How to be prepared: a guiding hand from Amanda Earl. Lots of valuable advice on what and why. Dos and Please Don’ts. It’s all about smoothness and clarity and avoiding the easiest mistakes so we can get to the real stuff — the ideas and words.

Robert Kroetsch on the future of the book at the WInnipeg Review says change is good. The writer should make a mess of traditions.

5) WR: In what ways will paper books change in the next few years because of ebooks?
RK: The dead tree technologies will no doubt change as we struggle to save forests (and life). For the time being paper is still a bargain. The rising cost of animal skins altered the production of medieval hand-copied books. But the shape of the page pretty much survived. What now?

I’m starting a new project. I’m pretty keen on it. I talked with Tom who started the Guatemala Stove Project (GSP) and he’s behind it. The idea is that collectively a few bucks at a time the poetry community can use poetry to pay for Mayan masons to buy a stove for one family. If we go into a second print, a second stove.
The poems are good poetry for a good cause.

Phafours is seeking poems on: The Value of Air.
Each poet in the chapbook will get a contributor copy with the option to buy more. The print run is 60 copies.
All proceeds from the chapbook will go from community of poets to the Guatemala Stove Project.
The print run will buy a $200 stove for a Mayan family to cook and breathe clean air.
Deadline: August 31, 2011

Cover art proposals welcome but that’s for an October-stage.
What the GSP does is send a certificate with a photo of the family around the stove so you can see the faces you helped. People who buy a chapbook can opt in to for me to send them a notice when the stove is purchased. I’ll put the picture online somewhere.
More details.

Egad, it’s wonderful and a wonder what’s online. And where it may lead — A 1940s thesis for Harry Hugh Cook’s MA. And another English thesis from the 70s on Souster by Karen Margaret Wood. I haven’t read all of either but a from few dozen pages in I want to process what I’ve gathered thus far.
Cook said that if poetry sales relied on living an interesting life, Souster would be in trouble. Seems a tad harsh. At the time he said that Souster was only in his 20s and would go on to write for several decades. Wood characterized his people’s poetry as being emotionally-laden vignettes, and often dark stories. Either of those make him sound dreadfully dull.
In theses time capsule they consider prolific poet Raymond Souster. Souster will be the symposium focus at Purdyfest this year, July 29th, Marmora Public Library.
He’s still alive, in his 90s. He’s won the Governor General’s Award and Order of Canada. His name rings a distant bell. He was an Ottawa writer with Oberon Press starting some decades before I moved to Ottawa. I’ve probably browsed his books at the Ottawa U library. Oberon has been going since the 60s. In New Wave in Publishing the founder said he started a new publishing house because the nature of our nation was changing, from “a new sense of the differences involved in being Canadian. The centennial was the occasion.” and Macklam later adds, “Nationalist motives were of cardinal importance […] This is partly a matter of marketability, partly a matter of conviction.”
What is it to shape a nation thru poetry? What does it mean to shape or change? What is one changing from and why is that a catalyst?
Both Cook and Wood looked at Souster’s thought-lineage and what was going on in the national scene then.
Wood (p. 21) observes that people perceive that Souster wrote artlessly [haphazardly seems an easy place to find consensus; even Souster himself called himself emotional and sloppy], but she concludes that Souster made stylistic, political choices to not sidestep affectation and the refined form of the Victorian age he was born into, to deliberately resist the polish within his reach.
He was against the more prevailing attitude of let people who want to make political poems enter politics and leave the poetry alone. Poetry and class could be fused and couldn’t be shaken apart. His poems seemed to feature an uncommon number of streetworkers that he had no particular sympathy for. His poems worked against the idea of poetry as polished commodity, to keep it gritty, level with the average Joe. He wrote a poem about being told what he does isn’t poetry, Riding the Thundering Horse. Wood believes he edited to keep it towards raw and blunt, avoiding the sheltered and cooked and he ridiculed those who wanted art but unlike what his critics said, he did edit.
I gather people feel he isn’t talked about and is underappreciated. Earlier this year Derek Walcott suggested Souster was one of catalysts to allow Canadian poetry to get to the post-modern by going thru “unpoetic” workaday observation as a stage. His influence seems unremarkable because we take his ground-breaking premises for granted. They are normalized and internalized and so invisible. And set foundations for Babstock and Starnino.
The funny thing about this discussion is that except for the MA by Wood, every player is male. Every person leading to or away from Souster. Anyhew.
Souster joined Dudek’s side. Cook talks about the competing poetry mimeographed magazines of the 40s,

