & was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He currently offers a manuscript mentoring service for the Toronto New School of Writing. This fall he isWriter-In-Residence at Queens University. Next fall, he will be a faculty member of the Wired Writing Program at Banff. He is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, & the League of Canadian Poets. He lives near Perth, Ontario.

Rachael Simpson's poetry has been published in Canada, the United States and abroad. Eiderdown is her first chapbook. She lives in Ottawa.

Claudia Coutu Radmore is known for her Japanese form poems, as well as for her lyric poetry. Her poem where language forms won second place in the 2010 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Awards and Accidentals (Ottawa: Apt. 9 Press, 2011) won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Recent series have been Qui annus est?/ What year is this?, poems in response to 13 – 18, PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLIVIA JOHNSTON at the Red Wall Gallery (SPAO Ottawa), and saturation, the joy of, poems in response to TILT, ORCHID PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAKE MORRISON at the Orange Gallery (Ottawa).

COLIN SMITH & SANDRA RIDLEY

More info: abseries.org

8pm
Friday, November 2, 2012

Ottawa Art Gallery

Arts Court

2 Daly Avenue

Ottawa, Ont.

A B Series presents readings by two poets of razor-sharp intellect. Join us for this not-to-be-missed convergence of exceptional literary talent.  

2012 Archibald Lampman Shortlist Reading: Blouin, Ridley + mclennan,

Each year, Arc Poetry Magazine honours Ottawa poets. Arc is proud to present the three 2012 finalists for the Archibald Lampman Award for best book of poetry by a National-Capital author.

The award is named in honour of Archibald Lampman (1861 - 1899), one of Canada's finest nineteenth-century poets. Lampman moved to Ottawa in 1882, and much of his metaphysical nature poetry was inspired by the National Capital region.

Michael Blouin: Wore Down Trust (Toronto; Pedlar Press, 2011)

rob mclennan: Glengarry (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011)

Sandra Ridley: Post-Apothecary (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2011)

The three authors will be reading at Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar on Sunday, October 14, from 2-4pm.

http://arcpoetry.ca/2012/09/24/congratulations-to-the-2012-finalists-for-the-archibald-lampman-award/

The event will also include a reading of the 2012 Diana Brebner winning poem by Lauren Turner, this year's winner.

info: arc@arcpoetry.ca

Jenny Sampirisi & kevin mcpherson eckhoff

More info: abseries.org

Join us for an evening of visual poetry and poly-vocal performance!

8pm
Saturday, October 20, 2012

Ottawa Art Gallery
Arts Court
2 Daly Ave.
Ottawa, Ont.

Jenny Sampirisi is the author of the novel is/was from Insomniac Press. She is the former Managing Editor of BookThug and current co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing, a series of reading and writing workshops designed and facilitated by working writers. She teaches English Literature, Creative Writing and Composition at Ryerson University. She is the 2011 recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Literature. Croak, a libretto of hermaphroditic Frogirls, is her first poetry collection. It is a poetic narrative of love, loss, and compromise played out on a Beckettian stage. She will present a poly-vocal rendering of the text at the A B Series.

kevin mcpherson eckhoff equals rhapsodomancy plus easy peasy! Will he win the ReLit award this year? Join whobet.com to make it interesting. His bestfriend is named Jake Kennedy; together they enjoy art, popcorn, hugs, Open Letter, musick, kindness, whey protein, students at Okanagan College, clinamen, Tim & Eric, Denny's, pretend violence, and eventually finishing their community-written novel, Death Valley. kevin’s words have been made for real totes in-print, like, within West Wind Review, Fact*Simile and Descant. He lives & loves in Armstrong, BC, with some rescue dogs and a dog-rescuing super-lady, Laurel. She & he are merely weeks away from welcoming their first & craziest collaboration ever, which remains, as of yet, untitled.

More info: abseries.org

Geof Huth launches A B Series Season #6

More info at abseries.org

A B Series launches its sixth autumn to spring programming season with a multimedia presentation by renowned visual poet, archivist and popular blogger, Geof Huth!

