Books, performances of poetry and music this weekend, Saturday, Jan 21, Arts Court, 2 Daly Ave, Ottawa. 7pm doors. Cover $8

Come for one, come for some, come for all – you can watch or perform in the Theatre, or have a drink, socialize and buy books in the Studio. We’ll open the doors at 6:30 then at 7:00 a performance by folk/bluegrass trio Call Me Katie, and follow that with short open mike segments and featured readers.
We’ll crown the winner of our “Poetry For The End Of The World” contest – and then we’ll send the winning poem off to the end of the earth. Literally. We’ve got our hands on a weather balloon, and we’re going to laminate the winning poem, attach it to the balloon, and launch! Weather balloons can travel up to 100,000 feet in the air, and who knows how far it might go… before air pressure causes it to explode, going out, as they say, “not with a whimper, but a bang.”
The third main segment of the evening will feature four prominent local poets we never hear enough of. Brigette DePape, Kevin Matthews, Rhonda Douglas and David O’Meara will fill a half-hour with fine lines.
We’ll close the evening starting at about 10pm with Montreal indie band Puggy Hammer (featuring last year’s VERSeFest guest David McGimpsey, poet Jason Camlot, and Matt Rosenberg.)
And while you’re at it, check out VerseFest’s new website with this year’s amazing line-up.

Allison Armstrong is a queer femme poet, model, and pornographer living in Ottawa, Ontario, where she co-organizes the Voices of Venus women’s spoken word showcase. Her work has appeared in Vagina Dentata, Venus in Scorpio, Whorespeak, and at Bywords.ca. She is one half of the queer women’s literotica troupe Honeyed Tongues, and she blogs about feminism, bdsm, sex work, and gender at http://syrens.wordpress.com/.
Mike Montreuil lives in Gloucester and is waiting for the Habs to win the Stanley Cup again. He has a small haiku press: Éditions des Petits Nuages.
rob mclennan is Ottawa’s literary encyclopedia and creative superhero masquerading as a mild-mannered writer of more than 20 books of poetry, novels, essays and other non-fiction. robmclennan.blogspot.com
Luminita Suse is as a software developer that writes poems in her spare time when she doesn’t read, bike, do gardening or tend to her family. Her poetry appeared in Bywords Quarterly Journal, Ditch Poetry, New Stalgica Hymnal, Moonbathing, Gusts, Atlas Poetica, Magnapoets, Tanka Café/ Ribbons, Red Lights, Notes from the Gean, and others.
Amanda Earl’s poetry appears in the air and on paper. Amanda is the angel of AngelHouse Press & the curator of experiment-o.com, an annual pdf magazine that celebrates the art of risk. For more on her hijinx & shenanigans, please visit amandaearl.com

Fellow Sage Hillers Frances Boyle, Cynthia French and Heather Haley are in a love poem anthology that Leaf Press will put out next month: The Wild Weathers. Heather Cardin (who moved out of Ottawa back to Saskatchewan), Linda Crosfield and Susan Ioannou and Kim Yong-Hi, Winona Baker (haikuist) and Leonard Neufeldt are also among the 4 dozen or so in that upcoming.

Salty Ink asks Valerie Compton:

You’re an accomplished short story writer, but this is a debut novel. What was the hardest part of upping a story’s wordcount to novel length?
It’s not a matter of upping the word count so much as solving the dilemmas of a story that is too complex to be resolved in small span of words. A novel does, and should, require depth and breadth and time to complete.

Good to hear someone say that.
A novel is a different creature. Just like a haiku is a different creature not just a short free verse. You don’t compress the best phrases of a page long poem into Cole’s notes short poem and call it haiku any more than a cowboy in a story makes it a western. Because it’s a long utterance doesn’t make it an essay. Because a written piece talks about a book doesn’t make it a review. Carry on…

For the 9th time, Bywords held its Bywords warms the night fundraiser for the Cornerstone Women’s Shelter. There was music, poetry spoken and more music as Amanda Extraordinaire Earl organized and hosted. All the money [$300 this time] goes towards the women’s shelter.
• $21 will feed one woman for a week
• $75 will provide a homeless woman with the support of our Housing Worker in her search for safe and affordable housing that she can sustain when she leaves the shelter.
• $100 will provide one month of addiction or mental health counseling services for a woman in recovery from the effects of trauma and abuse
• $200 will sponsor a woman in our iSisters computer training course

Andrea Simms-Karp performed on the banjo and guitar singing her own songs. Her CD, Hiberation Nation of snow snows was for sale at the back.
The few rows of chairs gradually filled.

Jamie Bradley, who was published in this issue of Bywords Quarterly Journal, read a few poems including his Sex at 31 poem “that smallest efficiency/that clenching jaw”. It is a hat tip to Barry McKinnon’s series exploring the character of what sex means at each 7 year interval. McKinnon’s coming to town for Versefest. Unless another city lures Bradley away, it’s easy to see him still here, crafting solid books of poems 40 years from now.

Vermont then Montreal resident Abby Paige is a newcomer to Ottawa but not to poetry. Abby read some striking work, including “Obedience” which started a little ripple thru the gathered people when she said “I dose at my desk while the poem goes out/to find itself”. Later the poem drags itself home with its prize trove, “scuffing blistered, bunioned/ feet, down the hall, soft like an old man in slippers.//It guides me to a trapdoor, a narrow/mouth circled in moss. It puts the pen/against my callous and points me in.”
What wonderful sounds and line breaks and metaphor to run thru a poem. Little bits of surprise on suprise yet over the length it all holds together.

Luminita Suse, took us from the Berlin Wall, not yet down, to a dinner table where “silence/is secured with forks and knives” until the fork “I push into my ribcage/ it gets through epidermis/the rib cage blocks/meta teeth” to “smiling with no apparent reason” “simply happy/to spend the rain together”.
If you’re in town, you can see more of Luminita and Amanda in a few days since they are also reading at Collected Works again on Thursday as part of the Guatemala Stove Project launch.