Issue 8 of Branch Magazine, Make-Believe, is up today. It includes a feature of Susan Musgrave and 2 poems of mine as well as lots of text and art goodness.
It never rains, except when it rains. NationalPoetryMonth.ca features a poem of mine today

This Saturday, April 14th at 7pm there will be a spring reading of In Air/Air Out with the SLOWest Coffeehouse reading series at Bridgehead on Wellington near Collected Works. Readers are include the El Dorado reading series people Jorge Etcheverry and Luciano Díaz as well as Czandra, Shai Ben Shalom, and Monty Reid.
Chapbooks will naturally be for sale. Donations from this event will go to the Guatemala Stove Project.
Czandra published This side uP in 2011 with Broken Rules Press, Ste. Anne de Bellevue. So far it has raised stoves for two families in Guatemala. She is unable to escape social issues, administers www.poets againstwar.ca, teaches yoga, poetry, activism and peace at a Quebec College.
Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, lived for many years in Alberta, and now lives in Ottawa. His recent publications include Disappointment Island (Chaudiere), The Luskville Reductions (Brick), Site Conditions (Apt 9) and a number of chapbooks from the In the Garden project. He has won Alberta’s Stephansson Award for Poetry on three occasions, a national magazine award, and is a 3-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Award. Disappointment Island was shortlisted for the City of Ottawa Book Award and won the Lampman-Scott Award for poetry.
Born and educated in Israel, Shai Ben-Shalom has been experimenting with poetry since he started thinking in– not merely translating to – English. A biologist who recognizes science’s limits, Shai draws inspiration from nature, art, relationships, daily life, and Leonard Cohen.
Born in Chile, Luciano Díaz became a writer after emigrating to Canada in his youth. In the 1990s, he edited two Symbiosis anthologies of poetry and fiction from Ottawa’s diverse cultural communities. He is co organizer of El Dorado reading series in Ottawa. His second book of poetry, Nomados/Nomads, is forthcoming from Split Quotation press. He is coauthor of several anthologies in Spanish, among others El lugar de la memoria, an anthology of Chilean poetry in Canada and Borealis, an anthology of readers featured in the Taller Cultural El Dorado.
Jorge Etcheverry, born in Chile, has published poetry, prose, criticism and articles in several countries. His latests books of poetry are: Reflexión Hacia el Sur and Cronipoemas. His work has appeared in anthologies such as Cien microcuentos chilenos (2002); Los poetas y el general (2002); Latinocanadá (2007); Poéticas de Chile. Chilean Poets (2007); 100 cuentos breves de todo el mundo (2007); and The Changing Faces of Chilean Poetry: A Translation of Avant Garde, Women’s, and Protest Poetry (2008). His anthology of Chilean contemporary poetry Chilean Poets A New Anthology was published by Marick Press this year. Is ambassador in Canada of Poetas del Mundo.
Watch this space for news of another reading this summer in St. Catherines, Ontario.
And look for copies at Collected Works, Wellington St, Ottawa, and at the Ottawa small press fair on June 30th, this year.

John Barton was the feature reader at Tree yesterday. Well-published and well-recognized Barton’s latest Hymn was for sale, with his collected to come out later this year.
He shared various stories, often with a comic twist and/or local spin, thru form poems, pantoum thru spencerian stanza. The constraints of meter and length can cause an inspiration, musicality and tightness if spun right. Some of his poems were as evidenced by the little happy oohs popping up around the room. Here’s an audio sample of him reading from Hymn.
Now based in Victoria and editor for the Malahat Review, he was a long time Ottawa resident and edited Arc magazine for 13 years. He’s also become something of a collector of literary awards [poem links and interview there as well] and has done his share of mentoring over the years as well.
He’s seen a lot of Canada, between book tours and being raised in Calgary and recently being writer-in-residence in Fredericton.
He spoke some of being in the middle of blocks of his own family history. His family arrived in Nova Scotia in the 1830s. By coincidence the segment of the night that honours poetic pillars was on Alden Nowlan, also of Nova Scotia. Both David Blaikie who gave the talk on Nowlan and Barton spent time at Nowlan’s Fredericton house, although Blaikie did so when he and Nowlan were reporters in the 1960s (when Bread, Wine and Salt was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry) and Barton decades later when what was his residence had been converted into a university student pub.

