I’ve joked about Ottawa having a book launch every 3 days but I’m not sure I’m far out. Even when we’re past National Poetry Month, even when it is not writers festival high season, it’s a rare day that Bywords doesn’t list at least 3 literary events. Some are workshops or intimate writers circles, some grand-scaled such as the A B Series with internationals at the National Arts Centre of Massa Sato, Bolot Bairyshev, Jaap Blonk and local sound troupe, Playback.
On the whole the town is lively for options. The Wig, Sneezers, Local Tourist Ottawa and Apt. 613 all promote arts scene and events. Lit Live looks at performance. We have such a richness of reading series that it could embarrass the Queen. Or whichever foreign national royalty is coming to town soon.

In the current issue of Magma, issue 49 there’s an article by Katharine Kilalea. Her book Ede’d Leigh, (Caracanet) was long listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30. She reflects on a symposium’s discussion on creative writing classes. Do they provide

‘an enriched environment’ for lab rats (like having more exercise wheels or more human contact, etc)[…] create an enriched environment for the imagination. At this point JM Coetzee […] said something to the effect of, “But I think we may be applying a very rational understanding to something which is fundamentally irrational.” Since then I have often returned to this thought. What constitutes an irrational conversation? How can things be spoken of on their own terms? And following from this, how would it be possible to have a more poetic conversation about poetry?

Part of what she considers is the awkwardness of wrokshops where we talk about the language and presentation “overhearing the content” while not addressing it. Talk about the how but not the what and why? Sometimes we are making delicate suggestions of line breaks, punctuation, energy, momentum, word choice while stoicly ignoring that the entire lot is rot of sentimentalism, or a convoluted syllabic monkey scream, or petty surface narrative complaints. We don’t feel we are in our rights to put anything on the table that digs too deep.
We need boundaries in such an intimate space as self-expression, especially when the people workshopping are newbie and are whispering secrets furtively that no one has ever suspected and is only the first 1% of finally opening a door. We can’t be too harsh with such frightful risk and heart ventured.
We crit the poem, not the poet, not the life, not the thinking, just facilitate it being said more fittingly to the subject. As she points out “no one wants to end up with a group therapy session. And so we are careful to heed the area at the heart of the poem which has been carefully demarcated as “Not open for discussion”.
Yet. Are we doing poetic conversation if we don’t examine the underlying, if we don’t inquire into assumptions, world views, question the point of view, the perceptiveness, guide what is perceived as self-evident and what needs to be more unpacked for an audience larger than the person who composed it? Ask into what do you hear yourself saying? Can you speculate on why this matters? To ask too big of question too early risks a hand of composition that tries to block itself and urge itself in a direction. The point is for awareness, to observe, not to necessarily change, but to understand what you have written.
Would doing that damage the “magic” of the poem? A poem is sturdier than that. The sounds are sections of one leaf of a huge ecosystem of tree within. Asking after the forms of illogic and logic doesn’t mean trying to force a poem into a hierarchy of sense, nor is it to shrug it off as unknowable.
Part of the discussion can be the why of sound choice, looking at the mechanism of how the story works, of how the poem works, of how the ideas evolved, picked up from what, going towards what. No agenda need be set as a result but the conversation can include a broader perspective of context. That, again, might venture towards oversharing and a personal conversation rather than one of craft but the lines cross at times. To edit, we need an impersonalness, a sense of changing this totem, not ourselves. We keep ourselves out of it, conversing at a distance of these specimens, these scat, picking apart hairs and exoskeletons, seeing if some pattern of habit and habitat can be discerned and learned from.

Cathy hosting Dusty Owl.
The 15th Anniversary of Dusty Owl will be May 22 at the Elmdale Tavern, 2 pm. featuring performers from the past 15 years of perfomance history.
Admission is free. Donations of funds or food will be lovingly accepted by the Ottawa Food Bank.
Time flies when you’re having fun.
Way back in the 90’s we started this little poetry reading series at Café Wim. On Sunday, May 22nd, The Dusty Owl Reading Series will be celebrating its 15th anniversary. It’s a little thing we’re calling our Family Reunion.
We’ll be featuring many of the people who have graced our various stages over the years. Poets, slam artists, and musicians… oh my!
readings by:
Monty Reid, poet
Jessica Ruano, spoken word poet
rob mclennan, writer
Mary Lee Bragg, novelist
Kate Hunt, writer
Gary Dimmock, investigative reporter
Rob Friday, poet
Jim Larwill, poet
Sandra Ridley, poet
Greg ‘Ritalin’ Frankson, spoken word poet
Christine McNair, poet
Phil Jenkins, historian
Copper Conundrum (Kevin, Mathews, Rusty Prisk, Danielle Gregoire),
spoken word troup
+ music by Phil Jenkins
If you’re one of the people to have been featured at The Owl over the years – please, please, please get in touch with us. We want to dish on what you’ve been up to and hear some of your latest work.
More info.

