The Great Black North Anthology, Susan Glickman’s, Ken Babstock’s…

Anita Lahey’s. Rita Ann Higgins’

Bunches and bunches, McKay, Owen, Ross

Mortiz, McNair, Ross

Simpson, Ross, Winger

The 7pm was sponsored by Voice of Venus. The features were: Luna Allison and Lady Katalyst.

Luna Allison I’ve heard 3 times this year but each time is different, even when the set list has some overlaps.
Part of that is the energy in the room, intimate room vs. cavernous space, small group vs crowded, buzzing crowd vs. just try to impress me, I dare you sort of facial sea, familiar fans vs. whoever happens to come as curious of whatever the series puts on, as well as the energy of the night, what the group mind chemistry resonates with for whatever mysterious reasons. It all changes the loop of communication and performance.
In this case, there was also the change of elements of Luna being accompanied by Glenn Nuotio so the poems I’d heard spoken or spoken word style were presented with jazz keyboard and more sung. It changes the tone and makes different elements pop out. Her crystal voices was one of the things that popped.
She did her piece, I don’t date to domesticate which is sarcastic of the nest-making of “hovering and hoovering” where the model of couple is idealized as a permanent structure “carbon date love to prove its worth. wow, 25 years. we must be really good people”. She urged the point that short-lived relationships are also valid and valuable. Holding on past the best-before date doesn’t necessarily benefit anyone.
“I want enough space to feel we both have edges”, a relationship with openly communications on boundaries and respected permissions – “no break and enter, no combination lock, just knock”.
In another poem “Purify” she brings people into the experience of a sweat lodge arranged by a Dakota woman for a healing circle for 21 queer women and the power of support in that space. One woman wanted to run, from the scary mental space of “snot and sweat and tears” but “a friend wraps her arms around her to give her the weight to stay” and deal.

She got applause, asked for applause for Glenn then someone from the audience called, and applause for his socks. Which are rocking socks.

Everyone has an off night. In Lady Katalyst’s case she was improvising her set list and doing it a cappella against her habit, because of some logistics difficulties. Good on her for going ahead anyway. She spoke intros off the cuff.
Because she felt she had to respond to being in a church with something to push out and give herself mental space, she started out with two poems about dicks. One was in favour of large dicks and ridiculing smaller ones. The other poem was about how she is owed oral sex regardless of how her partner feels about it and she is a martyr for giving oral sex regardless of how she feels about it. “My jaw hurts babe” understood as no but being dismissed, overridden and coercing for sex against that no is harassment and rape even if you are woman. If I were one to shout out advice to a poet on stage, and I nearly did, I would call out buy a vibrator.
The audience didn’t give the response she expected so she asked people to call back the words she felt they were shy about: dick, pussy, penis, vagina. Some obliged. There was a smatter of laughter at her poem of sexual frustration.
Comes to mind…”We are getting nowhere…It is not irritating to be where one is. it is only irritating to think you would rather be somewhere where you are not.” John Cage’s Lecture on Silence.
Lady Katalyst was incensed at men for not showing up. Why are there mostly women here?! she demanded. Naturally my response was to do what I often do in a crowd in any case: head count. 24 presenting as female, 21 presenting as males, and 2 who were ambiguous.
Data doesn’t interpret itself. Unless you mean Lt. Commander Data. We all spin what we see based on what we’ve seen, are continually making ourselves and each other by our presences and our absences.
She stated that misogyny exists. Women know it, she said. If she could ask all the women to step out of the room for a smoke, she’d talk to the men about it but they would probably only listen to other men anyway.
Ah, where to begin? Let it go is one option. Our philosophy is the same, hers and mine. There’s a problem of inequity. There’s a problem of arbitrary gender boundaries. There’s a problem of lack of dialogue.
Misogyny doesn’t descend from some male monolithic conspiracy. If we say the word, it doesn’t dissolve. Our unconscious patterning is slippery, hard to pin down motivational structures. We can attribute what becomes the aggregate pattern for immediate causes. Do women run in circles of money and power less proportionally because of daycare or pregnancy or because they are shut out of social with men and turned down in small ways?
It’s not a male problem. Women are not a helpless hapless collective innocent. It’s a human thing. Women also reenforce patterns, enforce and support the same systems as men do. Women are not part of a binary, nor are men but part of a diverse, not even continuum of gender but a 3-D range of expressing.
She said the subject upsets her so much she could vomit for an hour. She dropped a poem about a man abusing wife and kids as example of misogyny. Again, that simplifies. Spousal abuse is abuse. Does it stem from woman perceived as weaker or bully reacting from many causes? That’s much larger dialogue than a one poem.
She asked her audience who had ever been to Africa? Who had ever heard of Africville? She urged the audience to do as she does and do something each day to dismantle white entitlement and education ourselves.

