Are there mistakes really? Or only critical mindset? Obviously grievous ones exist in war and acts of fear. But what comes after? 

Can you do an event planning wrong? Eventually there will be an event where my a combination of factors next to no one shows. But where two minds meet, what more can you want? Mobs of upward spiralling energy, but mostly that is rare. 

I have a buzz after the last Haiku Canada Conference with no energy crash. That’s odd. Grocery shopping can give me an energy crash and days of trough. I did things differently, blew off talks, the day starting and ending for me when I got there or left. Not a strain to absorb everything. Chatting with folks or not. Where is this lack of pressure coming from? Who knows. 

The core of life, of writing, of events, is about people, affections, connections, curiosity about people not “Networking” and “Learning”. Reflecting on the weekend there are all kinds of salient patterns, inner and outer. 

There are high or low planning conferences and events. I’ve done committee for TESL and haiku conferences and Tree Reading Series. And been far more often on the audience side. Pet peeve for feedback of any is people not praising programming but complaining about the coffee or snacks. That is also universal human nature. Until we start programming for cats we can disregard that data. 

There are two extremes of conference planning. High planning: 

• A theme tagline that guides all the programming 
• Corporate sponsors 
• Schedule announced months in advance 
• News releases to local papers or relevant journals 
• Logos everywhere: on the website; on signs with arrows to event location; on the paper agenda; on the welcome package of tourist info, notepad, maps of town, parking, free chapbooks, coupons for meals
• Corp of volunteers for set up, registration desk and greeters 
• Banner to announce event on site
• Theme-coordinated table cloths
• Early morning start and strict schedule 
• A moderator to cut people off to prevent running overtime. 
• Complimentary break time snacks & drinks
• Taking speakers out for a meal 
• Formal gathering social time
• Plenary address with prestige speaker(s)
• Panels on theme
• Music or theatre interludes built into events 
• Microphones
• Filming events and/or arranging for people to do photography and live-tweeting 
• Live broadcast and pre-registration 
• Chain of people introducing speakers 
• Hostess gifts and reader gifts
• Formal thank you bouquet for organizer 

Stripped down planning: A schedule released a couple weeks ahead, word of mouth for directions on the day, speakers adjusting for longer or shorter speakers, byob, organically spreading word and letting people photograph as they like, hearty thanks. 

Both are for the same audience with the same budget. Both are style. Not right or wrong. And audience adapts. 

And both work. The core thing is the people meeting and ideas exchanged. Everything else is bonus. Which is not to say chic is bad or good or that stripped down is good or bad. 

An event has a lot of moving parts. A lot of people to coordinate. Behind the scenes is busy in either case. 

You can get up in your head about perfect events, or perfect writing, considering every contingency, trying to accommodate every need. People are pretty good at meeting half or at walking away no matter how much you chase. 

You don’t have to grow or shrink yourself and your impulses, to what you think would reach the most people. You don’t have to mask to an imagined normal. You don’t need heroic measures. 

You can let your freak out & that works too. A narrow band of people feel less alone and most people are neutral. 

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

– Ernest Hemingway

People who started publishing after me have twice three times the number of book-books. People who friends praise… I don’t always get what the fuss is about. 

Resonance like humour is personal. I can give myself permission to not get it, to not try to be everyone’s perspective and focus on following my bliss. 

Part of me worries about siloing. Spinning off so far into arcane that I lose people but losing some people puts into position for finding other people. If people are contextual they will fall away no matter how you pursue. Keepers look after keeping themselves kept. 

It requires a certain trust and acceptance of paradox of being enough. Knock yourself out and you are enough. Barely calling it in and also you’re enough. It’s not that it is subjective. It’s that being enough is inescapable. 

Maybe it’s a paradox like universal basic income. Being provided for doesn’t make lazy people lazier and hard workers lazy. People who are driven are still driven but are cared for more. People who are under pressures internal and external that makes them in danger of going under are also taken care of. It’s a structural choice to accept a universe’s model of sufficiency instead of threat and scarcity.

It is easy for a pessimist like me to look at what is wrong, what isn’t working, what is broken, impending, excluding, disappearing. I have to train myself to see what is ample and welcoming. I get spoiled by like-minded people, shocked by something outside my usual. For example a Catholic magazine I came across that had a reasoned, articulate, compassionate, well-structured argument against anyone accessing abortion. A whole parallel isolated reality. 

It’s easy to forget that most people are not English speakers, even locally. Most are not readers, nor readers at my consumption rate, let alone not writers. Most of those don’t read or write poetry, let alone read haiku, let alone write non-syllabic haiku and are in the subset of that that tickles me. 

I’m more a line on a pie graph than a slice. But like a tree seed falling on a rock cut ledge, I only know what I immediately touch and that it’s good and enough to start.

There are people also on that narrow line. 

It doesn’t matter what I am not. What I am not is also infinite. I love the idea of being a generalist, a know it all, a curious renaissance man or polymath, drilling down immersively also appeals.  

