As summer ends, Ottawa’s literary scene gears up with even more than the usual number of activities planned. Inevitably, there are scheduling clashes, with two or more poetry events going on at the same time. The last day of summer, September 20, is one such occasion, when you have to choose between a joint reading by the contenders for Ottawa’s major annual poetry prize, the Lampman-Scott Award, and the launch of an early front-runner for next year’s Lampman-Scott prize, Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres, from Brick Books.
If you find yourself on foot in the shadow of the Peace Tower that Thursday evening, your choice is easy, because you are a short walk from the luxuriously appointed Nicholas Hoare Bookstore, 419 Sussex Drive, where Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres is being launched. The store is carpeted and lined with books, so a microphone will be needed for the listeners, who will no doubt outnumber the chairs, however comfortable many of them may be. Look for a short reading, then, and a sociable wait for the author to sign your copy – a must if you have fallen under the spell of McInnis’s poetry. Like the poems in Two Hemispheres, McInnis’s reading style is intense, emotional, at once elemental and personally vulnerable. Her new collection weaves together meditations about the lives of inmates of a women’s mental hospital photographed in the 19th century with accounts of the poet’s father’s secretive descent into mental illness. The poetry is rhythmic, sometimes incantatory, exposing raw emotion without veering into sentimentality, and the book is under twenty dollars. The hors d’oeuvres, this close to the Byward Market, are probably pretty good too.
Across town at the Lampman-Scott reading, the seating is adequate, luxurious in fact, at the reception centre of Beechwood Cemetery, off Beechwood Drive, a little beyond the Governor-General’s residence. OCTranspo buses serve the location, and there is convenient parking, but the group reading won’t attract anyone happening to walk past. It’s a pity if the reading doesn’t draw a large audience, too, because it brings together as many as possible of Ottawa’s poets who have brought out a book in the past year. Listeners may sample, in comfort, the whole range of styles and levels of achievement among the city’s poets, young, old and in-between. At the September 20th reading, for example, the readers might range from that ubiquitous chronicler of the mundane, rob mclennan (who knows?) to that meticulous archivist of the nightmarish, Ronnie Brown; from miniaturist Grant Savage to activist Oni the Haitian Sensation. If the Lampman-Scott competition were like a poetry slam, the poets I’d expect the final rounds would see the veteran, GG-nominated archaeologist of the zeitgeist Monty Reid (Disappointment Island, Chaudiere Books, Ottawa) sparring with a couple of “rookies”: the well-seasoned “first book” by Sylvia Adams, Sleeping on the Moon (Hagios Press, Regina), an explorer’s journal brought back from 19th-century Africa; and the snapping-fresh Hung Out to Dry in Cape Breton (Signal Editions/Véhicule) by first-time author, long-time editor Anita Lahey. With exciting new books of poetry like these coming out by the handful, who cares who takes the prize? The audience is already the winner.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Saturday, September 08, 2007
12 or 20 questions: with John-James Ford
John-James Ford (photo by Charles Earl) was born in Kindersley, Saskatchewan. He studied at the Royal Military College and the University of New Brunswick. John is a Canadian Foreign Service Officer currently posted to Colombo with his wife, Karie, and his children, Jackson and Samia. Bonk on the Head, which was co-winner of the 2006 Ottawa Book Award for fiction, is his major work, and he has recently completed a long poem picaresque entitled Epiphany Season. He was recently awarded a grant scholarship to attend the 2007 Banff Writing Studio, and is presently finishing The Air Inside Us, his second novel. His short fiction and poetry have been published in qwerty, Carousel, Grey Borders, Other Voices, papertiger, stonestone, Yalla, Prairie Fire, SUB-Terrain, and Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Chaudiere Books).1 - How did your first book change your life?
