Currently Reading

John B. Lee, Hired Hands (Brick, 1986)
Pat Lowther, A Stone Diary (Oxford, 1977)
Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills (M&S, 1994)
Gary Geddes, The Acid Test (Turnstone, 1981)
Erin Moure, Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love (Vehicule, 1992)
nathalie stephens, somewhere running (Advance Editions, 2000)
John Lent, Cantilvered Songs (Thistledown Press, 2009)
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Not without Parables (Ave Maria Press, 1977)
Rae Armantrout, Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007)
John Robert Colombo, Abracadabra (M&S, 1967)
Marianne Bluger, Gathering Wild (Brick, 1987)
Heh, the list is sandwiched between two Bricks.
[Two later in the day additions:]
Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane (Nightwood Editions, 2004) and
Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffrey and bpNichol (Underwhich Editions, 1978)
What a mouthful. Is that too much to bite off? Too much to chew? (Someone stop me.) (It’s okay. I’ve self-regulated. Thanks for the impulse to offer tho.)
The first two I’ve finished and am re-reading selectively. The others are at various depths thru.
John B. Lee I’ve read interviews of and seen fragments but to come across by chance was ooh. And the whole collection to sit with was wonderful. It works as an entirety and in bits. Hugely resonant.
This Pat Lowther book I can hear. I’ve tried before and blanked out on why people raised her reputation. Maybe I wasn’t in a place to hear, or maybe I needed some of the items of thought in this collection now.
Catherine de Hueck does wonderful short stories. They click up shivers at 1/2 a page from the end of each. Raising a response reliably. How does she elicit that sense of mystic suspense like ghost stories even back to back to back to back. A queue of stories. Normally I’m jaded and annoyed at such conveying me along but this comes in slant, unfamiliar. She’s a good storyteller.
I won’t go thru item by item.
It’s counterproductive to assess anything too early, or perhaps at all. So these jots only of what I want most to retain.
*
As my habit, the reading list is to check in with myself, to have a record and since it is typed, to share so someone else has the option to read it how they will. Which also goes for the following speech to self:
I try not to be weak-minded, not to scoff at divination from entrails nor its equivalent for our time and yield to lessons of loss of digital file.
There is. Good and bad butt in more than useful.
Software instability is not to be co-opted into labour hands for fate. It is not directive or indicative of approval nor rejection nor lesson to build character to persist.
Not a sign. To designify is to deconstruct my cognitive habit that I dressed with religious words once. So, it poofed back to ether unsaved as any parabled demon.
Life is sufficient with every myth and magic in quotations as make believe, to toy with the simple-minded part of the brain, satisfy it, but it is not the adult in the room and to give it self-determination would be reckless and to give self-immoliation to the whole collective of self.