I’ve kept one foot in familiar, compensated. I was the peacemaker, negotiator, translator, who was bridging worlds. I don’t need to be a runner, messenger on the bridge. I don’t need to shield people, make myself available as a piggy bank for other people’s secrets. I don’t need to use up my slack for people who are thrashing. I don’t need to affirm everyone and sooth and mute myself to not make waves. That may seem radical and selfish. That may seem to bear no relation to how I seem. I have spent a lot of time trying to justify my existence by helping and pleasing others, trying to be found acceptable by people who would use anyone convenient. 

I don’t have a lot of life left even in best case scenario. Maybe a third if I’m lucky. 

Being drawn by glimmers, by quiet yesses instead of being hampered and hammered by crowd of hectoring internalized voices condemning is a new idea. What if I could say, shush you, and be led by what lights me up. 

Btw, there are updates to upcoming readings, and a new haiku section on website.

Also, maybe phafours press is coming back small, micro-books of object poems. Then more trad, maybe come fall?

A few in mussels, a few in jars, a few unfolding from birch bark backed with felt. Finding the fun of playing again…extending the series made from last fall from this small singing.

See more at instagram.

If I let myself talk I only depress myself. Maybe that’s why I like to wear another person’s mind through reading. Training a posture. A break from self.

There are so many books I want to finish writing but the inner heckler is revved up and I’m getting tired of the fight against rotten fruit and veggies. I have contempt for most of what I’ve written. I know that’s just a brain fritz effect not objectiveness. And I know I can edit each much more but when? I get a few hours of function against the backlog before I crash into another headache and/or brain fog.

At last at least it is teaching me to be selective about what I do. With a good side dose of can’t give a flying duck.

What matters more, process or product in poetry? People. People being heard, people hearing. The community outweighs poetry. Both are ephemeral.

Going though old photos it becomes more and more albums of the dead. It gives a certain wight to the logic of writing sci-fi, eyes faced ahead.

Summer Girl haiku journal returns soon.

Han VanderHart is on substack.

Anne Michaels has a blog which I’m trying very hard not to lose track of.

The Bee will be a new journal in Wales dedicated to the working class who are under-represented in publishing.

The Pontiac Journal article on Poetry in the Pontiac with my reading in a bar and grill is up.

I have another reading within a week and probably 2 more in June. This chapbook is getting more air time than some books did.

What do to next?

Always hemmed in with the priorities vs brain bouncing like a rubber ball.

I miss the obsessive focus capacities of my thirties when I could just flat out work for 30 to 40 hours straight and sleep when I was done.

What I want to do is in part watch the few DVDs I have stored up, and watch a few shows for a week, and read a thick ole novel cover to cover while someone drops food into my mouth periodically. (Any volunteers?)

I have to set new rules for myself of what and who I allow in. Energy drains were fine when I had the luxury of more leeway. This isn’t a subtweet at anyone in particular. My time is reshuffled since my regular volunteer place is closed for renovations. I have 3 weeks with this extra longer-blocks of time. It makes me question my best practice of time use.

How do people keep their lives running? I’m swamped. Finding clothes in the morning uses all the neurons some days. Drinking a cup of tea in one go? Try four tries over a day or two. Finding the book which I know I own, but what Pooh-Bear did you do with it? Mercy me. And the instructions for my embroidery. Gone like the wind.

Parts keep breaking, which doesn’t help. The washing machine is toast. The DVD drive died. The kitchen counter needs replacing. Need to get around to buying new sheets and bras. Incidentally wikipedia on bras vindicated my 14-year-old self who told the fitter that my cup goes up and down by a size over the month. She cod-eyed me and rolled her eyes and said that’s not a thing. Ha! 20% change for some people over a month.

The garden gives cheer. Our pear tree is blossoming for the first year. I think it’s 5 years old. Our garden yielded asparagus. I’ve got book mail headed my way. Some tokens for the glad game. There is chocolate in the house. I get to see people I like soon. Unfortunately it means going by car. However I don’t squeal and turn rigour mortis on braking and turning like I did for a few years. It’s still disproportionately tiring to expect death more particualrly than everyday rate.

A photo taken outside shows my hair had the audacity to go silver grey. Not a bit, entirely. I visited my aunt whose hair is brown. Dyed but still. She walks fluidly and here I am creaking, stumbling and groaning. Bah.

The siding which we just repainted last year is peeling again and the deck boards, under 7 years old have gone punky in places. Give me a whackload of money and I’ll hire people to replace it all with stone siding that won’t peel and rot.

So much takes so much concentration to do so little. I fixed my glasses. I made a sign for the fair, with hinges so it stands up as I’ve been meaning to do for a decade. I finally made a haiku section for the website but can find no digital trace of the trifold I had published. When to even look? Things I just did are apparently 6 years ago. I finish some books but others I’ve been poking away at for 2 or 3 years, including time mislaid and set aside.

Enough grousing yes?

First Frost awards. Good haiku there.

