One day held four small press events: Canzine West in Vancouver, Expozine in Montreal, Indie Literary Market in Toronto and the Ottawa small press fair.

At Ottawa’s fair, and over the week, I got 13 things to highlight:

1. Instruments of Surrender by Christine Wiesenthal (Buschek, 2001) from the backlist 3/$10 deal. I liked the playful tone. p. 14 from “wild finches, august”
   

   c’mere yiu little slackers,
   i want to say, you slippery flitters,
   you two-ounce peeping toms

   She also has a chapter with epigraphs from The Cook Not Mad to the Soap Opera digest paired with prose fretting over laundry which seem to run the line between satire and tragic.

2. Have you ever Seen a Sky So Grey?, (in/words, 2012) Chris Johnson’s first chapbook. (no page numbers, at mid-chapbook) often have comedic twists, like this, “Two short poems for the everyday pessimist”
   

   Just because I need alcohol
   to make it through an ordinary day
   doesn’t make me a drunk,
   it makes me a failure.

3. Go to the Pine: poetry in Japanese Style by Izak Bouwer and Angela Sumegi (Buschek, 2009) and I can’t find my copy so I either gave it away or just considered buying it before. p. 12 tanka by Angela,
   

   an evening flock
   of wax-wings gorge themselves
   on my mulberries –
   oh teacher of gods and men
   whose fruit do I eat?

   It also has a CD in it. I never know if I’ll listen to CDs. I mean, I even prefer to read the subtitles of movies on mute and read the transcripts at TED talks instead of listen. I like visual information. Here’s a visual; the Buschek table at the fair:

4. Eiderdown by Rachel Simpson, (Apt 9, 2012) who read it the pre-fair (pictured) and launches this first chapbook of hers at Raw Sugar this Saturday afternoon along with Phil Hall and Claudia Coutu Radmore. from poem 6
   

   What touches us most is a feeling of disbelief.
   Drawn in by what we can’t accept and can’t deny.
   Truth as intimacy, instead of precision.
   Different answers to the same question:
   what happened to you?

   She opens interesting things to ponder.

5. little nothings by Marilyn Irwin (self published, 2012) poem 29,
   

   maybe next year
   I’ll cut my hair
   pack vices
   as tea cups

   I love how the meaning sways both ways. Vices as opposed to virtues or heavy metal tools for stability. Both sketch different intriguing scenarios.

6. her absence, this wanderer by Rachel Zolf (Buschek, 1999) doesn’t seem excerpt-able as some. p 11
   

   We bundle Rose into the car and travel
   through the streets of North End Winnipeg,
   Rose pointing out the Peretz school where
   grandfather taught, the Labour Zionist temple,
   the houses the family lived in, landmarks
   on our way to the cemetery, where
   after a bit of combing (too many straight
   lines, too nearly kept) we find a polished
   grey granite stone, carved with our name
    
    
    
   and the simplicity of it overwhelms me

   There’s some of a haibun to this except although it continues in both directions on the page. The poems are emotional extreme, all over the map, retracing histories, some of collecting family stories, some of creating stories of sexual self.

7. A Rural Pen by Phil Hall (Apt 9, 2012) in “Ubdegrove” (with most of the poems similarly titled for disappearing villages), delights me but I don’t want to finish it because then it will be over. Still something unique of time and place that one would be familiar in equal parts with a wood-borer insect and with the Indian script.
   

   what we wrote will be the wood-borer’s Urdu
   spelled-out by tunneling blind
   between the bark & the trunk
   (between the warning & the baggage)

8. All the Perfect Disguises by Lorri Neilsen Glenn (Broken Jaw, 2003) which I read in part a couple times but want to take time for the whole. From p. 15-16 a poem of genealogy of County Kerry, where my family also came from in part,
   

   Glenn na ginci, Glanageenty, in Bally Mac Elligott, 1583[…]
   Out into the sun, I carry the pages. The song began
   here.
   At night we climb hills, weave tales into stonecrop
   join a chorus of voices calling down an old sea.

   stonecrop is a wonderful reduction of the frost-thrown stones phenomena. I wonder how well the word travels or how widely it unpacks?

9. A blank art book by “Mary Kritz (pictured below) made of Lokta paper cover with die-cut pages, with a horsehair braid closure.
   
10. cemantics by Michael e. Casteels (Puddles of Sky Press, 2012) is unretypable, with visual poems and the structure of book being surprises. Tasty concepts. Get it if you can. Oh wait, you can
11. Peter F Yacht Club, issue #17 by various, launching in December including some of Amanda Earl’s “ghazals against the gradual demise” which she read from at Dusty Owl and Tree recently. A bit of xvii,
    

    these longitudes are heavy with thorns
    and i will continue to blossom
    please let the miracles continue
    confuse the cartographers once more

12. Chrysalis, issue 2 a new zine in town by Kimberley Dawkins, Robert Sandercott and Sanjeevan Thermaratnam.
    
    chrysaliszine.tumblr.com was at the ottawa small press fair Nov 17, 2012 with their submissions call for issue 3. From issue 2 by Miguel Eichelberger,

    Human
    he called me
    As through the very word
    were mucus

13. Keep by Deborah Poe (aboveground, 2012) wanders thru brain science of perception and retention of them.
    

    windflowerrain
    dendrites, feathery tips of brain cells, extend to neighbouring cells
    one blossom bears many blossoms[…]
    how you pay attention determines what you remember
    old branches, which do not reach

That all should hold my attention for a while.

