ArtsPark, now in its 8th year, filled a street and Parkdale’s park with its booths of gluten-free foods, woodwork, crafty clothes, the TacoLot, knitting, ceramics, hand massage, soaps, teas…a collection of visual artists had a tent as well.

And cupcake caterers. There were at least 3 booths of this. One gave all of the day’s proceeds to WaterCan.
This one was Petite Treats at Bite-Size Bakery.

Over at the main stage Lucky Ron played and kids came jumping and dancing as if the piped piper just blew a note.

Meanwhile at the Arc poetry tent, people took turns at the typewriter. Hm, what comes next? Monty Reid takes a look at the cake poem underway.

Peter of Collected Works with a friendly halloo on his way to his booth. Is that Chris the Junior Bookstore Monkey in person?

And on the front side of the Arc table, free bilingual magnetic poetry set to play with.
Around the grounds, lots of news…and thousands of toddlers? A tricycle race and dry wading pool as a velodrome. And Wellington West has info on free bike clinics at Cyclelogik and Fresh Air Experience, RightBike rentals. Apparently some abandoned government buildings are being looked at for artist studio spaces. There’s a petition group to approve The Bayview Workshops. Credible Edibles next month is getting a side-shop of Hintonburg Pottery shop.

This year anyone could try his or her hand at a poem.

Brecken interviewed customers for what they wanted in their poem as the band took a break from music and brought out a few spoken word performances.

Proceeds went towards the 2013 Versefest and literacy programs.

Brecken and Terry Ann compose drafts.

Monty, Bardia (on his laptop) and I are typing, or in my case, typ(o)ing.

Here’s one I did given a quick interview and a few minutes on the fly to make a custom occasion poem. What a rush, in the adrenaline sense to dive in with a few details and design words to please in such a quick turnaround.

A couple happy customers. Both said that they loved it. It was so special to make a custom poem like that. Anime movies I don’t know, vinyl figurines, favourite foods, colors, family member names, adjectives, things she collects, favorite types of animals, whatever one is offered, and on your mark, go.
You might remember that last year I was at the Arc Poetry Factory too. Any area poets with a bit of time can stop by without (necessarily) get wrangled into writing one.

Clare Latremouille serves up juice to the kids. L.M. Rochefort reads the commissioned poem to her customer.

Reverb Syndicate played while being stage-dived by a most persistent toddler, regularly retrieved from behind the drum kit by one parent or another.

Over at the booths was BeadWorks which started in 2008 as part of Operation Come Home. My eye skipped past the jewelry to poetry from their Job Action Center. Hm, a poet from a 2009 Bywords reading has a chapbook out.
shawn macmillan’s laid out poems of “This & That” are within a photo collage that demonstrates understanding of photo/word pairings. They’re not duplicating and illustrating one another but doing what haiga is said to aim to do but usually fails at. They relate and yet you can’t say always exactly how they support it.
He has a poem for the shaggy mane mushroom, also called inkcap, which is one of my favorite mushrooms because of the ephemeralness, even for a mushroom. It dissolves, can be watches with our time scale as if in time-lapse. His poem “Coprinus comatus or my archetypal fungus” starts with an Audubon guide epigraph “Fragile as this mushroom is, it has the remarkable ability to push up through asphalt” and continues within the poem with,

an underground network
going unnoticed
expanding, beneath the surface
its fruiting body
fed by the rains
has enough force
to pry apart the paving
the shaggy mane mushroom
can grow up right through the streets
[…] each one a matchstick before the blaze

He’s got a wonderful musicality in his poems, such as the 4-page poem before it. Look at this excerpt,

yea, if I could only turn my face towards the sun
wilderness would make me a bear king
anoint me with a crown of daffodils
weaved from the cotton of milkweeds
safe in the arms of the holy ghost
          the animal god
the daylight
the moonshine
the warmth
the call of the nightingale
an old gaelic song from the highlands
a war cry
a lullaby
l’aube et crépuscule
the way things can change for the better

The power of the words, cadence, exaltation gives me a bad case of poem-envy. It’s why to go places and poke around on spec, to come across a find like that.

May 26, Arc Poetry Magazine will once again be participating in Hintonburg’s ArtsPark festival. It runs from 10 am to 5pm in the Parkdale Market Park, and features a variety of entertainment and arts programming. Musicians, visual art, jewelry, bake stands and other things.
Arc will again be selling magazines, creating magnetic poems, and providing a poetry-on-demand service, with on-site poets typing up new poems on lovely paper for eager paying customers.