Whereas the Preview poets chose the British for their mentors, First Statement poets looked to the Americans, to Whitman, Crane, Frost, Fearing, and Sandburg. They wrote poetry from their own experience, shunning metaphor and symbol for the sake of forth-right statement.
[…] First Statement objected to Preview‘s assertions that poetry should be the handmaiden of
politics. Louis Dudek wrote [that] Preview, had the following faults;
(1) a clever aptitude for exploiting the unreal universe of language;
(2) a pedantic absorption in the second-hand universe of books, literature and erudition; and
(3) a falsified devotion to a special universe of ideas, chiefly sociological and-political ones.
By way of correctives, First Statement can suggest three slogans for the poet’s masthead. No poly- glot displays. No poetry about poets and poetry.

Ooh, I’m feeling nailed on the frame of “polyglot displays”. Several of my poems in Thirsts use Chinese, French, Arabic, Hungarian, Latin or Spanish. Is it being posh? Or would it be denial of what is immediately around to exclude that which I don’t happen to have as mother tongue? Multilingual texts and conversations are more the norm now than perhaps they would have been in the 40s? Or would Montreal in the 1940s have more first generation Canadians and more of a swirl of multicultural stew?
I use the second-hand universe of books begetting books. Books are just a dead lop from a person. (As in a piece, not as in a dead bunny — so sad.) Are epigraphs giving credit where due or self-justifying defence, or coattail-riding?
If one writes books and they are never referenced, then why would one write books? It would be a terminator seed.
I like that these notions would be questioned instead of just done and instead of just sniped at.
How fascinating that people should actually debate such things instead of retreating to mutual solitudes of whatever turns your crank (with the belief that only one crank and one way to crank it or else getting cranky) with the occasional flame war breaking out among trolls.
What’s worth writing about? Only things past your noses, or about your nose, or outba ryou esno?
What poetry is can be understood by what people are taking in, passing along vs. passing on mentioning. How do we choose our forms and subjects and stances? What makes them click or fail to click?
It’s a pleasure to explore just one route in detail. A day for lyric. A day for sound poetry. A day for haiku. A day for spoken word. Each has strengths and weaknesses. To catch sight of their outsides without understanding their mechanics, their [word come back to me] essential character needs attentiveness.
My bias is that getting into someone else’s shoes, not just touristing in their poetry can offer more development as a writer or person. If there is no awareness of what others do and cross-pollinating, curiosity, respect and interesting, then everyone is comfortable speaking to their own little crowd of converted. And just by chance meetings could one dissatisfied person encounter the other solitude, leap over to it, never to be heard from again from the old group.
If we find people who we can hear and who can hear us easily, it’s a joy and a relief that we are able to understand something and by understood by someone but it can’t be a place to hide. (That would make it a closed loop.) If you read only what you already like..you can only be mentored for a while. It becomes solipsism and gets pretty boring after a while.
Cook related:

John Sutherland attacks a Preview writer’s strong socialist stand in the following manner, “This man uses words in the way one uses fists to clip people on the jaw. He is a socialist aching for a revolution, and he has found the perfect art.”

What an interesting idea. From the safety of words being bold and combative while talking about equality, peace, etc. To be bold and reckless with words while talking peace would suggest that the speaker really believes the words are impotent, doesn’t it?
It’s a worldview that informs what makes someone think something worth the breath to express. Is it the same that makes someone believe it worth time to listen?
Wood in her thesis related the words of young critic A.J.M. Smith, Dec 15, 1926 in McGill Fortnightly Review:

Poetry today must be the result of the impingement of modern conditions on the personality and the temperament of the poet. Some have been awakened to a burning enthusiasm by the spectacle of a new era; others are deeply disturbed by the civilization of a machine-made age. Some have heard music in the factory whistle; others have turned aside into solitude that they might better harken to the still small voice.