On Saturday the fall fair returns, 12-5pm, Jack Purcell Community Centre, 2nd Floor.
What to expect?
mysteries, non-fiction, poetry, letterpress, literary magazines, handmade papers, vampire novels, zines, graphic novels, small publishers, chapbooks, ephemera & unexpecteds.

Good place to see what your local and not-so-geographicallly-local neighbours have been up to since spring or since last year.

Jay MillAr at CPPC says,

It makes me nervous because publishing a “collection of poems” (you know, the kind in quotes) doesn’t give the media anything to talk about. But maybe this will mean people will read the poems and think about them rather than sound-biting the book to death before they get a chance to read it.

That feels like an astute point. While having a collection of poems revolving around one idea makes for convenience in the 5-10 word pitch to a press or reader, or mom, project books tend to go one of a few ways: they drag having overextended a simple idea or a couple good poems, or they read like lineated fiction wasting paper, or they work even if they feel overly constrained.
And if Berstein’s right and not just entertaining, it applies to more than just within the poem.
When buzz comes too soon, I’m bored of the name and the concept months before the book is on paper, let alone the month or few after that when it officially releases. It’s something of a pop-song-on-over-play-but-can’t-avoid-so-eventually-kinda-like but something is spoiled somehow.
But if the text doesn’t get to enough eyes early enough, then it will miss all the promo hoops of awards that could boost to more eyes. Unless the author or publisher is a relentless and effective promoter like Avon Extraordinaire.
It’s good to see a book where the writer still likes the work. There’s something strikingly uniform about readers who are sent on book tours is comments on them hating their book, grudgingly reading something and then perking up to sneak in a couple poems of new work.
Part of that can be chalked up to poets being resistant to being told what to do so automatically resenting there being an obvious right thing to do, like promote something that can give income at a relevant time, and part of it is poets realizing poems work on the page or with other poems but socially in a room slay in the less good sense, and being Canadian, habitually apologize for dragging out another downer, or worse, realize mid-reading that they’ve never vetted the poem or read it aloud before and realize it is a downer, despite having presumably intentionally consciously written, edited and published it. I find that lack of self-awareness frustratingly common.
It’s not about the poems, or the reading but the living and the priorities of what one calls poetry-worthy. No sense of humour allowed? Only profound allowed? No profound sentiment allowed? What sound bank is roped off?
But that is all off-point of the interview, which in itself is a good read. Don’t stop before you get to the vending machines. Not this one. You’ll see.

Coming this week: The Factory Reading Series presents a VerseFest Fundraiser with lectures/talks on writing followed by a Q&A.
The idea is to give more depth and meat to the why and how and background of poetics than can be usually afforded in a format which is focused on people sharing their poems.
The first set of talks were by Monty Reid on How Come Inger Isn’t Here? and Marcus McCann on propriety and poetry. Reid’s is in issue 4 of 17 Seconds. The second set of talks were by Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Barry McKinnon. McKinnon’s essay from his talk is now up at the current issue of 17 Seconds.
This time it is a fundraiser for Ottawas third annual VerseFest Poetry Festival, March 2013.
When? Thursday, November 15, 2012, doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm
Where? The Mercury Lounge, 56 Byward Market Square, Ottawa
How much? The $10 door cover includes a copy of The Peter F Yacht Club #17
Who? Cameron Anstee, Pearl Pirie & Stephen Brockwell
Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press and is pursuing a PhD in English Literature at the University of Ottawa. Recent chapbooks have been published by above/ground press (Ottawa), The Emergency Response Unit (Toronto) and St. Andrew Books (Ottawa). He plans to talk on the life and works of Raymond Souster.
Pearl Pirie has been organizing the Tree Seed Workshop Series for the Tree Reading Series since 2009. She is always on the lookout for new facilitators to bend their poetic passion to mentor local writers there. She tweets, photographs and verbs about town. Her blogs include pesbo, Humanyms, and Eaten Up. Her poetry collections include Thirsts (Snare, 2011) Mammals of Hoarfrost (Corrupt Press, 2011), Between Stations (epiphany press, 2011), been shed bore (Chaudiere, 2010) and over my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010). She is working on a couple full-length manuscripts. She plans to talk on the need for including the extraneous and the role and rule of safety in poetry and publishing.
Stephen Brockwell is the author of 4 books of poems. Fruitfly Geographic won the 2004 Archibald Lampman Award for the best book of poetry by an Ottawa writer. His Excerpts from Impossible Books is an interminable work in progress, with two sections of such appearing with chapbooks by above/ground press. Brockwell runs the small business from his basement, borrowed office space and coffee shops. His subject will be revealed on the night. spoiler: on various subjects (Poetry, Migration, Networks, Language)

Join us at the Jack Purcell Community Centre from 11am to 4pm on Saturday, December 1st, for our first major Holiday Book Sale.
With thousands of interesting books for sale, any three hardcovers can be yours for just $10 and paperbacks are just $2 each!
Featuring poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, we’ve got some amazing books on offer. Plus 100% of the funds raised will support our free children’s literacy programs.
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Pssst, that’s held at the same place as Ottawa small press fair on Nov 17th where you can get new small print run, locally published books, magazines and broadsides as well as whoever from small press comes in from around Canada and the U.S.