Le Prix Jocelyne Villeneuve (2012, trifold broadsheet) with Janick Belleau taking first spot.
Luce Pelletier (below) just read her 3rd place and honorable mention haiku in the competition:

Betty Drevniok Award: 2012 (trifold broadsheet). The top prize went to Bill Pauly of Iowa, someone who has been writing since the 60s and 70s but had disappeared for years and is reemerging. Another longtime poet, Timothy Russell, from Toronto, got second and third places.
There’s an anthology of all the Drevniok poems that have won this to date but somehow I missed seeing it. It’s out with Mike Montreuil’s new bilingual press, Petits Nuages.
A Thousand Fireflies/Mille Lucioles (Petits Nuages, 2011) by Lumita Suse, translated by Mike Montreuil is a collection of tanka. I don’t recall if I did rave or not about the poem she read at Tree that would come to be included in this book, p. 46:

a child lying on the grass
wonders why passersby
attach their feet to earth
instead of diving
into blue
un enfant couché sur l’herbe
se demande pourquoi les passants
attachent leurs pieds à la terre
au lieu de plonger
dans la bleu

Speaking of plunging, why are Canadians so taken with Basho?
I’m happy to have come across The Basho Variations (BookThug) by Steve McCaffery, partly to read it back to back against Frogments from the Frag Pond and partly because my biggest laugh of the day came with McCaffrey’s “The Prebyterian Basho [no page numbers, bother] which starts,

Not a frog nor a poet
nor a stone if of sinpleness, yea I say
thrown into the pond of sin’s round circle
but rather the complex martyrdom
of wounds by words
and the smoothing of the skin thereof into a bufic
croaking form,
Yea, and the webbed toes of Satan
fanneth out him into the bullfrog of our vanities

At which point I was laughing too hard to see to read on immediately.

Robyn Sarah’s “Digressions: prose poems, collage poems and sketches”, on the other hand, although promising sketch has more heft and breadth. And is also a pleasure to read and hear.
How many poems into the reading before I didn’t want to leave the room without being able to read and re-read and own the set? It’s writing from over 35 years. For example, she takes “A Brief History of Time” and excises in order only the words used to reconfigure meanings with that material for new purposes. It takes as much time, paring, editing and reediting as anything that comes straight out of your head. It gives the sense of listening to texts in a way.
This is the same technique that I used for Over my Dead Corpus (Angelhouse, 2010) and I thought it ended there but I’ve restarted the process again.
p. 57 of her poem “A Brief History of Time: Digest and Subtext”,

you can never be sure that the fact
is what is supposed to happen.
You can always question the question.
It turns out to be very difficult:
a millionth of a millionth of an inch.
And our goal is nothing less.
2 Space and Time
pure thought falling vertically
in a straight line at the same speed
unifying the partial theories
like ripples from a pond:

The Hard Return (Insomniac, 2012) by Marcus McCann is mentioned at rob mclennan’s internet go-to-place. As is often the poems he singles out aren’t the ones I’m drawn to but what I am reading, I’m enjoying. All that dexterity of language, craftedness, cleverness and an extra depth of grace over his last collection. Like Robyn Sarah’s collection, he’s plundering. He’s got Don McKay’s “Some functions of a leaf” cut up and laid in, in entirety, in order thru his collection without singling themselves out. Other poems are centos. If you check the references, you can say, ah yes, that does sound in isolation like a David O’Meara line, but put together, the overriding current, intention and direction is Marcus’ voice.
If twitter and the internet broke would people run up to strangers on the street and try to show pictures of their cat looking cute or meals? Yet people do unload depressing oversharing to total strangers in transit. Why not in fiction? Emily Schultz started a short story with a line “Everywhere I looked people were crying.” This makes me grumpy. This is why I stay in poetry not novels and short stories where there are perhaps other rules of engagement. Still,
ribsauce: a cd/anthology of words by women (Véhicule Press, 2001) looks interesting in places. Marie Clements has a striking piece. Rita Wong’s “chaos feary” plays in language and its components without getting lost in that and never making a point. It is a response “upon reading biopiracy by vandana shiva”. Here’s the first half of one of her poems in there, p. 34

pyre in pirate bio in bile
mono in poly breeder in
womb pull of landrace allo
me poietic auto me diverse
trans over genic harassment
over seas genetic as pathetic
as engine of disease socio
me catastrophic political and
eugenic organ as an ism

Finding the sounds and meanings in components of syllables that don’t mean that, a sort of twisting of original intentions, digging out and reshuffling. It has a wonderful momentum and mouth feel.
Funnily enough I follow Rita Wong on twitter but I don’t think I’d read her poetry before. It’s funny, kind of like finding out your neighbour is also a doctor when not gardening. A strange percentage of the anthology are musing in the voice of being a child or teen but the perceptions of an adult.
Moonbathing: a journal of women’s tanka (issue 5, Fall/Winter, 2011-2012) is a journal I’ve heard good things about for a while. Finally I see one in person. I got a couple issues and dipped into one. My favourite might be by Christina Nguyen, p. 13

another dictator
instruct his troops
to mow down innocents
I tell my daughter
to let the ants be

