Le Prix Jocelyne Villeneuve (2012, trifold broadsheet) with Janick Belleau taking first spot.
Luce Pelletier (below) just read her 3rd place and honorable mention haiku in the competition:
Betty Drevniok Award: 2012 (trifold broadsheet). The top prize went to Bill Pauly of Iowa, someone who has been writing since the 60s and 70s but had disappeared for years and is reemerging. Another longtime poet, Timothy Russell, from Toronto, got second and third places.
There’s an anthology of all the Drevniok poems that have won this to date but somehow I missed seeing it. It’s out with Mike Montreuil’s new bilingual press, Petits Nuages.
A Thousand Fireflies/Mille Lucioles (Petits Nuages, 2011) by Lumita Suse, translated by Mike Montreuil is a collection of tanka. I don’t recall if I did rave or not about the poem she read at Tree that would come to be included in this book, p. 46:
a child lying on the grass
wonders why passersby
attach their feet to earth
instead of diving
into blue
un enfant couché sur l’herbe
se demande pourquoi les passants
attachent leurs pieds à la terre
au lieu de plonger
dans la bleu
Speaking of plunging, why are Canadians so taken with Basho?
I’m happy to have come across The Basho Variations (BookThug) by Steve McCaffery, partly to read it back to back against Frogments from the Frag Pond and partly because my biggest laugh of the day came with McCaffrey’s “The Prebyterian Basho [no page numbers, bother] which starts,
Not a frog nor a poet
nor a stone if of sinpleness, yea I say
thrown into the pond of sin’s round circle
but rather the complex martyrdom
of wounds by words
and the smoothing of the skin thereof into a bufic
croaking form,
Yea, and the webbed toes of Satan
fanneth out him into the bullfrog of our vanities
At which point I was laughing too hard to see to read on immediately.
Robyn Sarah’s “Digressions: prose poems, collage poems and sketches”, on the other hand, although promising sketch has more heft and breadth. And is also a pleasure to read and hear.
How many poems into the reading before I didn’t want to leave the room without being able to read and re-read and own the set? It’s writing from over 35 years. For example, she takes “A Brief History of Time” and excises in order only the words used to reconfigure meanings with that material for new purposes. It takes as much time, paring, editing and reediting as anything that comes straight out of your head. It gives the sense of listening to texts in a way.
This is the same technique that I used for Over my Dead Corpus (Angelhouse, 2010) and I thought it ended there but I’ve restarted the process again.
p. 57 of her poem “A Brief History of Time: Digest and Subtext”,
you can never be sure that the fact
is what is supposed to happen.
You can always question the question.
It turns out to be very difficult:
a millionth of a millionth of an inch.
And our goal is nothing less.
2 Space and Time
pure thought falling vertically
in a straight line at the same speed
unifying the partial theories
like ripples from a pond:
The Hard Return (Insomniac, 2012) by Marcus McCann is mentioned at rob mclennan’s internet go-to-place. As is often the poems he singles out aren’t the ones I’m drawn to but what I am reading, I’m enjoying. All that dexterity of language, craftedness, cleverness and an extra depth of grace over his last collection. Like Robyn Sarah’s collection, he’s plundering. He’s got Don McKay’s “Some functions of a leaf” cut up and laid in, in entirety, in order thru his collection without singling themselves out. Other poems are centos. If you check the references, you can say, ah yes, that does sound in isolation like a David O’Meara line, but put together, the overriding current, intention and direction is Marcus’ voice.
If twitter and the internet broke would people run up to strangers on the street and try to show pictures of their cat looking cute or meals? Yet people do unload depressing oversharing to total strangers in transit. Why not in fiction? Emily Schultz started a short story with a line “Everywhere I looked people were crying.” This makes me grumpy. This is why I stay in poetry not novels and short stories where there are perhaps other rules of engagement. Still,
ribsauce: a cd/anthology of words by women (Véhicule Press, 2001) looks interesting in places. Marie Clements has a striking piece. Rita Wong’s “chaos feary” plays in language and its components without getting lost in that and never making a point. It is a response “upon reading biopiracy by vandana shiva”. Here’s the first half of one of her poems in there, p. 34
pyre in pirate bio in bile
mono in poly breeder in
womb pull of landrace allo
me poietic auto me diverse
trans over genic harassment
over seas genetic as pathetic
as engine of disease socio
me catastrophic political and
eugenic organ as an ism
Finding the sounds and meanings in components of syllables that don’t mean that, a sort of twisting of original intentions, digging out and reshuffling. It has a wonderful momentum and mouth feel.
Funnily enough I follow Rita Wong on twitter but I don’t think I’d read her poetry before. It’s funny, kind of like finding out your neighbour is also a doctor when not gardening. A strange percentage of the anthology are musing in the voice of being a child or teen but the perceptions of an adult.
Moonbathing: a journal of women’s tanka (issue 5, Fall/Winter, 2011-2012) is a journal I’ve heard good things about for a while. Finally I see one in person. I got a couple issues and dipped into one. My favourite might be by Christina Nguyen, p. 13
another dictator
instruct his troops
to mow down innocents
I tell my daughter
to let the ants be
I could dedicate that to Alistair.
Harper’s Magazine (June 2012 issue) has a complex story on zoos by David Samuels. He interviews people who work there, people who founded zoos and what their worldviews were. He reports life as a people pyramid, pitting elephant feeding in competition against breakfast programs for school children. If budgets are to tighten, cutting back on an individual’s/specimen’s food, wouldn’t arms trade would be a more useful comparison. In the article he never stops and looks at any of the animals, which is curious. He talks of people who only know people, no relationships with any animals that aren’t human, suggesting there are no animals outside agriculture and zoos. 100 species disappear a year. It could become true. I never knew how unusual it was to spend days in and out observing various individuals who were farm animals.
Joy in Me Still (Inkling Press, 2010) by George Swede. I’ll close with a sample of p. 52. I like how it leaves to the audience to see the absurd comedy, as if the animals would tell which directions ancestral geography was, how the mind insists on imposing a narrative to incidental details. And yet for someone who believes in the mystic knowing, it reinforces that too.
the zoo’s four capybaras
all facing towards
South America