I’m still befuddled by/resistant to the idea of a novel, short story or poem having a set structure.
I don’t know why I should be. How many times have I bent myself into a knot declaring, that’s not a poem, that’s not a story, that’s not even an idea!
Any form of storytelling, whether photographic or verbal, is catered to the human mind. There’s a hook, there’s a body of story, there’s a surprise or lesson. That may be a reveal or what accumulates in understanding in the mind of viewers.
Poetry can use language. At the same time poetry is not literacy test. To be distracted by spelling and grammar, punctuation and line breaks are to get derailed by surface level. People can do what they must by habit do for poems towards me but when I see in workshops someone taken down a few pegs for spelling mistakes, inner mama bear tends to roar. Someone reproaching another about the need to “get literate” before they write a poem because they muss up “it’s” and “its” or that usual set? Seriously? Is that not saying: Bzzt. You haven’t qualified as someone I will listen to is the message of. It’s like throwing out resumes for typeface to get thru the slush pile faster. Expedient but looking at the wrong factors. It’s as relevant as being distracted by someone’s hair in a reading. Writing is also communication. Would one interrupt someone who says um, er, with a catty get back to me once you’ve learned how to talk? Point of human interaction missed the last train out.
To have sentence structure or essay structure or list structure is not sufficient to make it a poem or a communication. It can be ideas rendered in image and text, and be a poem. A visual concept, an ad can be poetry but someone mumbling to themselves without interest in what they are saying, not even paying attention to themselves…no.
Poetry signifies something. Signals something. What about something that isn’t cosmic, isn’t crisis, isn’t emotion, isn’t new rational outcome, isn’t music?
What constitutes it? I’m not saying there is no inherent nature.
Good stand-up has a feel. A joke has an arc of set up and reveal. A piece of inspirational oratory, a sermon, a radio show all have structures. Roman Mars said at Design Matters about public radio for his 4-5 minute segment, he breaks down hours of footage to show: 1 big idea, 2 anecdotes, 1 take-away fact, and something funny.
Should it have internal coherency and a point? If its not without a refinement to a point, what would be the point? If its just sampling without reduction from the general mass of conflicting information, or if it is just a news summary, what role or advantage does it give to the reader?
The in-between bits matter too. In The Smooth Yarrow (Signal, 2012), Susan Glickman has a poem “On Finding a Copy of Pigeon at the Hospital Bookstore” and speaks in the poem of the “bulky bestsellers” on the shelf,

the omni-present present tense, that fake cinematic contrivance
meant to create a sense of “being in the moment” with the hero
as if life were one constant rush of adrenaline
with no possible mood but surprise.

Formula novels bother me for that. As do movies, tv shows, ads, conversations. It’s claustraphobic the containment in a narrow maze of orders of reveal, everything for purpose, nothing extraneous. I like extraneous. I like all timeframes allowed to be present. I like the access to all the tenses.
Like Zach Wells pointed out in Baffle,

Not every sensation
can be sensational if we wish to remain
whole and sane.

It can’t all be important, nor all dismissed. Variation allows perception.
There’s room for a lot of range in communication. It makes me tense to be reprimanded in a poem to stick to the cardinal rule of immediacy of present tense, cutting out automatically all -ed, -ing and present perfect as if it were a controlled vocabulary for adult literacy programs. And the rule of thumb that one must prune out all species names, to dumb down in case a reader doesn’t know a word and it “takes the person out of the poem”. Is the goal of a poem to cast a spell like that dull slack-faced gaze one gets when facing a tv? If you want a mindless ride, there’s pop culture for that. Poetry can do other work.
Part of that editing impulse is useful. It drives me to include words I know from other languages, to avoid ballad spells, to signal that reading is not a mentally sedentary activity.
Still, the sweet spot is a dilemma. How to present something compelling, without preselecting content that is too reactive or too inert/flat? Too just-talking, or too trying too hard to be a poem?