I could dedicate that to Alistair.
Harper’s Magazine (June 2012 issue) has a complex story on zoos by David Samuels. He interviews people who work there, people who founded zoos and what their worldviews were. He reports life as a people pyramid, pitting elephant feeding in competition against breakfast programs for school children. If budgets are to tighten, cutting back on an individual’s/specimen’s food, wouldn’t arms trade would be a more useful comparison. In the article he never stops and looks at any of the animals, which is curious. He talks of people who only know people, no relationships with any animals that aren’t human, suggesting there are no animals outside agriculture and zoos. 100 species disappear a year. It could become true. I never knew how unusual it was to spend days in and out observing various individuals who were farm animals.
Joy in Me Still (Inkling Press, 2010) by George Swede. I’ll close with a sample of p. 52. I like how it leaves to the audience to see the absurd comedy, as if the animals would tell which directions ancestral geography was, how the mind insists on imposing a narrative to incidental details. And yet for someone who believes in the mystic knowing, it reinforces that too.

the zoo’s four capybaras
all facing towards
South America

At the corner of Coach House Books and the North Pole….hm, think we’ll choose Coach House.
It is not in Open Doors Toronto this time, but you can arrange for tours. We just dropped by. I had a ridiculous amount of being tongue-tiedness to be there in person. (Stutter is my mutter tongue.)
If hubby had not spoken up at I timidly stared into open doors, we probably would have gone and not gone in.

Here he is with bpNichol’s landmark poem.
There was a meeting going on upstairs and we just stopped by so we didn’t get the Magical Mystery Tour but were given a look around (by someone I should have taken the name of but didn’t).


He gave us these cool newly done sheets.

Tremolo by Ethel Harris was going thru the presses for the 7th time. It is a one-color press that is fed thru for the registration marks to line up each layer of color.

Each book cover is creased with this machine, the Gordon Press of their logo, before being folded and wrapped around the pages. It can score 400 covers per hour. You can see a corner of the type room in the background.
Micallef’s Stroll was being glued and trimmed. All along walls and windows are titles they’ve printed. (I was too trigger-shy to record all that.)

This is the linotype machine that originally did many of the first titles. You type a line and the machine pours and casts it. The machine was built in 1917 and was used until 1975. Now their books are laid out digitally, put by laser onto a film negative to make plates for printing.

Here’s a pic Brian took of me outside 80 bpNichol Lane.
P.S. Have you seen Epilogue: the future of print, a documentary with interviews of Joanne Saul, (Type Books), Stephen Fowler, (Monkey’s Paw Bookshop), Stan Bevington, (Coach House Books), Brian Morgan, (The Walrus Magazine), Don Taylor, (Don Taylor Bookbinding), Michael Torosian, (Lumiere Press), Akemi Nishidera, (KOZO Studio Gallery) and George Walker, (Biting Dog Press & OCADU).

Martha Silano’s homage to Heather McHugh who had a few weeks of one-on-one.

what comes to mind first is her handwriting; more specifically, her messy comments scrawled all over my mostly-awful rough drafts with a bright red Sharpie. Once she wrote at the bottom of a very pathetic and worthless poem: This is so sad. God, did that comment ever make it obvious I’d written a poem not worth fixing! Another time she placed a big X through the last six lines of a poem. Next to it she’d scrawled You can stop now — enough already!
I adored Heather’s work, and now I was learning about the woman behind the poems, this teacher who could be warm and encouraging, and also tell me to shut up without making me cry or feel stupid or prevent me from writing the next poem. She exuded warmth, seemed to have complete confidence in my abilities, and yet she had no trouble giving me the proverbial slap upside the head.

Jan Zwicky on reviewing is part of a Lemonhound series. She says why review? “To inform people who might be interested in reading the book that it exists, and to offer an imaginatively and intellectually engaged appreciation of it.” She considers reviewing as moral reform, by generosity and respect, or shaming.
Kristin Berkey-Abbot’s tribute to Jane Kenyon includes a pointing to Donald Hall on life with Jane Kenyon where he said,

If anyone had asked us, “Which year was the best, of your lives together?” we could have agreed on an answer: “the one we remember least.”

Keith Wilkinson’s blog includes beauty, including this poem of his George ‘n’ Me

I don’t think he could remember my name,
and I decided I didn’t have anything to say to him
that was worth saying, so we just looked at each other
across the aisle, slightly amused, slightly affectionately,
as we might have looked at a moth on a rock,

Lots of beauty out there.