pesbo blog – Page 120

Factory: Madhavan-Reese, Spenst & Pirie

Kevin Spenst spent yesterday poem-bombing Ottawa. He’s towards the end of the biggest poetry tour possible for the smallest wee books. When he gets back to Vancouver he’ll hit 100. Kingston gets him today and St. Catharines, soon.
And last night the Factory Series Reading happened. What a fun time. Good crew of audience with a mix of regulars, newcomers and occasionals.

Sneha Madhavan-Reese read from a few of her poems. Here’s two bits:

my father spends his days
watching signals sent from India
via outer space. How small
the world has become.

just back from work, suit jacket
over his arm. I had his features, his silence. He had
my eyes in his face.

Her poems have classic balance of external and internal, profound turns and fond compassionate gaze at her subjects. Her collection is set to come out from Hagios in 2016.

Kevin Spenst brought all kinds of beautiful little papery things, including this new one which is an interaction with bpNichol’s love poem.

He gave a high energy entertaining lope of a reading, greeting scenes seen in his travels. Lot of laughter with his comic touch for keen observing.
For those that missed his sold out sonnet chapbook, that will be rolled in part to his collection next year with Anvil Press. Watch for his tour. Flag it down if you can.

rob gave a skeptical introduction. He doesn’t believe we could build a trebuchet? Why, wat did you do at Easter? I meant to say a bit of the history:
One of the last occasions on which the trebuchet was used with success was at the siege of Rhodes in 1480 as described by Guillet in his ‘Life of Mahomet II.’ source] Gunpowder made the trebuchet’s brute flipping obsolete. It was used again militarily with less success,

At the siege of Mexico by Cortes in 1521, when the ammunition for the Spanish cannon ran short, a soldier with a knowledge of engineering undertook to make a trebuchet that would cause the town to surrender. A huge engine was constructed, but on its first trial the rock with which it was charged instead of flying into the town ascended straight upwards, and falling back to its starting- point destroyed the mechanism of the machine itself.

And all that turned towards the good of poetry.

I read some from the vertigoheel for the dilly and some from the new June project with Michele Provost to come out in Aylmer and likely in Ottawa with a few people. And some of the Apostrophe and Semicolon sonnets. Then I shot candies. The poem-papered one had impaired flight capacity.
The candy projectiles were with poem fragments from each of us to take home. A sort of party favour. Here’s a few examples,

after using the same scented soap, sweat becomes
its morning smell, so soap becomes dirt.
Pearl Pirie, Factory Series, April 23, 2014, Ottawa
you only believe in the bedbugs that bite you.
everything but your own eyes is soft-headed rumour.
Pearl Pirie, Factory Series, April 23, 2014, Ottawa
K Spenst ‏@twinnegganswake Feb 24  He who runes may rede it on all fours. OCD, necker, trestle, crumbling play! Sell me the process sooth @mtrimpe humbling buzzwords of self
Factory Reading Series, Ottawa, Apr 23, 2014
K Spenst ‏@twinnegganswake  First we feel, then we fall – , then we try to translate Finnegans Wake on our iPhone, then we make a video… http://tmblr.co/ZQIycx-U_DC3
Factory Reading Series, Ottawa, Apr 23, 2014

rob reported the the Raw Sugar staff looked a little alarmed at this shenanigan. But no one lost an eye, which is a good motto for every reading, isn’t it?
Lots of time after to chat in small knots of people. We closed the place down eventually. Last out the door helps fix and close the curtains.
P.S. Thanks to Dave for giving me a lift back when, once everything was set up and set up —books, chapbooks, candy favours with poems, candies to fling, cash, snacks, water, trebuchet, ballast, camera, spare batteries, lenses, materials for finishing the chapbooks (which became a bee with a bunch of people folding the last of Sneha’s mini chapbooks), and what did I forget? My set list, and poems to read. 3 bags of stuff and no poems; they were still in the printer.
P.P.S. previous post has a link to CHUO’s Click Here where you can hear a couple of the poems so long as that’s online. I archived it interviews here too. We’re about 20 minutes in.

News roundup

Yesterday’s Sneha & I were onClick Here with Mitchell Caplan. You can listen at that link.

