Want a weekend workshop with him in the Ottawa area? $250 for a Tree Masterclass with John Barton this April, lakeside meals included. Two spots left. Going….going…

Glenn Kletke had a group engage on editing poems with an eye to form in the Tree Seed Workshop. He went into a close read, searching for the heart of the poem and finding out how it ticks.
Kletke sees 3 routes to form – starting with a form and filling in a poem, organic form of what develops from the content and to shape the content into forms. He talked about the possibilities and impacts the choice of stanza size makes on the speed of a poem. Stanza means room and the first impression you have of a poem is not once you scan around inside the walls of the room, but that first glance of shape. It is a closed thing and each room tells you there is something new about to begin. He gave a whack of handouts of examples, things to consider, different samples of what people did with different shapes. He asked us to consider in other poems and in our own practices why the choice of tercet or stepped poem, quatrains, couplets, scattered, etc is made and what it does and how.
There were over a dozen readers at the open mic on Valentines Day after the workshop.

Marilyn Bowering came in from BC to Ottawa to read from various of her books and manuscripts Tuesday night at Tree. Some were of ghosts and ancient greek myths rewritten which aren’t to my tastes but she wrote a rebuke to friends of Nebuchadnezzar when he went mad and was eating grass. How could they call themselves friends and not have the compassion to ask him to find his coat, ask him to get out of that field.

Leslie Vryenhoek came in from Newfoundland to read from Gulf. In Letitia’s Cold Footprints she relates arriving in the rural prairie, and relates to another newcomer to there from 140 years ago:

Letitia and I arrived in this plain
country daughters of someone high
somewhere else, our credentials crammed
into oversized luggage and rounded
vowels, bold outfits and outright attitudes
as if entitlement and piano lessons
would pass as currency here.

Interesting stories, sweet orders of reveal, some depth of significance from a historical calm of appraisal of insight, pleasing music in words and on the page the enjambment make the reading even more rich.
It’s not only what you write, but how you say it. And I must say Vyrenhoek not only composes poems but composes herself. She presents calm, assured, confident. Her voice and presentation is clear. No baffling off-topic preambles. She continues onwards between poems with, at most, a line of set up which serves to make a stream thru the poems. She has it timed out, knows the effect of tone on the audience, doesn’t futz with distractions of light or what page to go to next, but gets on with it. This is remarkably uncommon.

It was announced that open mic semi-regular David Blaikie won the Tree Press chapbook competition, blind judged by Jason Heroux. His manuscript Farewell to Coney Island will have 50 copies printed by Tree Press.
Second place was Janice Tokar, third Jennifer Pederson with honourable mentions to Leslie Strutt and Grant Savage.
The next Tree will be rolled into Versefest.
Normal Tree programming to resume March 13th with feature Jane Munroe and a one hour version of the long poem workshop with Jay MillAR to take place starting at 6:45 pm.

As Apt 613 pointed out the energy in the room was fantastic. And as Rusty said, amazing performances by everyone.

The lineup takes a bow with host Ruthanne Edward who runs the storytelling slam series.
The thing that struck me about this women’s slam, at the time and after is that is was good poetry. And it was poetry that identifies problems not with cynacism and looking forward with hope. As Nancy Duarte was talking about on TED, a compelling talk has a certain rhythm of back and forth and narrative curve that works. These poets could work it. There was a cycle of performers and audience exchanging good energy. They could perform confident and engaged and get it back. It wasn’t soap box rants. It wasn’t cliche thoughts. It wasn’t raw therapy. All the poems were polished and thought out on a deep structure, with compelling hooks.
Various poets used metaphor and language in agile ways. Some went towards storytelling, some with the structure of song with bits of bridge or chorus but the net effect wasn’t feeling trapped in someone else’s narrative outboard gunning for the far shore. And of course, everyone was performing from memory.
Each owned the stage. Some did it with a low voice and still body and timing that made a room of 130-plus people still and listening. Some owned the stage as she walked around it. Some changed emotional tone, using volume and motion to enhance their pieces.
This championship brought together a few sets of ladies: Women who started the local scene and the top scoring women from each of Capital Slam, Urban Legends, and Ottawa Youth Poetry Slam.
While everyone got seated (and it was a completely sold out show with over 130 tickets sold and spill out to listen in from the next room) PrufRock was DJing

The event was a fundraiser for the organizing poetry series umbrella group, Versefest. Upcoming events were scrolling on the screen:

For reading order, Ruthann pulled names from a hat for both rounds. Each person had 3 minutes to make their poem. (There was a time penalty for running over.)

