The pulse, again.
try to not return, unused.

A good use of life, this paying attention. Can we ever pay too much attention? It’s probably just a matter of timing your focus well to live well.
It’s funny, a good reader performs with intonation and body as much as with language. Several people remarked how they didn’t understand Spanish, or were not fluent enough to understand it, but letting Pura’s poems wash over them in Spanish, they didn’t have to understand language to understand. I found myself with too few words to race to couple the phrases but whether I was keeping up or letting it flow, I found my eyes tearing up.
What concessions due we make to syntax when we translate. I always remember my Spanish-speaking student translating for someone else and at some point the person who spoke Spanish too switched to English but the language brain is funny. He did not change facial expression or posture and kept simultranslating English to English without noticing for a few exchanges. I don’t think any of us did, until we did. What changes were they? To a simpler syntax, to reduce down the amount of thought complexity to keep on focus.
In poetry the task is different. You want to keep the music as much as you can, the layers of connotations where you can. Poetry is never truly translated but remade, in this case cooperatively since both Pura and her translator speak both languages, are both translators and been translated. Pura has brought to Spanish HD, Beckett, Robert Creeley, and Gertrude Stein. Gander and she most recently made Watchword (a bilingual edition from Wesleyan a month ago) and before that No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé”. Here’s a pair of sample poems.
Pura and her English translator Forrest Gander are interviewed here.

The summit reading was chock full of people. As Phil Hall said, “This is high culture, boy. bet if I read a sonnet right now, oxygen masks would drop from the ceiling.”

Phil Hall said earlier than this shot,

This poem that I’ve just written
hasn’t read my other poems
and if it did,
it wouldn’t like them.

He asked us to spend some time this to honor poets who passed recently Colleen Thibaudeau. Here’s a bit of one of her poems:

their laughter underground makes the thyme flower in darkness
my granddaughters are thin as fishbones & hornfooted but they are
always beautiful under the stars: like little asian paperthings
they seem to open outward into their own waterbowl

And Ruth Stone who published the second of her eventually 13 books when she was 56. She dreamt of better worlds, for example

In the Next Galaxy
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet.

Hall read a poem where he referenced real concrete living as somewhere to stand. “bill bissett knows the tree.” and later referring to himself “the fresh refrain smells of sawdust”.

While Philip Levine was rifling thru his books he spent the time recounting a reading where he kept searching for a poem he was sure he had published. The audience was getting restless then he remember, he’d never written that poem. He’s taken many shots at it but never finished it. That got a good chuckle out of the audience. He also quipped, “I forget what’s in these books. I keep looking for Blake. He’s not in here. He had the wisdom to stay in his own books.”
He told the story of what he speculated from when Hart Crane met Garcia Lorca in 1929 in Brooklyn, just shortly before they each died, one by suicide, one by politics.

Pura López-Colomé read in both Spanish and English. People who wanted her newest book had to act fast. They were gone by the time the reading was over.
Summit sound bites from Pura López-Colomé: “Pilgrims have a faith I feel envious of, constantly.” and “I drive my funicular from chance to fate.”
Phillip Levine in the Q&A said that when poetry gains confidence, it loses its geography and can communicate internationally. It reminds me of the axiom of painting. You start with a still life, move to still figures, then moving figures and then, when really good, you come back with all you have learned and pour it back into a still life again.
Phillip Levine tested Hall’s theory that oxygen masks would fall since he read a sonnet, written in syllabics rather than meter, so perhaps the ceiling sensors were foiled.
*
Rusty Recaps his highlights of the week.
rob recounts some of them, including of day 6 here, marvelling, in part, at how Hall doesn’t dull down, but stays alert and engaged as he does.
*
After largely 3 days to recover from 6 days, and only getting out to about 2/3 of what I’d like to have seen, I’m glad Versefest is no longer than it is.
The length allows some people to catch some if they’re occupied for a day or weekend. It’s a fabulous opportunity to buffet the different series, but what a marathon. Keep the quality but there’s no need for bigger, more. The regular series have that continuing covered. As with Writers Fest, wonderfulness fatigue sets in. Another event to blow my mind? I’d rather just absorb what’s happened so far.
I thought if we missed Rucker’s live performance, we might be able to get to the workshop but late nights caught up. I could get mobile by 2pm. I don’t know how people do regular 9-5 and have energy to catch any. The large number of volunteer helpers do make it possible on the organizing end.
I look forward to next year. And to the goodness happening this year. Which, next up this weekend, is a workshop on literary blogging and a reading by Ron Silliman thanks to AB Series.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

I just came in at the end of the Usula Rucker Workshop. It looked like some intense connecting. People seemed to have a satisfied pondering about them, walking away better for it.
Rusty Priske said the day before, “It a festival that was full of wonderfulness, Rucker / Partridge / McGee / OpenSecret made it overflow. Our poetry cup runneth over.”