David Blaikie talking about Nowlan and sharing a couple poems.
In another cross-connection, Nowlan is buried beside Bliss Carmen who was a cohort of Barton’s great-grandmother, living within a couple blocks. They would have likely known each other. Which only goes to show the size of poetry — go in any direction in time or space in Canada and you run into a poet.
Barton will the be leading the Tree Masterclass retreat this weekend, April 14-15th. He will be focussing the group’s attention on the line which is not to say cleave off tidy end-stopped lines but tension and structure and possibilities for it. (As of earlier yesterday there was still one opening available for the capped at 1-dozen-students workshop.)

Tree always has a table for books to sell but this week and in 2 weeks time, there’s a second one. If your shelves are bending or feeling in need of something new to hold, there’s your ticket.

Also this week but happening again in 2 weeks time is the book-making workshop with Christine McNair. This time she brought a lot of lovely examples. She covered types of paper and types of binding, how to tell the direction of paper grain and why that’s important.

How to book recommendations of include two core texts: Design with Type by Carl Dair and The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. For a page to work one way, one can employ the golden ratio. She gave examples. And pointed out that the space use on a page is derived from ergonomics, not only the practicality of text not getting lost in the middle gutter but room to hold the page at the side margins and bottom of the page so your thumbs don’t cover what you’re trying to see.
We also each did a sewn binding. No blood was shed even with needles involved and over a dozen people. Woo. Unlike the last time I tried to sew a binding, I didn’t loop my thread around the thread of the person beside me.
She also gave some resources for learning about how to layout pages and how to match type of titles and body to create something harmonious. April 24th is the next session. You won’t have to have gone to the first one to attend the second one.

In discussions of poetry, the taking of something familiar and defamiliarizing is one definition. Another one floated is making someone care about a sharing of intimate confidences. Both are voyeur rather than ideas brokering. Fewest words to be effective leads to cyclical definition spin. Sensation-based is something. Poetry is in the body, in the senses and in the senseless outside border of logic as well. It can be just telling a story or avoiding a story leaving a blank spot in the middle where you can imply the subject and feel the effect. It’s general fruitful to consider what a poem is and is good at, why write it and what would make it break and what would make it shift.
Somewhat like Fumblerules of grammar, I expect some contradictions as I think aloud. It’s another go at expect the unexhumed-pricey-junebug-trapeze-act.
I suppose there’s a sweet spot between what you can fill in if unelaborated and what you don’t want to hear again and what is too random to bear that just does no good either. If communicating is overlapping and extending from what is in common, some people like more overlap or less extension.
I want to be absorbed. I want to learn. I don’t want to be lectured to learn but I want to not have my suspended judgement broken by a silly factual error in a poem, word misuse or history or biology wrong.
I would love to stay in a poem without tiring because the person never pauses for a breath and never concludes anything or only is a stack of conclusions leaving no room for me. I detest slanted language such as this opinionated sentence.
I would love to not skim. I want to be held to the text because I can’t predict what is coming, or rest in the text, watch it’s cavorting and trust that it’ll all end up somewhere interesting. If it just twists around and then randomly stops, it’s not very satisfying anymore than a street scene is fascinating until a drop off to dull. Probably at the moment just before something novel occurs.
That’s another dynamic for sweet spot, between novel exploring and reinforcing. When the text extends from shared experience, it may suggest more is more of the same but more of it, or it may mush and mash and push around the amoebic boundaries.
It’s more the characteristic of the company I want in my head than anything to do with the poem. It can be a painting or an architecture that behaves in the same satisfying way. It can be an oral conversation that doesn’t have a lack of self-awareness but does have a wit for patterns and playing with them. All the pretty sentences that are put together with skill are fine but I think I’m drawn to a personality of inclusion, a crooked-laced outlook.
What would be welcome in poems for attitudes or subjects?
Christian Bök sez,

I often joke with my students that, given their experiences, the word “microwaveable” needs to appear more frequently in their lyric poems (since I cannot easily tell, through diction alone, whether or not such poems have, in fact, been written before or after the invention of television—let alone YouTube…)—so I suggest that this fact may be potentially problematic….