Collected Work had 3 events over the day for the national event to promote buying from local physical bookstores. This is the second year.
I made it to the mid-afternoon novelist panel and readings. There was a lively Q&A. Here are some of the questions and responses:
Am I too old to start?
Peggy Blair said, no, she wrote the first time creatively in her 50s. She’d quit as a lawyer and her university daughter demanded to know what she was doing next because she can’t just do nothing. Off the cuff Peggy said she was going to be a novelist. The daughter eye-rolled and said she wasn’t then demanded to know novel about what. She picked Cuba out of the air. 3 weeks later, she had the novel written. 150-some rejections later she still had a novel but no publisher. Her story on the route to publishing is up at OpenBook Ontario as well as in newspapers in the UK, Australia and more.
Do you use your own life in your creative writing or create a divide?
Missy Marsten and Sandra Nicholls remarked on how it is often the start of writing to write from self and then once that it done, you are freed to write anything. Some start with memoir, some with poetry and then once you are past the backlog of your own experiences you can go wild and crazy.
What do we do when someone recognizes themselves in our writing, whether we’ve unconsciously added something real or not?
Scott Fotheringham passed on the tip he received that if you reverse the gender of the characters, people wouldn’t draw themselves into the characters. It’s remarkably effective.
Missy Marsten added that although one of her characters in her previous book and going thru a divorce, and she went thru a divorce, it’s a different divorce. It isn’t a reliving but how different characters would respond to the same thing.
The panel was asked, how do you decide what the characters do?
There was a conscensus that the characters decide. They block the plot and won’t be moved against their wills. They develop lives of their own. One of the panelists quipped, yes, what we’re saying is we all have schizophrenia.

Sandra Nicholls who has a couple poetry collections read her new novel And the Seas will Turn to Lemonade about academics forming a commune.
Missy Marsten was reading from her first novel, The Love Monster (Vehicule, 2012), seems charming. It is about an alien living on earth who falls in love with a human, one who happens to be named Margaret Atwood, but not that Margaret Atwood. I get the impression of a lot of characters and lively writing. She read an excerpt of the awkward moment at work: how to navigate so your femaleness is not to be brought into question when a former coworker brings her new baby into the office and you don’t get the omg-melty effect.

Michael H McCann wrote Marcie’s Murder most recently. He said he’s wanted to be a writer since he was little. He writes police procedural crime fiction. His is novel with a strong female character, 5′ 3′ and martial art expert, cop. She is working with Lieut. Hank Donaghue who is accused of murder. He read a bit about chauvinism in the workplace being called out. McCann has a blog where he notes he saw “name up in chalk”.

The Rest is Silence (Gooselane, 2012) is the story of a man leaving an armageddon-bound world to create a subsistence life in a rural area. YA author Jess Ross with of Dawn Patrol (Orca, 2012), surfer novel for boys who don’t have things of interest to read.

Peggy Blair holding up and doing a dramatic reading from her crime novel, The Beggar’s Opera already in translation to German and Norwegian. It is now out in English with Penguin as well. In it Inspector Ramirez has an incurable dementia that makes him hallucinate interactions with the ghosts of victims of unsolved murders.

There were 17 left when I got there.

Alas, I spent too much time looking at books and that bonus was all gone by the time I chose.

In This Thin Rain by Nelson Ball (Mansfield Press, 2012), second read thru.
When inside, why would I go out. When out, why would I come in?
There’s internet inside…weak case against the sun. But you’re here. And so am I… 2 new poems of mine up at Truck.

Or outside, what stays and what goes. A claw by water.

3 skippers on a wild Iris.

We’re sad to share the news that the owners of mother tongue books have decided to close the store after its 18-year run.
But the doors won’t close for good before we all get to celebrate its achievements and the role it has played in our community.
mother tongue will be hosting a series of events and publishing a blog where folks can share stories and experiences.
The first event is Friday, June 22, with Giller Prize-winner Elizabeth Hay and acclaimed Ottawa singer-songwriter Jill Zmud.
Please stop by the store at 1067 Bank, south of Sunnyside, over the coming weeks!
For more information, please visit http://www.celebratemothertongue.ca/
Please spread the word!
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CELEBRATE MOTHER TONGUE BOOKS
1. Buy books!
2. Donate. No amount is too small. Join the Friends@200 fund, where individuals or groups purchase $200 worth of books or donate $200 toward our closing costs. Offer a service or special item for our online auction (details to follow!). Or just pass the hat at your next meeting, group or event! We appreciate every gift.
3. Join us at our series of events starting Friday, June 22, with Giller award-winner Elizabeth Hay and acclaimed Ottawa-based singer-songwriter Jill Zmud. Events are every Friday evening until July 20.
4. Send us a note of support or share a special “mother tongue moment” on our open blog at celebratemothertongue.ca. We will be sharing these stories and memories as a way to honour the store’s history. And spread the word! Circulate this blog’s URL: http://www.celebratemothertongue.ca
5. Buy local. Now, more than ever, it is important to support your remaining local booksellers and businesses. They are the building blocks of vibrant neighbourhoods and communities. Next time you are at a community event, take the time to see which local businesses that supported it; in turn, support those businesses.

