The Atwater Poetry Project in Westmount has announced their 2013 season and first up, Lettuce have, McGimpsey and Sue Sinclair. Rhea Tregebov and Carmine Starnino are next month, Méira Cook and Bruce Taylor in March and can you remember further ahead than that?

span-o (the small press action network – ottawa) will present the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2013 edition on June 15 in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).
Held twice a year since 1994, the fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels,cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including (at previous events) Bywords, Dusty Owl, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, Phafours Press, and others.
Register to have a table by June 1 if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue. Exhibitors should send name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered & any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any).
More info.

A peruse of what’s out there for sound…
Heard of Poets: a documentary on Canadian poets (from 2007) is now online with these contemporary folks: Seymour Mayne, George Elliott Clarke, Mark Frutkin, Max Middle, Shane Rhodes, Oni the Haitian Sensation, AJ Levin, Jim Larwill, Pauline Michel, Terry Ann Carter, John Akpata, Drew Bernard, a.rawlings, Nicola Volpe, Melissa Upfold, Susan Robertson, Steven Brockwell, Bill Bissett, Paul Muldoon, Becky McKercher, Gustave Morin, Michael Dennis, Christopher Levenson, Danielle Gregoire, Jason Sonier, Anne Davison, jw curry, Gregory Betts, Greg, ‘Ritallin’ Frankson.
Videos of particular poems with recordings of the poets is on youtube. Cdn Poems includes: bpNichol’s Pome Poem, Margaret Atwood’s The Immigrants, The Moment, Milton Acorn’s In the Sky, Al Purdy’s On Being Human, Necropsy of Love, Irving Layton’s There Were No Signs, and Patrick Lane’s Wild Horses.
The national archives also have The Canadian Poetry Audio Archives, Canada’s first online bilingual poetry audio archive which have
Pre-Confederation Poets
Poets from 1867 to 1899
Early 20th-Century Poets
Poets Between the World Wars
Poets from 1940 to 1970
Contemporary Poets
Including for example, George Bowering’s Place of Birth, , P.K. Page Brazilian Fazenda, Earl Birney The Bear on the Delhi Road, Phyllis Webb Middle Distance and my favorite of all of those, Leaning Tower.
More Canadian contemporary audio comes from The Berlin poetry festival, 2007 via Paul Vermeersch such as Karen Solie’s Migration, Suzanne Buffam’s Vanishing Interior and Erin Moure’s Theatre of the Hope of a Cebola (Santiso) and lastly for here, her Theatre of the Green Leira (Mandúa)

Sometimes the best part of a reading is the unscripted bit, such as how readers or the works reference each other in unplanned ways, the randomness interlinking, or such as randomly synchronous interruptions; I can recall one in which the poet said emergency and an ambulance siren, as if on cue, started to wail.
Where we get to the unplanned element, there was a Q&A. Sometimes these go badly with a good question tossed but it isn’t caught. Sometimes comically lame questions come from people who feel someone should speak because there are no questions. My favorite part of one Ottawa Writer’s Festival event was when an audience member asked those on stage what their inspiration was. The 3 exchanged looks and started laughing. When they recovered, a panelist said, next question.
And sometimes they go well like this. Nigel Beale asked a good question surrounding the difference between composing poems, building a boat and making a musical instrument, all of which Taylor does. In part he replied,

“a boat has to be pointy at an end to penetrate the water and move forward. It’s not as clear what makes a poem move”

There were a few other questions, one of which elicited doodling “is an alertness to the accidental”. That ready for attentiveness is good for poetry and living as well.
Asked about his creative cycles he said, he felt sure another book would eventually come but “when I write, I write intensely and when I am not writing I avoid poetry just as intensely.”
That’s not a possibility I considered. To be in a head-space for poetry or not. I’m always in it. Perhaps the people who appear in the poetry circles when they have something to sell and disappear when not are in the same sort of binary of intensity.

I have a couple of Bruce Taylor’s books and I think this is the 4th of his readings I’ve been to. For some reason I like hearing his material again the way one would hear a song repeat. His voice stands behind his poems rather than impede them with overacting or nervous ticks. The poems go unexpected places but are not all fracture and randomness. There’s a humbleness to them that isn’t humblebrag. They are as simple as they need to be and no more. I mentioned reading him here a year ago.
You can see the whole reading he did here.