Mike Blouin in the crammed room opening the writers festival at the Barley Mow with his Wore Down Trust.
The book is a triple bill book of Johnny Cash, Alden Nolan and the author. Bluesmen and guitars and histories and their tangles. The working class poor men get their voices. Here’s a sample of one section from p. 74.

I have no regrets
I carry no guilt
bear no ill will
there are reductions in everything of course
But not everything dies. Not everything leaves.

See also Alastair Larwill’s write-up on the launch and if you want to see more, you literally can. The writers festival has a youtube channel and it’s here.
More poetry at the Fest includes Prairie Scene tonight, followed by spotlights on Coach House and Anansi.
Come Sunday it’s Messagio Galore followed by Lorna Crozier, Gillian Sze and myself at the Poetry Cabaret.

A new anthology, big bright amused, of poets responding to poems of other poets has been posted on the ditch, website.
The writers and the works responded to are:
Márton Koppány: Marcia Arietta, before the revelation
Jamie Bradley: Gary Barwin, Psalm 91
Caleb JW Brasset: Kane X. Faucher, Syncategoremata and: Jamie Bradley, Epithalamion
John M. Bennett: Daniel f. Bradley, T=I=D=Y LANGUAGE
Mary Kasimor: Nathalie Stephens, We divide into occurrences
Christine McNair: Amy Dennis, (Response to) Joyce Wieland’s Water Quilt, On the Listening Hill, Anatomies (circa 1930) and (We’re) Almost Touching
Sheila E. Murphy: Camille Martin, nomadic slant
Sean Moreland: rob mclennan, solids, or, strike-out (a suite)
Lily Robert-Foley: Nathalie Stephens, The Sorrow and the Fast of It;  … s’arrête? Je
rob mclennan: Natalie Simpson, similar fingers
Marilyn R. Rosenberg: Erín Moure, My own daughter, heart is what I grieve
Sandra Ridley: Christine McNair, the many waters and: Pearl Pirie, stepping from shackle of muscles to balcony black

This last installment in the Eco-Jest-Us week of poets concludes with erika.

We were lucky to get in this busy poet from Montreal for an Ottawa evening event.
erika n. white writes, edits, gardens and publishes on the island of montreal. She organizes poetry events, including Twigs & Leaves and Poets, a monthly reading series in the Griffintown Cultural Corridor. With R de Smit, she runs Broken Rules Press. Her work can be found in chapbooks, quarterlies, magazines and flower beds.
Here is one of the poems she shared at the event:

crowactive
a family that flies together
cries together
a family that mourns together
stays together
in a murder you’re never alone
teach the next generation
how to recognize the enemy
crows remember faces
raise the alarm
keep an eye on the other birds
harry hunters
steal eggs
stay near your brother
keep vigils for your dead

Part of Poets Against War, you can find two more poems of hers there including: wish: I wish Harper would scarper and unfair.

Vote for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere before April 29. The 19 candidates have a hyperlinked ballot ready to explore.

Sheila giving opening remarks at Eco-Jest-Us.
Some of the strength of the event is giving time to consider our place in the universe, rather than tromping on only aware of the human dramas.
Below is an excerpt of what Jennifer Vallance [pictured here] gave a dramatic reading from.
It comes from And Now Birds Sing, a play by Sheila Forsyth, a play put on by BearAmI:

Celebrate the species that procreate only by the full moon … moonfish, polychaete worms, horseshoe crabs.
Changeless since the Paleozoic moon, perhaps observed by the round eyes of some ancestor of ours … perhaps not.
[…] you and I had plenty of midnight forays. … Our special nights, ones with the choicest of high tides. And we’d be like the horseshoe crabs on a full moon … Advance onto the sand like a huge invading army in two waves.
[…] Males line up … like a legionary guard and wait until the females emerge from the deep water … and they mate, as they have done for millions of years
At this border of sea and land, untouched, unchanged since the days of the trilobites … they obliterate the barrier of time.
Is it us watching, or our ancestor a million years ago?