There was a scrum of some CD signing going on.

Next up was another meaty bit. A poetics talks sponsored by Factory Reading Series. I love this level. It balances out the diet of people performing poetry to dig a little deeper.
Life is what happens. Poetry isn’t what happens, or even how you feel about what happens, but how you feel about how you feel about what happens. That more mixed attitude and posture.
Thinking about this gets under the performances, looks at the how and why that drives the poetry. The attitudes in retrospect. The results, in this case, get published in 17 Seconds, probably this fall. (The ones from last year’s poetics talk by Marcus McCann and Monty Reid are now up in issue 4.)

Paige Ackerson-Kiely was first up. She is a lifelong fan of arctic explorers. She wanted to get into their head so she fasted (that lasted a little while) and tried to take a vow of silence (that lasted a day). She tried wearing the same outfit for a year and that proved problematic at work, but more so because she lives in Vermont where the temperature fluxes a lot more than the arctic so a polar fleece dress chosen in January eventually is sweltering.
She tried living on pemmican, little rounds of it in muffin tins in the fridge. Their fat and berries “provide a complete nutritional profile!” but it’s like a bad joke: at first you think you will be able to endure it, then you realize it might be interminable, and start to dread, and then, finally, it becomes hilarious because it just might never end.
In the end she decided all these efforts were more precious than effective but got her thinking about poetry in our culture. Is is used to assuage boredom in a culture of glances? It is easy to get swamped by too many particulars and we settle for the illness of glancing and for general impressions instead. Poetry is about attention despite.
She considered the practice of parataxis, that juxtaposing two parallel texts for the reader to make the leaps. What does it aim to do? To create emotion in a society that dampens it down? Is it rewriting permissions on what to notice and feel and encouraging others to as well. She wrote in a poem, “it was good clean water and he drank it as if it were not a miracle.”
Like many poets she assured she really is happy. She isn’t inconsolable although she said she “expresses everything with a need for consolation”. She speculated that her generation, or perhaps her crowd are in the habit of relating thru complaints rather than thru joy and gratitude.

Barry McKinnon spoke around his essay next. He said he’d not inflict the worst possible impact of a reading, and that is boredom. He certainly managed. He covered a lot of ground but engagingly. (Sometimes it seems like festivals in this town are catered for me personally.)
He talked about the journey of his poem “Bushed” into an anthology by Margaret Atwood then to an anthology translated to Chinese. His name phonetically in Chinsese means “wheat gold peasant”. He had his Chinese version get translated back to English and read us both. (You’ll have to wait for the fall. I can take notes, but not at that speed.) Suffice to say, Alterations Were Made. He speculated on a book made into a career of just one poem translated over and over. That would be like Blissful Times in perpetuity.
He reflected on his “translations” of Dante, mucking about with raiding the Inferno and emails and various other poems by others as source text. The goal is to follow TS Eliot’s dictum about escaping your own emotion and personality in the process of creating poems. Even still it’s a muddled process because “emotion is the poem’s fact” and besides which, if you achieve a departure from self, and it resonates with yourself and others, you’re still in the bind of reaffirming self.
He was once asked by a nervous interviewer, “Do you write traumatic monologues” and he had to answer immediately, yes, yes I do.
I believe it was Olsen who quoted who said poetry needs to say things that are immediate truths in the world.
A disadvantage of oral is spelling…he recounted the relationship of a poet to his work. Jack Daw bought an industrial shredder and tried to destroy every manuscript, magazine and collection he’s made, even the poet’s beret that Robert Creeley gave him went in. He diligently tried to quit poetry but reentered the fray and into language poetry, that habit of anti-semantics, of academia vocabulary that tries to break ideology thru the ankle of syntax. But then he shredded all that he could get his hands on of proof of that too.

