The South Townsville micro poetry journal has interviewed former in/words poet Peter Gibbon in Australia. Here’s part that struck me:

Peter Gibbon: When I was an Ottawa resident, being a presence at readings was much easier because there was a more active poetry scene. There are good & bad things about that. As the political capital of Canada, diplomacy is absolutely congenital to everything in Ottawa. As such, the poetry scene is incredibly supportive, warm and encouraging, but not competitive, critical or especially innovative. There’s lots of experimentation but I feel like a lot of concrete meaning gets edited out or relegated to play. Again, a double-edged sword.

That we’re a warm fuzzy soft town isn’t surprising to hear. People clap more readily and heartily for lukewarm material, calibrated for more shows of encouragement than some towns, especially if instructed to. And one more round for. And one more thanks and and and.
But the entire English poetry world is a teeny neighbourhood not even a whole village. Conservative town. I could see that. Is anywhere innovative? What does innovative even mean? Talon claims to be innovative but the Talon reading at writers fest a few years ago was one of the poorest attended events. Would a different energy and buzz create a different poetry performance?
I see myself shifting more to photography and fewer words because of audience. I can say most any heavy, light or profound thing in words in blogs and the majority of the time I get no signal back that it was heard. Silence to words and some words for photos. You write to what is getting a signal I suppose. (Be the change you want to see and endure the dead air of waiting for others to want the same change until there’s the luck of quorum?)
Still his view leads me to wonder how much I am a ship in a bottle. How much of my sense of what poetry is is a product of what I’ve encountered because of where I am? Is there a whole parallel world that I can’t see?
Although I do tend to hop streams to parallel worlds of vispo, people’s poetry, haiku, lately tanka, to sound poetry. I take in some spoken word of the stage, some lyric (close your eyes if you hate the word you see coming) page poetry. Things that are drum-skin tight and that which is just chatting.
Some places don’t have much going on. Any drop of poetry is gratefully grabbed at. When saturated you get more picky, I’d imagine.
Anywhere has sad and good. Is always which poetry you attend to, more than geography?
What makes a scene? The current tide of vibe sweeping thru of which individuals are active? There’s another entity in the room in addition to each individual, the general aggregate sum of the vibe that fluxes as each person enters or exits. Each person responds to this aggregate as much as as the focus reader’s content and mood. Or is there actually an aggregate for each individual as well, doubling the number of energies in the room?
I’ve seen poetry in Dublin, London, Paris, New York City, Vancouver, Montreal (I will stop listing soon), Toronto, some wee towns in Ontario, at Sage Hill and that’s about it. I was most blown away at the calibre (percentage-wise) at Sage Hill.
I can’t speak for what I heard in London as my ear wasn’t there long enough to decode the accent of a lot of the speakers. I read at the open mic but probably was to a similar degree incomprehensible to the tavern basement poets.
To the degree that we visualize what we read or are read, we have an echo in our brain, like a dream reenacts the waking. How a person presents instructs people on how to respond in inner echo. A numbed reading gives a subdued response or understimulates to sleep. An animated reading either overstimulates or rouses an animated response. As automatic mimics we can respond in kind.
We almost hopped over to Berlin since there was so much buzz of good chemistry colliding there at the time. Is there any one aggregate thing in Ottawa? Is the curve going up with more engaged informed readers, university town, a lot of access so the luxury of being picky?
Or do people go out to poetry the way they would to a movie not caring before during or after if it was B-movie level? An excuse for an outting, perhaps it’ll be entertaining at the time, maybe there’ll be takeaways, maybe it’ll be a wash but it’s something for variety done on spec of bumping into something that’ll inspire a bump upwards.

On June 25th the Elmdale Tavern hosted the newly re-booting The Muses Reading Series.
It started in 2007 and was for a while at Rasputin’s Cafe. The series took hiatus and is now back with its 10th instalment, with an eye to continuing quarterly, each time combining two acts of the 9 Greek Muses.

Organizer Mike Buckthought introduces the drum troupe Konundrum who played, danced and sang songs from South America and West Africa.

Here’s a photo Brian took of them. They alternately clap, hand-drum and use the sticks. There was also xylophone, shakers, cowbells and various things I didn’t recognize.
They did a set, I did a set of short story and poems then there was a break and more chatting among the around 3 dozen gathered. A few people who said they don’t read poetry but enjoyed that was gratifying. A few laughs where I’d hope there would be. (Phew. From reading to reading I don’t repeat material, unless I’m in another city but even then I try to not overlap too much.)

After break I read another set of new poems from the last couple months, then back to the drumming and about a dozen of us dancing. Glad I was urged to get up.

Kunundrum does about 10 events a year for charity groups who want a feature entertainment. Pssst…if you’re looking, they’re a wonderful upbeat energizing group.

2 more pics by Brian.
A big thanks to Mike for getting this series going again.
The donations at door brought in $172 for the Peace and Environmental News Centre, one of Ottawa’s longest standing grassroots organizations covering things like food policy, water, greening spaces in a constant push over decades. Great cause, great night.

