From Leonard Cohen “Master Poems” from Music for Humans
Choice bits:

To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you.

At the same time, I’d add, to avoid dramatic flourishes is no excuse for giving a dead boring reading that disinterests the reader first, and the audience second as the reader is fumbling and unfamiliar with your own material. One needs to care about what one says or say nothing as in any case.

Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.

Of course it helps if you have voice training so it is pleasant to listen to or listen past. Let the meaning rise above the sounds.
If your voice is unconsciously taking the forefront of attention, interrupting your words with squeaks, breaks, or plume of nervous energy then that would make the audience sympathetically uncomfortable but uncomfortable and distract from the words as well. It’s the same problem as stilted amateur league dramatization. Be a conduit for the meaning and yourself at ease.

It’s tomorrow, short notice, but perhaps a few can make it out to this:
The Poets’ Pathway is hosting a reading by local poets this Friday night.
The event is at Poet’s Hill at Beechwood Cemetery, with readings by Henry Beissel, Andrée Lacelle, Susan McMaster, Diane Schmolka, Michel A. Thérien and Nancy Vickers.
Hope to see you there, and please consider spreading the word to your readers.
Best,
Lee and Jane
________________________________
What:
Sunset at Poet’s Hill
Readings by local poets at Ottawa’s memorial for founding poetry
Local poets will read a selection of their works at Poet’s Hill in Beechwood Cemetery this Friday evening. The hill marks the end of the Poets’ Pathway, a 34 km biking and walking trail.
The Poets’ Pathway aims to preserve green space in Ottawa – it mainly follows pre-existing trails – and to commemorate Canada’s first famous poets, many of whom lived and wrote in Ottawa.
Who:
Hosted by Nicolas Tremblay of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra and The Prism Chamber Music Ensemble, the event will feature six local poets, reading in both English and French:
– Henry Beissel: playwright and poet of “The Jade Canoe” (First Prize in Poetry, by the Surrey International Writers’ Conference) and “Where Shall the Birds Fly?” (Naji Naaman Literary Prize)
– Andrée Lacelle: author of Tant de vie s’égare (Trillium Book Award, Prix de Poésie de l’Alliance française and finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award) and Demain l’enfance (Prix Littéraire Le Droit)
– Susan McMaster: Past President of the League of Canadian Poets and author of Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (finalist for the 2010 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award, the Ottawa Book Awards, and the Archibald Lampman Poetry Award)
– Diane Schmolka: author of poetry collection Fedora and Other Hats, regular contributor to VOICE magazine and reporter/poet for online arts magazine Women on Top
– Michel A. Thérien: author of nine poetry books, including L’Aridité des fleuves (Ottawa Book Award), J’écris à rebours (Prix Littéraire Le Droit) and Du vertige et de l’espoir – Carnets africains (finalist for the Radio-Canada Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award)
– Nancy Vickers: author of twelve poetry, fiction and children’s books, including Le Pied de Sappho (Trillium Book Award)
When and Where:
The event will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, September 28 at Poet’s Hill, Beechwood National Cemetery, 280 Beechwood Avenue.
Refreshments and conversation at a nearby restaurant will follow. Parking is available.
Background:
About the Poets’ Pathway
The Poets’ Pathway is a 34 km walking and biking trail, much of it on pre-existing trails. It runs from Britannia Beach south along Pinecrest Creek and east along Nepean Creek. It crosses the Rideau River, moves north to the Ottawa River, and ends in Beechwood Cemetery where the poets lie. Its purpose is to help preserve greenspace in the nation’s capital and to commemorate Ottawa’s poets – particularly Canada’s first famous poets, the Confederation Poets, and francophone poets of the 19th Century.

Julie Bruck and Jan Conn. Julie launched her new collection, Monkey Ranch (Brick, 2012). Until the Tree vid is up, you can try this audio sample. Jan launched her brand new collection Edge Effects (Brick, 2012).
The workshop was a look into translation and what the process is to transliterate and translate. What considerations are involved to catch the intention of the first writer?
Next Tree, Oct. 9 will be Jan Zwicky and Méira Cook, with a Tree Seed Workshop, also free and also open to all, with L.M. Rochefort giving a look at the Imagists.

Part of knowing and improving is to know what questions to ask. In editing, where to begin?
Jason F jotted down every question that came to mind and posted them: Questions I ask when reviewing a design-in-progress at Signals vs. Noise.
They work very well for editing poetry as well. Here are a few examples in no particular order:

• What does it say?
• What does it mean?
• Is what it says and what it means the same thing?
• Do we want that?
• Why do we need to say that here?
• If you stopped reading here, what’s the message?
• What’s the take away after 8 seconds?
• How does this make you feel?
• What does someone know now that they didn’t know before?
• Is that worth scrolling?
• Why that order?
• Why would this make them choose that?
• What does a more polished version of this look like?
• What’s the obvious next step?
• How would someone know that?
• Would it matter if someone missed that?
• Does that make it easier or harder?
• Would this be better as a sentence or a picture?
• What would happen if we got rid of that?
• What happens when this expands?
• What problem is that solving?
• How does this change someone’s mind?
• What makes this a must have?