It made certain members of my family not talk to me for months because they thought I was writing lies about them. This was my first introduction to the perils of entering the public domain, and how some see certain elements of life accurately portrayed in a story as proof that I must be writing thinly-veiled memoirs. After Bonk on the Head was published and I was travelling across the country in an old VWFox, doing readings to a couple or three people in every city, I had a few soldiers, some of them friends, approach me (the novel is mostly set at Royal Military College, where I studied my undergrad). They would say things like "Dude, I can't believe you took a shit on the Commandant's lawn, that's disgusting!" Otherwise the novel lent a sense of legitimacy to my writing, at least in my own head. I think writers, as a rule, are sensitive beasts, and finally getting that first book professionally bound, especially when browsing a bookstore and coming across it, is a very emotional and gratifying experience. Yes, it has a lot to do with ego, but so what? There are worse things to be driven to do than to manipulate the symbols of the alphabet in such a way that the final product will open the curtains in a new way for another human. It's nice to have someone interested in what you have to say, even if they are asking for a free copy (which many people seem to do).
2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I've lived in Ottawa most of my life. My dad was RCMP so we moved around a bit when I was a kid but eventually settled in Ottawa, so this is my de facto hometown even though I was born in the prairies. Geography is very important to me, I like my characters to live in a definite place, with concrete landmarks that the both the reader and I can relate to. I have noticed though that I don't usually use a specific place until I'm far away from it, writing somewhere else. For instance I'm presently living in Sri Lanka, and have a story bubbling to the surface that will be set here, but I know that I won't startwriting it until we leave this place about a year from now. I'm not sure why.
3 - Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I have active files on different subjects, little folders with insights I have had and collected over the years. (I have recently learned that while insights are powerful and exciting, most of them end up being wrong). When a story comes I never know where it comes from or how long it will be, but I can always tell when a new project has arrived. I then use various old pieces, or insights, as a sort of road map to find my way through the story. It's never the same process twice, though.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
I don't mind them so much now, but they are in no way connected to my creative process. I hated them when I was in grad school or on my book tour. Generally, I prefer to curl up in a cool, quiet room with a book and a blanket and enjoy it alone, so when I'm reading my own stuff, I tend to assume everyone else feels the same way. But since having children, I have found a genuine joy in reading to others, so much so that I want to write children's stories now.
5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. At a certain point editing seems to get tedious and it's possible to become blinded by the manuscript. I, at least, need an editing hand that I can trust. I had a very positive experience with my editor, and learned more about writing from him than anybody else. He was also my publisher, so he didn't pull any punches because at the end of the day it was his dime.
6 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
I'm not sure if this is a skill testing question or if you are just high. Is this a koan? My official answer: "The voice of my flute intones through the orchard."
7 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It's a three-way tie: Tell the truth (my Dad) Tell the hardest truth first (Hemingway, I think) and Be happy (Buddha). (No, it's not trite to say that!)
8 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don't really write non-fiction. I can't see it happening anytime soon, but you never know. I haven't written much new poetry in a few years and have been sort of hoping it will come back.
9 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
04:00-05:00 meditation, 5:00-6:00 writing, 6:00-6:45 yoga. Then I have breakfast, with the kids if possible, before work. At night I'm generally too bagged to write so that's when I read. My partner Karie gives me much lattitude on the weekends, especially when I have momentum and am finishing a project.
10 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I'll start editing what I've already written to get into the groove. I always listen to music when I write. If I feel really stuck I'll take a journal and go to a public place.
11 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
People, especially those I have relationships with. And rock music.
12 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sit with S.N. Goenka.
13 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, I'm a full-time civil servant, in the Foreign Service. If I wasn't a writer this would be my dream job so I guess I have no complaints.
14 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
14 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When I was young I realized that I could do it effectively, and I enjoyed it, and I knew the overhead was low, I just needed paper and a pen. Secretly I used to want to be a rock star, but I don't think that's very unique. My first girlfriend told me my poems were beautiful, and I never looked back. Later I realized she was lying, or had bad taste, but it gave me a start. I don't think I'd be writing today if nobody I cared about had ever encouraged me.
15 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book is the one I'm reading right now: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. It is beautifully written. Incredibly tender. What's a great film? We don't have TV but I'm a Hollywood junkie, for better or worse, and the Bourne Ultimatum was a very entertaining movie.