Irving Layton Reloaded

LAYTON RELOADED

In conjunction with “Whatever Else": An Irving Layton Symposium, to be held at the University of Ottawa May 3-5, 2013, and in recognition of the centenary of Layton’s birth, we invite writers to respond—whether by way of homage, parody, retort, homolinguistic translation, or any other dialectical form (glossa, travesty, echo poem, etc.)—to a Layton poem of their choice. Our favorites will be published on the symposium website (www.canlit-symposium.ca), and we are exploring the possibility of other forms of publication as well. Please send your response, along with the title of the original poem, to Robert Stacey at rstacey@uottawa.ca or Cameron Anstee at cameron.anstee@gmail.com under the subject heading “Layton Reloaded.”

Submissions are due April 1, 2013.

Bywords Quarterly Journal Summer Launch

Sunday, July 15, 2012; 2-3pm
Collected Works Bookstore, 1242 Wellington W.

Please join us as we launch our latest issue with music by Neil Gerster & poetry by Rebecca Geleyn, a.m. kozak, Willow-Marie Power, Tim Mook Sang & rob thomas.

Event is free, but we'll be passing the hat for copies of the BQJ.

Cover photo by John Gilles

Hope to see you there!

At 3:00pm after our reading finishes, mosy over to the Elmdale House Tavern just down the street at 1084 Wellington W. for the Dusty Owl Reading Series featuring rob mclennan & Christine McNair.

Sachiko Murakami reads in A B Series at Laurier House, Thursday, June 7, 2012

More info: ABSERIES.ORG

Montreal International Poetry Prize winners read at Arts Court

A group of young Montrealers surprised the poetry world last year by offering a prize of $50,000 for a single poem in English by anyone in the world, promising that the competition would become an annual event, funded mainly by entry fees. In addition to the big prize, an anthology of 50 short-listed poems was to be published, as well as a broadsheet designed by a prominent artist to illustrate one of the short-listed poems chosen by the artist.

On Saturday, April 28, in the midst of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, the two winners arrived in Ottawa on the last leg of their reading tour. Grand-prize winner Mark Tredinnick of Sydney, Australia, and broadsheet prize winner Linda Rogers of Victoria, B.C., read at ArtsCourt.

Well-known Canadian poet Linda Rogers gave a brief reading, including an excerpt from her novel The Empress Letters. In her characteristic lush, elegant language, Rogers revisited some horrific episodes in recent history, especially involving a violence against women. While she apologized to the audience for the lack of comic relief, she made the point that it is important to witness the devastating effect that violence has on the lives of everyone involved.

Mark Tredinnick’s reading included many topical references and a “political” poem about his country’s exclusionary policies toward refugees, but he argued that the chief social role of poetry may be to counteract the rhetoric of politics by directing attention back to the constants of the physical world, family and love. A former lawyer and a lecturer on environmental law. Tredinnick came rather late to poetry, and in the past decade has established himself as a major voice in Australian poetry. His prize-winning poem, however, is based on his first trip to North America, last year.

The Ottawa audience warmed to Tredinnick’s vigorous yet reflective poems, both his preferred long-line meditations on the natural world and his occasional syllable-counting lyrics. Apart from a few unfamiliar words – antipodean animals and trees, for instance – his idiomatic writing seemed approachable and familiar to his Canadian audience. And he graciously opened his session by reading poems by others: the Australian poet Debbie Lim (who told him about the Montreal contest), and Canadian poet Jan Zwicky.

Tredinnick mentioned how pleased he was that five Australian poets had been selected (by Andrew Motion in a blind judging) for the Global Poetry Anthology. Another three of the short-listed poets were also included, and they opened the evening with brief readings of their own. Congratulations to Peter Richardson, Barbara Myers, and Maria Borys.

The Montreal International Poetry Prize is intended to be repeated annually, and its launch must be judged a big success. Winner Mark Tredinnick did comment, however, that there is room for improvement. For instance, nothing was set aside to promote the winners or the prize anthology, so Tredinnick and Rogers had to organize and finance their own cross-Canada tour by train. The little-publicized reading would also have benefited from being associated with the OIWF, which was happening across town at the same time. Fifty thousand dollars for a single poem, and he still rates the prize “could do better”? Well, yes. Tredinnick is equally demanding of us own work; the winning poem is not his favorite of the ones he sent in to the contest. No doubt, he will try to do better next time.

OIW: A Talk on Contemporary Poetry Feat. rob mclennan and Pearl Pirie

 “Be careful not to scratch and make too much noise with that,” said Brian, motioning to the pen and paper I’d removed from my bag. “I might be trying to commune or something!” Maybe it was due to the fact that I’d only met him minutes earlier in line to attend Ottawa Independent Writers’ latest discussion but gauging whether Brian was kidding or not proved difficult. In either case, writers young, old, experienced and curious alike had convened to soak up the wisdom of two of Ottawa’s foremost poets, robmclennan and Pearl Pirie – scratching away with my pen felt as natural a reaction as listening in.

