Reading List

I’ll start by doing what isn’t on the list of 3 things for today that I’ve obligated myself to do. Once I’m writing it’ll be easier to continue writing anything…right? We’ll see. In no particular order, satisfying books I’m in the midst of.
Acre of Time by Phil Jenkins (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, 1996), p. 14

limestone, the kind a child would throw into the water to the splash. In a previous incarnation is was alive, a colony of ancient coral and molloscs; four inches tall, it took eight thousand years to grow.

Carpe Diem: Anthologie Canadienne Du Haïkus /Canadian Anthology of Haiku (Borealis Press, 2008), p. 107

rose hips and roses and buds
on the same bush
August Evening
– Philomene Kocher, frogpond XXIV: 1, 2001

Dart, Alice Oswald (Faber and Faber Ltd, 2002), such unreeling of unusual language p.2

listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking,
rustling and jingling his keys
at the centre of his own noise,

Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, edited by Zachariah Wells, (Biblioasis, 2008), it only takes a few to fill up to sated again, p. 60

The sky holds thunder like a swimmer
gone under holds air,
– Joshua Trotter, The Teacher and the Peach

Writers Talking, edited by John Metcalf and Claire Wilkshire (Porcupine’s Quill, 2003) p. 70, 71

We students [at Queens, 1980s] were being lent a glimpse into the beating heart of an authority figure. This is rarer than it sounds […] I was fed up with thinking in therefores and demonstrablys and notwithstandins; sooner or later academic cadences an habits of thought would be colonizing my brain, housebreaking my imagination. Partly inspired by the writers I was studying, partly repelled by the studying itself – Steven Heighton

Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (The Gig, 2008) (female: male, 12: 9). Responses are packed as dialogues, academia essays or in forms of poems. p.142

Because speaking for Indians is a double-bind (to be capable of the discourse of the colonizer is to reveal the extent to which the speaking is no longer “really” an Indian and therefore has no legitimate claim, yet to keep silent is to remain under the oppression of that discourse), making oneself “HEARD” may not always be the wisest course. – Reg Johanson on Annharte

selections from frankiecynoctras 1-61 translated by Marshall Hryciuk (red iron press, 2008?)

a tree-high thought
                         fasten to the light-tones:
hinter of what is human
_ translation of Paul Celan

Too Busy for Spring, edited by Michael Dylan Welch and Lee Gurga (Press Here, 1999) with a comic edge showing here and there,

TV off
the screen reflects
a living room
– Penny Harter

Some Assembly Required, (pooka press 2008)

beneath an every shifting
emptying of the word
– Warren Dean Fulton

Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry, edited by Robyn Sarah (Biblioasis, 2007), p. 38, in praise of smaller servings,

To qualify for subsidy and awards alike, a book must have at least 48 pages. Most poetry books run longer, so as to not appear too slender for their price-tag. But 48 pages of good poetry are not so easily come by. We forget that a single poem is an independent work of art, no less than a painting […] poets pad new collections […] persuading themselves they can pass these off as poems; or worse, they deliberately mandate themselves to write exercises and call them poems.

Totem(s) by steve dalachinsky (unarmed chapbook, 2007?)

weightless blossoms consuming even the blind
with their essence

The Luskville Reductions by Monty Reid (Brick Books, 2008), one of my favorites of the year, p 68

Every morning
bones click
into place
with less precision.

is 5 by ee commings (Liveright Publishing, 1926, 1985), such stylized ideas drops still sounds current, page ONE XXXVI

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