Who says written on the wind is intangible?
Remember the October Megalaunch of Snare and Coach House titles at The Artel in Kingston?
There was Lesley Trites, Pearl Pirie, Tristan Hughes, Leigh Kotsilidis, Jenny Sampirisi, and members of the Kingston Slam Team, Faith Mousa and Sherry Huang. It was hosted by Georgia Webber, Alana Wilcox and Evan Munday. (Unfortunately kevin mcpherson eckhoff couldn’t make that poet stop but here’s an interview with him since.)
It was broadcast on Bruce Kauffman’s ‘Finding a Voice’ on CFRC November 11, 2011. The mp3 of the audio is here.

The Advent Book Blog is back again, gathering people’s recommendations for best book each read in 2011, regardless of the year the book was published.
Over there I won the collected works of Malcolm Gladwell (Hatchette Book Group, 2011). Cloth-bound and still with new fresh glue smell. Lovely object in hand, and this edition is illustrated like an idiosyncratic 1960s textbook.
I like his common sense of out-thinking your brain and its backwater deals. I’ve followed his blog. I’ve borrowed and read The Tipping Point and Blink, but haven’t read the Outliers one.

Literary Happens in Ottawa at Local Tourist Ottawa. One is already down, Kate talks about the Tree of this week.

Shane Rhodes did a talk at it about a broad definition of found poetry that includes erasure texts like Wave Books is doing to reportage like Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston of 1974. He described 3 major peaks of using found texts. The first was in the dadaist era, when the only logical response to the absurdity of war, is nonsense. The second was in the 1960s and 70s where Colombo and his clippings took the national imagination. The third wave is now with a number of poets from Kate Eichhorn, derek beaulieu, himself and others recontextualizing and re-intending found text. I didn’t consider that I was consciously brokering in this myself. I tend to see found text as unmixed with other texts, such as people who gleefully “find poetry” in novels and re-lineate and curate it under their names.
He speculated on what may have given the rise to this wave in popularity, considering access, digitization, cross-polliation from remix culture of music (and I should think copyleft for software and images). I wonder is not a response to a war-culture incidentally in common?

There was also the Tree Seed workshop where Phil Hall led us thru the ideas of threes, poems that took that off-balanced number and used the form into other forms, from Dante’s Inferno with its rolling forward rhyme and Sir Thomas Wyatt bringing terza rima to English, to Wallace Stevens’ Large Red Man Reading which is rather three squared, structurally with lines in triplets but also three grammatical phrases per line.
There was also a visiting into the words of Merril Gilfillan, Rae Armantrout, Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth who cluster together 3 ideas that may not relate or intersect unless the poet put them together.
To put in a set of 3 does something different than the solidity and authority of sets of quatrains or even pairs of beats. How does form inform range of interpreting and range of movement in a poem? What causes movement and what causes pause, how and why. Lots to mull.
There was also a time to round table poems brought in.
Tree’s becoming a sort of open university with the direction it is headed. More theory talks like Shane Rhodes are planned for 2012 so readers and writers can go deeper as well as broader.
In other news, George Whitman, of Shakespeare and Company, has passed on at age 98, a debate over whether the TS Eliot Prize is a good thing, even if it uses dirty money, Claudia Coutu Radmore who coedited the walls’ sharp white chapbook with me, has won the bpNichol chapbook award for her Apt 9 chapbook, the top place of the Montreal International Poetry Prize will be announced today at 7pm, and the Globe and Mail has picked up the baton on drawing attention to the unfilled post of the Poet Laureate, “a position created in 2001 and enshrined in the Parliament of Canada Act. The position, which is overseen by the Parliamentary Library, has been vacant since April, and the selection process to find a new laureate still hasn’t begun.”

It looks like the dining hall in Harry Potter, doesn’t it?
But it’s another magical place: a gathering of writers and publishers and the public.

SPoT: Small Press of Toronto, Winter Book Fair.
The unphotographed here includes The Beaverton, a satire newspaper, echolocation, a U of T journal, Cathy Thorne’s Everyday People Cartoons (who also had buttons, magnets, scarves, t-shirts and books on theme), Boardwalk Chocolates, a high school group putting out their 10th issue of Writer’s Ink, Sunnyoutside up from Buffallo, New York, Brick Magazine, and a miniature leather tooled classic books table. And a bunch of other things.

Alan Breistmaster was there, perhaps with Quattro, never made it to that side of the room.
(Photo: right) The fellow’s face is familiar but I forgot to record his name [John Reibetanz] with the lady at Rufus Books. (The Agnes?) I asked her how much to buy the whole table. (Indecision is expensive.) Her letterpress books including Fernando Pessoas Alberto Caeriro poems in English-Portuguese. Normally $45 or so, and sale for the day of SPoT, $25.

