pesbo blog – Page 153

Links Roundup

Awesome entry point to National Poetry Month with a beautiful piece by Gary Barwin.
Carol has rounded up a bunch of prompts if you want to push yourself to do a poem a day for April.
It’s International Pwoermd Writing Month too.
Here’s an issue on erasure.
An article from early March on Patheos on Muslim women in poetry [web cache link] features two Ottawa poets Hodan Ibrahim and Sarah Musa of Urban Legends. Hodan says

Things changed in 2010 when Urban Legends (UL), a new slam series, was launched. “Its founders are Muslim, Black, minorities, and they presented an alternative,” she says. The most notable feature of UL, which distinguished it from the other leading poetry collective, is that it is not hosted in a bar. Hodan adds that the identity of its founders played a role in creating a welcoming space for Muslims and other marginalized groups.

My photo of Hodan from 2011 runs in the story.
Anastasia Filippova, Hodan Ibrahim and Sarah Musa

agreed that as an under-represented group, it was up to them to create their own spaces. “If there’s anything that I’ve learned,” says Sarah, “it is that that no one will create venues for you. You will have to create them yourself.”

Brenda Schmidt has been interviewed about Flight Calls here. Excerpt:

The epigraphs were a constraint. A foundation of sound. There was no escaping them. With the epigraphs in hand, I came up with ten titles and ten ideas for essays and went from there. Each day before I began work on an essay I’d read the epigraph aloud and that was that.

Can I love CanLitCat more? Apparently. CLC had a paw in creating Writer’s Trust Social Media Award.
Kevin Spenst has a poem for Leaf Press’ Monday poem. Love that penultimate line.
4 aesthetic attitudes in poetry by Christian Bök.
Reduplicatives.
And this amused me: Language register.

VERSeFest: Dutch Showcase

And back to the VERSeFest stage. Anita Dolman reading her poems. One of these was around the legacy of the past. For example, shoes that will never fit due to childhood war and being bound into too small shoes. The misshapen small-toe-details will never fit the post-war world.
above/ground had a new chapbook which was launched as part of the event: Two Dutch Poets: Hélène Gelèns and Erik Lindner, translated by Anita Dolman.

David O’Meara and Erik Lindner alternated reading in English and in Dutch.
I’d hoped we’d get to hear poetry in other languages again. How to present it, solely in another language or both, the original first, or first for sound and second for meaning. I’d rather hear the sound and intonation first. Or exclusively. I suppose tho, the mind would tire of floating to not get any semantic except what breaks through as similar words.

In one poem there was a different painterly quality, more El Greco crossed with Emily Carr (is that shelter or claustrophobia?) when he read “a man eats an apple in the park and the trees crowd around.”
His landscape is pastoral, rivers and pastures and edges of peopled areas populated by docks and rivers, horses and statues. In one poem he asked, What is it to be male? To scape a blade against an unshaven throat.. The violence that starts in the thought turns to cleanliness at the last moment.
From Island‘s last third, a dream sequence of images,

Say thank you, damn it, and please
and every friendly request, friendly.
I came calling, pounded on the door
and shouted her name repeated,y.
Then by the window appears a
woman.
My mother.
She says: I am your mother.
Do not dwell, all ships that have been burned.

And memories of a mother alive again in dream, as mothers have a habit of doing. Still, in Island as translated by Dolman, it ends well. Onwards then.

For one piece she read for two voices, literally high and low text.
You can hear her poem for the clock/klok:

Here reading from zet af en zweef (the book turnoff and float, according to Google translations). It is more about tension to existential binds, things that don’t add up, and refusing to fudge to make them neatly tally. It is a trick to allow chaos to run with control without leashing randomness so that it loses its personality.
In one she micro-studies the act of walking, as if in a meditation slow walking, watching her feet, mid-floor and tumble of thoughts. are you afraid to look? realize what you are trying and you are trying to trust? The thoughts are fragmentary and yet more pointillism than without point.
There’s a sample poem you can see here by Hélène Gelèns. The way the language zigzags reminds me of Merz. Here’s a bit of hers:

do we storm onto the square? do we wave our arms wildly?
we scream away! away from the tree! we point upwards
glass! we chase the businessman zigzag zigzag away
a cyclist a stray kid a map-reading couple away!
beer-drinker caller tourist away! we bump we shove
we drag the guffawing teen zigzagzigzag away
shall we keep doing what we’re doing? formulating arguments
shall we look for support in lines within our sight

If it didn’t once she said “do we storm onto the square?” I’d stll have gone to the “man just standing there” in the square of Schwitters. Google books has the full text (in Kurt Schwitters: A Portrait from Life) of Causes and Outbreak of the Great and Glorious Revolution in Revon, one of my favorite pieces.
AB Series is having Colin Morton as a feature April 3, who wrote the Merzbook. April 3-5 the GCTC is putting on MERZ, the one man performance of Kurt Schwitters‘ sound poetry that we we saw a few years ago. They have posted the Sneeze poem, (although it loses something by being called out in isolation since inside the performance it walks a grey area where you’re not sure if its performance or performance interrupted). Go if you can. It’s a poetry show that still comes into my everyday 6 years later.