It’s a tinker’s fine tuning where everything can come under scrutiny. How does it work? Why does it work?
People get attached to the romantic intactness of their poem. Or they can make it function better with more economical or florid choices.
If every word is load-bearing, there can’t be saggy bits until you get to the end word with rhymes as beams.
Or build something that is an arch to allow for sweeps of large open spaces in the poem. What would that look like syntactically?
When people say it’s good is a pretty low bar to stop jumping. Part of the game of thinking is to craft something that exceeds itself because the creator wants to make something that’s a personal best, to date. That answer of “enough” can only come from within.
I do what I need to do as best as I can determine, regardless of divergent views of ideal according to different tastes and skills of various potential audiences.
I want the sweet spot of producing something I can be proud of. One can choose to be proud of anything arbitrary, naturally. Or be proud and also move on and improve. But I want to improve my skill; life is very short so getting at it asap is best.
It is always a race against time when I have so little energy to work with. Organization is essential and a learning curve since I have never planned well. In order to write better, it is a matter of being better, whole life improvement, more clear-headed, healthier, more organized, more good-humoured, better at holding a line.
Other people are other people. They may rave or rant or more likely are busy with their own lives. The game of improving a piece of writing is only with the writer.
In a more recent post at the blog, Jonas says,

Ignore cynicism. Do what you want, and love doing it.
The Internet appears to run on cynicism. Twitter is a complaint delivery protocol, and comment threads are polluted with meaningless grammar fights and nitpicky personal attacks. It’s hard not to be distracted and consumed by the blustering.

He also says, work with people you enjoy. The upshot of work with work that gives you energy, does that go without saying?

In a Huffington Post interview, Marie Howe:

MH: Well, Stanley [Kunitz] was a great friend. We were walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. This was in the fall, my brother had died that summer. Stanley asked me how I was doing, and I said, ‘I feel as if something has me in its mouth and it’s chewing me. ‘ And he said, ‘It is. And you must wait to see who you’ll be when it’s done with you.’ It was the most comforting thing anyone said to me. Because what he was implying was that I was undergoing a critical, essential transformation. Stanley always looked at change as transformation — all his poems have that quality in them. It was a great, great comfort to me when he said that. So many dear friends would say, ‘Oh, I wish I could take it away from you’ or ‘Oh, I wish I could make it better.’ And I didn’t want anything to be made better. You know about this, Mark, you’ve written books about it. One doesn’t want anything to be taken away. But you don’t know how to necessarily negotiate it, either.

While there’s something smarmy and romantic about the notion that an artist is inextricable and better for his or her discomfort, there is something patronizing about wanting to remove someone’s discomfort too.
Pain is just sensation. It’s bodily. It’s mental. It skews things just as everything else affects everything else. Its importance is socially determined not intrinsic.
Writing comes out of grief but also the grief of its own sad (in every sense) self.
James Salter at the Paris Review says

I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
[…] I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it’s disheartening, you don’t want to go on. That’s what I think is hard—the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done. This is all you could manage?
[…] I need the opportunity to write this sentence again, to say it to myself again, to look at the paragraph once more, and actually to go through the whole text, line by line, very carefully, writing it out. There may be even some kind of mimetic impulse here where I am trying to write like myself, so to speak.

The joy comes in the process of fixing, not the initial making, not the product per se. The aim is self-talk and clarity that comes with aha, perhaps, eventually, mayhaps, in distilling away all the crud.
I was asked, if I hate all I write, is it because of something it is or something it isn’t yet. I think it’s the stage. I haven’t completely rendered anything.
In the NYT The Trouble with Intentions Verlyn Klinkenborg says the trouble with writing is people chasing a sound, a sense, not attending to the meaning and the sentence,

Imagine how it works. A writer speaks the language, knows the vocabulary, and tries to honor the rules of grammar and syntax. Yet he regularly produces sentences of whose literal meaning he’s completely unaware. In its own way, this is fantastic, like setting out to knit a cardigan, producing an armoire, and wondering why it’s so loose in the shoulders.

Sloppy is fine at first, sloshing about, seeing what’s there. If a piece of process, being what is is, so readily open to interpretation, it may as well be a blank page that the reader writes herself, fine. But where is the game. You can have a good game of tennis with the net of rhyme and meter on the ground but even meaning? If you don’t care what comes across, that’s not conversation between reader and writer. It’s two soapboxes side by side overhearing each other.
The grief of writing is the information gap between what can be grabbed from within and without and fused so that a reader and writer can access it without being confused on what might be intended.