The blogs of consumption intersect at tabouli
13 things to read on deck, literally. I’ll sample from page 42 of each, for Douglas Adams’s sake.

1. Ottawa Woman, a new print monthly newspaper, March issue, 20 pages with a feature on Cornerstone Shelter. p. 2 by Janice Clarkson:
   

   […]providing encouragement and a sense of community to women who are going through a very difficult time in their lives. The team helps women work on goal plans, set appointment, make meals, help with household duties or plan special activities.

2. Harper’s Magazine, April issue, p. 42, article by Matthew Power,
   

   After the news of artemisinin’s failure broke, the Gates Foundation made an emergency dispersement of $22 million to the WHO for a two-year Malaria containment project […]

3. Frogpond, vol 35:1, 2012 although a haiku journal, this issue has a broad retrospective of and by Penny Harter, p. 42
   

   I believe we are all much more than we consciously know. I am fascinated with the possibilities of parallel and/or multiple universes, multiple dimensions[…]

4. Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poem to Memorize, edited by John Hollander, from p. 42 Paul Laurence Dunbar When Malindy Sings
   

   G’way an’ quit dat noise, Miss Lucy –
   Put dat music book away;
   What’s de use to keep on tryin’
   Ef you practise twell you’re gray,[…]

5. Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from Midaregami, century-old love poems by Akiko Yosano has no page numbers so tanka #42
   

   How would I feel
   If he should say,
   “Three hundred miles
   have I come–
   This loneliness too much to bear”?

6. Food & Wine magazine, April 2012, p 42 is where to eat in Napa Valley which seems to be by Megan Krigbaum,
   

   […] Kollar Chocolates: He creates beautiful truffles in flavours like passion fruit and fennel pollen, and a surprisingly savory white chocolate poppy-seed-and-saffron bar.

7. The Obvious Flap by Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, p. 42
   

   TAKE IT TAKE AWAY

8. Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation p. 42 is during the 10 days she spent travelling alone in Centosoyouz, 1931 on meeting a soldier who spoke French and could translate
   

   […]the slogans being blasted out over the loudspeakers, as well as in the signs in the front windows: “For one torn sock you are entitled to one new sock.” “You are entitled to one boot at a time.”

9. Roses Love Garlic: Secrets of Companion Planting with Flowers by Louise Riotte
   

   Bayberry (Myrica pennsylvanica), beloved of early Americans for candle making, will not bear its berries unless staminate and pistillate forms keep company together.

10. Twentieth Century Verse: An Anthology by Ira Dilworth, 1945, page 42 brings up to Laurence Binyon’s The Sirens
    

    The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dusty,
    And generations of men asleep in the old earth.

11. Sincerest Flatteries by Kurt Brown is 36 pages so I’ll pinhole from page 24, his take on/tribute to Thomas Lux and the Asian Carp,
    

    […]slimy vacuums eating 5 times their weight
    each day, gluttons on the fish world.
    Look how they hurl themselves[…]

12. Incitements by Sean Howard, p. 42,
    

    VIII
    Back-
    wash, salt mea
    dow. All notes marg-
    inal. Science found-
    ation? Light’s key
    on the rocks. Sponge-
    beds, vases hatch-
    ing. Kept minutes. Art-
    iculate stars. 5 petals[…]

13. Shikibu Shuffle by Andrew Burke and Phil Hall, (aboveground, March 2012) has no 42nd page so from poem #2
    

    Don’t play what’s there
    play what’s not there
    a Chinese dragon of smoke
    wearing my dead friend’s clothes
    above the marina

[Thirteen Thursday]

In today’s Guardian in Ruth Padel: ‘Poetry has a responsibility to look at the world’, she says,

On its own, a burning moral issue never made any poem good, and often makes one worse. A poem must first of all be a good poem; something you make as well (as inventively/imaginatively/beautifully/convincingly/technically) as you can. It’s got to work in an interesting, fresh way as a poem. Its voice has to control the tones and resonance. If it’s not a good poem it’s letting poetry down as well as letting down the moral issue you want it to address.

For her book that mixes prose and poems, for 7 years she

I don’t know about the poems that resulted, but the process looks promising. There’s rigour and contemplation.
Meanwhile at the Globe and Mail Linda Leith ponders this gender disparity. She says,

the lion’s share of the submissions are from men. The men win, hands down, not only on quantity but also on quality. I have asked a couple of women – and a couple of men – to work on their books a bit more.
[…but] why is it that such a high proportion of the submissions are by men? Is this a fluke? If I had waited to write this article five years from now, would I have a different experience to report? Is it some fault of mine? Am I inadvertently looking for a quality that men are more likely than women to produce?

