Rather antithetical to report sound as silent photos but motion stilled in image is a kind of implied sound. This, I believe is the finale, piece 32, SIZERZ by Steve McCaffery (Canada, 1976).
It’s interesting how much a piece can change with the chemistry and particular skills of a group, the vocal range, and the arrangement of set order.
A reading can have a sort of narrative arc, with pieces hinging from the last without a pause by some similarity as it did this time. When MG was done with AB series there was more of an amplitude to the wave with pieces contrasting each other more sharply. The melodic and comic and dark were all intercutting. When there was a MG at the Writers Fest it was more a wall of sound.
Here’s another Glimpse at IX.
It’s interesting to hear something live. For example, at a coffeehouse reading lately, hearing the laughing response to David McFadden’s poems showed a listening I didn’t hear before there was a group around the poem I’d only seen on the page. Likewise the synchronized half a dozen or so people reacting to david uu’s Salmon River Soliloquy was fun to hear. I’ve heard a crowd pleased response to Claude Gauvreau’s My Olivine before but this one was such a simultaneous breath of reaction it was neat to be among. There are things live readings do, like during the rolling rs and the trills of The Man in the Lower Left Hand Corner of the Photograph (Mike Patton, 1995) outside a motorcycle gunned its engine.
I love hearing the birdsong piece, Oiseautal, a two-person piece made from parallel evolution texts on birdsong by Haussmann and Schwittters. I don’t think I heard Knots (jwcurry, 1982) before but really enjoyed it. This time around Totem Étranglé (Antonin Artaud, 1964?) sounded new as the Messagio Galore group was pitched differently, with more females and Grant’s deep pitch the last time. Each person’s shape of body and shape of sound gives different instruments for a living orchestra. It was different. Doing covers of poetry that otherwise might be lost to ears and archives breathes life back into the bowl of letters.
Liberty Village, a former factory district that’s becoming shops. Arraymusic has been there since the 1970s. The venue’s next show is a performance of Satie’s music. The last Friday of each month they have an Improvisor’s orchestra.
On Thursday night in Ottawa, the CCMC with Paul Minton perform sound/music at the NAC. CCMC is a free improvisational band that has been reinventing itself throughout four decades. For the last eighteen years, CCMC has been the trio of Michael Snow (piano and synthesizer), John Oswald (alto sax), and Paul Dutton (soundsinging and harmonica). Phil Minton is from the UK and is doing an improv feral choir this week as well.

If you went into the woods that day, you’d have had a big surprise: A sneak peak at a sound poetry rehearsal:

Alastair, Brian & jw with Sheena in front (and Zachary not in shot). Hubby’s the one in the black hat. (Wave to hubby!) He’s been part of rehearsals for about about a year, once or twice a week.

Past MG’s have been in Toronto, Calgary and Ottawa. Some have done some of the same pieces but each show shifts, in people and pieces. The crew changes for each Messagio, sometimes in midst of rehearsals if someone moves out of town, drops out, or drops in.
Some pieces are classics, some new, some composed as sound pieces, some converted. Pieces range from seconds to almost a half hour. Some are improv, some are tightly scripted. Some are pure sound, some are deconstructed words. Some are more musical, soft and delicate and some are intense. Some are duets and some quartets or quintets. It is in the no man’s land between music, poetry, and chant. None of the above and all of the above.
At this practice session, some passersby muttered about some spiritual ceremony going on there. Another guy called out a reply of weEe-weEe-weEe in imitative greeting.
This show will be at upstairs at Arraymusic studio, 6o Atlantic Avenue, Toronto, this Sunday, 7-9pm, ticket at door $20.
If you’re in town you can catch it and the unrelated LeftWords Festival of Books and Ideas also Sunday May 6, but earlier in the day, 11 am – 5 pm. It’s free and at Ryerson Student Centre, 55 Gould Street.

