Currently Reading, Active Pile

I have an untenable number of books in the active parts of piles at the moment.

Haiku Canada Review just came. (btw, the Haiku Canada conference will be May 16-18 at Carleton University Ottawa this year.) To excerpt a poem in part becomes infinitely harder when a poem is a word long, itself a portmanteau, like Geof Huth poems. Sandra Fuhringer was in the spring anthology with the poem,

watermARK

It can be nearly as hard to pull out excerpts for Jenna Butler‘s Winter Ballast. It’s the accumulation of sounds that builds to the weight of the end doesn’t scan out in bits. The context of building suspense and subset of Os and R to the global sense make the ending of I-nis’kim pop like a broken ankle.

Also in Lisa Robertson’s the weather, who I also can listen to via a Philly talk on Slought radio. I could hunker down contentedly as she read me the phone book really. Her voice and sounds just wash over. She does mention in the talk how the corpus she pulled the book from is like a bedtime story tucking in those who listen to the reports coming in.

What else am I reading? The Wompo list, bits from Poets of Contemporary Canada: 1960-70 by Eli Mandel. Canadian Poetry Now: 20 Poets of the 80s by Ken Norris. And counting images as reading, A Beginner’s Guide to Knots by Terry Eagle, Origami Club, Elam’s Typographic Systems. I surely can’t absorb all this but something sticks or osmosises at some level.

I’m still reading Coolidge online, maintains a certain amount of interest. Poems can make more sense when they try not to make sense but flip about in phonemes more playfully like this,

through
the such the pour as as
ton the hum
tire you
such tire
loyally views
the dodder one of the other
the love too

It has a lurch to it yet something compelling, in a way I can see no reason why it should work, yet it does, like his polaroid, the during seemed dials as may beside the points parts/singles that this during some that often bend acts /often during apart further then even could it can. Makes me want to disassemble to coo-coo clock to find the birdie toes.

And The Fine Art of Small Talk by Debra Fine with the nugget of p. 10-11 Get over your mom’s good intentions chapter, speak anyway:

I admired his poise and grace as he easily conversed with everyone. Bob’s self-confidence intimidated me so much that I rarely talked with him, despite my respect for him. […] I was stunned and horrified by his reaction. It had never occurred to me that shyness could be mistaken for arrogance. While shyness and arrogance are worlds apart, the visible manifestation of each can appear the same.

We’re also reading aloud Unforgettable Fire and I’ve finally untangled the distinction in my head a between Bono and Paul McCartney, Sonny (of Cher) and the bald guy from REM, by around page 300. Interesting to read of behind the scenes of what I’ve never heard of, hear those accounts then go to youtube and see what it looked and sounded like on the outside. It’s almost 25 years ago, yet as if live. To see the body language that I heard of verbally and literally get a skin for the people I only heard the words of is interesting. Sorta like meeting a pen pal.

The book is a long slog, at least this early edition. Later versions may have fixed the incessant recaps of the character of band members, and lack of recaps to people who breezed in and out 80 or 100 pages before. Still the constellations of how bands relate to one another and building something in the way of cultural context is useful. And the general scene of politics weaving in and out thru that lens is interesting. I found even that without know who they are, at least 1 song I kinda like that has been in my head for years attach to them (With or Without You).

Lorine Neidecker and the thoughts that revolve and evolve from her words are next…