He teased that he might play the bongos but didn’t. (Perhaps I should have given a request in the Q&A.)

Here rob mclennan extends the mic to an audience member.
The Q&A time did better than most for these sort of things in public forum. Often there is a person who just needs to say something because there’s a gap, or there are crickets, perhaps one good question, but here were 4 or 5 engaged questions; 4 if we don’t count the inquiry into whether leather pants are comfortable and warm. (And for those interested, the answer is no.)
There was a question into a suggested course for prairie poetry if the rural has disappeared, since the grain elevators are more for tourism than life now, what would be a good focus.
McInnin replied, whatever you need to write about. Oil fields may not be a historical cliche the way a patchwork of fields are, but when one writes personal history, one needs to write what is your story that matters to you.
(Other questions were asked but I rolled them back into the earlier bits.) If you haven’t caught it already, Amanda’s recap is up too.
Because this is a long post, I’ll split the day, but then, the title tipped you off, didn’t it?

In Brenden McNally’s column he quoted Suzanne Buffam, who came up from Chicago to read. She said she thought VerseFest is fantastic, adding, “It’s nice to see a festival that’s not about networking, it’s just about poetry.”
And what poetry it is.

This picture could stand-in for any of the events. A blaze of energy from the stage and the full complement of audience lightly glowing.
Evan Thornton at Sneezers said by going to Versefest “You’ll gain a sense of scale: In one fell swoop, you’ll get a feel for the astounding level of poetry activity in Ottawa. Not just a one-time festival, VERSeFest is actually a confluence of what’s happening in Ottawa poetry every month of every year, all the time.”

Tim Lilburn applauded Ottawa for putting such a size of festival on and applauded the organizers for pulling it off and so smoothly.
It’s curious what happens in cross-pollination between events. He also read from a play’s script with the point of view of Louis Riel, although he used the traditional Canadian-government-victor-term of Rebellion not resistance. That got me bogged down for a while. Are both writers appropriating a historical voice, or is all writing a fabrication and appropriation and the term doesn’t apply? Did I just return to present to hear him diss Salvation Army clothes. Ah, well.

Rae Armantrout read from Money Shot as well as her new above/ground chapbook, Custom and new work. Such a clarity of vision and words and yet infused with that sense of play with the world.
She was one of the readers last night as, outside, a doozy of a storm blew thru, with horizontal winds and snow. Inside was lively in its own hot way. Sweet turns of phrases careening around corners of ideas.

Outside our intrepid ladies of posters directed pedestrian traffic to venues.
Over at Ottawa U last night there were spoken word events. Jenica Reid ‏tweeted: “Mike McGee, OpenSecret and Ursula Rucker just blew my mind. I don’t think I have it anymore.” Danielle Gregoire said “Ursula Rucker went beyond my wildest dreams, Taqralik Partridge wrenched my heart with her beautiful words, and Mike Magee made me so damn happy!” (Ursula Rucker will be at the Mercury Lounge this afternoon. You might be able to squeak in if you go and hope on stand-by.)
(btw, there’s a post at Local Tourist Ottawa on VF.)

Between shows Kate was nailing down more last minute details behind the scenes.

Between performances, people mingled in the reception area. The built-in downtimes help let the brain digest.

Shane Rhodes (a reader sponsored by Plan 99) looked touched by an angel after giving his reading. Amanda Earl said he Erred and didn’t, because “all of Saturday’s readers were good readers, their words quiet & poignant or funny; imaginative, whimsical, subtle, powerful.”

To one side more t-shirts, chapbooks and CDs get sold at one table

or another. Collected Works said they were happy with sales. It was worthwhile for sure.
And today is the finale. Versefest welcomes Ursula Rucker to give a workshop at Mercury Lounge. (It’s full but there’s a slim chance of a spot if someone doesn’t show up to take their reserved tickets.)
At 4:30, also at the Mercury Lounge in the Byward Market, there’s Vermont poet and novelist Paige Ackerson-Kiely and west coast Canadian poet, Barry McKinnon. Can you believe it? This one is free(!)
At 8pm at the NAC: Mexico poet Pura López-Colomé’s, US poet Laureate Philip Levine Governor General award-winning poet Phil Hall do the summit reading. (Tickets are still available. $30 for one-shot or $10 for those with a pass or for volunteers.)
I’m really looking forward to all of these too.