Shane Rhodes read from Err. His drinking poems are always popular among drinkers. His book has 3 sections, each quite distinct in feel. One plunders stories of HIV from an online patient Q&A discussion board. One gives a nod to constraint-based, controlling for combinations of letters, not surprisingly evoking memories of Eunoia.

Cameron Anstee did a tribute set to Artie Gold, a poet with large gaps in his writing that got published. Hundreds of pages of uncollected poems might be floating around among his friends, and among his papers. cityflowers (1974, Delta Can), even yr photograph looks afraid of me (1975, Talonbooks), some of the cat poems (1978, CrossCountry Press). Talon put out a collected books of Artie Gold post-humously which included a poem of his mourning of an impossible passing that Cameron dedicated to Artie and John. get up. do it all again.
[picture from July 2010 Dusty Owl]
Rod performed Death Shall Have No Dominion.
On Sunday afternoon, for those of you who don’t know, John was to perform at Dusty Owl and release his CD. On Sunday morning, John died of cancer.
A Memorial Celebration of Words and Music will be organized and held, probably sometime this September in the Gatineau-Ottawa area. The celebration will include readings in English, French and Spanish as well as songs and music.
Some pictures of him are here, a video of him playing classical guitar here, a tribute to him here, a tribute to his writing, a poem by John, an interview excerpt text and an audio interview of Sept 2010 on Lit Landscapes…

Jeramy Dodds and David O’Meara in break time. Dodds was guest reader and in conversation with Shane Rhodes in the poet-poet discussion session.
Unfortunately I was too beat to hang on longer. His discussion at the writers festival in 2009 was fascinating, talking of his meticulous process for composition. I hear this talk was equally interesting.
The next Pre-Tree session will be 6:45 pm as usual. Brenda Leifso is the next Pre-Tree workshop facilitator on May 24th and for the two sessions following that.
The homework, which is optional, is to do a “concepted” sonnet in the form of ABBA ABBA CDCD EE except using “thought rhymes” rather than ear-rhymes, such as George Murray did in The Rush to Here. For example, if line A ends with the word dark, the next line A would use a closely associated word like black or night, or the opposite, such as light or pale. If B ends in mother then the other B-lines would be parent or caregiver, or child.

For a decade the haiku group of the Ottawa area has been doing their spring meeting at the Japanese Embassy. This one was distinct in that it has been chaired by TA Carter for those years and this meeting the chair was passed to Claudia Coutu Radmore of Bondi Studios.

Dorothy Howard talked about book making and haiku publications she has done, including everything between this chapbook made from the lid of a take-out container and her seminal Haïku: Anthologie canadienne/Canadian Anthology edited with André Duhaime.
Guest Angèle Lux presented some of her French and English haiku and took questions on composing bilingually.

Luminita Suse presented some of her tanka. She does some striking, spectacular poems, in tanka and in free verse in a few series. I look forward to the next ones whichever form they are in. Most recently she’s been published in: Moonbathing: A Journal of Women’s Tanka [No.2/2010, No.3/2011], Magnapoets Magazine [No.7/ 2011], Ribbons – Tanka Café [Vol. 6/No. 4/2010, Vol. 7/No. 1/2011], Gusts [No.12/2010, No.13/2011], Red Lights [Vol.7/No.1/2011] and Atlas Poetica [No.7/2010, No.9/2010].

Gillian Foss, who recently launched Fleeting Moments is reading KaDo’s spring broadsheet at the Japanese embassy.
Mike Montreuil put out the broadsheet of members. He is starting his own small press for Francophone poets. Watch for news about that.

Claudia Coutu Radmore, Sandra Stephenson and Grant Savage did a spring renga and shared it with KaDo Ottawa. What a beautiful set of harmonies and chimes of images.
More pics at the KaDo set.