Max Middle introducing the Sunday installment of quite arguably the best reading series in town with poems that are challenging and off-the-centre but on target for refined craft. This edition was at the Raw Sugar Café, just under the Chinatown arch.
Meredith Quartermain read from a few of her books. Her books include Vancouver Walking, Recipes from the Red Planet, and Nightmarker. You can read a sample of it at the bottom of this review and more bits of her writing, here. I didn’t track well which she was reading from but bits that struck me were addressing the geography versus the self, such as city, you are intentional and I am unintentional…I am unclamourous. She has an unusual angle of engagement, such as “When I am Hudson Bay’s Beaver flipping my James Bay tail.” “Are you loyal to Ontario or to Marilyn Monroe?”
The A B Series bring back Meredith Quartermain tonight as well. This time she’s reading from a different set of material. She’ll read from her first novel, Rupert’s Land, will be published shortly. She is reading with Adam Dickinson and Blaine Marchand. Dickinson gave a good reading this spring from his Anansi title of The Polymers.
Phil Hall read from his newest BookThug title, The Small Nouns Crying Faith, which I’ve mentioned here before. He has such an uncommonly good way of presenting his poems, being fully present in them. It seems standard habit for poets to be dominantly self-conscious or self-deprecating or poem-deprecating or in competition with the poem. He stands back and slowly shares in a casual way. There’s self-deprecation built into some poems but he’s not in opposition to his own presentation so that makes a difference.
Language is taken apart rather than as a given so that the language serves the communication instead of the communication being quite so bound by the language. For example, p. 74, The Crack,
If it were a person the crack would say sidewalk
it’s pointless
there’s the old cement plant there’s the new one it’s whiter
but the person-crack addressing its weather that defines it
would still not speak in smokey squares it would be true by
its absent nature to goof lovingly on the Parthenon
to admit worse than pointless to widen & fragment a lie
into a confession ointless
There’s a wonderful sense of flex in here. A person, not slipping through the cracks of society as the cliché goes, but a person who is a crack in cement. A person whose shape is heaved by the weather effecting the cement around it. One isn’t the material but the gap. Conceptual that is an interesting direction to go. What is the point? What is selected, removed, formed, true? It digs at fundamentals.
The next A B Series is tonight at the Ottawa Art Gallery on 2 Daly Ave.