A research group compiled the 1000 most popular titles owned by libraries worldwide. LibraryThing lists books that are in the zeitgeist. Traditionally I’ve considered that if something is popular it’s safely covered and will be carried into the future. I can expend my energies on other things.
So the next chunk of the 95Books endeavour were reading these:
Blue Light In the Dash by Brenda Brooks (Polestar, 1994) [pangy]
Some books I pick away at for months, some can be whipped through in a day or two. It seems likely I’ll make it to 95 books in the year at this point. But then anyone can die tomorrow, or similar hazards or spun-luck.
As a civilian – as opposed to those on the organizing committee or the reading series organizers – I sometimes feel as if festivals were built for me. Given the room of 30-80, or so, for each event, evidently it fit with more people than me for audience.
JM Francheteau watching the show and Monty Reid laughing during VERSeFest.
Saturday night ended with a double-header: Magpie Ulysses and RC Weslowski. If you’re on FB you might have seen my first response: “If I had wifi and sway or access to transporters y’all would have seen the 9pm versefest. Egad. Tingles until chills and laughed until ab workout.”
Other readings had given me tingles and made me laugh or set me back on my heels to give something a think.
A few other people raved at how this was the event to not miss, although, one can never know that in advance. Something about the people in the room resonate to complete the any performance.
Still, this one was utterly professional in form and content and presentation to a thunderous degree. Part of the effect was how both moved thru their set list in a curve that rode the energy of the room and directed it. It wasn’t jolting as here’s a poem sampler. Here’s a disconnected sample poem. The attention wasn’t choppy. It went more in waves so even though it was the same amount of time as other readings, it rolled better.
How much is that is being exactly the meal I wanted when I wanted it? Some, but not all.
Magpie Ulysses after Kevin Matthew’s intro.
Part of what struck me was the compassion in the poems of Magpie Ulysses and RC Weslowski. Instead of the saying people mistreating people is a problem, or thumbing noses at things that make us uncomfortable or being self-depreating about our own insecurities, the invitations were often to dig a little deeper at what’s going on, the complexities. There was a different point of view that prevailed as well, relating stories of encounters not just story of self as lead.
Part of the impressed was their entrance playing with the 4th wall before even being introduced, hiding behind the signs on stage and making shadow puppets and waving. They framed themselves as ones who would amuse and use the whole space, not only the spotlight where they shoes are to be tied to the mic base. Magpie Ulysses
She was on hand with her third chapbook, Strangler Fig with a scrum of signature-getters at the end. (Take my word for it. I forgot to photograph it.) From p. 9, Reckoning Winter” which she read,
What I wouldn’t give
to waste a Sunday with you.
Preach in your housecoat,
pray to your soft musculature,
sing hymnals to your tibia and fibula.
Because, yes we are made of bones,
but we are not merely skeletons looking for meat.
No, we are shadows and muscles seeking joy
to fill the undefined watery spaces that can become
cataracts and cancers
all too quickly.
As gorgeous and glowing as that it, and as much as it could stand alone, it’s within a 3 page poem that complicates the territory of subject, includes a faded type-written letter on an angle in its body of an eviction notice of evicting sofa surfers who overstayed, and/or the figurative equivalents in her life. And it swoops thru what an earlier stanza calls boy crazy needs
And you look good to me.
Like you look a bit older,
like I feel a bit shorter,
like I am already sinking in an oversized couch with my
bra coming off and onto the hardwood
with a twist of two fingers.
Like you look a little too un-tampered with,
and I kinda want to tamper with that shit.
I like it’s energy and its contained uncontainability.
She does some surprising things with metaphor, like a poem where she says we are all tied to the bedpost of post-modernism. She also has poems for social conscious such as one in which she says, There is carbon in the sky.
Breathe in.
Can you taste the old growth forests as they burn?
Many of her poems of the night were from her project of hitchhiking 25,000 km and the people she encounters. Except for one woman, everyone who picked her up on the road in the were men. One guy who picked her up said the house was hers since there was no more use waiting for his woman to come home again. Her eye for telling detail showed in that poem where by the waterbed there was “The Joy of Sex with her name inside the cover as if it were meant to be lent out and returned.”
In a few poems she’s relating the glimpses of stories, a mom and kid on the way for their chemo treatments, to being in North Alberta and the only ride coming past smells high of pot and the occupants of the truck look dodgy but it’s the only ride going and the stories unfolding over the miles. In a striking poem that I can’t bring back to mind, she accumulates a pile of all our diversity and ends asking, who are we to judge the paths when half of us are on our way to dying of cancer? (That would be one of the chilling moments.) RC Weslowski on March 16th who declared “there’s no place like homelessness”.
Part of the color-me-impressed was R.C.’s presence in the room once he stepped on stage. Or rather, once he didn’t step on stage. He didn’t use the mic at all but could project his voice to fill a room as he roved around it, moving chairs and going down the aisle and engaging with individuals, all without losing the pace of his content.
He owned the room and attention and kept it. And as a civilian audience member he’s invisible, unlike some authors at events who gain attention when not on stage as well. When he snapped on, he was on.