Unfortunately the only 2 writers fest events I made it to this year are also the only two put on vimeo, but then, maybe that is lucky because they were both great events.

Here’s Jenkins’ talk.
He pointed out the peculiarity of “creative non-fiction” by defining by what it isn’t instead of what it is. He suggested we call it poetic documentary. The term already exists in film of the 1930s, such as in The Bicycle Thief.
Writers are not distinguished by the act of writing but by the fact of rewriting. He called a well-written sentence, a lozenge. The job of writing is to break up ideas, clichés.
The value of writing better isn’t remuneration but a kind of self-development and world-creation. To learn to talk to yourself better is to get a better life. To let others into the dialogue allows the dialogue’s benefits to spread. The outcome is deeper considered words.
A better poetry leads to compassion and away from practical short-term financial vision. Art leads to the left. He challenged anyone listening to take up the idea of making a poetic documentary of something of the other side of the street, and infuse it with a poetic narrative towards insight and compassion to spread the discussion broader. For example, write about a history or real estate, or the tar sands, or banking, or interview someone who had been imprisoned in the Kingston farm prison that was closed in favour of a system of cement block incarceration model. Farming the land is a sort of poetic antidote, a rehabilitative model to a troubled mind, to do things and make things grow in a self-sustaining farm, whereas the indoor prison block is more a punitive model.
Poetry can be a record for the next time history repeats so that we can confirm a pattern we see developing by looking back or suggest a way forward. The subjective aspect of poetry is in its favour. Journalism pretends there is no observer effect, but it nor poetry needs to. An audience member, Aiden Parchelo, pointed out “we’re hard-wired to be receptive to other human beings”. Telling stories about people taps into this. As a writer, we are creating views of the world, either replicating or altering for the better or worse. We can’t help but skew. Parchelo also pointed out “Journalists create observers.”
There’s not just a reporting of feelings but a ripple effect of those impacts, perhaps with a gap long after you remember the experience you recorded in a poem.
If you missed Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, you can watch him for an hour as he talked in Chicago in January. He talks about making mnemonic devices and the impact of digital devices on deep reads. Memorizing is learning. All the knowledge we have is that we can remember. A mind furnished with memory skills is stronger, can synthesize and create but the skim read and refer to recorded memory cannot innovate ideas, only mediate experiences.
He also talks about his journey into accidental participatory journalism instead of the usual pretend neutral perspectiveless journalism.

Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English at Yale University, and Martha Lavey, artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company dialogue on actor’s body and roles at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Over the hour, a lot of it seems to apply to the process of poem-making and reading as well.
– acting is setting up a sequence of impacts on an audience (10 minutes)
– gertrude stein; something about the way she constructs sentences makes me spill over (12:30)
– as people observe the same neurons fire than the ones that would if they were doing (27:00,)
– being “under the weather of the role”, a doctor said to actress, your body doesn’t know that it’s lying (30:00)
and it’s healthy for “the theatre to die at night” to turn that role off and rest
– even when we think we are being natural, we can’t help be be mannered by the time we’re in (36:00)
Some job roles are to understand the impact of what you say, to build expectation, know when saturation or boredom point is and pull back and try a new tack. It’s something of a garden of words to make a stream of sound or story that turns and causes new reveals.
Something that doesn’t “make sense” still is felt in the body. The conscious upper brain is bypassed by some constructions in words.
Be careful little mind and body what you consume. Your body doesn’t understand what you obsess over isn’t really happening. Could a tough manuscript make you end up literally and literarily sick as you wrestle with the angel in the cave, breaking your own bones, giving yourself ptsd for the sake of a creation of the mind that then ripples ill effects to other minds that take a turn arm wrestling with the angel you made? Part of that is culture and each cultural artifact gives an exercise against a surrogate devil so one can handle ones own. Transferable skills and all that. Gains are hard to measure but impacts as you go along are easier. Sure, go into dark places. That is part of the writer’s job but come out at night for beauty because that is what renews the human animal.
Being under the weather of a project, the obsessive stage of editing, single-minded rewritings, the depressive trough of having no focus when it is done for a while, all have physical effects, mental effects and are a job hazard not just of actors.
Training the mind to be completely in one project and then clicking off so that one is shifting up activities is healthy. A little social, a little sun, a little obsession and cycle back again.
The matter of style and stylistics is to be a product of your age and peers and even when you think you’re not stilted, it’s temporary. But that’s the universe’s balloon. Looking at a 1940s anthology, some wrote in a manner that seems now like 1800s and some could be written by contemporaries today. Did they seem so stylistically marked then or the centre of style has just shifted so that one fell sideway out of the bubble while the other is still inside?

