All the seats were full at the Factory Series. Monty Reid was MC of the Ottawater Issue 4 launch. (On third photo my camera battery light started flashing. bah.)
Ottawater’s an annual magazine, a free pdf. This issue has art by various people, over 30 poets (I’m in there on page 80), interviews (Nicholas Lea, Anne Le Dressay, David O’Meara) and book reviews (Muybridge’s Horse, and John Newlove’s A Long Continual Argument).
The reading moved along quickly with readers introduced two at a time. Each person read about 3 poems, some from issue, some new or old from elsewhere. Some people I have known and appreciated the work of, some were new to me. It overall made for a nice mix of familiar and not.
Each poet had a distinct coloring of mood, intensity, pace, style and humor so it was was a varied buffet of ideas. It is always interesting to hear work read that you’ve seen on the page and the cadence and body language that surrounds the words. There were 8 readers: Rhonda Douglas, Anne Le Dressay, Chris Jennings, John Lavery, Marcus McCann, Christian McPherson, Sandra Ridley, and Peter Richardson.
Peter Richardson and Chris Jennings were new-to-me-voices in this issue. Richardson’s Sympathy for the Couriers just released a couple months ago, his third book.
Evidently Jennings has read a lot, given his dexterity at setting up a poem and making an audience anticipate and laugh. John Lavery too has that sense of comic play with expectation and pullback. You can see that for yourself in Quickeye (p. 32) in the issue. I heard read him read as part of Max Middle Sound Project in June and in the AB Series last week. I’ve heard his sound poetry, his lyrical music, his poetic short stories, but hadn’t encountered his poetry before. Equally pleasing sort of fare, that with a touch of irritation as comedy.
Likewise for Christian McPherson. I’d seen his art, come across his short stories but this was first exposure to his poetry. Unless my memory fails me he read from poems not in issue. His were more in touch with embracing the dark side of imagery.
I can’t disclose what Rhonda Douglas read since it’s a shush-secret from her engineer-love. 😉 (Although you can peek to p. 17).
It was good to get the issue and get another “dose” of Anne Le Dressay’s gentle vision of the world. I waited a long time between her first book and her Old Winter, coming a few month ago. There’s a long view in her words, simply phrased, quiet, but looking for gold glimmer. Sandra Ridley has a slow unfolding reveal of what has a holy quality of the everyday. It appeals to me in a similar way to Le Dressay’s. Perhaps it’s the underlying quality of poems that content with the surface and denial of deeper, and the finding the deeper that appeals.
Sandra Ridley and Marcus McCann closed out the night. Marcus McCann read a series of poems that speculated what friends did on New Year’s Eve, although narrative deliberately scramble-filtered thru sound and word play.
The crowd seemed to enter and exit on a contented buzz with good applause and appreciation in between.
Blog Links: In other words, Amanda described her take on the launch. John did a post and round-up from issue 3 last year.
Quote: “We could all stop writing poetry right now and there’s going to be enough to read. So in the end, you have to do it for yourself.” – David O’Meara