You can’t fully escape your own filters, but maybe you can expand yourself and your own understanding. I like the idea of journalism as poetry. The conscientious intensity and lack of dilution of poetry would improve the vagueness of journalism.
The setting outside oneself, being less egocentric might correlate to the occupational hazard and outcome of being overly terribly earnest, suicide. suicide:

The poets who committed suicide used many more first-person singular self-references such as “I,” “me” and “my” and fewer first-person plural words than did the non-suicidal poets.

Admittedly it is a small study. 18 people are not statistically valid even if it reported in a medical journal.

Using a computer program that examines word usage in written texts, the researchers analyzed 156 poems written by nine poets who committed suicide and 135 poems written by nine poets who did not.

Wonder what would be found, if randomness factor could be reduced down and if comparable results would be found. They call it a risk marker, not causal.
Still, It seems healthier to process millions of stories around oneself than to have the phaser always pointed inward on stun. People seem preoccupied with self-expression.

John Phillips at 0:45 does a poem about imitation and says “it’s at that point that you make a botch of everything that you are yourself.”

Michael, the head of SPAO, introduced rob mclennan who curated the poets for the Call and Response Project. One of the other initiators of the project, Khalia Scott couldn’t attend the final reading of 7 poets reacting to the photos of 7 photographers.
rob also wrapped up the series by doing the reactions to last set of photos, those by Greg Zenha which are still on display at SPAO’s Red Wall Gallery. I was struck most by his poem’s line, the inversion of the idea to any weapon can be made into a tool in the right hands. Ah, the poem set is online: “Used correctly, any weapon is a tool.”

I responded to Leslie Hossack’s work, images of Israel, in part. It seemed fairly well-received. I had trouble with mic height and a few people from various directions in the room called out advice on how much to lift and tip it. I said “it takes a whole community to raise a mic.” (Maybe this time it’ll get a groan?)

Sandra Ridley was on double duty playing the role of Amanda Earl and herself. Both responded in aggregate to the images so the student (Leslie?) who was running the projector ran the images of each in continuous lopps. It was interesting to see that 3 times in Amanda’s poem by chance synched up, the red iron ground reference, the piled cloud reference and fence by the side of the road. She timed her poem so it referenced itself in a sense, two minutes have passed. The poem continues in its way wandering landscapes then that time point again, 4 minutes here, to orient in time even if not in place. Interesting effect. Although Amanda did her response in the fall, she recomposed the poems since then and that one long poem response was presented.
Amanda responded to Moment(o)by John Hewett Hallum while Sandra responded to Pedro Isztin’s photos from around the world. There was a phrase I tried to keep a hold of but the poems that came after swept it away. Perhaps “the doctrine of cold we are blinded by”, perhaps it was something else, “a red cut tree” but away from the sweep of words that lead to and from they are as useful as a church up to its window in a flood.

Monty Reid responded to the Farm Family Series of Rob MacInnis. The poems were comic and pointed, both of which he does so well. They paired well with the photos, not overlapping entirely not disjunctured entirely. The last line of Fresh Faces 1 I didn’t get on the digital page nor paper page but aha, then I did.

Christine McNair responded to a series of crafts people and their crafts done by Caroline Tallmadge which you can see here (and should). She was one of two of the photographers who came to the reading. These poems were formed as if they were responses to physical artifacts in first assessment for curation. The dream imagery, gut leaps caused a few ripply oohs from the audience.

Claudia Coutu Radmore responded to the portraits of SPAO student Olivia Johnston of making poems from the images of teens and their bedrooms. Each poem was started with a Latin phrase, often for something modern, for example, “spectaculum carissimum est Zona Crepusculi” which as they used to say in the old days, “your favourite show is The Twilight Zone.” That was a real crowd pleaser, that gap.
For each show, a lovely set of cards with one photo and one image was made by SPAO by the visual designers in-house.
What next? Monty suggested a set of photographers willing to then respond to the poems and then poets to respond to those images and see what happens. The process was most interesting for poets when there was a connection and collaboration with the other artists, which happened in a few cases.
If the images and words are presented on equal terms, it would be more in keeping with the nature of calling and response where the response continues louder and longer than the original call.

Peace and Environmental News is a bimonthly print and web newspaper put out by The Peace and Environment Resource Centre (PERC) is one of Ottawa’s longest-standing grassroots organizations. It champions all the common sense things that aren’t common enough like energy efficiency, cycling, saying no to pesticides and yes to better food network distribution, that sort of thing that needs a steady persistent reminders against those temporary old defaults of the last century. A century ago, we didn’t need the goal or word sustainable, it was rolled into how to live well. Anyway,
On Monday there’ll be a fundraiser for them as part of the reemergence of The Muses reading series. (Facebook event) It’ll be myself and a drum troupe.

Kunundrum is a hand drumming group based in Ottawa. Members of Kunundrum practise and learn the art of hand drumming, and have been performing at charitable events in the region since 2006. Kunundrum focuses on African rhythms, and plays some Cuban and Haitian songs too.
I do love some good drumming. Hubby and I took a djembe course years ago which had 2 main upshots beyond orientation to the making of the instruments: 1) global admiration for music teachers who for the love of music and spreading the love endure rooms of newbies 2) by whacking my knuckles on the rim often enough I realized I may have dived in over my head. First listen to music, then make it.
Monday, June 25, 2012, 7 – 9 pm at the Elmdale House Tavern, 1084 Wellington Street West, Ottawa. It’ll be $8/pay what you can.