It was 3 days and the inaugural fest. Words and photos feel utterly inadequate to express the energy there. You have to go next year and hope the zeitgeist is as beaming. Warm as a womb and as full as it was it was bound to release us all soon to the wider world again.

Uncapturable. Yet being writers there’s a certain impulse to try to capture, isn’t there?

This is part of the ongoing lecture series of Professor Quack & T.A. Grunt (aka Spy Denomme-Welch & Catherine Magowan) as the first honorary doctorate is given to Ula at the University of Mockulecturing after ‘Various ontological lectures of the quest for what’. They were hilarious at spoofing. Over the top goodness. right down to the last dragged foot off stage.

Complementing the lectures was a random banging thru the walls which must have been more zombies wanting to attend.

The mic saw many tones. A lot of conversations.
My order of remembering is all tumbled now. At some point I was swept and forgot to jot any notes at all.

The Zorras performed as another continuity thread thru the days. Some of us in Ottawa were lucky enough to catch the AB Series visual artist/writer, Sandra Alland, and musician, Y. Josephine. Beauty mixed with social conscious questioning of labels. You can see videos on youtube. The ideas move at unconventional angles. Even the same piece performed live is different each time.
These two are also the fabulous instigators of this event.

After day 1 wrapped, there was a jam session too. Such beautiful voices and music.

Pro-poetry protests took to the street out front thanks to Wally Keeler. Out front is one of the visual artist Karen Miranda Augustine.

He shot a video of it

A few cars honked and bystanders were suitably distracted, concerned or amused.

Leah Murray has pieces in That Not Forgotten, a poetry/short prose collection of work from authors with ties to an area along the north shores of Lake Ontario, from Kingston to Port Hope, north to Highway #7 by Hidden Book Press. She introduced herself by saying she’d been reading the long poem so back, it’s story hour. She related stories from travelling over Canada’s north, including descriptions of weathering the long winter night up there until “the back of the bitter season has broken” and river marigolds are in the icy streams. But “stay on the road. water logged snow is like quicksand, swallows once.”
She also has a book of haiku, senryu and short poems called “Abandoned Land” where she photographed and observed the rubbled area left after the Thanksgiving Day Explosion, 1918 by Trenton. When the munitions plant blew it was with a comparable force of the Halifax Harbour explosion except in the Quinte County area there was a successful full evacuation. I don’t know why my history lessons skipped this.

Andrew Kaufman comes from the same town, population 3000, as Alice Monroe which makes him the second biggest novelist to come out of there. His newest book “Born Weird” wasn’t on the table. It’s due out in January but we got a sneak peak at the magical realism of the story. The dying grandmother realizes the blessings she bestowed on her grandkids could have been blessings but cursed their lives more than it helped. She asks them all to assemble at the pre-chosen hour of her death so she can take them back. The voices are vivid. Delightful man. Must get his other books.

Stuart Ross read some poems about Cobourg life, including the sage of the Chinese Restaurant, which the audience loved! When he gives his workshop, he also composes. It was neat to see one I saw composed come up in the reading. Here’s a sample, Cobourg Commerce from his chapbook Cobourg variations.
Wally gave out Free Speech Cards which is another of his project. He explained about the chair in the back where you could be filmed taking Oath of Allegiance to poetry. Paul Bailey did the oath. You should look at his photos. He has a couple fine art photography books out.

It wasn’t just verbal arts but tactile too, like these rolls of musical notes from the 1800s to mid-century.

This kind of reminded me of Michèle Provost

Laurie Siblock had various pieces.

There’s Laurie and Y.
Rebecca’s Impressario Artissan Market has everything from sculpture to repurposed toys, to old fabrics and felt made into new clothes to…

tempting Stinson Studios bowls.

And books, CDs, chapbooks, anthologies!

Jennifer Lovegrove read poems that skipped around in a fractured way that reminded me of my own poems. News: for 10 years she used to do Dig and it’s being resurrected. Like zombies, but better.

I read from “eclectic” including poems that have the word pirate in them which I think added up to 6. It was in tribute to fellow-reader, Gary Barwin who is at work on the great Canadian Jewish pirate novel.

I also brought other toys. And Brian and I did two poems in two voices. That’s the first time I’ve got a chance to read to an audience the poem mixing Arabic, French and English and it went over well.

Gary Barwin read a few beautiful pieces as well as had a short film playing the day before he arrived like a digital flower girl. You can watch his Inverting Deer. I wish I’d jotted down enough details to pull back this particular tender father poem from the tip of my mind.

Another day’s book table!

David Keyes read an excerpt from his new new new novel “I Do Worry for all Those Lost at Sea”. It officially releases in about a week from House of Pomegranates. The part he read was about rescuing a mermaid who was held hostage in a personal collector’s home, then in a freak show. He might have read for 15 minutes. It was entrancing with its rush forwards and its asides then rush of details again. He prefaced it with a smut warning which I heard scared one person from the room. The section he warned of was explicit but tender and poetic.