There was a humour and good-humouredness but a sharp wit as well. Some of it was in the terrain of stand-up with pope tweets where the audience was asked to call out “pope tweet” to ask for the next. He said, this is the part where you may be offended. And that’s okay. It’s not going to stop me, but that’s okay. In another poem Floyd Jones the profanity of the miner catches the flavour and something of affection for the characters encountered.
There wasn’t a heavy-handedness in presumed answer but left more open-ended in some cases that suggested a humbleness of here’s the data, but not always a therefore; a gathering and presenting details without an implied one possible response. Except when the thrust of the message was let’s rebuild it all, but better. burn your residential school to the ground. Or a piece about the oil sands. Even if he does love poetry, it isn’t the same-same trajectory. Where else have you heard, “Our love is just a used condom in a dead unicorn.” (I may have popped a rib at that point from laughing.)
They were narrative with a story arc, word play, sound and rhythm, bow to the detail and a curtsey to the profound rather than exclusively language in language, although on that count he did poems which fell into sound and coined words rather than an anecdote model of poem like Ev Ree Bawdy Haz a Sownd and Beauty Ba Bo
With eye on theatre on performance that’s between theatre and sound poetry.
And someone thinks you’re delicious. It is quirky, silly, funny and uplifting.
How can a poet stand in front of the work you have to look around the poet to see the words? What would that look like? If one is not present and reliving the words in performance, the body language mismatches the content and isn’t convincing. If the poems are about one emotional state but the voice is another, it muddles the poem. The poem on the page doesn’t have that distraction. It is in a more original state than the reproduction in person before an audience. Can the words on the page be fully disembodied or is the body always there in the rhythm and breath?
A conversation circle at VERSeFest with RC Weslowski, Rusty Priske, and Ruthanne Edward.
The advantage of a festival is going to everything because you don’t know what you don’t know. Some poets have no digital footprint or are in a different literary ecosystem that isn’t liable to cross paths with your usual path. Rita Ann Higgins began to write poetry in the 70s after being hospitalized with tuberculosis and the bout with words far outlasted her bedsit, luckily for her and the rest of us. The book table brought her Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011).
Unfortunately the sweet lady couldn’t stick around for the whole festival as she had a prior engagement to read for the President of Ireland on Sunday.
She did get to meet and greet for a bit with the poets from near and far, including a pub where she met a sign with the cultural impasse that she could win a Moosehead fridge. Whatever could that be? She started her reading with a poem centred around a different fridge.
Some of the poems had a sense of being inside a shallow depth of field, a kitchen diorama where you are face-to-face with a close-knit village community who gossip and urge you to wash your face and watch your language, hold pride in the altar boys, or fret on the boys who drag race cars. “He pities me for writing poems in coffee shops that no one reads […] but I pitied him first.”
There’s a sort of local history and neighbourly comedy running through, an offering and a twist in timing on what you expect from the anecdotes, such as one where she described what an indulgence it is to have a good neighbour who (and perhaps I paraphrase) knows every detail about you, and likes you anyway. they like me more than I like myself…and I don’t like me at all. Snippets from her New & Selected give a critical social eye here has God-of-the-Hatch-man, about the social workers who promise to give migraine, his grain…and was the subject of her play 20 years ago.
She uses a lot of conversational tone, although bridges to what’s past that. You can hear her here read The Immortals about the boy racers as they convert from the boys you know to transcend their everyday to becoming gods, in temporary or permanent leave of mortality. Matthew Sweeney also popped over from Ireland for the festival, and a couple other stops, including Concordia.
He started out introducing his curmudgeonity, with a sonnet after prefacing it by saying it a Rubik’s cube from hell and how he tried to redirect people to do sestina’s instead.
I’m afraid I then got lost in his vowels as his diphtongs and flow, his a and o took me through a portal to the 80s minister of my church.
His poems have some themes running thru, dogs, crows, cats and rats, ghosts, magic and ancestors and those abandoned decaying places in history.
In my scratch of notes, what had he said? “You have to lie your way to the truth”. [But so plausibly it could have been You have to live your way to the truth, or love your way.] As Ayelet Tsabari said, “the process of writing nonfiction is an act of fictionalizing”. Sweeney elaborated, if you try to go a straight autobiographical path, you’ll never get there, so here is a story like my father would have told, although he never told this one. I believe that was the preface to In the Garden about a cow rescue, my favourite of his poems of the night. (At that link you can hear him read, and see the text.)
He pronounced that poetry is a battlefield and we fight for what will remain. He indicted an overblown book review that said the book in question contained the best poem the reviewer had read in 20 years that Sweeney declared exciting as dishwater. He read a poem that is rebuttal to it, which is soon to come out in The Irish Times.
He has travelled around, lived for extended stays in various countries. He read poems from his sojourn in Romania. An image in time lapse that struck him from there was an abandoned car: Every time I went past the car, there was less there. It was like how ants got rid of a mouse.
A lovely economy of words and comparison.
The Irish poets in the break before an earlier event.
Evan Thornton in a conversational circle.
John Maeda said, As we both have an arts background, the word “integrity” has special meaning. She said resolutely, “Integrity equals consistency.”