Visual echoes in storytelling: motif, colour, composition. Using patterns and rhythms, repeating elements for harmony.

And in case you missed it, an unboxing of my chapbook.

Life is kind. I’m living in the best place I ever have for landscape, for neighbours, and am in a good place. My body hating me, giving me light-headedness and anxiety is frustrating. I’m able to catch myself earlier than ever. But still worry is a time-suck and energy suck. It means it’s hard to eat and hard to sleep and hard to key into tasks. I know when I’m peak I can slap though weeks of work for a day or two. But I’m not there. I’m in the sloggy boggy bit where everything is hard. Anyway. Lunch time calls. Did you know clock comes from bell?

As I mentioned in an earlier there was an annual National Poetry Month in the Pontiac event in Shawville, population 1600. Fun fact, unlike most municipalities in Quebec, it has no Catholic church. This is an area I’ve been researching for family history and I learned that thanks to a person in charge of handing out land grants who felt the way of peace was to keep Protestants and Catholics sequestered, no Catholics were allowed under his watch. And it held and holds for a couple hundred years. Anyhew,

Hursty’s at 368 Main Street was the venue this year but each year a different area of the municipality hosts. It was a friendly sports bar sort of spot. Look at the pure sky night from the parking lot.

We had room for chatting before the event kicked off. All kinds of craft chat. That was nice.That doesn’t happen organically over email the same.

Since then I posted a poem over at Patreon. (Is it annoying to come to one social to be sent off to another link? I swear I’m not handing you your hat. You can go to that link after.) I like giving poems a dry run. Ideally, share a poem with test reader, then a group, then submit individually to a journal, then to a chapbook, then to a book, then to a selected works in a few decades. Some poems skip a bunch of interim steps. Some rooms like this one invited that sort of thing.

I’ve been in rooms for readings with crossed arms and cross faces with a g’wan-impress-me-I-dare-you attitude. Those are daunting. There was none of that here. Mellow and breeze-shooting.

Cheryl, Tom and Earleen and people at another table of the 6. Dale Shutt, local artist, was in attendance as well (pictured below)

There was an open mic with host/organizer Jennifer Mulligan reading as well as Tom McCann and Earleen.

Tom McCann read several poems including some fab lines. I wasn’t there to make an archive of it, but my nature prevails. One of his poems considered what is worthwhile and what gives value to a life lived in the context of talking to an older man, asking himself, “could I plan a more heroic end than melting in a wheelchair?”

Earleen Devine (sp?) has some striking poems about her husband, with insightful turn of phrase about aging, “our bodies are designed to rot”. (It’s a feature.) She also wrote of “that vaulted space of sorrow.” Andy the time Jennifer read I was too keyed up to focus.

In the unusual position of not being on a tour, to tout a particular title, I could read anything so I did a scattershot of 10 years of titles, surreal to family history to haiku. To my surprise, the haiku sold best. We have the idea that only the tiniest sliver of a niche that is poetry of the niche that is creative writing would like haiku but there you go.

A group photo of the readers.

For more or for different, check out the next Pontiac Journal.

Hey all,

Sit tight. It’s going to a longer one.

I used to do it a lot of testing out poems at reading series around Ottawa before the Great Crash of the Year I was Dead, and moved out of the province. I used to get out a couple to a few night a week year round. There was such a bubblebath of options. Unless you wanted a series at 8am, you were probably in luck.

The spoken word scene was packing rooms, halls, auditoriums with hundreds. John Akpata said he performed to 1200 in Ottawa back then.

It was a thing for a poet to pull in 60 or 80 people, sometimes more. Sometimes only a dozen but it’s the reaching a person, not the bums in seats that matter, well, except for funding applications.

The thing is every good thing runs on volunteers and volunteers wear out, get jobs, get sick, die, move on and planned succession doesn’t always get the torch across the river of time. And some trends pop like bubbles. A lot of reading series have folded and crowds shrunk.

Some events still are mercifully on zoom that makes for wider access. Facebook may be less functional for reach about events but still works to a degree.

Even having said that much, I don’t understand how people post weekly or more with salient things to say. (Or not in the case of a couple newsletters I unsubscribed from, not.) Even the energy to put a sentence together that’s clear can be taxing. (Boy, am I complaintsy today.)

What I came here about was to reflect on National Poetry Month more broadly.

I set myself the challenge of poems that stayed with me over at bluesky. With walls of books, there must be some I’d want to write on the interior ineffaceably. There must be among them pivots I treasure, moments that made me. Not promoting what’s new and cool but personal chestnuts of what others gave to the culture. When that challenge was over, I kept on more #NPM sharings. The account was originally for not-poetry but since I deleted twitter’s remains, I let poetry out over there too.

It seems I’m not exempt from the profundity hook. Meaning and significance is becoming more important to me again. Whatever could that mean?

Next I’ll write of the last reading I did then I might fall silent until the flip side of the next later-May event.

I’m thinking for fall I may restart phafours press from hiatus. So maybe a chapbook or two coming out for November.