There were also 3 short films, mini-film of a few minutes each. The opening was catered by Daisies Cafe with vegan, vegetarian and sushi treats. The curly dried onion ringlets were odd and interesting.
One remarkable thing was how no one griped at the mic. No one apologized or winced that there was only a few more. No one said, my publisher made me. People read what they liked. The engagement was two-way. In breaks people talked about what they’d just seen and heard, or about shop. There was a wonderful sense of camaraderie. Most of the writers and performers and artists I’d never heard of nor met before and people came in from Ottawa (us), Hamilton, Toronto and from around the local area.
Unfortunately we had to go back to town before day 3 started with Ted Amsden, Beatriz Hausner, Linda Hutsell-Manning, Rozina Kazi, Emily Pohl-Weary and Lee & Billie Strange.
[There’s more photos for those on you on FB]

Amanda Earl described some. To which I’d add photos:

David introducing at the Plan 99/Writers Fest readers on Sunday including Nyla Matuk from her first collection Sumptuary Laws.

Tierney was reading from Probably Inevitable and Marcus McCann from The Hard Return, a book I bought asap pre-launch with good reason. Hear him read ‘Cover Letter’ at the weekend event.

Eric and new co-coordinator Craig hosted the latest Grey Borders proudly presents of bill bissett (Lunaria), Steve Zultanski (Brooklyn, NY), Pearl Pirie (Ottawa, ONT), Donato Mancini (Vancouver, BC) and Beatriz Hausner (Toronto, ONT).

Happily audiencing. (And the middle lady drove up from Niagara Falls for this.)

Formerly of Ottawa Ryan and Emily. Ryan wrote about the night here.

Some phafours. Jay and BookThuggery.
It was one of those stunning evenings of coming in from the cold and being able to say, ah, this is why people do poetry. This is why I stay involved. The vibe in the room was great. The poetry was unexpected, unstaid, rocketing askew.

I’ve read a couple times on of Donato Mancini’s books but there were two more to be had. Some letter-form vispo, some image-based vispo, statistical tangled spinning lists, all kinds of off the beaten path poetry. Mancini didn’t read from his new book of essays but new work. Many readers tend to leap from poem to poem of small emotional curves that can add to info overload of a reading. His sustained if digressions and progressions in main directions and aside kept it all glued together for a sustained longer poem on death row last meals. Both he and bill considered social consciousness in a political sense that didn’t lecture so much as engage the subjects.

I’d seen books pipping around by Steve Zultanski before but he wasn’t on my radar before. He runs the Segue reading series in NYC. You can sample his book, Agony from BookThug. There’s an effect of it continuing to pile on such as one of calculating breaths volumes against faces of lovers or places that are not lovers, deductive pushed past the nth degree. He did the whole slot on one poem which was strange and mad and rather absorbing line of digressions and zigzag thought of how to get rid of swimmers by dropping the Taipei building on an ocean which would not shatter because things don’t shatter in water.

I didn’t get a non-blurry shot of Beatriz while she read but caught her here.

Brian got a picture of Beatriz reading from her surreal novella-poem of racoon lovin’ lifestyle: Enter the Racoon.


I read from Where There’s Fire, and most everything else I’ve got on paper.

bill bissett did the re-launch of RUSH: what fuckan theory, a rerelease of his 1972 collection of essays and poems, as he wryly put it, written when he was about 12.

bill bissett performed his magical musical chants too. Wonderful to hear poems that seek unity and peace and position for confounding warring defaults of language.

Brian took a picture of the other side of the shot below:


Conversational flow after.

Messagio Galore XI at the Niagara Artists Centre
Snapshots give a mute version of the performances.




The audience broke out into spontaneous applause during a couple times in the evening.


Ending with Glass on the Beach.

A rare and very special evening of sound poetry, featuring the work of Antonin Artaud, Richard Beland, bill bissett, I.K.Bonset, jwcurry, Fortunato Depero, Paul Haines, Raoul Hausmann, dom sylvester houédard, Ernst Jandl, Alastair Larwill, d.a.levy, Steve McCaffery, Christian Morgenstern, bpNichol, Mike Patton, Kurt Schwitters, August Stramm, Richard Truhlar, David UU, Frank Zappa as performed by the band known as Quatuor Gualuor — jwcurry, Alastair Larwill, Georgia Mathewson & Brian Pirie.
The evening will also represent the opening of jwcurry’s UNWANTEDs: a collection of postings in the Dennis Tourbin Members Gallery.

The jwcurry and Tourbin will continue on for a couple weeks. The sound travels to the Common Ground Art Gallery of Windsor Ontario tonight, 3277 Sandwich St.

Or is that Thugging with Bookers?
At any rate, out in St. Cats the inimitable Eric will host: The bill bissett, Steven Zultanski (a repeat BookThugger, Pearl Pirie, Donato Mancini (I’m reading his Ligature for the third time.) and Beatriz Hausner. (Her most recent book is Enter the Raccoon which documents a love affair between a woman and a raccoon. They are a couple that loves without preconceptions, whose being together eschews all limits until their beliefs in the self are put to the test. )