Pictured is Anke Tuinman and Jeanne Mott. Making Mud Pies is the first chapbook of their Toronto writers circle. It is more beautifully laid out than most self-published and than some press-published things. Their first chapbook is of short stories.

Vincent Ponka started a press of poetry, short stories and novels this year; Emmerson Street PressI don’t recall who the lady was in the next booth but a lovely smile, eh?

rob mclennan in his spot of sun of above/ground and Chaudiere titles.

The stained glass windows cast their rainbow on the above/ground subscription and Camille Martin’s latest chapbook.
I minded the table awhile.

The Descant booth had bundles of back issues with related theme objects, like cat toys for a cat’s issue, candy for a childhood issue. Er, not childhood issues in that sense, but you know what I mean.

Sheniz Janmohamed has a Tsar book of ghazals called Bleeding Light.
There were all kinds of tables of people painting things in water color, or drawing a monster or graphic novels but my radar went only to poetry.

Said like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004) by Mark Truscott.
It’s a wonderful head space. The text uses the book for pacing. One poem sets up the idea and turn the page and the next poem uses nearly the same phrasing but turns the meaning. It’s hard to explain. A poem all on one page that uses something of the same mental shifting is p. 26

SERIES
realize
realign
realize

The cover blurb says the poems cast a haiku shadows. I was skeptical and prepared to defend against the misinformation maligning haiku. They are not haiku and yet I could understand reading partway thru how. There’s a subtly. It reminds me of an Egytian lady who danced nearly without movement, the smallest shifts of wrists and skirt and yet as graceful as any long large sweeps and taking as much skill.
Determined by Aperture (Fewer & Further Press, 2008) by Shannon Tharp
This one I am also re-reading. There’s a discipline of restraint as well, not a telegraphic curtness in how brevity is used. For example,

2.
We point
to locate,.
That is,
there is
responsibility
in vision.

Some lyric poems I can’t see any logic to line breaks. Some do nothing for pacing and seem a matter of ego to call words poems and the meaning would be served as well in prose format, and be baggy prose at that. Here if lineated a single sentence, there would be meaning loss. There is little but it isn’t fragmentary. There’s a line sketch in we point and once that situation is established, there’s an expansion of the line into the motivation of why we would collectively point and already the suggestion of more than a literal pointing. It is already at 4 words in, an uncommon awareness of what’s going on.
Then the middle couple regathers thoughts in something like conversational tone and stammer and yet not going on. It becomes a call to arms to look after the members of this collective looking, creating a loop in the poem back to the initial word. It is like postage stamp art rather than mural art.
Keeping the Quiet (Bellowing Ark, 2008) by Rick Kempa
His isn’t excerpt-able the way some are. They build over hundreds of words a world. If I told you what happened it wouldn’t convey. It is how he told it. Poem for Bruce or Subway Song are experiences that unfold. I feel like I want to know Bruce or already do remember him. Whatever I may say about poetry being not about real life directly, I want to set aside for Subway Song. I want it to have literally happened like that, gleaming, compassionate, extending oneself to connect. They are about reconciling various griefs and various hope. In Bar the Door I got goosebumps at the telling of a loved one in, we gather, the ICU on machine support and declaring the entubated “Thank god you’ll never know/ what it’s like in here.”
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein (1914). From Roast Beef, p.35-36

There is no use there is not use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, here is no use at all and the respect is mutual.
Why should that which is uneven, that which is resumes, that which is tolerable why should all this resemble a smell, a thing is there, it whistles, it is not narrower, why is there no obligation to stay away and yet courage, courage is everywhere the the best remains to stay.
If there could be that which is contained in that which is felt there would be a chair where there are chairs and there would be no more denial about a clatter. A clatter is not a smell. All this is good.

It’s been called wild and cubist and sound poetry and experimental but it doesn’t seem all that. It is musical. It makes sense but makes sense differently. It interlocks and back and forward references. It is easy to parse even if the syntax is overlapping. The commas and forward run of it with its structure melts the distinction between one object and the next, one idea and the next. Boundaries are shown as arbitrary as they are. It often seems cynical although there’s a nod there that the world has part of courage being as omnipresent as anything else.
Perhaps Stein makes sense to me because non-literal and hyperbole and torqued seems more true to me than claims of measurably slowly rounded space. A world that contains only matched sets unsettles me.
Experiment-o (AngelHouse, 2011).
It’s hard to do tender well, but Cameron Anstee struck the lines “you kissed me, no heroics, you kissed me /the parts we remember scaffold our bodies”
Held together, keeping integrity physically by memories. Past perceptions as structural, formative. Intriguing ideas.
I can’t explain Francis Raven’s visual pieces but they please me somehow. I look repeatedly and enjoy. Likewise with Márton Koppány’s. They are untitled but the vision of making the one with the leaves has a sweet elegance to it.
Poems can have a self-examination element of critical thought, a journalistic record making, a verbal movie-making and can enjoy themselves. Phil Hall’s willingness to play is a treasure. There’s quite a lot of his poems in the issue, including this Basho nod.