Judges were picked randomly from the audience. Beforehand Rusty gave them a run down of how it works.

Mia Morgan was the sacrificial poet who calibrated the judges. She did a love poem of inviting the person to go on together “like iambic hexameter is inconvenient, in a good way.” She said, “let’s make poetry out of road signs.”

Nicely sacrificed? was on one of the signs of one of 5 judges.
In slam the top score is thrown out and the bottom score is thrown out to account for a judge who gives 10 to everyone or someone who had a fender bender by chance with one of the participants or is in a particularly out of sorts mood.
Not that that a bad mood was likely. The room was full of good vibe. Judges were cheered or told they should score higher.
Ruthann read out the scores from lowest to highest. Rusty tallied them.
The top scoring 4 poets will go on to a showcase night at Versefest on Feb 29th. top scoring poets of the night as it turned out were two tied.
Co-champions matched the spirit of the evening with the cheering each other on from the green room backstage could be heard front stage. When one poet lost her place and blanked out, got it back together, got thru, but with a time penalty, she was met at the curtain with a hug. But we’ll get to all that later.
Each of the teams have their own tradition to encourage the poet. The Youth group makes a heart in the air drawn with their thumbs and says en masse, “love”.

Urban Legends do a hand up and say “speak!”

Capital Slam says, “Raise it!”. Since this was a joint-show, each performer circled thru the next one of the three greetings.
In all traditions, the performer isn’t stranded under spotlights to wither on stage should stage fright hit. Encouragement comes from the audience, vocally or by quiet finger snaps. Thru the performances, the audience is part of the show and may make sounds. They aren’t a passive vessel for the poetry coming at them.

Sepideh was first up and had a poem about god vs. mother nature that towards the start asked “Who delivered god, cut the umbilical cord and declared…It’s a boy!” And you don’t want to miss if you can help it the story of returning to her grandfather’s hometown, imagining what it must have been like for her Afghani grandmother “where she never wakes up to the stigma of where comes from…there is a place…hundreds of pistachios open their mouths to tell us…” Tell us what? Come on the 29th.

Elissa Molino talked about the kiss she’s waited 28 years for and can wait 28 years more for because it will be worth it. In her second set she told a comic story of a friend’s friend dropping acid and the trouble that got him in. If you get a chance to hear her perform that, do. It reels as quite the ride.
And Stargazer did a piece, with the technique I mentioned, with a refrain that came back thru and deepened each time about the steps we need to take for our kids. It’s not easy to grow up black in Canada. In her next set she reminded us that it wasn’t women who obeyed the mores of their time who changed the world, like Harriet Tubman.
Breaktime was interview time:


This interviewing was transcribing with pen, asking questions and audio recording at the same time.

Elle P was one of the ones who spoke quietly, with stillness and still commanded attention with her presence. She was top scorers so she’ll be back on the 29th. One of her poems was about listening to your own instinct, and loving and stretching despite because “turning into a cynic is only hurting your cause”.

Festrell always gives a powerhouse reading. One was a fallen-out-love-and-into-self-confidence poem (“your fingerprints all over my memories”) and the other about the inane cultural habit of gender. The floors were shaking with people stomping responses to her poems and the poem made my hair stand on end. Expect Festrell on the 29th too.

Now CauseMo is part of Ottawa Youth Capital Slam and you’re lucky; she has a youtube vid of her piece: Masquerade about false social faces. She’s a dramatic actress and so talented so young.

Sarah Musa asked about impossible propositions like being welcomed and treated as outside both, like “how can you be a ballerina with razor blades for feet?” and in her other set addressed the mind and body poison industry, er, I mean, the cosmetics industry and asked people to not play the game of being reduced to someone else’s ideal. (Wish this message could get out further.)

Scotch either related a story of being unheard during sexual assault and being jaded of partying drunk all the time from a 14-year-old’s point of view (or else she is that young).
“Screw strobes – we were the lights!” “We were the hipsters who made hips stirrrr.” She said, “the average lifespan of a female born in 1997 is 79 and to you I look 14 years old but to myself I’m 14 years dead.”