Gosh, I agree him.
Poems unanchored in time are interesting but not the one defining goal of poetry. Something grounded in lived contemporary experience, even if that risks being translateable across time or space, doesn’t skip over life data an ineligible. Much is salient. Poetry doesn’t have to end with a moral. Or one shoved sentiment, whether that is with or without traditional syntax, with or without poetic devices. It doesn’t have to come from the heart, nor avoid the head nor be in balance of body, head, heart.
What was it that derek beaulieu quipped? Rules are for people who can’t follow guidelines.
People who play with words do so for love of words, or for love of ideas.
I get impatient when there are words that are not part of normal diction or that assume a limited normal diction and flag anything else as inappropriately out of register. Everything doesn’t fit in life. Is poetry to improve on life or make a smaller pocket sized model of it? Or be its own holy thing separate from life? I like the second option best personally.
Surely life provides enough straight jackets that poems can have a little more freedom of movement of subject.
Words are to carry ideas. Maybe all we need expressing can be borne on trees and birds or discussion of romantic relationships, allegorical greek without naming any family names, or letter shapes. But can poetry not just get into it, into whatever it?
Poetry is a means of thinking and perceiving. It is a bunch of styles of communication.
I am stymied when I try to frame poetic language using King James English as not ironic, or academic word lists as serious.
How do I force myself to read something straight up or not comic?
I’m used to reading conversations even on two levels, how to pare back a poem to a single literal without an emblematic word or acerbic wit? I don’t know how to read or write or think plain, do I?
It’s like an optical illusion of cross-purposed intentions, author and reader.
But then I often see earnest as satire. That descends from my attitude towards myself. My first response to my own earnestness is to mock.
I wrote a dreadful poem that called up dragons and slayers. It’s a signal of what’s going on.
When most in crisis I write most unrelatedly to the threat. It’s for this reason that when people write of or photograph placid things, I worry that they are trying to counter something inward or outward particularly hostile and dangerous. It makes a sort of tenderness. If someone is healthy enough to complain, they probably aren’t too bad off.
If someone is telegraphing ouchies, it’s hard to stay with it. If a toddler falls down and has a boo boo, you don’t cry with the toddler or they’re sure they’re going to die immiently. A little callousness might be healthy.
It’s hard to read raw. Partly because it’s responding to the irrelevant. It’s mourning the light of a star that exploded long before I was on the scene. It’s real for me now, but after this time lag, it is no longer real out there. I would put myself thru a wringer for the sake of something now resolved? It won’t better me. It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t equip me for the future to read something with no long perspective.
If there’s something that needs addressing, it should be addressed by action or conversation but surely not poetry. Poetry kept to oneself diaristically might be an outlet, a device for therapy, but it doesn’t make it art. I’m happier with a found art of a urinal on the wall of an art gallery. Context makes built objects art. But words are not made so finely as household design objects. If you curate them, they are still complaints or frazzled nerves or jubilation. But feelings don’t equate with art, even if you sculpt them. That’s not enough.
There’s a lot I don’t understand. As you work a poem, how do you not change the feeling that initiated, if it came from an emotional source? How would you firm up on a feeling and try to maintain it (and why?). I tend to identify feeling mopey, or cross, or tired or impish or cynical and as soon as the mind lights on a feeling, it’s moving again.
Don’t old feelings naturally change properties? If you can sculpt a reflection of one solidified feeling, why? To prove you can? What’s the fascination with feelings?
How can one keep to tender places without them becoming oxygenized to hard shoe rubber and make something false?
Partly it’s the matter of TMI. Why should I be pulled into someone trying to share a confidence? Aren’t there better people and routes?
I was thinking about how abstraction tends to go hand-in-hand with poets trying to express and capture and dominate over their strong emotions. It seems a defensive mechanism for people to write in metaphor, create a distance from the irritation or pain.
The trick is to not let the poem become that helium balloon animal and never deal with the real irritant. Or maybe there is no dealing that useful. Any dealing would just be indulging in futile energy wasters. Perhaps the abstract is the lesser or two evils preventing one going in hot-headed and making whatever situation that is, for a time, or always, inactionable, worse.
What use is it to write endlessly of timeless or of contemporary and not connect the two? What’s the string that makes it relevant at hand?