Sets of 3s and Finding the Found: Tree

Literary Happens in Ottawa at Local Tourist Ottawa. One is already down, Kate talks about the Tree of this week.

Shane Rhodes did a talk at it about a broad definition of found poetry that includes erasure texts like Wave Books is doing to reportage like Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston of 1974. He described 3 major peaks of using found texts. The first was in the dadaist era, when the only logical response to the absurdity of war, is nonsense. The second was in the 1960s and 70s where Colombo and his clippings took the national imagination. The third wave is now with a number of poets from Kate Eichhorn, derek beaulieu, himself and others recontextualizing and re-intending found text. I didn’t consider that I was consciously brokering in this myself. I tend to see found text as unmixed with other texts, such as people who gleefully “find poetry” in novels and re-lineate and curate it under their names.
He speculated on what may have given the rise to this wave in popularity, considering access, digitization, cross-polliation from remix culture of music (and I should think copyleft for software and images). I wonder is not a response to a war-culture incidentally in common?

There was also the Tree Seed workshop where Phil Hall led us thru the ideas of threes, poems that took that off-balanced number and used the form into other forms, from Dante’s Inferno with its rolling forward rhyme and Sir Thomas Wyatt bringing terza rima to English, to Wallace Stevens’ Large Red Man Reading which is rather three squared, structurally with lines in triplets but also three grammatical phrases per line.
There was also a visiting into the words of Merril Gilfillan, Rae Armantrout, Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth who cluster together 3 ideas that may not relate or intersect unless the poet put them together.
To put in a set of 3 does something different than the solidity and authority of sets of quatrains or even pairs of beats. How does form inform range of interpreting and range of movement in a poem? What causes movement and what causes pause, how and why. Lots to mull.
There was also a time to round table poems brought in.
Tree’s becoming a sort of open university with the direction it is headed. More theory talks like Shane Rhodes are planned for 2012 so readers and writers can go deeper as well as broader.
In other news, George Whitman, of Shakespeare and Company, has passed on at age 98, a debate over whether the TS Eliot Prize is a good thing, even if it uses dirty money, Claudia Coutu Radmore who coedited the walls’ sharp white chapbook with me, has won the bpNichol chapbook award for her Apt 9 chapbook, the top place of the Montreal International Poetry Prize will be announced today at 7pm, and the Globe and Mail has picked up the baton on drawing attention to the unfilled post of the Poet Laureate, “a position created in 2001 and enshrined in the Parliament of Canada Act. The position, which is overseen by the Parliamentary Library, has been vacant since April, and the selection process to find a new laureate still hasn’t begun.”