fillingstation said something about there being a need for courses on creative reading to complement this explosion of courses for creative writing.
What is reading? It can be blinders. There’s a danger in reading what’s safe, what you already like. Frances Woolley called it Literary You-genics.
It’s a danger embedded in being courted by customized smart filters. Google suggests things along the line of what you already found. Amazon suggests similar books. Facebook for its potential to talk to anyone in the world, creates nodes of related people and similar aesthetics. The chance of being surrounded by dulling sycophants goes up.
It isn’t a purely online thing. Books themselves suggest books. People are chains of connections of who they know and where they know it from. It is connected up inside a system that supports itself and meshes together. How to step outside that one universe of knowing of that time, place, class, education, experiences, etc. How to map other nodes to navigate to to avoid the pitfalls of being surrounded by unquestioning agreement on givens?
We’re always contained in a bubble of what we already know. Are we trying to direct the bubble? How to get traction in a bubble? Break it and you’re in freefall before a nasty thump.
I’m reminded of being in an elevator where two people were chatting in English and a fourth person boarded. One of the English-speakers greeted the new person in French. There was a gasp. And the three began speaking in French. The initial two had always spoken English and neither knew the other was Francophone so presumed each other English. Their bubble just merged and floated larger with the addition of one randomly entered data point in the form of a person. A simple exchange of word and linguistic worlds shifted. They all became French-speakers to one another instead of English-speakers by identity.
How do we identify what or who we will want to know?
I remember a guest author speaking to our guild. She preambled about how we all enter a bookstore and go to the section we like and turn to the first line of the first page of a known author. Most people (mercifully to my sensibility) in the room shook their heads or looked baffled. I too tend to go to sections that aren’t my area (like music, knitting, economics, business, magazine on things I know nothing about like dirt bikes or something in a language I don’t read). To check out a new book I always open a random page. If a phrase mid-book is weak, that’s the point to look for the rot of the apple basket, not the stem. From the looks on the faces of the fellow writers, I wasn’t alone.
What is reading? It may be self-brain-washing, trying to convince or prop ideas. If we liked the same ideas the same way we’d all just spend our lives on one mantra, repeating that to ourselves and each other. We want some new information but want information we can accommodate with what we take as true, or relevant, or in some radical or rakish angle to one of these. It should threaten or comfort.
Reading is an act of trust. Reading is willingly or unwillingly following the thread of her or his thoughts. Reading may be a quiet rustle nearby or an outright wrestle with the ideas of the communication.
I’m haunted by the tension between “When two people entirely agree, one of the people is superfluous” and the need for symmetrical seeking of common ground as a basis for respect.
It can’t be resistance and novelty and growth all the time. Just as the mind needs rest and the body needs healing time, the perceptions need times where they map to another’s perceptions, unchallenged. Accord and record matching.
When one comes to a writer who thinks compatibly for our understanding, who one has met the words of before, one may want to settle in like a child before a bedtime story, assured that one doesn’t have to waste neurons deciding if one will like it or not, resist it or not. One level of filter is passed.
Perhaps the writer, like a musician switching from pop to easy listening or classical, won’t provide the same product, the same experience. Maybe the writer has changed in life experience and/or aesthetic and can’t produce a comparable sort of brain fodder.
Still one can sample new writing by a stranger or new writing by someone familiar and quickly decide if there’s resonance/comprehension mixed with curiosity enough to proceed. The piece of writing shares enough of a pattern with the reader’s mind so that there isn’t over-explaining and being pedantic to what is know, isn’t necessitating too large of leaps so that its discouraging or undoable, isn’t offending too much to bear, isn’t too delicate to tolerate, and is offering something with the right sweet ratio of new enough and familiar enough to satisfy.
With one writer I may cozy up to the page because I like the cadence, enjoy the type of story, or like the proportion of unsettledness and the freedom from a need for story and Meaning. But then, in both cases, the writing is about the experience of the reader, and the relationship to trust and desire, not about the story itself.
In part the ability to read is the ability to listen, suspending judgement while keeping alert and critically observing without criticizing so that you can’t hear. It may be a whitewater rush on the sounds, being swept. (I’m personally poor at whitewater and stream floating. I want to plan and paddle and analyze currents and decline some areas of river and, in short, control.)
To read you need to turn yourself down so that “how you feel” (interested, bored, whatever reactivity) doesn’t matter. The process is an act of paying attention to out there, not continuously expressing self thru forming opinions, self-monitoring, micro-managing your reactivities.
Can you hear others or only yourself with the volume on your own mic turned up higher than the mic from what is outside yourself? Does outside yourself and inside yourself need to reconcile and agree or reconcile and have positions towards each other?
To read in a community is a different act than to read for self-gratification. When we read for what will spark us, what will engage or resonate with us, it is a selfish act that we pretend is about Art on a large scale. When we read to communicate, receive communications, we see the writing as an extension of the person. If one is to care for the person, one is seeking the meaning of the writing to the writer, stepping into those shoes as a compassionate act. The dynamic of “quality” writing isn’t pertinent with the same weight. Instead of skill of art, it is in a context of difficulty or ease among all the skills of living. The writing is evaluated in its own terms, relative to its own progression rather than the reader’s.
How to read is not about the act, or about the subject read, or the subject doing the reading but the purpose of the reading. What is the goal? There isn’t one good way to read. Well, there is. Analyze the hell out of it. Do flow charts and graphs and paper models if possible. Retort it and making a flambé torte in its honour at the living room canonization ceremony. But one can hardly do that every day. 😉
What is reading? Communication. It looks like one way communication but it is two-way. It isn’t a passively absorbing but a critica-thinking perception of perceptions to the degree that is warranted and practical and useful for a purpose.
How to communicate? Communication is based on having enough overlap in worldview or word-view that you can understand enough to grasp something of what is coming across. It is extending a perception to share. It is extending oneself towards that perception, in first act, to see what it is before the observer effect kicks in.
Part of the weakness of interpreting a poem relatively is that with that model (where a poem’s Meaning Is In the Eye of the Beholder) what is discarded and disregarded is all the effort, skill, intent of the writer. It becomes an exercise in flattering the reader and flattening the writer, rather than understanding the act as two-way parity. Reading becomes an exercise in projection rather than perception.
In a text, maybe the speaker is convinced. Maybe not. Maybe the reader comes in as pre-converted choir, or the stoic endurer of the differences in opinion. To read one may come to speculate on the writers relationship to the text and not just create a relationship of reader to the text. It is a community matrix of relationships, even if it happens at skim-speed.
Maybe as a result of reading there is ash in the mouth, or maybe there are embers bitten between the teeth, sparking until all we readers are dragons who will strike fear into any sword-bearer.