Noah Cicero in the discussion of New Sincerity, at HTML Giant said in comments something particularly articulate, or perhaps that is to say, something I can hear particularly well.

if a person has an ironic personality that constantly sees the ambiguous nature of the universe, then they will always be unsure if they are thinking, doing and believing in the rights things.
Concerning sincerity: looked up definition “Sincerity is the virtue of one who speaks and acts truly about his or her own feelings, thoughts, and desires.”
See there is a fundamental thing about sincerity, it is rooted in the transitory character of the person who writes it and the worldview they hold at the time they are writing the book.
Kerouac was being sincere through some weird buddhist catholic drug induced worldview.
Mailer was being sincere through some jewish harvard educated fought in world war 2 worldview. (speaking of Armies of the night and siege of chicago)
Yates was being sincere through some atheistic fought in world war 2 alcohol induced lived in the suburbs worldview.
Rhys was being sincere through some atheistic raised in Dominica went to england alcohol induced worldview.
If a person is truly sincere, they can give a portrait of the times they lived in, what was timeless and what wasn’t so timeless.

Maybe it is another way to say, you have no choice but to write who you are, where you are coming from or headed to.
Filters are hard to shake. Confirmation bias is hard to shake. What makes sense and seems important is filtered by what you’ve lived. You can take in the millions of details coming at you simultaneously all the time, can’t chase each one to its logical conclusions from how and why. Life isn’t long enough.
If you concentrate on making something matter that you have not lived, you are directing your future self.
You are still tangled in the mosquito net of filters. How would you write past yourself, step aside of yourself? Exercises and plunder can help that. Someone else chooses you tools. But still handed any material, you impose yourself, whether given a dictionary or butter stick to carve.
When asked why he attended so many public lectures on chemistry in London. Coleridge replied: “To improve my stock of metaphors.”
Gotham writers tweeted: “If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.” -Nikki Giovanni
You write not only from inside your margins but your margins plus.
How in infinite choice do you choose which plusses to add?
Maybe you value something because someone you value values it so extend yourself in that way. Maybe it seems something one “should” know and it largely makes no sense but a skew of 1% resonates — you focus on that and it leads places in a wikipedia leapfrog sort of way. Maybe you add a plus because it is not comprehensible, a glimmering signal of not-here-therefore-good-enough-for-me.
Is self inescapable? Probably. But there are things that seem more repeated, core, characteristic, defining. That’s what gets billed as voice, those quirks that one is compelled to squirt. Is this called “authentic” too? Or “sincere”? If it is bullshit, at least it is recognizably distinctive as your own? If one decides to perform poetry in only a certain manner, keep to that palette even when one caricatures oneself, or is bored but in a rut, or engaged but everyone else is bored, does it matter if there’s a true to selfness?
Sincerity doesn’t mean raw. It doesn’t mean constant cosmic awe. One can sincerely be avoidant. One can sincerely show a mask one loves best, some common man hokey, or some provocateur that never shows “human vulnerability”. One can spend decades sincerely plying the water or profound around every corner. Everything is sincere and everything is delusions. Both are opt in labels. What could be said to be meaningful “sincere”, “real”. What is outside the frame is reality is about the frame not the reality. Or we can say sincere is what we really believe and the rest is humour, satire, irony, allegory, hyperbole. But what if what we sincerely believe is nihilism, dark comedy of universe of unreality of all? That messes up the model.
If you model the universe in poetry, which you can’t help but do as every gesture is an expression of where you are in time and space and understanding of intention, how to move or determine movement is finished? What is a unit? What matters is completeness perhaps, even if it a fragmentariness. Is it pushed to the reasonable limit of what makes it adequately complete?
All have margins around that have implications of what is not being addressed and one can fill those with suggestions of what omissions could indicate.
Maybe it’s my preoccupation, the sense of unconscious intention. One gravitates to what one needs, builds what one misses. A writing is one’s baby, a sort of grow your own supporters project in absence of proper family support, perhaps.
Irony has one foot on belief and one on disbelief, playing safe on base. Sincerity makes a run for the next base and risks being tagged out.
Irony is self-aware. Sincerity can be self-aware and proceed anyway. In the discussion, Tim Jones-Yelvington says relates from Sontag’s Notes on Camp, “Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.”
Camp can exaggerate irony or sincerity. It has a sense of humour that is kindly more than mocking perhaps while satire is hurt and anger turning sad to pretty.
Adam Jameson said in that article’s comments, “Manifestos[…] did announce a movement. And one thing that movements do is move.”
People flow towards, away. Change, adapt, rewrite, overwrite, change the rules, follow those until thrown over. Or until one expresses with life in some different area of life instead.