Nobody Move by Susan Stenson is reviewed in 6 minutes at Bilio-File at Radio Canada International. It’s a lovely book. I read it last year and enjoyed it. A book that seems like a real person conversing yet not prosaic and not a posturing or evasion and pretty cleverness. Poetry with the characteristic pings on the scalp.
I hadn’t heard of this radio series but I like it. Priscila Uppal has been doing them recently. Earlier Suzanne Hancock talked about John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse written in the 1980s was also talked about.
Nice to see older books still talked about. I’d like to work my way thru Everyman’s Library [Warning, their website is unfortunately flash-based] and Penguin Classics. Watching current releases can be dizzying as watching raindrops fall instead of the hills behind them. Alternating between both gives a depth.
A valuable book they reviewed is Ray Robertson’s Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live about dealing with depression. Uppal relates that people with depression have brains that key to aspartame that inhibits Serotonin and worsens depression. That as well as being a carcinogen. Why is Serotonin not a controlled additive?
This looks like a useful book to check into. Although I understand the spin that it’s good for anyone if you’re feeling down or like a good enjoyable read, I quibble with being down being drawn as comparable to a biochemical skew. Like Fibromylagia, depression isn’t a little downer because of 1st world problems cropping up, but more of death-duel. The little optimizing strategies can make the difference between functional and not.

In case you missed hearing somehow, the Ottawa small press fair with its myriad delights of things papery and people-y is back this November 5, usual place, Jack Purcell Centre, 2nd floor. If you smell the chlorine pool you’re walking 180 degrees off. Details of getting a table, hours, etc. I’ll be there with a booth, 1 new book, 2 new chapbooks, and possibly, just possibly, carrots or brownies. I’ll hide whichever you prefer. 😉

Espacémi, the art gallery of UQO (Université du Québec en Outaouais), is proud to present Vocabulaire, a new exhibition by artist Michèle Provost. The exhibition is featured as part of les Journées de la culture en Outaouais.

Vocabulaire is an attempt to extract a bit of poetry out of the everyday, by isolating some text elements that have become so customary that our eyes no longer bother conveying them to our brains. The work is centered around a list of 100 French words collected and photographed during regular comings and goings on both sides of the Ottawa River. The installation also features special contributions from a wide variety of both French and English participants, who will individually explore and recompose the same collection of ambient vocabulary. The aim of the exercise is to explore how such apparently banal utterances can be recombined and reconfigured to form an infinite number of more substantial concepts and images.
The exhibition will be on view from September 30 to October 13 2011, at the gallery of the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO).
When? Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 12 to 2PM and 6 to 7 PM , Saturday, 1 to 4 PM
Where? Pavillon Lucien-Brault (A-0112), 101 rue Saint-Jean-Bosco, Gatineau
P.S. I’ve got a little word piece up with the many responses with Michele’s exhibit Amanda’s there too among the dozens.

Rufo hosting on Sept 20 at the Poets Live Series held in the wine cellar space of Carr’s Irish Pub, 1 Rue du Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries, Paris.

Peter Hughes also read a sonnet sequence of love poems for his wife. They are as of yet unpublished but tight and moving. He also read epistle poems which are a dialogue with an Italian poet. The series starts out as as 54-line exchange, then 53-line then down to 1-line exchange. It will be coming out shortly as a book. (What an interesting mind.)

Peter Hughes’ Behoven from Oystercatcher Press. The title is a play from Beethoven as all the poems were composed listening to 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in order. I’ll have to seek out those in particular. His plays among language have an energizing music to them. Recently having heard Beethoven pieces performed on piano, I was struck by how he seemed curmudgeonly and comic, aware of being dramatic and almost spoofing himself. But what do I know of music of Beethoven, only this impression against Chopin’s pieces who seemed more self-serious, earnestly manic when his music was irregular.
The poetry seems matching of confirming to the fragments I felt – there’s this comic twist and large gestures both in music responding to it. For example to Piano Sonata 5,

from sonata 5
        ideas cancel each other out
    gravity & hiccoughs
        mimes of paranoia
twitching through the forest of itself
            poised & well-hung
          the magic cherries
         turn out to be
       peaches

from sonata 21

they joined hands
       to form a lake
   in which nothing could live

There’s a sort of twist and grim more than dark humour and yet the pivots are so lively without falling to random.

Bonny Finberg, a travelling poet between continents, was a pretty animate reader thus no photo was left unblurred. She was launching Déja Vu.
Both of our poems sets had bird flights and amoeba sort of references and neither being at all nature poems. That was an interesting cross-tie. Bonny plays in fragments well. Hers isn’t a pendantic story-telling. Even with her poem, “A Novel in 24 Chapters” with one line per chapter, there are gaps, space enough to breathe in. For example,

9.
Early attempts at fondue failed because cheese had not yet been invented.
10.
She forgot where she put her untold stories so she went to the market for a new economy.
11.
Ethnic minorities took pictures everywhere.
12.
So close to death his wife gave birth before the cricket tournament.

There’s such a wonderful density of compression, humour, cynicism and pathos. Each could unpack rather than each idea set out in labelled indexed diagram. There’s a vivacious bite to some of her poems like

Falling
Smoking star,
listen to me.
Call the stain
to you hand.
Go – I’m ready
to burn.
Has caffeine
a tiger’s kiss?
Be wild,
shove the
sequestered
kiss with force
and school me
in your pause.
Ia this
blood
clean as
the sea?
Make me wait.
Respect the
sea and
say amen.

“School me in your pause”. What a lovely turn of phrase. Some poets use imperative but in a wishy-washy way that seems more of a rhetorical suggestion. This instead has such a lovely force to it.
To me it seems to order a lover to come during a period, challenging the religious laws that forbid sex during periods, slashes back at the indoctrination of the notion as woman as unclean. The woman is salt water ocean, a force of nature and thank her for it.

My new chapbook in rack with George Vance’s Short Circuit which play in concrete poetry and self-disruptive sort of texts.

That’d be me reading in the vaulted space. Good acoustics.

Poets Live from Pearl Pirie on Vimeo.

Rufu said there are 3 poets tonight and each are launching chapbooks and each of you in the audience are buying a chapbook so that’s a nice symmetry isn’t it? (Heh. The nudge might have worked too.)
David Barnes did a post on the Sept 19th Spoken Word in Paris. See his post with a few of my photos in it here.

A Snare, DC Books and Coach House fall launching of 10 new titles at The Sparrow Bar, 5322 boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montréal. When? Oct 2, 2011, 8:00pm doors, 8:30 reading
Readers: David McGimpsey (Li’l Bastard), Sina Queyras (Autobiography of Childhood), Lesley Trites (Echoic Mimic) and myself (Thirsts). Who else? Louise Bak (Syzygy), Rob Benvie (Maintenance), kevin mcpherson eckhoff (easy peasy), Tristan Hughes (Eye Lake), Leigh Kotsilidis (Hypotheticals) and Jenny Sampirisi (Croak).