Book in the mail. Mystery package still a mystery one layer down. But it’s a book so happy hour fits.

Ooh, it’s a chapbook. And with deckle edge. Nice hand feel. It’s Jess Mynes‘ How’s the Cows (Cannot Exist Press, 2011). Look forward into getting into this one.

Westfest Lit has a totally new feel this year. For one thing, the event is moving indoors — to one of Ottawa’s cooler restos, Juniper. Because of the quieter indoor venue, we’ve been able to mess with the format a little. This year’s reading will be framed as writers in dialogue, loosely based on the theme Outsiders & Outlaws.
Westfest Lit
Saturday, June 11, 3pm-4:30pm
Juniper, 245 Richmond Rd
Hosted by Lucy van Oldenbarneveld
Conversation #1: Outlaws
Gabriella Goliger & Patrizia Gentile
Goliger’s latest novel (Girl Unwrapped) is set in post-war Montreal, as the novel’s protagonist struggles to understand her surging lesbian sexuality, religion and society’s attitudes. Gentile’s latest book (The Canadian War on Queers), cowritten with Gary Kinsman, is a deeply researched look at the ways the government oppressed gays and lesbians across the country, with a focus on the civil service and the military.
Conversation #2: Outsiders
Jon Paul Fiorentino & rob mclennan
Fiorentino’s novel Stripmalling is about outsiders, the economically and socially marginalized, youth, and stark realities of making minimum wage in Winnipeg. Incorporating letters, found material and elements of the graphic novel, Fiorentino’s writing enacts the outsidership he writes about. The same can be said of rob mclennan’s two novels, White and Missing Persons. Whether tackling the disaffection of the middle class in a fictionalized 1970s Niagara Falls or a working class farming life, gaps in memory and belonging show that we are all, in a sense, outsiders in our own lives.
via rob mclennan