16 - What are you currently working on?
I'm just finishing my new novel, The Air Inside Us.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
12 or 20 questions: with Stephen Brockwell
Stephen Brockwell (photo taken in Cardiff, Wales by rob mclennan) lives, writes and works in Ottawa and other places. His third book, Fruitfly Geographic (Toronto: ECW Press, 2004) won the Archibald Lampman Award. The Real Made Up (Toronto: ECW Press) will be published in September. Brockwell will read from the book in Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Montreal this fall and winter.1 - How did your first book change your life?
I can't say that The Wire in Fences changed my life. There was an earthquake the night of the launch, about 4.5 on the Richter scale. A friend proved he could descend a flight of stairs in two steps to save his life. But I don't think my book had much to do with the earthquake. I loved having a book in my hand. I enjoyed reading from it here and there. Not a life changing event, though.
2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I lived in Ottawa half-heartedly between 1987 and, say, 1999. I've been living here whole-heartedly since. I think breaking ground for an extension to your house, planting trees and building a deck help to make you part of a place, which is more important than choosing to reside in a place.
Geography is a big field, eh? I don't think it's possible for a writer to escape the influence of geography: it shapes our economy and culture. Geography is the surface time and history move on. The Canadian winter seems to me a giant factor in our writing. The vast emptiness, the cities dotted along the border. The rivers. Think of Newlove's "Driving."
Race and gender are big, complex issues, eh? The Real Made Up dips its toe in those waters. If nothing else, postmodernism is the era of the question. People are asking questions about how the macroscopic economic and cultural systems maintain themselves by rules that had always been taken for granted. The delusions of fundamentalists (christian, islamist, keynesian) notwithstanding, many people now refuse to accept these rules as given. Good. I write poems that are informed by these ideas, but I don't have articulate or informed opinions.
3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Jeepers. You'd have to ask my hypothalamus and survey a handful of neurons. Poems begin in order and end in chaos. Poems refuse to accept the idea that engendered them. A poem is "the cry of its occasion" (Stevens). The work on a book is, for me, always a background activity. Plan, abandon, re-plan. Fill a notebook. And then write something tangential as the motivation or the impulse leads. It's important for me to be excruciatingly patient when working on longer pieces. The point is not write the poetic equivalent of an idea - that seems to me the antithesis of poetry. I try to enter into an idea, explore it, read about it, read poems by others about it. Once that foundation and framing have constructed themselves, a poem can lay itself down.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
I test drive nearly everything by reading it at an open mic. A poem is made out of sound - it would seem odd to write a poem without feeling it in your mouth. If it doesn't taste good, hork it into the spittoon, I say. And of course it's important to hear work by others. Poetry has been recited, heard, sung and performed since it was first uttered. I find it pleasing to hear the music of other poets' phrases, the swing of their sentences, their attack (in a musical sense) on the line.
5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
That's a good question. It really depends on the book. My first and most recent books benefited enormously from work with an editor. My second and third books didn't call for as much interaction. I don't find it difficult at all. It can be an essential part of discovering the nature of the work, under optimal circumstances. Let me digress for a sec. I don't believe in certainty. The day I write a poem that I think is finished, please shoot me on the spot. The very idea of completion in poetry makes me queasy. Whose notion of completion? Is it a perfected object? What aesthetic, idiomatic, ideological, formal criteria is a reader going to use to compare your little blab of words with a perfect grid? I prefer the collaborative cultivation of poetry to the solipsistic prophesying of poetry. But, hey, depending on what you believe, even Moses wrote what he was told to write. That whole come-down-from-the-mountain thing was an exercise in legitimation.
6 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
I find the process smooth if you're working with a decent publisher. I've been lucky enough to work with Michael Holmes and the crew at ECW for my last three books. They're hardworking, diligent and genuinely helpful. Book-writing is another matter; that becomes more and more difficult.
7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
A few weeks ago. I have kids, so we eat a lot of pears. My daughter likes the canned Delmonte variety but we refuse to buy the ones with 'syrup'. We squeezed up home made lemonade and limeade this summer. So much for that.