Rage is in the youth category too and told the story of standing against a nasty neighbour who with his dog blocked the sidewalk and told her and her friend to “go home”. Unfortunately for me I didn’t copy anything down from her second set getting happily lost in her imagery. Here’s a bit from her from last July.

Jenna Tenn-Yuk you can hear at CFSW championships Keep Breathing. She spoke of being “no longer under my inner Stalin, holding the revolver to her own head and shooting bullets of judgement” and everyone’s favourite stressor, family dinners with closed-minded ranting relatives. Again there’s that sense of designing, composing words for the ear, for the performance to build in the reader’s head and pivot as it goes on.

D-Lightfull spoke to the ladies in bad relationships. Here she holds up the ring finger that’s empty. The guy claims until death do you part but no jewelry and “you’re already dying/ to get out”. She had spunk that makes the audience hoot and clap thru it.
She gave a piece about the court system claiming to be black and white but clearly it sees in colour judging from the disproportional treatment of people who are not white. She’s one of the ones you can catch at Versefest.

Danielle K.L. Gregoire recounted the story of her first love on a ski lift.They were separated only by ski pants and “a kind of erotic rigor mortis”. (They were 10.) Her CD is Optimism is a Constant Struggle. Great CD.
A part of what made the night speed by and give more energy than it took was the spirit thru many of the poems of problem, solution and paint a vision of what it could be like and exhort people to embrace and make this better world. We are not passengers in life, but drivers.
For me it wasn’t about women poetry but about good poetry and vision.

The night ended Ruth Ann giving the final tally, stomping applause, and the whole group coming forward again, and a group hug while the crowd was dispersing.
Tickets and passes are now for sale at the Versefest site. it runs Feb 28-March 4th. I expect I’ll be there every day.

p. 14: Black fly season at Eye Lake: “A bush plane went buzzing over us and it seemed funny to me how even the human stuff around here was beginning to be like bugs.” ~ Tristan Hughes. p. 16
Lovely dexterity of observation and language, yet with a sustained flow that doesn’t chop itself to bits like a book of poems that rolls ideas into discrete paper beads…well, before I came along and hacked out a bead at least. We’re far from thru but if more novels were like this, with craft going pages after page under a likeable narrator, I would read more novels.

She was using that voice that’s really two voices at once, one soothing and friendly for the kid, the other hissed and pissed for you, as if your ears are meant to pick up an extra frequency when you’re older that kids can’t hear, like a bat.
Bobby and I stood there confused. He wanted to lure a lot and I wanted him to have it.

Ah, that awkward scene. Yet so well told. There’s something appealing about a story where the internal monologue and what people say mismatch, the narrator understanding more than he lets on and different things than people around him assume he understands. The writer steps back and lets us cross the gap of differences.

Taking a digital page from Brenda‘s notebook, a picture of what I’m reading next:

I’m not chasing any particular theme of thought, just changing pace from what the same-same memoirs of literal today that have such prevalence and sway. What was brought to my path by friends, family or random chance.
It’s tricky this admired trait of being contemporary, being in step with current. It’s like being present. I seem to need to be present and past back and forth I try not to drag too much of history with me at once.
I wonder about my relationship to history, literary or general. I look back at my growing up in the perennial urgent harvest or urgent to rest up and there was no past spoken of except by senility which wasn’t lucid and there was no future because it was either uppity to presume what god (or husband or random acts of neighbour dropping by) had in store. Plans were kind of taboo except in the broadest strokes and immovables, like wash day or grocery day for a given house. I’d guess that’s what drove me to history, anyone’s history. I was shut out of my own, so fine, anyone’s will do. I’ll glean something to make sense of now. Because now needs before to make any sense.
What is communication except an extension of trust or extension of mistrust? It plays in somehow.
I wonder why Candy Hemphill’s* song was so resonant. “You gotta trust somebody. You gotta let somebody in. You gotta trust somebody and call somebody friend. When you’re afraid and been betrayed, go to the Lord Almighty. He’ll show you with his tender care that you can trust somebody.”
A funny claim, that a god who doesn’t interact can prove trust. Funny that in the absence of reliable real people, trust is still needed and you can take an abstract concept and construct a “personal friend in Jesus” to fill the gap that needs filling.
[*She was born Carmel Hemphill but is now is Candy Christmas having married Rev. Christmas near Nashville. In her photo she is a middle aged woman but she was just a teen when I saw her sing, but then, I was a teen and I am middle-aged. Still somehow this all doesn’t add up right.]
We need the past and community to stabilize present and allow motion to grow to momentum in the future and are resilient and creative enough to find solutions wherever.
But the books and whatever I’m looking for for reinforcement or countering…
Top to bottom: Paul Mackan’s O My God of Apes and Apples (Publish America, 2011). My Father Who Art is one of my favorites in here.

