Currently Reading: Mostly Magazines

I’ve done this survey of the desk and head about 4 dozen times over the last 4 years. As usual, scattered across many texts, digital and paper.
Quarc issue: Looks like my Arc subscription has run out so I picked up one at retail. Love their poetry postcard with a periodic table of poetry in it but the price of admission was paid by Bruce Taylor’s poem Life Science. It’s the sort of thing I’d sift thru life for weeks or months to find something as satisfying and worth re-reading. I suppose I should substantiate that — it’s a poem, although excerptible, partly built on the strength of building over the course of itself. It has music, humour, and knowledge and a lovely pov.

our mouth-parts deep
in the approaching day and long tails lashing
in the past, and what one calls
one’s life is something like a duct
though which desire is made substantial,
then extruded in the form of loss–

It’s also from his new collection No End in Strangeness. I’d run across his name but getting to hear him in person at the launch made me sit up and pay attention. He’s won the A.M. Klein twice and perhaps this book will be his third.
There’s 260+ other pages in The New Quarterly/Arc issue to browse and read.
Rosemary’s poems where she mentioned meeting the bar: critique and craft where the writer mentions in a poem “There is no such thing as neutral” words. No deadwood. Every word is structural.
Dennis Lee’s essay on cadence, the rythmic gestures that descend from energy of the culture, the civil space, memories of the 60s and colonialism.
Eileen R. Tabios’s interview where she considers the dichotomy of fiction where you say something vs. poetry where you feel something and “first draft, best draft” approach after the research and living to form the poem vs. continuing to edit and research and live to hone.
Poetic Asides is good for prompts. The last prompt was hay(na)ku a form which Eileen Tabios created. I’d decided to continue the one good poem a day pattern started July 18th to see if I can go until the end of August. I’m cutting myself some slack in that I know some days harvest and some days won’t so 2 poems one day and skip a day is fine. It’s about habit and exercise and trendlines not punching the clock. Still a starter gun helps the run sometimes.
Hordes of Writing, written by Chus Pato and translated by Erin Moure was another sit up and listen sort of work. Just as I was getting disheartened at people blithering and blathering and calling any haphazard utterance a poem, along comes something that communicated with power. (p. 54)

“let’s call this dysfunction unreal deployment or pituitary hallucination
when these messengers rule the imaginaton, reason desertifies (any desert where camels perhaps gaze undomesticated): it’s the pituitary talking”

No baggy verse here. None of this ‘it was a sad dark winter night with snow that was cold and the poet who was sad’. The bar’s held higher. It’s a fusion of conversation, prose parts, poem-lineated but in any shape it is paying attention. p. 59 “Like dough we roll out until it fills an entire geography, like a tangle of sprouts”
Narrow definitions of poetry run like this: Doing poetry like X means you’re skilled.
Well, that thought was truncated early. Doing poetry like X means you’re skilled at doing poetry like X. Poetry isn’t characteristically anything but paying attention and asking questions out of curiosity, playing in what information there is.
Australian Poetry Library was put together by the University of Sydney and the Australian Council for the Arts — over 42,000 poems arranged by poet and by period. What’s the point of an interconnected world if you stay fixed as a mature coral. Naturally I’m not thru the Library but it introduces me to Kris Hemensley. His Conversations with Uncle Michael I’m glad I read. There’s something ample about its ramble that isn’t quite squeak tight but isn’t random either. And it’s funny how predictive a title is of the aesthetics below it. Titles of Joanne Burns are snappy and sassed like Bibleromat, coin-op and deliver on their pact of their titles with impact.
Geist, Summer 2011 issue, looking at Todd McLellan’s Instrumentation where he’s disassembled objects and laid them out in patterns. I’m considering how I view images differently than text. Do people whose first language are visual see space in images the way I see kerning? Are the shapes within images like line breaks, a message of the structure of the world, with outline of information being a sort of mandala mirror of their world view?
Keeping the Quiet by Kempa in is reviewed in Boxcar Poetry. The review might be as close as I’ll get to the book since the publisher doesn’t have a functional site for sales. *sigh* But there’s a poem by him in Town Creek Poetry, The Secret of Bruce Cooley, another in Leveler Poetry. Kempa’s wiki has leads to quite a few.
National Endowment for the Arts has a feature on Alison Pelegrin. Hello, great entry point for poem: “Li Po, this is your invite to the Prop Stop, /a honky-tonk unreachable except by boat”.
Descant: Possible World, Issue 153. Marty Gervais has a photo set of Canadian poets and his memories of them. Interesting to see people at different ages. The portraits are taken with more tenderness and kindness than other images I’ve seen of some of these people. They list the Winston Collins/Descant Prize shortlist. Very cool: 2 friends, 3 people I was at Sage Hill with, and a few other familiar names. In the issue is one poem by Francis Sparshott, a name I’ll have to watch for more by.
Dandelion: Mapping, issue 37.1: The mapping idea cross-ties well to the future issue of Descant of mapping hidden city. But Dandelion. Cool, Phil Hall is in here. And George Bowering made me chuckle, as he tends to. In Ability, p. 28, section 2. of the poem, “Yes, yes, bladder, you are more important/ than poetry. Let’s put on our jewelry and/ go to the opera.”