Nearly a century ago. Same sort of question and responses.
Yet Wood was saying this is the context to understand Souster. He was reacting simply in simplicity against the overbuilt structures of Victorianism.
Would this academic bent, the extension of dadaism and refusal to mean or play the games of vignettes in prosaic grammar and social orderliness be a natural response to our ubiquitous poetry which tells a lyric mood without momentum, that relies on Self-Expression, that reacts with closure against tmi of decades of overt confession?
All kinds of poetry go on in all decades but. All kinds of poetry and political bents come from all kinds of geographies. First Statement and Preview with their conflicting aesthetics (or depending on how you look at, complementary niches) were both from Montreal.
How does it all fit together and move? Are any of these labels genuine groups or alliances or patterns or just individuals and categories of convenience?
New York style of writing percolated into Montreal and cross-pollinated. Toronto’s New School of Writing is getting traction for a more poets about poetries and polyglot and inclusion.
People have embraced writing stories of their own lives. Every adult basic education and primary school class takes it as their due that they can write poetry and they should write about themselves. People’s poetry for decades has been positioned where rich people writing airily in forms used to be.
Is it then natural to assume this is a cause of making a poetry for poets, an in-group niche poetry so that the purpose is not to Take Back Poetry for the People. It is to distance oneself from The People’s poetry.
If so, this would mean churning out as many people as possible thru MA programs, PhDs, lecture series, forums, retreats, etc, would be a way to make Non-People’s Poetry economically viable since they rely on an educated audience to make sense of their points of reference.
If this is true, we are riding in a movement to build walls, territories, specialities to rebel against the status quo as it now stands with plain language, a reliance on internal consistency of register and metaphor and a sensible storytelling verse that may dabble in a coy way with the leap but never get both feet off the ground.
If there is to be academic poetry of social criticism that would be easiest if there were an opposite pole doing the opposite.
If all the people’s poetry can be swept with apathy against The Way Things Are and write upbeat verses of denial, that would be a way to in aggregate unconsciously create distinctions.
Are aesthetics as complex as we think or is poetics just amoeba reacting to light and dark, hot and cold? If we’re too chill(ed), we move toward emotional heat and chaos, too overexerted/overcome we move towards cold rationality and order and stillness, trying to self-regulate towards moderate, and overshooting.

Stacey May Fowles in the Afterword at the National Post observed last week,

During spring’s endless industry parties and launches I watch male writers navigate rooms with a fearlessness and comfort their female peers do not. It’s actually beautiful to behold; their whisky-drenched casual discourse, their freedom from consequence, their suit jackets, scarves and virile come-ons.
Everything about them — their demeanor, their conversation, the ease which they take up space — suggests they deserve to be both there and on the page.
The female writers I speak to are afraid to pitch to magazines or publishers, afraid to submit their finished work, afraid to promote themselves, afraid to get in the face of someone who might hand them an opportunity. Male writers seem to start in a place of entitlement, while female writers take decades of fighting and proving to earn it.
One female writer I encountered said that she didn’t go looking for attention for a recent piece because she believed that to be selfish, an odd statement in an industry that now relies heavily on an author’s ability to sell both themselves and their work.