Ah, interesting odd tidbit.
Internal consistency is my nemesis. Consistency, aka “voice” – those subjects, attitudes, moods, syntax, lineations, cleverness ratio, densities, language register – which some aspire to, to make it seem like one knows what one is doing because one is making a reliable caricature, a personal brand, a polished set that looks intentional because it has one feel to it. This could add up to a whole, easily balanced to the idea that everything one makes adds towards a life poem.
I disprefer the everything agreeing. I like things to jangle and not pretend there is ever one thing, one monolithic prevailing mood, subject or object. It is a blinkeredness that I find unsettling, hazardous, oppressive. If one is to arbitrarily pick a set of things and make everything reconcile or relate to those things, one is ignoring or resisting all else. Why does that bother me so. I like a simple pattern. I like it interrupted better. Some wabi sabi to acknowledge that the sample of similar has an error.
Knowing my penchant for this, I work against it as well to make a set that is smooth, playing make-believe that there can be one led-by-the-nose-narrative-arc that isn’t so wed to random and mismatched elements. If I only make uneven then it is as false as to only make pretty.
I like the swatch more than the overall. Consistency in practice makes me fear for the well-being of the maker to keep oneself in a small box without resolving past it. Even if the box is of bliss, it is a box. Even if it is a large box, the corners are too predictable and square.
Even if it hard to do the box well and one could do it for a lifetime without attaining perfection…maybe I’m just claustrophobic. Or a.d.d. Or untrusting of being pinned within something and missing out on other things. But if one is speculatively surveying other options, one loses the richness at hand, can’t invest in delving and those rewards. Hm, nope, still haven’t convinced myself.
Maybe my trip is that if you are doing what logically follows, you are doing what you should. To be disciplined or specialized in such a way, you omit messy unfitting bits. I value the unfitting bits but it’s a complementary relationship. You can’t have bits that don’t fit unless you have a straight man for its comedy or contrast to give each part significance.
In Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry: Essays by Jane Hirschfield, on p. 45, she said
Syntax and form are also worldview; a poem’s perception and its linguistic surface are inseparably fused If they are not the poem’s possible discoveries will be squandered, falling into either mannered or incoherence.
I don’t think that that is the necessary outcome. Perhaps tho, the off-note will ring, same as any time one writes about control in blank verse or about randomness in a rhymed lipogram. But tension between the worldviews gives some animation. Who has one worldview, one role in life? Isn’t keeping parallel systems that rise in context more common as we adapt to the zeitgeist of each scene? Some people are integrated more, some echo more but both seem a hemming towards rather than the natural free flow.
A sweet aspect of VERSeFest is the inclusivity, bringing into the fold, out from the cold, all ranges of poetry from those who do micro press to M&S, from story-oriented to language oriented, from overseas to domestic, and various lineages besides, such as various Eastern forms. KaDo is a group that’s been meeting quarterly for 13 years. It looks at the forms and schools of thought of aesthetics of what took its origins from Asia but has new transplanted roots in Canada, U.S., and England.
Claudia welcomed people to the event at Mercury Lounge (and its wacky wild coloured gel lights and red curtains. Photos here were taken by Luminita Suse).
The feature reader for the March 17th event was LeRoy Gorman. He’s the as the 16th honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento. This is for for all the decades he put into attention to haiku and related forms.
His poems have been in print since 1976. He’s a publisher, and a little left of traditional. (Sometime in summer my interview of him will be coming out in an online magazine. I’ll let you know.) A lot of his poetry is visual (mostly minimalist and haiku, or haiku-like) and plays within the folds of the material of language. For example, from Frogpond 32:2, Spring/Summer 2009
at the end of the rainbowat
Some of the poems LeRoy read at VERSeFest for those who missed it:
walking by the Oscar Peterson
not so cold
in Ottawa anymore
*
sex on Mars
everything
is longer
*
a tsunami in Asia
raises Ottawa one half inch
before it returns to normal
how easy it is
to lift a city above its politics
*
the drone
of a city going home
fills the hour
you move
from coma to death
By a vote people in KaDo nominated who else would get a spotlight.
The other readers included Luminita Suse who read her gentle but startlingly lovely tanka. She has a book of tanka, A Thousand Fireflies out last year, and a lengthening list of credits. Here’s one of hers:
I search in vain
for a trace of green
under the snow
some things remain
buried in the past
Mike Montreuil (writer, publisher of Éditions des petits nuages) read a series of haibun, the Japanese form that contains prose sections as well as haiku. His prose and haiku tend to be grounded in urban, gritty, every day, with topics more likely to be about hockey practice and high heels at the bus stop, than pines and weevils. Guy Simser read a form similar to haibun, but one that incorporates tanka and longer poems. (There are a lot of poems of his readings at that link.)
Lastly but definitely not leastly, and Grant Savage read his haiku and histanka. He’s also in Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North America. A poem of his from the day was this:
moon traces the budding hills
and valleys of her sleep
the flutter of dreams
flying with the northbound geese
winged by my touch
It takes a community to build a blog post so thanks to KaDo members for sending parts.