It takes a poet-publisher of considerable expertise to tackle a topic as broad and massive as Contemporary Poetry but, as luck would have it, this evening delivered two. Calling upon proven skills and noteworthy anecdotes from careers waist-deep in the literary arts, mclennan and Pirie discussed some of the many poetic forms (examples being haiku, tanka) that stream and intersect contemporary verse. Those in attendance were encouraged to ask questions or even interrupt the flow of conversation, the latter option proving popular when the introduction of visual poetry came under fire. Make no mistake, the OIW isn’t a group of starry-eyed pacifists; for some members, the art of arranging letters in a way that deepens the author’s intent sparked a vocal debate on the merits of certain poetic styles. A surprising change of pace for the event, perhaps, but these stubborn viewpoints and insightful defenses provided even the quiet attendees with some food for thought.

At the very least, no one could refute the effectiveness of visual poetry any longer with so many convictions flying about!  One writer stood and passionately recited his criteria for good poetry, to which everyone applauded. Another scoffed at the example of several contemporary forms but took detailed notes on each. Even my new colleague Brian, who had worried about the sound of my pen on paper, stood arms-crossed away from the table, peppering the guest speakers with questions. Now this was unfiltered discussion! And as one of those demure individuals taking it all in, I found the heated yet respectful exchange life-affirming to any poetry-lover’s ears.

The immeasurable size of the topic at hand allowed mclennan and Pirie freedom to dive into certain facets or styles upon the whim of the audience. Some inquiries had concrete solutions, such as Pearl Pirie’s insightful breakdown of approaches that distinguish and shape a writer – a classification that caused the group to pause and consider their work’s intention. Concentrated dialogues also arose on the subject of prose poems – and by extension, knowing when to keep poetry and prose apart – plus ways of promoting one’s work in a changing industry.

Other questions were impossibly pointed; when asked to define poetry in two or three words, rob mclennan enunciated as though counting each word: “I don’t know”.  It was one of many refreshing exchanges during an evening dedicated to uncovering the joy of poetry’s borderless playground. Riffing off of each other’s leads and shedding light on how the expectations on contemporary poetry have changed from an editor’s perspective, mclennan and Pirie defied expectations with an engaging talk that refused to pull punches.

As a non-member, I witnessed many potential perks to enrolling with the OIW, including notice on inclusive submissions, writer’s retreats and a whole lot of local support. Get more information here: www.oiw.ca

A choir like no other makes Ottawa debut

OTTAWA's FERAL CHOIR conducted by PHIL MINTON

See local participants perform in Ottawa's Feral Choir premiere!

8pm

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Church of St. John the Evangelist

Corner of Elgin & Somerset Streets

Entrance on Elgin Street

Ottawa, Ontario

Following dozens of stunning productions around the globe, Feral Choir comes to Ottawa!

A Feral Choir - photo by Bryony McIntyre

An A B Series Presentation

For more information and online advance tickets, visit A B Series’ website. Advance tickets are also available from Octopus Books at 116 Third Avenue and 251 Bank Street, 2nd Floor.

A UK singer and conductor, MINTON has taken Feral Choir around the world, hosting over one hundred workshops and transforming the lives of thousands of people. The project is comprised of a series of workshops open to everyone, amateurs and professionals, young and old, singers and non-singers. MINTON encourages participants to take a vocal leap and explore all vocal possibilities through exercises and improvisations, over the workshop period and in performance. Ottawa participants enjoy an unprecedented opportunity for voice exploration with the world’s leading sound-singing choral conductor. There is, indeed, something feral about MINTON’s approach, a primal scream philosophy to free participants from the limits of orthodox singing. The culminating choir performance, with dozens of local feral singers, premieres a public art project as never before staged in Ottawa.

MINTON notes that “the human voice is capable of so much more than is generally understood. In the workshops, I have encouraged participants to realize that anyone who can breathe is capable of producing sounds that give a positive aesthetic contribution to the human condition and many of these contributions are without any cultural influence or reference.”

“For over twenty years, with Feral Choir, MINTON has been helping people’s inner voice to break free!”

Phil Minton by Francesca Pfeffer