How branded into our brains are these laws?
Of course it’s a subset of males who belligerently bravado their way thru a room on a carpet of entitlement that they roll before them, and it’s a subset of women who are embarrassing mouses who have to be continually coaxed that its ok to speak at a whisper. There’s a lot of grey areas and rainbow areas. Different age demographics and personalities overshadow unconscious gender playing but her observations match mine.
That its not true across the board, for every individual and situation doesn’t mean in aggregate it doesn’t ring true.
Gender drives me crazy.
I’ve been doing head counts on busses of who appear to be het couples. The male tells the female where to sit on the bus with a gesture, a nod, a tug. She consents but he chooses. In one case I saw the female protest and lead them to a different seat. Woohoo. He followed but then remarks were made by his male friends and he tugged her out of her seat and they went where his seat choice was. Maybe I’ve not enough random data for patterns to cancel out. Maybe I’ve got confirmation bias going but I’ll keep recording the numbers and see what evolves out of them.
Females are more likely to sit with their belongings piled on them in a bus, knees together, arms tight at sides as if signalling they are taking up as little space as possible, not being selfish thus petitioning to be allowed to stay.
When was the last time I saw a female with legs and arms sprawled over 2 or 3 spaces? When a females takes more seats, it’s likely to be not with her body but her stuff as a privacy wall. It’s not uncommon for each bus to have one or a few males behaving in this body-sprawling way. Or two males sitting in a bench, knees wide so they take up 4 seats between them. Again not all males, but no female using that right to take up space.
Males and females walk down the sidewalk and females are presumed if there’s a narrowing of sidewalk to be the one to step aside. When I don’t my shoulder gets bumped because I’m either invisible or disobeying the unconscious pecking order. Part of that is eye-contact. With a gaze rather than ducked head I signal that I’ll be taking the right of way, rather than signalling deference and be expected to get out of the way. I can hear people say that’s a human communication not a gendered thing but how often is the direction of communication folding into gender patterns?
Maybe writers are more self-aware than average? Maybe some of doing better or worse in this conundrum we’ve built collectively, like Stacey May Fowles considered in The Unbalancing Act in the Walrus.
There isn’t individual choice for individual reason. We have each internalized sets of behaviours and values for them and they go thru us faster than we can process and block and redirect. At least at the start. I came out of the 1800s at birth from a strict religious background where gender divides were more marked and marked forms were more heavily policed. I recall the loggerhead of only be allowed to go to church if I dressed like a proper girl, which would involve short sleeves and showing my legs in a skirt. I wanted to go to worship but felt in danger to expose skin that would not categorize me as a good gendered girl but as meat causing temptation and her own blame. Even at church. The cobbled step of women’s shoes and the constraints of how you can move in a skirt reinforced to me the nature of woman as in shackles. Whenever a bra strap shows I hear mom’s voice call it — whore. That internalization needs to flip on its head for my own sanity. I need to counter with a call of bullshit.
Gender is a pattern but also an excuse. I’ve been slammed against a wall by a male friend by the neck for the audacity of just the way I am, in dress and demeanour, or more accurately at a lower level because he was a bully and thought I would be easy to intimidate but the label he put on it was my gender inappropriacy of wearing pants, of sitting on the corner of a desk, taking male postures. He saw it as his duty to police me for my own good. It wasn’t gender. The excuse could have been anything except the excuse so often is laid at the line of woman and man.
Nonetheless the same pattern of attitude primes flight-fight response, makes on more reactive which reinforces patterns that would be opposed. We putter along not considering what isn’t called out as being broken.
In 1910, Camille Lessard-Bissonnette, a columnist for Le Messager of Maine in speaking for suffrage said

You say, sirs, that it is the woman who lights up your home. You compare her to a ray of sunshine. You exclaim that women must not be dragged into the mud of politics. But sirs, when a ray of sunshine falls on the mud does it dirty itself, or does it dry up and purify the mud?

To sully males as mud and characterize females as light doesn’t forward matters but it being a rebuttal in his terms, it does the job.
When females are born believing they can speak, they just choose not to. Rates of women heading companies, heading political parties show this gap. A women in business organization is distressing: fair for spas, beauticians, flower, chocolate, daycare, y’know the things womenfolk like.
We’ve lost the dross of religious props of female as servant and helpmate and yet rates are off. I can’t abide the explanation of intrinsic equal but different gender by chromosomes. Women can become doctors, they just choose to become nurses. They can become politicians, they just choose for their own reasons to be civil servants or office temps. I was born believing I was relegated to permanent childhood, to be seen not heard thus I feel more of a seed to be heard.
When people are waffling about doing an open mic, it’s often that a male will say no or yes, and keep the no or yes and that no be shrugged as final. He may change his mind but the exchange to encourage him is shorter if it happens.
When a female says no it is more tentative phrased, asking for support, often accompanied by a shrinking back, face covering, coyness or turning shoulders away or curling the back. It is constant if the female is a teen or retired.
When her no is often not abrupt or clear, it is usually respected and people back off. More often it becomes a protracted game of various people encouraging to get her to speak. And she may defer a few sessions and only read, egged on weeks or months later. Why does this happen at all?
Why do publishers more often chase females to hand over manuscripts whereas males cold call and keep sending unfitting poems? Sitting as a reader for Bywords I remember noting the gender skew of males who just keep hammering away sending in poems and the relatively fewer females.
Of course other females of their own volition just say yes, get up, do their bit and sit down again without any of this silly nonsense. But I’ve never seen a male being coaxed. Asked, yes, with tone that expects a brief answer. It is as if we still treats males and females like babies in pink booties or blue booties and impose all this role playing game.
Do we presume the boys in our society to be on their own, self-regulating, self-perpetuating while it takes a whole community to raise a girl?
At the end of the day, writers who are female become accomplished anyway, become published despite self-cancelling attempts. And males become accomplished anyway and become published anyway. Rallies, legislation and essays aren’t the scale of change. (Although stopping funding cuts to women’s group would help.) The construction is made individual by individual, moment by moment and so has to shift in the same way it came if results are to last.