Her last poem had a bridge of “How have the many been tricked into thinking they are the few?”
This brought to mind the infographic video that has been going around about how wealth is distributed proportionally. Middle class is poorer and the poorest are far poorer than we expect.
Getting out of the usual box of daily to engage what is going on outside our individual lives is the effect communicating of any kind risks.

With 6 poets reading, by the next day, the first poet of the night is a week or two of information ago.
When on the weekend that goes up to 9 or so over 10 hours,…hm, should be interesting to wrangle. Some people come for one event each day, some for all. There’s many ways to approach anything that work.
Some poets have a small set repeated often. Some, a large set rarely repeated. What works best? If something’s not worth repeating is it worth saying the first time? What does an audience want? With music some people listen on frequent rotation.
Some pieces deepen with repetition with more layers to grasp, such as Tredinnick was saying in reference to his poem dedicated to his wife about Jacaranda blossoms as fallen soldiers. He himself doesn’t quite get what he’s saying and each poem had at least 6 layers and the writer may only get access to one but each reading brings something else up.
Other poems are blunt and there’s not much gap between denotation and connotation. They preach, judge, indict. For whatever the style of the poetry, it is presenting, embedding, an ideology, a worldview of what is important. Some are implicit. Some are explicitly rebellious. It may be anti-narrative. It may direct attention to one’s love of one’s child. It may be cathartic of what happened on the way to work. It may look for complex unresolvable pictures, fragments of actual and imagined to re-write what is worth paying attention to. It is all, look here.
Yet some things have to be said and if there’s that need, there’s no not-spilling it. If you think its valuable, you share it.
In one-on-one conversations the person who shares can narrow in on nurturing one idea, cultivating conditions for it to grow with a conversational partner.
Poetry, by its nature when presented on stage, is broadcast. It can’t customize to each listener.

It may land as a conversation between each listener and the the speaker but it doesn’t have the same knowing. Knowing your audience, dialoguing, you can have more of a fit for mutual development.
But poetry is putting it out there as is and there’s only so much you can do to make it accessible. It goes where it goes. Once out of your mouth and hands, it’s out of your control, out there.
As Timothy said, the mandate is to “preach in season or out of season” because some things matter. Sometimes that means shoehorning in a pitch, to mix my metaphors. You sow the seed of ideas indiscriminately because the seed matters and the ground and weather, you can’t control. You don’t know what will take root, if it will fall on rock or in thorns or in good soil, said Luke. Obviously seed pitched to receptive conditions give better yield.
So if we are to broadcast to change the world, exhort others to be reflective on white privilege, or idealized box of happiness = married long term stable opposite gender relationship, what works best as form and content? How do we prevent preaching to the choir? Or is reinforcing ourselves a way to further develop one strain of thought and also useful?
Lots to muse on.

A circle of chat of Mike, Kevin and Max before the official opening of VERSeFest Day 1.

And some Arc book table sales. Apparently the main book table sold out of copies of Mark Tredinnick’s book in the first break before he even read.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Rusty and David were among those who did some welcomes, introductions and thanks to funders and sponsors.

Opening was Sir Realist (aka Nathanaël Larochette) who has been working with youth doing poetry in schools for 6 years. He said whenever he feels down he makes a poem to inspire himself and sometimes those become performance pieces that reach others.
He opened with a cover poem by Kevin Matthews then did his own acrostic poem Beautiful. Here he is performing it in Vancouver:

It starts after patter at 1:30. It flows to make it look natural. Here’s one cycle through the word: “Breathe. Exhale. Again. Until truth illuminates fuelling unconditional love.” That he keeps the pattern flowing naturally as if there were no constraint there – well, I can’t imagine how long that took to work out.
He set up a frame for an audience to engage, speak back, repeat and did a choose your own adventure poem where volume of votes dictated where the poem goes next. A couple people threw in votes that weren’t on the list. (How could it be elsewise with an audience with so many poets.)
That was picked up by the next reader Emilie Zoey Baker who had the audience pick a poem that’s a secret or uses bad language.

Emilie Zoey Baker from Australia performed poems that had the audience laughing from the Vegetarian Zombie poem to one on making spaghetti. Here’s spaghetti inspired by Emilie Zoey Baker’s poem from last night.
She also had a poem on what baristas needs to have for life experience before they can make a proper coffee. For example, to feel themselves explode in their chair at seeing someone across the room, and have their wallet stolen in Vietnam, and feel their soul expand from a marble to a palace in a single breath.