My Life, Lyn Hejinian (Green Integer, 1987, 2002 edition)
What a fascinating book. I’m past halfway thru and am comforted by its eventual end that I am quite happy to reread fragments, sections or whole unlike most works, it satisfies as much on rereads. It plays in language, observing among words and humourously. “The child gawks, the child is gawky.” She plays with sound without feeling like she’s doing scales. She plays with roots of language and roots around there and what she comes up with fits with the text.
I can fall into the text fairly readily. Perhaps because with so much direct plain and plaintive storytelling as poems, there’s an appetite for more complex patterns with a considered canvas. Vocabulary is simple but medium common words are used disproportionally. It creates a sort of nubby texture, a sort of structure to see vocabulary repeat like colors of horse, farmer, plump (often birds but with other pairings) flesh (often of a kind of fruit but sometimes other pairings, like book).
There are pings of insights and refrains of repeated and remixed phrases that crop up and a mass of details. It resists narrative and yet builds overall scenes, not in the sense of [that cursed word of] “evocative” but her idea “Only fragments are accurate”. p. 82

I was tired of ideas, or rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m not home. I liked doing that, had made room for dolls on trucks that way, looking in through windows. It was a pretence of keeping our distance from anything that appeared pretentious. A sorry-mess but well-framed. As if a contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of the handsome woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles more than a moth before resting. Let traffic pass. They were on vacation and therefore bored.

And so on. It is rich in details and discontinuous yet there are plausible hinges, tangental relationships between thoughts that are like a renga or ghazal. Chasing an idea feeeling like a walk, a figurative run, the body, the imaginary absence, the imagination of dolls looking in windows, figurative, glassed off distance…
It is like a sidewalk rummage sale where there is a jumble of odd things next the other and yet if you zoom up, there’s an order of lined tables and zoom further there’s a pattern of streets and pattern of city she has made.
There are runs when she stays more on a thought such as p. 65

I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality, and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.

That rings home as the paradox I was born in. Always this extending self past what I imagine self to be, or be interested or positively inclined towards to re-form self. It is a common enough mental stance I suppose, a habit of a writer positioning oneself as an outsider to whatever society, an estranged observer, rather than a part.
Letters to Unfinished J., Sheila E. Murphy, (Green Integer Series, 2003)
The book works something the same way, each sentence not following linearly, and set down formatted in prose. There isn’t the sense of sestina-like order to it as with Hejinian’s. It has the same principle of leaps and considered judgements about how things work laid bare and yet in a pleasing cadence. Both are a calm intellect at work more than the organ-grinder-heart pulping itself away and seeking to provoke in that common poetry and drama way.
Murphy’s text I’ve been reading on and off for probably 3 years. It is pleasure to come back to each time. It doesn’t seem deliberately opaque and yet doesn’t pant after sympathies. It isn’t ploy and coy reveals. It isn’t dumbed down. If the right word is latinate, we won’t find a working class word for the idea to dress it down to place “consistent” over precision. It isn’t avoiding giving an opinion as if didactic is a venal sin but at the same time doesn’t load language to skew with leaning words and mood abstractions. It doesn’t dabble in personification and other of the romantic gestures of poetic forms. p. 70-71

Latitude is scenic but we’re new at this. And latitude is part-way bronzed immediately following the post-war news. Is any kind of wood an armful. Any kind of meteor the one we know. Remediation is the thing that makes digestion difficult. New forms of snow distract from settled moments trying on percentages of repartee. Barometers used to be free when we were iffy with our lawns. Some day she’ll need me was the lore. And which of us will still be here.
44. Tomorrow I’ll use both halves of my round ticket to hell.