There’s something going on. What is it she wonders. Is the male conspiracy idea more comical or paranoid? Blaming males for unilaterally in this generation creating a prohibitive patriarchy is absurd. There is cultural embedded behavior loops. Men step forward, women step back. While I have a few women for a year to give me poems to publish 3/3 have said no, later, maybe. Meanwhile 2 males have sent unsolicited manuscripts. That’s hardly a statistically significant pool. More numbers could easily wipe that difference out, yet I expect it won’t, unless this generation coming further dilutes gendered behaviour and just follow interest and personality instead of gender boxes. Is female kowtowing on the decline? The women’s movement to resist being told what to wear or not. We’ve come a long way from Kathrine Switzer in 1967 being controversial for running the Boston Marathon. But then I get isolated in my bubble of people who think gender queer is unmarked, where we can just move on. But then, girls are still more likely to not get literacy options, less likely to own land, and be blamed for having their boundaries ignored.
The idea that something externally imposed called prejudice causes this outcome seems naive. If we treat children different by gender from infancy, how do we expect that will disappear when it comes to communication as adults, as outcomes in literature and participation?
That culpability is getting rejigged by things like the SlutWalk in Toronto and London :

[photo by Tom Radenz in London, UK]
Things are messed up. We need to rewrite the scripts of cause and effect. The script as is goes: Females get their boundaries crossed because they invite it, leave themselves vulnerable, and don’t protest enough. The onus needs to be swapped.
If it weren’t offloading blame unilaterally, we’d just about have it.
Restorative justice model where we go in as a dialogue and say, what just happened here? to both sides and figure out and meet as two humans, we’d have a closer step.
What’s going on with outcomes in literature? Discrimination? Differences in outcome doesn’t prove a particular cause. It signals a problem, something to investigate.
Are women capped and lower in capacity than men? That’s taboo to think and particularly damning as a female to think I’d damned to be lesser by birth not only by habit and law and history worldwide. If it were possible to level the cultural perception difference, excise embedded discrimination that makes some females hold themselves lower and some males hold themselves higher could females in aggregate only perform more poorly? In Olympic sports females and males can’t do the same time in some sports. Some females exceed some males but on the whole, are there gender-biology differences past the cultural handicap?

The poem on the page moves relative to the time and place and headspaces of the readers. It can be remarkably unstatic. Some people kill their poems brutally, fatally dead by their reading style. Sometimes it’s better for the poem to be read by a surrogate reader. Some people make a rather plain common poem terribly exciting by injecting their live energy into it and then you bring it home and look for the glass slipper’s owner.
Poetry sharing is a performance. Some people own the room by commanding attention by movement, by loudness, by quietness, by stillness, by varying. The question is more expecting attention than how to get it. One can make a soundwall of shout and tone variance that is amateur theatre, yet not command attention. One can read in a flat intonation yet despite it, come across or stay flatlined in attention. One can whisper and own the room or whisper and get talked over. It isn’t the what of technique but some underlying how: Expect to be dismissed and you issue a command to be ignored that an audience unconsciously will pick up on and obey.
Variable(s in) performance are environmental enrichment, not a guarantee of a better or worse performance. What would you like to do? A bored reader is a bored audience. A poem can be read as a speaking voice, or in poet’s voice intonation, flatter than the prairies, perhaps with valley raising. It can be singsong. It can support or distract from the text.
Audiences have a habit of sitting and taking whatever comes. Once one reader loses one person in a poem, it can spread to others thru looks and twitches and the audience may be gone for the night, but still there, gone to their happy place or their disgruntled place. Each new reader may revive hope of something go. A person may fade in and fade out. The collective vibe of the room may sustain hope and energy high as a community love-in support that keeps people engaged.
If that doesn’t happen, how to reverse the stupor and low expectations of enduring a reading?
You can read polished material that is fully thought through, or try new material but the audience is there for a ride.
You can go thru a story arc of poems that start profound or comic or affable, with an entry point that is a sure sell, a handshake that isn’t too intense but not dead-fish limp either. Or you can start in with a shocker poem to wow, then step back, do intro and then start in slower again and build thru serious and lead thru a crescendo and leave at the high point or carry everyone thru tension then back to an exit station of feel good.
Often a reader stops moving except for the eyes. It means you can fall into the sound, close eyes to visual or get distracted by verbal tics, such as counting the number of ums (open mic people), rolling rrrrs (Robert Bringhurst) or disproportional poetic frequency of word, ghost, crepuscular, etc.
Uncommon things readers I’ve seen do to make a performance more engaging:

• special edition broadsides or pamphlets or even chapbooks for those who come (Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann and Angela Leuck)
• get audience to repeat chorus phrase (Kevin Matthews)
• get people to make a sound wave across the room of hand rubbing or finger snapping (a novelist I saw in the 80s)
• have a video playing in the background that complements and co-performs with the material (Zorras)
• have a musician improv around the poems (wind instrument with various readers spontaneously developing in a Sasquatch series, a troupe playing with the ghazals at writers festival, a response to haiku at the 2010 KaDo performance)
• strip (2011 versefest erotica showcase)
• have objects for talking points (Phil Hall)
• walk in among the audience as a single reader or as a group reading (Roger Nash I believe it was, and Max Middle’s sound group)
• manipulate the physical venue into props, taking the foam off the mic and making it a clown’s nose then a juggling ball that tied into the poem being read (Erin Moure)
• remix own voice in layers and play it back with live performance as another voice (Czandra)

Extraneous things I’ve done for readings:

• use a sound machine to make interjections of noise
• change between hats for different voices in the poem
• play computer voice sounds for portions of the text
• blow bubbles
• print small poems and give them out in fortune cookies
• build a catapult collaged with words from the book being launched and launch candies and nuts
• make it a read-along writing short poems on large sheets for people to read out
• have the reading outside with papers on the wall for people to add their own poems
• take photos of audience from the podium
• balloon prize for who gets one of the quote sources from a cento

People respond differently. Some of the audience find such things unnecessary and distracting and want the straight intoning. Some, perhaps most, find it expanding the experience in a good way. It is more animate and distinct from reading aloud what one can read for oneself.
There’s the unpinnable variable of personality and chemistry with the audience member. There’s skill in that, in not standing in the way of the poem, in asking to be heard, in speaking up and standing up and delivery. It’s not the full picture; there’s performing it in the right place and season to the right people. You can read the audience and adapt your energies to it and then, with real skill and practice and luck, bring their energies with you and a circle of energy looping a feedback takes off. There’s where magic lies.
But if a poem captures tone well in text, it should transfer without the writer being present. Seeing the writer read sometimes completes the poem or gives a director’s cut edition that makes it more interesting. It makes the text something else which is why some people have versions of a poem for oral and another customized for being a read text.
Some write more as jazz or mental theatre and live reading varies and inflects more. Some compose a score of words that is more set and aiming to stay gelled just so. The mellifluous stream should travel smoothly without dams to cause pauses except to breathe in natural spots.
Some attitudes towards the world naturally fit the relationship of playful delivery. Some relationships to the text are more sombre and it wouldn’t be appropriate to break out into a trumpet. Sometimes it isn’t necessary to do more than storytime sharing aloud. No bells, no whistles, literally. But then, sometimes bells are fun. Resources are there to be played with.
What serves the particular poem best?
If the reader is comfortable and engaged, that sets the tone for the audience to be engaged. Poem and poet serve the audience its food for thought or entertainment, or does not.
P.S. Happy International Poetry Day, all!

