The Robert Kroetsch Memorial reading for Ottawa will be Friday, July 15, 2011;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm, upstairs at The Carleton Tavern. A chapbook tribute will be available there courtesy of rob mclennan.

Robert Kroetsch at the David Eso haiku workshop at Canmore, June 17th (Photo by filling Station)
Eso points out the Kroetsch So often he began his sentences with “I’m fascinated by…”
Good way to live as he did with curiosity and humour.

What ends up cheek by jowl is fascinating. Like books in a rummage sale, some book on the Grand Ole Opry ends up between a dummy’s guide to rock climbing and music sheets for Mary Poppins. The remix ends up with enjambments of content you wouldn’t expect.
With this idea in mind, some of the poems in been shed bore tumbled the order of a small set of words in several ways to see what tones and combos came up.
As an extension of the idea, a generator game is now on one of my sites: The Poem Shuffler. It randomizes the word order of any text entered.
It is kind of like an anagrammer on a word-scale. You can pick the line length and see how it tumbles.
The program doesn’t keep anything entered and if you push shuffle, it’s gone, so copy as you go.

We trekked out to Perth to see the new reading series around. It started in March. Johnny Pigeau moved from Kingston to Perth and decided to bring the literature to him and to his new community. He started the First Edition Reading Series. It’s out of Backbeat Books although there are also Special Edition Series at other venues. The next one on July 24th will be at the EcoTay Center just west out of town on the Scotch Line Road.

Perth just lost a bookstore recently. It’s good to see another come. Backbeat is a cozy niche.

It has old books, new books, CDs, vinyl and crafts made from saris, and cards made from vintage collaged texts. There’s hand creams and pillows of letters of the alphabet. All kinds of goodies.
Speaking of goodies, Lynes read what she describes as her first successful poem in a set as a tribute to the underappreciated 1800s British poet John Clare. He is comparable to Robert Frost. It is about a drunken man besotted and up a tree to watch a lovely heifer (in the best possible sense) of a potential wife go by.
I’m not quite sure how I missed knowing about it but Jeanette Lynes had a novel out in 2009, long-listed for the Giller, called Factory Voice. (Sometimes I get waylaid in poetry I suppose.) The voices in this story of a 1940s aircraft factory and women who work there are distinct. It sounds like a story I’ll have to hunt up.

Here she was talking about how the cover of the novel came from her idea that it should look vintage, like something in a dollar bin novel of that era. The shoes on the cover came from a rummage shop, as did the sign in her hand.

She and Jennifer Londry read from a variety of their books and projects. Londry wrote After the Words (Hagios Press, 2010), a poetry collection about the Alzheimer’s journey. In 2009 she co-authored Life & Death in Cheap Motels (Hidden Brook Press) with R. D. Roy. She also read from new things, including a novel of being in the Hell’s Angel’s scene in Gatineau in the 80s.
It made for an interesting evening, a sampling buffet, mixing up poetry and prose. It begs the question, how much more often would people read from what they feel like reading if they were invited to read like this, not sponsored on a reading tour by a particular publisher but just invited to a nearby town?
There was a Q&A with questions after each reader in a conversational style. A good idea rather than saving everything up to the end if time permits. Too much time passes and questions fall out of the head as new material comes.
Somehow whenever there is a Q&A at some series around town, there isn’t this level of engagement as there was in Perth. I suppose part of it is because all the readers know one another, are comfortable around each other, and with a small space and about 15 or 16 people in the room, it encourages the sense of conversation rather than panel on stage. No mikes. Just a warm gathering.

Phil Hall gave a characteristically good reading. He has a wonderful way of owning a room and casting a spell. But if you missed it, don’t feel too bad because he’s doing the Tree series July 26th. And if you miss the Tree reading, you can hear him read a sample poem from Killdeer at the BookThug launch this spring.
He read from a range. He has had 16 books out over the last 30 years. He read prose and poetry and what he calls poem-essays. If you don’t like poetry, they’re essays. If you don’t like essays, they’re poetry. Reminds me of what Kroetsch said, “This is a journal that wants to be a poem. Or visa versa.”
In the Q&A Hall was asked, when he mentors what does he most want the newer poets to pick up on. He said, if you can stop writing, do. There should be an inner push. You often have to have rescued yourself in some way to have that push, to have your voice pushed down to have to now speak your voice. If you don’t need to say it, set it aside and say what you need to.
His words brings back to mind the centrality of core principles. When you are disoriented, unsure of what to say, collect yourself, assess, be quiet, wait and orient to what are first principles you’ve identified when your head was clear.
It’s easy to let one element of poetry overtake the others, sound prevail over sense or the storyline run roughshod over the music, or the idea and form and act of making of a poem become stronger than having an idea to express, or having an idea to express being a blunt instrument under the surgical lights of language.
The basic principle of poem or story is the listening circle. Come closer, I have something to say. Poems that sike and deke away and refuse to say, avoid the speaker’s story and the audience’s payoff, what does that do? On some deeper level something is got just as a building that is put together with craft for a use not your own communicates a respect and caring and how poor craftsmanship tells another physical story. It’s a human compulsion to make salience and sail it.

Like how some people keep the idea close to housing at Project Rebuild, how it evolves in a neighbourhood, like Jacqueline Turner’s response of making a poetic duplex, or other echoing the habit of the downtown core intensifying the neighbourhoods (for cultural capital) as Jane Jacob’s recommended for quality of life.
Darren Wershler‘s development re-evolved with Matthew Frederick George, the direction debated by Joanne E. Valin. Another lot cleared except for remnants, and left to develop by a few rounds of owners, last of which so far is Lynn McClory. A house demolished and trends bucked and a tree-house-scaled sleek structure raised by Christine McNair.
P.S. Here’s an overview of the origins of the project that’s part of a viral book promo for Sachiko’s upcoming Talon book, Rebuild.

Jacket2 has an article on Gertrude Stein and the Making of Tender Buttons

“I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible,” she confesses. “Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.”[10] The referent inevitably guides, misguides, disappears, and reappears — the carafe is never fully present or absent. Every sentence is both doing and undoing, attaching and detaching. Each sentence sensitizes, but sense quickly recedes as the next sentence comes in.

This notion of writing away from sense is tricky. Say something that seems true and say its opposite and it also may seem true as Dave Bonta said. Once you are on an active dynamic, it doesn’t matter so much where in the spectrum you are. Blind men debating the elephant’s bits.
JSAbsher recently brought forward what Czeslaw Milosz said: “[I]n poetry … straining comes to nothing, for we receive the gift whether we are deserving of it or not.”
I don’t know. Luck is working at things with discipline, being open to learning and keeping alert. Refinement doesn’t spontaneously erupt. That’s magical thinking. We can lean our intention and get nothing and then be pushed when we aren’t leaning but we have to be in a state of mind to recognize the bump as salient to notice it.
What Susan Sontang said about an image being invisible, insignificant without the priming of ideology to interpret and put weight behind the image. If your point of view diverges too much from that the reader, the reader can’t arrive at the conclusion. It needs more back story, more context that is larger than a photo, than a story, than a poem. It needs to terraform and build in all the pointing signals to make the point seen but when the audience has a different bias, it can’t convince in itself. It would need to be part of an aggregate. A single voice is context only longitudinally in close, rich contact.
Text or image is missing the majority of the markers that is the bulk of the meaning. If we infill text with a comparable culture and expectations, we become the majority of the text or image that, with its minimalism, says just enough.