Today Versefest bursts out all over the downtown with venues in the Byword Market at the Mercury Lounge and family and youth poetry workshops, and back at Arts Court and over at Ottawa U. Some events are competing time slots. There’ll be 10 readers or workshops leaders plus the after party of social. Although, after party or no, it does continue tomorrow with some more excellent programming too.
Last night was at the Arts Court with a pretty full room, too big for the reception room that seats about 50 – events went into the auditorium. It was a warm friendly crowd. Familiar faces to cheer on were greatly appreciate. There was a characteristic of Versefest mix of demographics, and of new and familiar faces. Good to see. Doors open about half hour before the show so people come early to browse books and see who comes to catch up with or talk shop.
I’ve mentioned before. It was a pleasure to hear him read them again. There’s such a musicality to them. There are thoroughly thought thru in order of reveal, sound, and concept yet come back to playful rather than tight. Nothing half-assed. His poems do depth and humour.
Each person has their own music, and this Versefest is a tower of song, but still while Taylor orchestrates some complex patterning within line of the brass section, I’m more kettledrum with a Snare kit. However, we’re all where we’re at.
And to perilously extend this metaphor, Susan is one-man orchestra since she did pieces solo that her troupe, Geode, did with instruments and chorally.

Susan McMaster shared a secret. Did you hear it?
She did a retrospective of works from the last 25-odd years. Her selected came out from Black Moss 2 years ago. Her “Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me” is looking at a 3rd printing. It excerpts verbatim quotes from her mom and charts that challenging territory.
For my part, I timed out all my material so I’d know how long it would take to read and match it to the slot. The more scripted I am, to the word, the more room there is for improv, and reading the audience.
I read some poems from Between Stations, some from Thirsts and some new poems.

New poems I shared were love poems, mentioning hubby and I would have our 242nd month anniversary tomorrow. And what goes better with that than bubbles?

Hubby was so kind as to take photos. (Do I look like Stuart Ross here?) I’m instructing to cross out the poem on page 18 if you have the book and email me for an errata because the poem as it stands there is dead, dead, dead.
My new version:

refilling, after Lao Tzu
a jug is made from clay
but made by
the space it contains
and made by the time
in the hand-memory
of those who have been
holding it so long.

It is from Kay Ryan poem and thisLao Tzu parable.
Ryan’s poem is from The Niagara River, p. 50

A pitcher molds
the air in it, dividing
from the air beyond
the air it holds. And
should the pitcher
vanish, something
would take a minute
to escape, a gradually
diminishing integrity,
a thinning pitcherful
of pitcher shape.

After that came Capital Slam, but with 5 hours sleep and no food since a salad breakfast, it was time to go be Lady and the Tramp over some stringy poutine.
Bet you can’t guess what the title of tomorrow’s post will be…

Versefest seems to be running somewhere around 100 people or more per day at the events. The door attendants seem to have their work at each event to direct people to the one or two open seats still left.
There are tickets at the door but the majority seem to be seated by time I ever get there. (Early bird catches the word.)
It’s nice to see some people stay regardless if it’s slam or music. It’s good to see performers come out when it’s not even their day to perform. Each day there are a several of those. It seems good sportsmanship and to be interest in community and in the field to not fly in and fly out without seeing who all is about.

The host of the Ottawa Youth Slam was encouraging the audience that they all should stand up. (The tallest head was the first to his feet.)
This is a participatory sport, he was saying. Get on your feet, stomp and whatnot as if it were a sports game. (That was at Versefest March 1.) A slam isn’t a kind of poetry. Poetry may be storytelling, rap, dub, mixing song and spoken word, dramatic monologue, or literary-device-ful of metaphors that some think of as more at home on the page. The point of slam is to grab the audience by whatever means you are best skilled at and elicit as response. No dead-fish-handshake equivalents.

Meanwhile the youth team waits in the wings to go on. The Ottawa team won the national competition.

Earlier on, Monty gave an intro to the Arc night readers. What happened after that? I’ve got more over at Humanyms.