8 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
In conversation, in technology and the arts, you are generally impersonating someone. I find the advice that the managers of J. L. Gotrocks' business empire gave to Fred Flinstone genuinely profound. When forced to impersonate Gotrocks, Fred had a three line script to repeat to other tycoons: 1) "Who's baby is that?" 2) "What's your angle?" 3) "I'll buy that."
My father told me never to take the easy way out of anything, but I'm no longer sure that's sage advice. Anyway, I think he really meant always take the hardest possible path to everything.
I hesitate to say it but Michael Harris gave me good advice when I was starting out: editors and reviewers will accept or reject your poems for reasons that may have very little to do with the merits of your work; acceptance doesn't mean a poem has value; rejection doesn't mean a poem is worthless.
Peter van Toorn told me to wait for "the long wave," a surfing analogy, no doubt, for not scratching down every poem the wind stirs up.
Finally, I admire Keats' empathy: “if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince (sic) and pick about the Gravel.”
My father told me never to take the easy way out of anything, but I'm no longer sure that's sage advice. Anyway, I think he really meant always take the hardest possible path to everything.
I hesitate to say it but Michael Harris gave me good advice when I was starting out: editors and reviewers will accept or reject your poems for reasons that may have very little to do with the merits of your work; acceptance doesn't mean a poem has value; rejection doesn't mean a poem is worthless.
Peter van Toorn told me to wait for "the long wave," a surfing analogy, no doubt, for not scratching down every poem the wind stirs up.
Finally, I admire Keats' empathy: “if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince (sic) and pick about the Gravel.”
9 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I can't write non-fiction to save my life. I recently ghost-wrote an article about an information system for a power company in Ohio. There wasn't a memorable sentence in 2000 words. Which seemed to please the client since the facts were straight and the article made them look good.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I refuse routine. A typical day begins with a barking dog, urination and a cup of coffee.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writing is perpetually stalled. I regularly pour a quart of Homer's Epic 10W40 into my ears.
12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
I think that's a question for other people to answer. I will say that The Real Made Up makes me more uncomfortable than any previous book.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Well, if David said what you said he said, he's very sharp, no? There's little need for "other" is there? Most of the things you describe find their way into books. Recently, I've been fascinated by physiology and neurology (which I read about in books). Mathematics has become less and less important for me as a way of approaching poetry. There are a few cryptic allusions in The Real Made Up to the speed of light. Other than poetry, fiction and criticism, I'd have to say that history and politics have caught my attention. Given our deplorable, undemocratic, secretive and obscene domestic political climate, how could they not?
14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Feel perfectly relaxed for 24 hours. I don't care by what means. Someone would have to tell me, "Mr. Brockwell, you have now experienced 24 hours of complete relaxation," because I don't think I would recognize it.
15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?
I'm not sure what you mean. My occupation is something like "information technology consultant." Many poets have said that writing as an occupation is a disaster for the poetry. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. WC Williams was a paediatrician. F. R. Scott was a constitutional lawyer. I could not write for a living. I'd be afraid of it. I would seriously consider running a restaurant or building green homes for a living.
16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I've written since I was twelve, I think. Blame "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" and Lampman's "November". And 70s progressive rock bands. But I do do somethings else: write java, tweak databases, plan marketing campaigns, draft technical white papers - gawd awful stuff.
17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Illiad is a great book - I listen to that on my mp3 player every few days. I think that The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is a great book. Erin Moure's O Cadoiro. Mark Strand's Man and Camel. Stuart Ross's I Cut My Finger may be the last really enjoyable book I've read. The last great film I watched? The independent Aussie film Little Fish probably.
18 - What are you currently working on?
Three very different things. A book length essay on poetry, geography and thinking. A book of poems about energy. A long poem about an English naval officer imprisoned in the citadel at Quebec before the Treaty of Paris. And a handful of poems that have foisted themselves onto my life.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Arc magazine's annual Diana Brebner Prize deadline
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
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
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.
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