Both poets refrains from the question mark even when they structure questions but if the audience isn’t able to reply in text, it is rhetorical, distinct from conversational questions for information. Another poet might put italics to lead the reader by the nose Some ay she’ll need me was the lore. This grants the reader more credit for figuring such simple syntax out.
The sentences and sections don’t dovetail but there’s still the latitude to see links sketched lightly in pencil. There isn’t the same repetition keeping the words over a long span in tension. I can set it down and pick it up again more readily than Hejinian’s. Murphy’s I walk away from satisfied even at a short read. It is dense but not opaque. More dazzling in the sense of being oblique enjambments. It is fresh.
There’s a sense of poetry going somewhere instead of trying to proselytize itself and boil down a simple story from complex data.
The marvel of the sculpture is that sense of movement, lightness, elegance in a material that is solid, dense, unremarkable rough stone, the raw material of everything that lands in the crate. If you make a linear narrative, you sculpt marble and what you cut off is the same type of material and density as what you leave behind. The objective is this paradox of form against material.
But once that trick has been done often enough, as hard as it is to do, it doesn’t seem like a paradox anymore. It is like consuming the comedy channel as a diet until everything looks like standup or failure at being good stand-up comedy.
What more can words do? The elements can be tumbled. Sound is still used. Movement is still used. What can we leave out? Line breaks that cluster thoughts for the reader. The reader can infer what chunks together and use his or her own initiative to pause where need be. Punctuation variation. Same thing applies.
Do words need to have a string run thru the holes in the a and o and b etc, and be laced with the ring in the readers noses to keep them on track?
Does it have to add up to something only if stacked in a tidy column for addition or can the reader be the one to audit the book, see which receipts of living are useful to keep and which to glance at and pass over?

Carol Stephen was typing poems for the Poetry Factory. Arc Magazine had a typewriter set up at ArtsPark.

It was a colorful place to be. Arts Park is a community fair day, annual since 2004 with art and craft booths, music, food, and poetry.

It ran all day with about a dozen different poets taking a turn at the manual typewriter doing instant poems on donation from passersby. Guy Simser, Gillian Wallace, LM Rochefort, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Dayanti Karunaratne and others hopped into the typist seat.

JC Sulzenko wrote poems on the spot for these two paying customers.

One couple threw in $5 for a poem about them. People drop the details they like for an occasion poem or pull the random words out of the bowl and see what happens.

Amanda Rheaume was playing on stage. [Apparently we just missed Lucky Ron.]

World Slam Champ, and recent giver-of-Pre-Tree-Workshops, Ian Keteku performed some poems for stage, making amendments for the family crowd, switching his ‘shit’ for ‘shift’. John Akpata was up next but unfortunately my camera died.

This juggler [photo by Brian] was also a unicyclist and had a whole drove of children chasing after him like the Pied Piper.

A young man made poems in the magnetic poetry.

So did these young ladies. If they wanted they could transcribe to paper their creations, and enter a draw for a free magazine or subscription. Kate was on hand to happily dole out poetry post cards, magazines, information and cheer. Her own post on the event is here. And another at Local Tourist Ottawa.

Some adults stopped too, and this one even won an Arc.

Brian took a picture of me doing my first poem, which I commissioned him to commission me to write so I could learn how to use a manual. I can see how typewriters are conducive to concrete poems. My fingers went between the keys or went too fast and the letters on the wing-things got stuck. Hit too hard, or, too soft.

I got the hang of it tho.