Robert Peake’s tube map relabels the London underground to poets’ lives.
You can collaborate on making something the same for Ottawa, but more multi-media tonight. Add poems, memories, ideas to the map of what Ottawa feels like.
Monty Reid is running a hands-on mapping literary Ottawa project. Anyone can drop in and participate. The last session of mapping Ottawa 7 or 8 poets put their ideas on the table. The second time is tonight at 6:45-7:45 pm at Arts Court, floor 2.
See a post on it at Local Tourist Ottawa.

Jessica Hiemstra van-der Horst’s Apologetic for Joy, released this year from Gooselane, is savory, to be savored, sweet but not easy. A little achy but not maudlin nor being an “agoniste” (as Richard Lopez put the idea). Take for example, p.18, a poem that I read and reread and enjoy. It is deft of words but it has a deep structure of understanding, of pondering. It gets to the nature of things and does so plainly, yet complexly, not patly.

Anatomy for the Artist (Light, Study III)
Fresh paint can only be touched by air
and light, shadow. That’s how we should 
touch, without consuming. I can’t believe
I told you, I want to own you. I meant to say
I need to watch you bend, listen to your feet
on the cold floor, fine hairs
dragged across the blue.

It is what poetry is good for, expressing what never fits into conversation, tenderness whose moment rarely comes and yet can’t be forced. It’s got fondness and regret, excruciating mindfulness of beauty.
Even by time and air and light, things change without tangible contact yet there is the effect of impact. A love like watching paint dry, slow and unstoppable and the perfect kind of metaphor for shiny fragility and transitory stages.
It’s rare that so early in a book I decide I want to read slowly so it doesn’t end too soon, even knowing I’ll reread.

When a poet prefaces a poem with “this really happened” a few things are in motion.
The poet often breaks his or her flat tone pattern, or poet’s voice, and has the most emphatic inflected speech of their entire performance. Body language often gets most animated and natural and says pay attention. This all throws off the curve and makes the rest flatter by comparison.
It suggests I would care, as an audience member, if something is autobiographical. (Because such prefaced poems are not about history of someone else that “really happened” but some moment of direct experience of the author.)
It throws emphasis on truth, and suggests all else said, before and after, is falsehood and fudged.
It braces the scene for, not artistry, but therapy.
It honours the relating of observation verbatim and treats this as sacred, unquestionable, and often goes along with remarks about how the poem arrived finished, and yet it often feels less so than companion poems.
By framing as “it happened just like this” the author says things are knowable and can only happen one way and the author perceived it rightly, which rolls up my buddhist, all thing-are-unknowable defences, which muffles what is said.
It indicates this “actual seeing” was an exciting and marked state.
What follows is often a dull or blunt or particularly narratively bare-boned story, or a is a story that would be indistinguishable from the others by craft, had the person not flagged it as “actual events”.
It distracts into arguments of motivation for publishing/performing particular subjects. It begs the question of why, as a writer, faff about with things you don’t actually care about, or that don’t excite the interest of the writer. Why present other things?
Lastly, even tho at any stage of life or career, one may declare such a thing, it is more the mark of beginners to say so. It is often a hallmark of starting writers to begin with self. The first book is often impelled by becoming a parent or losing a parent, dealing with the birth or death of a child, then the next book becomes about out there relating to out there triangulated thru self. What does that say about my expectations of what writing is to become?
There’s an embedded assumption that poetry starts with therapy, with working though the personal and “true” and moves with writing experience from non-fiction to fiction, from raw to cooked but linear paths are constructions.
There seems to be a parallel with painting. You start with still life, move to portraits, then the animated world and lastly come back to still life and self-portraits with a new depth of skills. It is the most accessible and the hardest and easiest both.

Arc Poetry Magazine is proud to present—drumroll—the 2011 Lampman shortlist! The Archibald Lampman Award is presented annually to an outstanding collection of English-language poetry by an author living in the National Capital Region.
Nina Berkhout, Arrivals and Departures, (BuschekBooks)
Terry Ann Carter, A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris, (Black Moss Press)
Paul Tyler, A Short History of Forgetting, (Gaspereau Press)
The award will be presented on October 27, 2012 at Library and Archives Canada, in conjunction with the Ottawa Book Awards.
And again, one of the finalists was a facilitator for Tree Seeds Workshop Series. Again because TA Carter led workshops last fall. GG finalist Phil Hall will facilitate again in December and recent Tree Facilitator Claudia Coutu Radmore is shortlisted at Vallum. What a day for announcements. Does Ottawa Valley rule the nation or what?

You Are Here is the first of four Tree Seed Workshops led by Monty Reid. It starts tonight at 6:45pm at the Arts Court.
Here’s a teaser:

Maps always suggest explanations, but they also force us to consider other possibilities. Starting on October 11, join poet Monty Reid for a series of 4 counter-mapping workshops. Beginning with the notoriously disorienting Arts Court building, we will create visual, aural and textual maps that reflect our changing experience of the space we live in.
We all make mental maps. Bees make maps. Dogs make them. They may or may not look like Rand-McNally but they help us navigate nonetheless. […]
The end result will be a collaborative digital map that will be posted on the Tree website and will be available for expansion and revision at later workshops.

More, it’s free to drop in on for any poet who wants to partake.