“To be my father’s son, a tragedy/ inherited with a ‘by your leave’. / His bones speak for him now/ he’s hit me with them if he could /[…] He was liberal so I am,/He sang, I sing,/ he played piano, / I the organ — a bigger to-do”

I must admit I’ve a weak spot for poetry with music that is sacrilegious or struggling with. “Resurrection Day will rise without me.” It’s a pleasure to see some of these poem’s I’ve heard at open mic come to the page and to discover new ones I haven’t seen.
The current issue of unarmed.
Pieces from Buck Downs thinking on ex mas when “suitability killed the tree”, Sheila E Murphy’s “I have been practicing/for life/to be lived” and Elisabeth Guthrie. Who is this, then? Her full X Portraits, from Crater Press is already out of print. (Their pricing scheme baffles. You can buy by a ROW? ROW? And for some issues, there’s a note “paperknife required”. It seems an odd enticement? warning?)
No End in Strangeness by Bruce Taylor (Cormorant Books, 2011)
It’s a chatty sort of book. Everyday language, from a playful person, not trying to put on the mask of lower class marxist layman. He’s alert, as in Fortune’s Algorithm which starts

If only you could strip
off the falseness,
tear away its fabulous
headgear and expose
its good bald head

It’s not a lineated prose (not that I expect it from him, just seems to be a common trend). His line breaks chosen to hook, turn, please and play. Conceptually he plays with the idea of mask yet more than theatre half masks, the suggestion of it covering the whole head, like a gorilla mask. As if even the back of our heads and our ears are trained to portray the target social grace in fabulous faux culture. He doesn’t sound bite excerpt.
Rather like Barry Dempster’s poems, they evolve and turn on themselves so the reveal is if you’ve been there for the whole poem.
In Taylor’s case, he really reels it out. Little Animals is a 10-page long poem. More commonly they’re 2-3 pages. Different things can be said in more time when you don’t cut to the punch.
In Taylor‘s 1998 collection, Facts (Signal), the title poem, The Facts runs on for 7 pages. Under the school of thought that each poem should have one subject and one metaphor set, clearly explored, it veers around like a webcam on a hummingbird.
He starts it sitting in a back of a moving pickup with a stray dog. By p. 25 and 26

[…]hammered sheet metal to a school wall;
then I drove a blue van, and later I worked for the city
painting white lines on roads,
and in the course of that spring
I did every job for a day,
so now I can tell you I’ve been every person in that town
I’ve done every work that was offered
and lived every life. When I went
I saw myself coming, the trolleys filled up with me
coming and going, the newspaper kept me informed
about all that I did, I looked up
to th rainstreaked windows downtown and saw me
looking down over streets full of me.
A red bird flapped up to its nest, it was me,
she laid me in branches and twine, when I hatched
I asked to be fed, so she brought me
a frantic six-legger and in a snap of the beak
I was gone, mislaid somewhere in a forest of me,
my slim branches clicking and groaning.[…]
in a world that’s always been there,
[…] with the power to pulverize
theories beliefs and conjectures
under the flat rough stones of the facts.