The OIW talk was lively. More than half of the 26 or 28 people who came asked questions. Pretty stellar amount of engagement. rob and I fielded questions, asked questions back so it became more of a roundtable of practice being discussed from how to publicize readings to what prose poetry is to how to respond to edits and how poetry responds to different times.
rob gave the best answer I’ve seen to that chestnut of a question of “what inspires you?”

My father farms. He milks the cows every morning. He doesn’t wait to be inspired.

Among the handouts I gave, (with Dan Weber’s sestina’s on offer as well and an updated chart on editing your poems) I included these handy poetry links
bywords event listing
Versefest
Writers Festival
OpenBook Ontario Events
Poetry Daily
Serif of Nottingham
nationalpoetrymonth.ca
NaPoWriMo.net
linebreak
Fishhouse Interviews
dverse poets

UBU Ethno
We started to touch on some of one handout at one point. Some of it is below:
Poetry can be split in any number of dynamics:
– according to attempting to make beauty or avoid beauty, make or avoid meaning
– according to the degree of internal or external performance, to inkblot with self or elicit an audience
– according to responsibility to which audiences, active or passive, in which community standards
– according to momentum, wanting to reinforce or change or observe
– according to how much it is raw or cooked, preference for level of polish
– according to what it the unit of language, of “natural” conversational or towards the smallest unit of the materials of compositions, the phonemes of sounds or the characters of text to new shapes
– according to style of craft (lyric, dirty concrete, haiku, confessional, sonnet, spoken word)
– according to the desire of the poet to embrace clarity or obliqueness, conscious or unconscious ink
– according to an attempt to resist politics or pretend social issues don’t exist
– according to using poetic devices or avoids them
– according to amount of editing and reading and thinking and time put it
– according to the needs driving the writer and,
– according to a writer’s role, which can be split into roles in relation to others in time.
Community historian
to record family or community history
– by retelling story of parents
– by head-hopping into life of historical figures
– by collecting bits of local history
Why: to perpetuate stories for the future
Thespian
to get words to enact your emotion’s story
– by story
– by allegory of myth or myth-ing persons
– by disrupting language to create sensation
Why: to reinforce, perpetuate, intensify or provoke a feeling
Explorer
to mess around with ideas tools
– by dialoguing with other texts in English or other languages
– by using form poetry, homophonic translation, flarf or appropriation
– by remixing language, examining grammar’s boundaries
Why: to see what happens and examine and build, or perhaps to change your own mind, ideas, behaviors
Escapist/Rebel
I’m sorry, that role is off daydreaming of
– is not available for comment at the mome–
Moralist
to preach the way the universe works
– in order to change someone else’s mind
– in order to convince and comfort oneself
– in order to create/build or deconstruct the notion of nation or man or political system or social behavior or Christian or other constructs
Why: to cause an effect in emotion or behavior, to control
Watchdog
to pay attention to immediate world
– by being observant to details
– by synthesizing information to arrive at new patterns for old data or reinforce old patterns with new data
Why: to meditate, slow down, find inner clarity, transcendence or truth or to direct attention
Some people and some poems and some phases of life or mood take on different prevalences. Personally I think I’m hard into the preacher class. Moralist, with bits of Watchdog and Explorer.