Gerund gerund gerund
the old frogs pettifog & the peepers
ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing

And paying attention. An excerpt from the poem Claver. In, it just before, burning the old New Yorkers he salvaged the covers (as I did with Lee Valley Catalogues).

mornings I try to read page-shaped ash
a quote my fire preserves all night
from columns it has only one use for now
riven by passion, not profit. We contin

m-Talá (Shearsman/Buschek, 2009) by Chus Pato, translated by Erin Moure.
p. 19 is misrepresentative actually since it holds a thought longer and the text is alert and moving, but this piece I particularly like

AS METAPHORS
ETERNALLY
AGRARIAN
        you select the saddest path
        a verdant landscape: glacée
        that’s how autumns come to an end
because we leap without a net, to do it we take “abyss lessons”
I’d better be nice
find things to do that make me smile
That’s how we survive:
me and you too, my favourite aliens
outside the womb
        
Just like the huge Polar Bears on the ice-floes of Greenland

There’s a background sadness, yes but a tender compassion, affection in here as well. The text brings in the world of the point of view to include these things that are part of our mind, melting ice caps, global warming, particular animals that we have no direct contact with and yet are embedded in our culture. It doesn’t sermonize but it doesn’t leave outside the picture the bigger picture.
It is text that is self-aware, or is it self-conscious of itself being a text? We live urban lives, most of the planet anyway, even the 1/6 of the human planet who live in Shanty towns. It’s a sweet spot to acknowledge, to not dwell nor deny yet have a larger sense of meaning.
Poetry often references the physical world we are often not living directly in, being inside heated or cooled buildings. Outdoors is where we go on vacation with supplies. Farms are education centres we visit. Some garden and its a centering activity. Do we write about the majority substance of our days, of insights into human interaction, about the solitude of walking back and forth checking for mail, or metatext about typing? Poems about writing poems? Where do we place our despair and optimism? Where and how are we in relation to the disorientation? Do we position ourselves towards survive, alive or thrive? Our attitude is not a castaway optional but comes down to a matter of survival.
Gently Read Literature, December Issue
It’s at 55 pages. It’s an issue as if catered for me. There’s a piece on prose and flash fiction and another on nonsense is not gibberish. There’s a review by Marilyn Krysal on Ingrif Wendt’s 6th book. Eventide is a poetry of non-violence. It wraps into itself Szymborska and Stafford. Looping back to what I was thinking about yesterday, William Stafford says, “You create a good poem by revising your life.”
Wendt ended a poem with lines by Seeger,

Here’s how to count the the people who are ready to do right.
“One.” “One.” “One.”

You never know what will spark. In the same issue Cindy Hochman reviews Ann Cefola’s chapbook St. Agnes Pink-Slipped (Kattywompus Press, 2011) where she’s wondering what’s an unemployed saint to do when laid off. It also contains a wonderful poem about “a constellation, a myth, a woman of 43[/…] Andromeda must unloose her own chains, rub her nasty wrists”.
Cefola also writes, “In the bluest of rooms, I am awash in X-ray light./ My body’s on lease to strangers:”
And in other news, an interview with me went up today at OpenBook Ontario.
Read 200 pages and you might be in the place to write 60 words.

in the highrise a raised eyebrow
and my sins are xray white. I fall 
not as dead weight heavy but as if 
tipped from dock to water, cold slapped 
back for a moment from the shock, relit
and back into the black out, a snatch of
a vision of lower cabinets, my own angle,
then slow sinking thru the watery ceramic 
tiles as the black out continues and I slump 
as a waterlogged ceiling, the bulge of my butt 
making the neighbours look up with concern 
at their dining room ceiling then a crash and 
a whoosh and I’m thru and their concerns can’t
be mine. I’m into the next kitchen below, melting 
their floor, bowing it down to bedroom of lower floor 
and I percolate, this fainting weight thru the bed’s 
percale cover, the plastic fitted cover that’s said
to stop spills less than me, the mercury that was 
my bones running tiny courses and dripping 
around the springs and recombining a pool of 
our favourite parts in a sort of Saturnal gravity,
pressing thru the new floating laminate beneath 
and I slide wondering if even China could stop me 
or if I’ll sweep straight out the other side into 
the great beyond and the exhale of meteors.

That X-ray of Cefola was the sort of gelling word that my brain’s been waiting for and out spilled this from my hunt-and-peck, tickety tack racket this morning.