Mon Feb 6th – Humour in Poetry, led by Bardia Sinaee
Thur. Feb 9th – Editing and Publishing Fiction, led by Dave Currie
Mon Deb 13th – The Spoken Word, led by Brandon Wint
Feb 25th, writing lives with Charlotte Gray is offered by Canadian Author’s Assoc
Coming March 3rd, Versefest workshops for families and youth and March 4th with registration now open, a slam workshop with Ursula Rucker

At Adanna Literary Journal Kathleen Kirk puts her finger on what I’ve been trying to reach regarding sentimental: “I think our worry as poets would be in asking for more emotion than a situation warrants, or manipulating readers’ feelings in some way—asking or expecting them to feel more than they do or telling them what or how or how much to feel. “

Issue 8 of Ottawater is now online. There must be something good in the ‘water. Sure is. 60 pages of art, and lots of poems
Poems by nearly 2 dozen including Marilyn Irwin, Phil Hall (“Come back Silence we’ll try to listen”), John Barton (a Masterclass weekend with him in April is now taking registration), Stephanie Bolster, K.I. Press, and ones by some of my other favorite writers whose work too rarely lets work to light of day, like Anne Le Dressay (in a list poem of pros of a city: “The absence of a silence so profound it wakes me out of sleep like/a sudden sharp noise.” or “it’s the back of his bent neck that makes you/ notice, so that you see the vulnerability/elsewhere in him.”) and Robin Macdonald, (“A year of too many desires /planted. In fertile soil, everything /grows.”)
There are interviews (with Michael Dennis and Christine McNair) and exceptional layout by Tanya Sprawl.
The launch is tonight at the Carleton Tavern.
Psst, the next weekly issue of Linebreak is also up. A poem of matches.

On January 28th, 2012, VERSe Ottawa (versefest.ca) is organizing Ottawa’s first ever Women’s Slam Championship, as a fundraiser for the annual poetry festival VERSeFest and as a way of celebrating the incredible women of Ottawa slam. Twelve of the top names chosen from throughout the history of slam in Ottawa will come together at Arts Court to find out who will take the title of the first ever Ottawa Women’s Slam Champion!
From new, up-and-coming poets such as CauseMo (member of the National Champion Youth Slam Team) to scene-starters like Capital Slam co-founder Elissa Molino and established slammers like two-time Canadian Festival of Spoken Word veteran Festrell, the field will take in a wide range of styles and feature some of the movers and shakers of the spoken word scene both in Ottawa and across the country. Competing: CauseMo, Danielle K.L. Gregoire, D’Lightfull, Elissa Molino, Elle P, Festrell, Jenna Tenn-Yuk, Rage, Sarah Musa, Scotch, Sepideh, and Stargazer.
The top four poets will also be given a feature spot at the 2012 edition of VERSeFest, Ottawa’s Poetry Festival, which runs from February 28th to March 4th, 2012.
Arts Court Doors at 6:30, slam at 7:00! Admission is $8. Show up early, this event is going to be packed! For more information visit versefest.ca.

On iTunes or other rental places you can find: Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. He said, “I don’t trust styles and I especially did not want to be encapsulated in one.” He also said in that documentary, “works that are too preconceived go dead[…] the peculiarities of the moment are more energized”. It’s a tricky spot to figure out what makes a practice work, and what is a knock off of the outward seeming practice but missing the point, or key elements or implementing it poorly and eroding the concept. What comes to mind is the filter down effect of clothes that come from runways to discount stores, modifying at each step to the constraints of price point and usual materials accessed and you end up with a cut of clothing that worked with a stiff fabric but with a rayon-clingy drape and the innovations to make the changes with the color of the year and clientele length and decoupage, end up with a rag. Regardless of what style poetry starts as, it can descend to cardboard verse. As Glaser said, “Crystallization of belief – “oh I’ve got it now – becomes a limitation” in the not good sense of limitation.
As the creation habit continues, the pendulum swings: Neo-classicisist, The Romantics, Symbolists, Imagistes, Dadaists makers of concrete poetry, OULIPO and Language poets.
Each were at the start only a handful of acquaintances over a short period of time that sort of agreed and if you squint held common threats, the way stars hold a constellation and story that help us orient ourselves but the myth isn’t really in the sky or history.
With each phase of poetry, one tries to correct for the weaknesses of the last phase, to be more structured, less structured, driven by sonorous, by paring away extraneous, by suggesting, by mathematics, by directing thru deletion, by accumulation, by curating the unimportant, by lifting up the mythical, by pointing past little things to the cosmic, by seeing the universal in the pore, by stripping false myths away, by insisting the universe is not kind but cruel, or not random but kind, ruled by kings, not by the common man, by including the unbeautiful and non-sequitur and disorder. All the methods try to not stand in the way of a reality that gets obscured by our habituating.
Pratt, in The Imagist Poem relates what TE Hulme said in 1924 in Speculations about language decaying in its power to signify over time. That’s why we choose “fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not because they are new […] because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract” by overuse.
Glaser’s drawing hand can think for him directly much. We record the world around us, but they are means, the world and the recording, not ends. “We don’t have an obligation to represent the tree, but the tree initiates”, Glaser said. The outward and inward are also a mobius strip.
Glaser’s an interesting fellow. Drawing, cooking and chopping, “I don’t see these as different kinds of experiences”. “What I’ve always hated is the parochialization of as an action, unrelated to other activities.” All activities are about interrelatedness, redesigning our world for the better in whatever sphere and capacity to create civilization, which is that which links people so we don’t all kill one another.