Did you see Michael Jacobson’s asemic piece at NationalPoetryMonth.ca? Here’s a whole gallery of asemic writing The New Post-literate
“I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won’t have to fool around with it any longer.” —William Gass at the Paris Review
I’m a little slow off the blocks. Three poems by Joseph Massey have been there for weeks including, “breathe the frequencies/that knot the air, another//animal baffled / to be an animal.” The Account Magazine.
Most of you must have seen this already but it bears repeating: rob mclennan has won the mid-career artist award.
Jennifer Dick was nice enough to bring me into the conversation regarding the fragments vs. the whole.
The VIDA Count makes the news at NPR
Beha of Harper’s magazine says,

Beha says other changes are needed too. He contends men and women approach the magazine differently with ideas and that may also affect the numbers.
“Speaking broadly, of course, a male writer comes to you with an idea and you say ‘This isn’t quite right for us, try us again.’ If I say that ‘try us again’ in the email, I may get a response the next day with three new ideas,” Beha says. “And there is a tendency, I think, among female writers to emphasize the ‘this isn’t right for us’ part, rather than the ‘try us again’ part.”

Elise Cowen as one of the beat poets. Her family destroyed all the poetry they could find upon her death but Tony Trigilio has gathered up collected poems and notebooks in Poems and Fragments.
A new Anne Le Dressay poem “Solitary people of a certain age / are afraid their stories will die with them.” at Chaudiere Books
It’s true, my little press that could, phafours, will be graced with some beautiful little poems by Stuart Ross to come out sometime this spring/summer.
Did I already point to the Nelson Ball interview at Open Book? In it he says, “find a core that works. Sometimes a poem that isn’t working can become two or three separate poems.” Hamilton Arts & Letters also has put out a chapbook of his, A Rattle of Spring Frogs.
Poems in transit can be as good as this Jim Moore piece.
New Haiku Anthology of North Carolina is pretty art object. Learning to See the Truth as a title might put people off but the contents and package look promising.
This was from last year but is timeless. Ariel Gordon’s 3 part guide on how to launch your book: 1, where all, < a href="http://janedayreader.blogspot.ca/2013/07/how-to-launch-your-book-part-two.html">two, whatnot: invite who, 3 set list, social & signatures.
Ouliposts best picks from the first half of the month
Not from poetry but going well towards it is Seth Godin’s meditation on The bottomless pit of pleasing strangers. In it he says, For some people, some of the time, the only response is, “it’s not for you.”.
Rattle Magazine tweeted on Apr 18, “It’s so weird that anyone thinks an editor would turn down a good poem just because there’s a typo in it. How petty would you have to be?” and yet the idea of intelligence conflated with spelling and standard punctuation use is rampant. If one part of the apple is rotten, it all must be seems to be the law. Which misses good things and stymies those with dyslexia. The point of a poem is not to be a spelling bee.
Sigh. Quill & Quire has reorganized its site, put most things behind a pay wall and removed the sidebar of Quill & Quire Flickr photos so you can’t see Ottawa Lit represented there anymore. Or any of the launch photos around the country.

Versefest 2014: Goyette Connelly and McFadden

A few more things from Versefest.
Sue Goyette read. She warned before her reading think of it like technomusic. The poems make no sense. There’s no decoder ring, no test afterwards. You get them or you don’t.

You probably already have Sue Goyette’s Ocean right? Before or after it was short-listed for the Griffin?
Funny how books sit on a book table. Some go, most stay then a poet reads and there’s a Boxing-Day-style scrimmage to get copies.
At a festival it’s good to get your must-buys in the first sweep. If you wait until after the person reads or the festival end, they’ll be all gone.
She had an easy patter, a comic timing, and looked at home at the mic as she set the audience at ease.
Her poems didn’t ride the expected path but have little twists of humour in there. It doesn’t read flat. Starting walking along a waterfront in the east coast and one can tangent to anywhere in social commentary or history.

Karen Connolly also mid-career (or “senior poet” which sounds like one should get free coffee and priority seating) to an attentive very full room. It’s sweet to see such a large crowd out for poetry when its not even slam. As many as there were you could hear a pin drop in her tribute to missing women. Probably someone could burst in and try to do a hold-up and would be ignored or shushed. She also wrote of “the good man who left a trail in his wake like phosphorescence” and how Calgary has changed, the riverfront becoming expensive real estate where “I cannot afford to be nostalgic by the glass”

David McFadden also read and had the room converted to tame chickadees resting on his palm. Overheard: he’s so cute I just want to take him home. I just want to eat his cheeks.
Maybe that starts with his gentleman’s approach to be called to the mic. First things first, he kisses his partner Merlin, congratulates and greets his fellow reader, thanks the person who introduces him and then goes up and delivers some gently comic good natured poems.
He read from his previous collections but mostly from his spring collection from Mansfield Press.
Here’s some hopefully correctly quoted bits to give you a flavour.
it wouldn’t be me
I’d want to be
I’d want to be
John Wayne
or my mom
every day we age
two days and every night
we get one day younger
Ian says
that as I walk down
government street
cherry blossoms
fall from the trees.
it’s hard to be serene
when every minute or so
another frog
of 5 or 7 syllables
hops into the pool.
And lastly, from longer poem was about being in small town Canada
“as Stomping Tom plays in a café and people are talking about snowmobiling. I was at home. My heart, usually the size of a dried plum, grew until it filled the whole room.”
He’s working on his 102 sonnet collection to come out soon too.