VERSeFest: Plan 99 Presents

Barbara Langhorst, Stephen Price and Susan Glickman read at VERSeFest March 16th under the exotic dazzle of purple gel lights.
Barbara Langhorst is considered in the experimental poetry camp. In her preamble she admitted that she used to about goth subjects like dead animals and didn’t key into what they wanted to say. They pointed to wanting to address the murder-suicide of her parents 20 years ago. She was working her way there.
It takes a while to progress. It’s a body’s best defence to turn away while first healing starts. As Samuel Johnson put it, “While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must
wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.” Or in the poet’s vein, cut and remix with dead horses, kittens and ancestors of the Franklin expedition. But eventually grief runs its course, if permitted. Although some poets can fossilize and specialize in a stasis of it.
There is such intimacy with a body in pain, she remarked. She did a poem dedicated to her rheumatoid arthritis, which she has had since her teens. With erosion in every socket, she prefers to think of it as “eros ion” in every socket.
Her poems were generally marked by melancholy and regrets and coming to reconcile what might have been with what is. “I know I am guilty of many dead mice and rats” and “I will never be as I planned it”.
I noticed a couple starry-eyed young women clutching her book through the reading and one going fangirl and breathless at the signature.
For some reason I have merged in my head Stephen Price with Stephen Collis (who’s coming to A B Series with Margaret Christakos this month but I think I’ll be able to keep them separate them now.
With a carrying over of the spirit of jousting from the discussion of the previous event, he was introduced as one who had also engaged in the inferior art of fiction.
He had a poem about a road-killed racoon “a purse of fur”. He quipped that whenever he’s at risk for writing happy poems, he can go back to the touchstone of dead animals. He also liked the romance of grittiness, the pairing of pretty and pessimistic grim, such a poem where he said all things that live have hives of darkness inside them.
He seemed like a nice enough fellow. He recounted with part of his time the most entertaining part of the timeslot, a preface on the lifelong relationship between Gerald Manley Hopkins and his, eventual poet laureate, friend, Robert Bridges. He felt he was a poet 50 years before his time. Gaudi did with space what Hopkins did with time and sound. I have a book of Hopkins and I dabble into it due to a friend who’s a fan of him. Maybe I have to try again to see the electricity arc in it. Here’s a Hopkins’ close-read.
Susan Glickman and The Smooth Yarrow has a conversational tone in places, such as the poem of Homeopathic Remedies for Scar Tissue where she has a cheeky conversation with well-intended misguided advice, [p. 22]

Tie a handful of crushed mint leaves in a piece of muslin to extract their juice. Rub the cloth all over your scars. You may be wounded, but don’t you smell fresh!

As we know well-placed snark does a world of refreshing sometimes.
Although the book is also about grief and its toxins, she keeps a more irregular and irreverant distance from it. The poems are not without skin and allow themselves to unpin themselves, move and move again.
One of my favorite poems in the book is Things From Which One Never Recovers which is a list poem that shifts weight continually over its length from

The girl on the high school basketball team who said
You have the biggest ass I’ve ever seen
the taste of cod-liver oil in a spoonful of molasses
administered by a schoolfriend’s proper British mother
as a prophylactic against obsolete diseases

The clipped tone that moves sternly merrily on, saying and leaving it to the reader to understand rather than spend time jawing it all out further to the nth degree is nice. And the cadence is terribly tasty. As it is later in the poem that doesn’t grow old,

a contemptuous review that gets everything wrong in elegant language
like a sadist with impeccable manners
the entrenched injustice of the world that renders one’s own problems
too trivial to mention
that there are different kinds of shoes for every sport
but only one pair for arthritic feet.

It’s a dark humour but it lines up well with my own.

David was at the back with a mini version of the bookstore.
Plan 99 now has a site. Their next event is Saturday, April 27th: Fiction Cabaret with Tamas Dobozy & Elisabeth de Mariaffi.

Best Thought

Among responses to John Cage Zac Pennington “I stumbled into Cage first in confusion and misunderstanding, and then in rock books that stated his monolithic influence, all well before I’d ever actually heard any of his work. And when I finally did, I hated it– a distinction Cage shares with just about anything that’s ever had any lasting importance in my life.”
That which comes naturally is suspect, sometimes. Sometimes it is a clicking into place of all that has come before in a new form. More often, first thought is the prejudice, the unexamined regurgitation or blind resistance. What doesn’t come with open hands might have more in it.

Micro Press

Do you make ephemera? Have you ever made chapbooks in Canada? Ever wonder what the bigger picture is? Be a puzzle piece that speaks and answer a few questions for a PhD survey on Canadian small & micropress. It needs your info asap. You might get a lollypop but you’ll have to negotiate such higher rewards with him.