there’s a problem and beauty with anything. and a vast tract of doesn’t-make-a-difference.
brokering in generalities, what frustrates me about narrative poems is the built in shushing; one thing at a time. the structure/stricture of one poem = one idea. it’s kind of like a grammar-school sentence. even a very long poem can keep this one-subject/theme rule.
is that the distinction between a long poem and a poem which is long? a long poem can have more than one thesis, arc and conclusion? it can become a yard sale of a poem. (am I getting warmer?)
what I’ll call “revolutionary poems” that aim to break syntax to reset the bones of society that just become a jumbled list poem that jumps from subject to subject between words or phrases instead of waiting for anything to develop except accumulation of academic concepts, that is still a shushing. the thing is gushing. no natural speech allowed. no pursuing one thought allowed. sure, there may be an overarcing theme once you get into it but the internal logic may mandate that it can only speak in such and such a way, as narrowly as the stage face of good ole boy poems where everyone makes plain statements of marxist equality.
stories with line breaks are tiring because they insist that short-vision can be wrapped up quickly. poems that refuse story-telling are tiring because there’s no way to predict where you are. is this the first 1/4 or towards the end? it’s kind of a stuck mid-prairie landscape where you can’t orient distance and mete your focus and energy accordingly.
“slight poems” are insulting because they are not profound. you’re telling me this why? I have spent time and got nothing in return.
autobiographical poems can be relating what one feels a need to say, driven out of you, or they may have the telltale of narrator disconnected from the domestic scene, described feeling numbed, bummed or awkward and alone while in a car or empty house. no one ever headhops into such a dull moment for fiction.
“profound” cosmic poems are eye-glazing because they accumulate to protesting too much that life has significance bounding around every corner and everything is due to be imbued.
fragment allows the whole. the whole allows the fragment. we can speak various dialects and subject without conflict.
have I covered all the downsides?
if and when I wake up encouraged and energized I can do the flip side.

Some may go for full length collections that would sell dozens of copies. Michael Dylan Welch and Emiko Miyashita have a waka (tanka) translation appearing on the back of a U.S. postage stamp that will be released March 24. The postal service is printing 15,000,000 copies. The stamp celebrates the 100th anniversary of the cherry trees in Washington, DC.
Meanwhile in Canada we’re doing all kinds of Jubilee stamps to celebrate our Queen. Wonder how Fred Wah’s workshop on How to write a poem for the Queen went.
Support for monarchy has never been 100% anywhere.

For Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of the day, composed a Jubilee Ode in which he praised the Queen extravagantly. The poem began ‘Fifty times the rose has flower’d and faded, Fifty times the golden harvest fallen…’ Haldane Burgess, thinking of the Shetland crofter/fisherman’s toil and poverty during those fifty years, composed his own Jubilee Ode in response.

It’s written in Sheltland’s dialect with mouseover translations and an audio link. The site also has love in a caald climate by Christine De Luca, the praise in her look that impelled her husband to make the windbreaks and so on so a rose could hold twilight.
It’s very cool to hear the language roll, almost familiar sound, some words entirely there, some out of grasp. [via Jen Hadfield]
What do you miss and catch? George Murray is doing a New York Times/Knowledge Network Introduction to Poetry workshop on: “how to write good formal and free verse. Topics include how to read a poem, form, meter, imagery, language, the relationship between form and content, and how to structure material to maximize its power and beauty.” He’s reading back in Ottawa at 5:00 pm at the Manx Pub (370 Elgin St) on Saturday, April 14th with Roo Borson. Roo Borson‘s ninth full-length solo collection, Rain; road; an open boat, will be published by McClelland & Stewart tomorrow. (Something else for the book wishlist.)
Free online at Curio Poetry are a few new poems by Anne le Dressay. Look at At this moment, won’t you?

Good day for reading outside. Tanka 55 of Akiko Yasano from a century ago, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda:

At the flute’s sound
That priest at his sutras
Stops his hand
And frowns –
Ah! still quite young!

The Poetry School (London, Uk) is starting Adventures in Form, a forthcoming anthology featuring new poetic forms – from skinny villanelles to sevenlings, text poems to break-beat sonnets. They’re planning an online course based on the anthology, to pass on these new forms to our students. Details to follow, email Rachael (online@poetryschool.com) to register your intererst meanwhile.
They have face-to-face courses too but online sells out fast. The upcoming terms with courses on Political poems, The visual narrative, and The Sonnet Studio have already sold out. Some courses are still open in songwriting. Coming in May they have an online course on editing run by Andy Ching: The Editor. (The next term starts in October.)
On twitter? Tweet @49thShelf about who belongs to the #NewGenerationCDNPoets. Tweet them your favourite CDN poets who’ve published 1st books since 2000.
P.S. Speaking of new, the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award Winner is is Laura Broadbent for her book, Oh, there you are, I can’t see you, is it raining? [More here including judge’s notes.] The news broke at the Montreal Gazette 10 days ago in an article mentioning she’s a Concordia student doing her MA while working at an antiquarian bookstore. Kathy Mac and Nathan Dueck were among those short-listed for it again. Darn. I still want to see more from her. And curious what he was up to next.