When he finished reading there was a whole room standing ovation.

And then the melee for books and conversations.

Putting the Launch in Launch: Factory Series

Glue is dry.

Supervisor cat confirms.

When supervisor cat wasn’t lying on the instructions.

The launch projectiles include a dozen excerpts from each of the poets attached to a mint or chocolate mint candy.
If test flings are, er, ah, problematic, the poems will be party favours on the tables.
Who reads? You know this, right? Pearl Pirie (Ottawa), Kevin Spenst (Vancouver) + Sneha Madhavan-Reese (Ottawa) (lovingly hosted by rob mclennan)
Wednesday, April 23, 2014;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Raw Sugar Cafe
692 Somerset Street West (1 block west of Bronson)
author bios:
Pearl Pirie has a few chapbooks, a micro press, several blogs, a gig as literary radio host and irregular gigs to teach poetry. She has two poetry collections, and a third forthcoming with BookThug in 2015. None of these poems are in them so you have to buy them both.
She will be launching the chapbook vertigoheel for the dilly (2013), her fourth above/ground press publication and second chapbook, after oath in the boathouse (2008).
In addition to the UK, the United States, Austria and India, Kevin Spenst’s poetry has appeared in over a dozen Canadian literary publications such as Freefall, Prairie Fire, CV2, Dandelion, filling Station, qwerty, and Poetry is Dead. His work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and his manuscript Ignite has come in as a finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. In 2011, he won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry. In 2014 he is going to do a 100-venue reading tour across Canada with his chapbooks Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press, 2013), Retractable (the serif of nottingham, 2013), Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012), What the Frag Meant (100 tetes press, 2014) and Surrey Sonnets (JackPine press, 2014). Follow the chapbook tour at kevinspenst.com
Born in Detroit, Sneha Madhavan-Reese [pictured, above] calls Ottawa home. Her poetry has appeared in Arc, Descant, and The Antigonish Review. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming in 2016 from Hagios Press.

Railroaded: Signature Editions

Railroad is a new pop-up reading series around town run by Rona Shaffran and Rod Pederson. It happens irregularly when there are speakers and a venue. On April 16th it was a special Signature Editions spring launch. It was a full to standing room only house.

Rod Pederson gave some intros. There was a warm up reading by Rhonda Douglas from her Some Days I Think I Know Things.
Cora Siré’s Signs of Subversive Innocents and Montreal, Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon and Rona Shaffron’s Ignite of Ottawa were the spring books. (We arrived late so missed Rona.)

Cora Siré read poems from her travels, including around Montreal. She related how she admitted to a local cyclist and painter that she wrote a poem about him. He responded with an illustration that went in the book.
She wrote of Timmy regulars who she called flaneaurs and pointed out the irony of them spending all day on their stools while outside a sign reads, no loitering. She wrote of the 30,000 missing people of whom we don’t speak but the silence around them are like a congenital infection.

Steve Artelle’s new book is wonderful ride. Partly I have read it before and so have you if you read that excerpt from his Chinatown chapbook. But there’s more in the book than that delight too. There is the sensation of that folks, is how you write poetry. Not just story, or language but that extra percent that adds density and leap. I find it captivating. He seems at ease at the mic and moving among the material which makes a pantheon of strange gods to walk among familiar concrete places.

As he read, perhaps, Terminal City Rollergirls or graffitichild builds the church of sleep p. 57 with its unpredictible rollick of sound and sense. If one is to use adjectives, this is how:

and nightshifter grafittichild knew
more than anything a city needs sleep
so he whispered she to the hypnotic figurine
I’ll worry you a church sweet starfish
but with grinning instinct contracted the circadian job
to the deafening reptiles eh unravelled he like wires
spitting sparks from the all the anxious cracks in heaven
one for every wakeful hour that grafittichild trickmaker
build the church of sleep with dragons

Egad what a roll. Poems that held my attention without a nit or dropped stitch.

Here’s some of his cheering crew.

Maybe at this moment it was p. 81,

Umbrella hag
no shelter, love
she’ll never have on
and neither will you
they’re too much like lovers
folding backwards before the least wind
so empty underneath
though the weather never comes from one direction
they’re sadder than the rain
so she’ll break every one, love
no one misses umbrellas
when they’re gone

Signing books in the line.