Next book down? Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and Jonson, edited by Hugh Kenner (Reinhart Editions, 1964) p. 85, Lame pickup lines that probably didn’t work then either, such as Song to Celia, where the narrator sends flowers which she rejects but because she breathes on them, they’ll never wither only taken an upgrade and give off her scent instead of their own.
p. 205, George Herbert who calls for a little more plainness, less painterlyness. Down to earth in Jordan 1 he questions, “false hair/ becomes a verse? Is there in truth no beautie? […] is it no verse except in enchanted groves[…] while he that reades, divines/ catching the sense at two removes”.
The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta Press, 2008) won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Almost no capitalization, the sense of single poems with the title at the top, except each page has the same title, and the only punctuation is space on the page. It’s an intricate structure, a sort of a verbal dancing sodoku. Almost every line of the 64 long-lined pages ends with the word stop, please or advise. A dizzying sort of structure. The funny thing is, so far, the lines can be read skipping those words, or including them making multiple texts overlaid. It is right-justified, which I don’t think I can reproduce here. p. 5

my pleasures inventoried like cutlery stop
no histrionics just two brass lamps a stack of old newsprint from Paris tied in twine stop
the glamour in asking first Are you happy? stop
I’m elongating the upward curve of my handwritten “f” please
years of growth sanded away to make this beautifully varnished myth please
the stories so often describe the homecoming as some kind of relief stop

Letters on Birchbark by Uta Regoli, translated by Henry Beissel (Penumbra, 2000) I’ve owned for a long time but somehow slipped sideways without being read. p. 53, City in Winter, “In the city glass separates/ice from light” and p. 84, Winter Litany,

It was so cold that we needed two fires:
each one to keep the other warm.
The animals emigrated south
and took the trees along.
We were left behind […]
and talked to ice ferns”

What better time for gardening? Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening by Louise Riotte (Story, 1975, 1998) Wild carrot’s deep taproot indicates a soil worth improving for crops. p. 73

Stinging nettle […] strengthens growth of mint and tomatoes and gives greater aromatic quality to herbs such as valerian, angelica, marjoram, sage and peppermint.[…] Fruit packed in nettle hay ripens more quickly. Stinging nettle is helpful to stimulate fermentation in compost or manure piles.

Custom by Rae Armantrout (above/ground, 2012) got slipped back out of the shot but it’s fitting because in “At least” there’s a natural slip to it

“The train of thought
is not a train,
but a tendril,
                   blind”

In West Coast Line (24/Three, 1990) Ray Kiyooka has some memoir essays, including on the Sino-phobia that swept Canada, poems, and something on arts funding from 1979,

as well all know: visual thirst in the last quarter
of the 20th century was satisfied by a weekyl sitcom on television.
I’d say let’s pull the gold-plated plug out of the kultural-grain
dump a can of draino into it and let the wind pass thru.[…] a simple
proposition, viz: does the thing on he wall turn you on. it takes
love or a reasonable facsilimile thereof to make a painting and
be able to see if for what it’s worth, clearly.

Curiously Kevin Connolly is also in the issue using the same date and year at the bottom of the poem as Paul Mackan used. p. 94 Connolly has a poem “Junk Male”

I wonder if we’d calm down
a little if sex were a seasonal thing,
like fruit ripening. If all you
had to do was sit there in the wet dirt
and wait for the carrot to scream.

He goes on to play pool in stanza 4

“Research,” I call it. Bob call
it “Thursday,” and he’s right.

The issue is curiously full of familiar names: Angela Bowering, George Bowering, Maxine Gadd, Barry McKinnon, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Creeley, Stuart Ross, Lillian Necakov, Lisa Downe, Gary Barwin, Michael Redhill, Margaret Christakos. And 17 others that don’t ring a bell. Over 20 years, some poets could have written the same today, and others have shifted. Some value different scales of change differently, I speculate but don’t understand. And I wonder what did Janset Shami do next? Amazon lists only one title for her from and it from that year, and 5 years later she was making marionette shows, but then, women change their names and become untraceable.
The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, edited by Susanne Woods (Oxford). Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer. Her book of poems is dedicated entirely to women patrons. I’m still in the introduction.
Maybe I should dig out The Cloud Corporation which I got at Dodge Poetry Fest…I started but didn’t finish it and it just won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize.
I’ve also just discovered Asymptote, a literary journal of translation and reviews. I often feel hemmed in by the small circles of reference. This widens it out.
If, what I’m seeking, is surrogate stories of family or tribe, I may be taking a circuitous, scenic route in the wrong direction to that end. I should be heading towards bloodlines, except the rate of dying is high and there’s no reason to bring me into the fold of stories among those who remain.
If I’m seeking a more benevolent, more critically engaged narrative of how the world works, and more diversity than the implausible conformity that didn’t comfort, perhaps I’m going the right way.