She had copies of her chapbook Bombora on hand. Her poem on Vegetarian Zombies and Fuck You Glee are in the chapbook, and surely worth the $10 price of admission for them, but alas, her poem on spooning isn’t. That’s a marvelous ravelling piece.
She mentioned how in Berlin there was poetry in any language and did her piece in deep Aussie. (Wouldn’t it be nice to see the French vers appear in VERSeFest more.)

Mark Tredinnuck picked up on the order of the day and had people vote from the blurb for his final poem. The audience picked “both!”
He presented himself as a formalist, mentioning he often performs with a projection of the poems behind him so you can see the tercets or sextets or shapes of stanzas and lines on the page for a second experience.
He won the Montreal Poetry Prize and shortly thereafter, the Cardiff poetry prize. He presented poems on his paternal grandfather Rev. Tredinnick, or more accurately, a dream of him where the suitable dour Methodist fellow – who lived suspicious of any music that was not composed by a Wesley – danced his sermons like nothing on earth. “It was Mormon bluegrass[…] but it felt human and glad with a license to live”. Coming from a similar (but different denomination) of upbringing, I could feel the scandalousness of the dream and the revelation of it being a way forward, an acceptance to go forward into life as well.
Music also featured in a poem of his maternal grandmother who had a piano all her life that had only played hymns. One night after she had died at 4 a.m. when the dead souls change shifts, he heard the piano play two notes with no one near it. He ended with a profound gesture towards “there’s a music out there that knows us by heart.”
There were lots of sub-vocals and ahs from the audience. His poetry leaned heavily toward the large picture and profound statement, speaking on the gods of the old pantheons and them as us, as rain, us as them and rain and remembering and forgiveness.
The audience responded well but I was in the curious seat of being between seats where to my right was enthusiastically wowed and to my right not so very much. Poetry is such a personal taste for what fills the bill. Both directions are engaged and amusing to watch.

The first night of VERSeFest had 6 poets over about 4 hours. Some people came for the 7pm, some arrived for the 9pm. There was some shifting but there were about 80 in the audience at any given time. A pretty decent start.
And the crowd was warm too, in thanks to the chemistry and rapport that went between readers. It’s always nice to see the roster of writers in the event chatting before and after and referencing each other during the show instead of parachuting in and out, doing a fixed set and being airlifted away.
The second event was sponsored by Arc Magazine.

Rob Winger has two books (and a third hopefully in the wings soon). He likes to go at fresh angles and remix against expectations. He’ll do a pastoral, but not how you might think. The litany is with categorical attitude and humour. I love hearing him read, anytime anywhere. [Such a pity that the university didn’t see fit to give tenure and keep in town one of the most inspiring teachers I’ve met, and beyond 19 years of school, I worked as a Cont. Ed. teacher for a decade, and done national conferences. I’ve met a lot of them but not with his zest often. I’ve rarely seen a wave of so many people inspired years later by one teacher like that. Anyway,…] He has a poem in the In the Next Poem poem where I have a few second clip from. You can see how the audience was taken by it. It worked by accumulations piling on ad absurdum of the patterns we use to preface poems.
Rob Winger was the Writer-in-Residence for Arc and under his time there he mentored 30 poets flagged as promising.

Brent Raycroft was one of these. As he said in self-deprecation, it is not my first time to emerge as a poet. That was in the 80s. I never stopped doing poetry. I just stopped finishing poems. I won’t be reading from my 11th book or my first because they don’t exist. What he did read from is included in Arc Magazine and an upcoming Freefall.
He did a number of relationship sonnets remarking on how the world has enough unrequited love poems so he does requited love poems.
He also did a poem on sex, the word, and how the shapes relate to one another; the X so angular and the e between the letters as if saying “you two should meet”.

In Anita Lahey’s turn at the mic, she acknowledged the pattern of audience participation and said I considered letting people vote for which poem to hear, but I’m too much of a control freak for that. She interlaced references to Rob Winger’s poem as well.

Anita closed the night with poems from her more recent book of poems from kickboxing and conflict (“she’s raining shredded knuckles”), and from life in Cape Breton where fishermen do fishing boat races and wait for storms to come. And ones from and for Ottawa including an ode to a parking lot “a night sky with constellations of gum, oil spills and spit”. She does some nice things with metaphor. In a poem on nicknames, “one is pinned like a tail to that galaxy” of the particular scene.
Amanda Earl’s post on VERSeFest, Day 1.
P.S. Twitter is an amazingballs. I tweeted about VERSeFest yesterday and it got picked up (retweeted, RT) by a few people and thereby bouncing to over 8000 screens in a few minutes. Arrival at isn’t reading but still the internet speed is a wonder sometimes.
Tonight at 7 pm, the curtain opens again with 6 more poets, this time the 9 pm is brought to us by the good folks of in/words.