Canada Arts Connect Magazine sports an article by Nathaniel G Moore Got Poetry-Month-Mania?

For an entire month (though somehow I feel like this happens every few weeks) poets are endlessly paraded out on half-known and well-known blogs and discussion panels, college and national radio shows and cattled to readings series like it was the end of the genre. What is the motivation? This hyperbolic blast of focus is a misguided attempt to create a frenzy for a business that is simply irreversibly marginalized.
[…] To compare poetry-going and movie-going public is a clear-cut confession that no one in this country truly has a clue how to promote our national literary sport.
Just take a gander on Twitter, Facebook and other forms of CanLit torture, and you see that the only ones truly enthused or critical (read: aware) of poetry month are those accused or suspected of being poets or poetry publishers.

Ah, countering points of view are so refreshing. The rah-rah poetry is a bit comical, even as I participate with a post a day on the subject.
Poetry is a tiny niche market, virtually a crack, with more supply smothering demand that tends to back away in dismay it breaks free of the mobbing crowd of choice.
Poetry is sold among poets. That could be argued with not much to counter with.
If poetry is sold only to poets, how do you expand a market? Make poets have more disposable income but more important than disposable income is trained desire. Marketing is social engineering that teaches the convertible-no-market that they want to obey and o-boy-oh-buy. Create a demand. Or make more poets, which the MFA programs are busily doing. It’s not an issue if only poets buy poetry is the ratio of production to consumption is balanced right.
Science research is swapped among science. Scientists are fine with that. Otherwise it would be a fellowship of inequals with quacks sending in their observations about why some statistically significant relationship between green jelly beans a health issue must be addressed. [yes, I am thinking xkcd].
If the bar is not high enough how does one walk around without being gonged in the head with the bar, or tripping over the standards bars littering the below-knees area?
Does poetry have the rigour of science? Maybe it’s just idle chatter written down with no objective or gain beyond keeping monkey mind busy. Maybe it should push out and do more with its potential.
Maybe poetry is a science itself of knowing what came before, observing more, theorizing and testing patterns and finding out what is disprovable.
Does poetry have any benefit like science?
Eventually people outside the closed loop of research may get a benefit. That science is working doesn’t prevent home labs or flat earthers from convincing people that one should only do mantras of Creation not examine. Science goes on.
So do poets eventually invent compressions of concepts and words that filter down to non-poets?
Is literature creating some advance the way science creating tetraethoxysilane mix yields silicone being overextended in first-blush marketing excitement, extruded speculatively into medical tubing, machine gaskets, waterproof fabrics, pot holders, sieves, spoons, elastic bands in funny shapes, silky-smooth feel in hair-care products and novelty toys? The end-user doesn’t care about the science or the process.
What have poets made as a concept lately that filtered down?
Paul Mackan in the Dead Poet talk at Tree talked about the legacy of W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) who gifted culture with “Make the punishment fit the crime” and “love makes the world go round”. It becomes an anonymous saying internalized and owned without source by society just like kitchen doodads don’t have a traceable origin.
Should poetry shape choices people make? Should it widen options in the mental toolbox of readers? And send out memes that ripple away and get picked up on by people who didn’t read it firsthand?
Going back to William Schwenk Gilbert, “I always voted at my party’s call,/ And I never thought of thinking of myself at all.” (from H.M.S. Pinafore) Any chance that awareness of silliness of obedience will go viral?
Can poetry act as a prod to say, pay attention to this or that or the other. Avert your eyes from that unspeakable. We mention such and such only in the most delicate or bashing fashions.
Is this distinct from other outcomes of thought? Is poetry able to do something different than casual conversation? Than an essay? Than a novel? Than oral story telling? Are all of these also science and if we were to draw comparisons, a novel is biology, oral story telling, archeology and an essay is a chemical lab?
Poetry might be any of these, some of it in the research lab, some of it archiving findings in strata, others just messy tomb raiders and other companion trades of poems as medical receptionist.
Poetry is a very big thing. As a concept at least. As a thing with an impact on social shapes of society, understandings and manipulations of our world that guide out attitude thus behaviour, potentially.

5 years in the making, Between Stations, a 40-page collection of train poems, is out from obvious epiphanies press of Japan!

every moment is a destination on the train. the head of a pin has toppled over, angels fallen off and the the comedies and gaps play out on the side of the slow diesel needle crossing the landscape.

I’ll have some in hand in a couple weeks…you can order direct or wait and get from me if you see me in person.

National Poetry Writing Month is a social version of the usual composing poems. At the NaPoWriMo site, they offer a prompt a day, a space to show results and featured poetry blog per day.
Yesterday’s prompt was from Kelli Russell Agadon’s “Write a poem of at least 40 lines that is a single sentence.” That’s from the Wompo Listserv’s 30 ideas.
Ideas galore everywhere. But it’s not the idea, but what you do with it, and it’s not the getting started, it’s the getting exercise and improving and the getting finished with something fully refined and realized.
I like to combine lists of prompts to make one poem from the constraint of 3 lists just to make it interesting. I’m not doing it daily this year tho because I’m in editing mode. If I were to, today would be:

Two for Tuesday: 1. Write a form poem. This could be a sonnet, pantoum, lune, or even something as sinister as a–dare I say it–sestina. 2. Write an anti-form poem.
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Kells’s: Take fairy tale and rewrite it from the viewpoint of another character. For example, use the wolf to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
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Ekphrastic: examine an old photo and write from it.

= a process of mash-up that would yield somewhere you wouldn’t normally go by a route you wouldn’t normally venture on, thus pushing out your zone and needing you to call on more skills than your usual.
It doesn’t matter how you feel about the poem or its potential or its difficulty or where it is going. Just do. The constraints are the censor, not you. It’s just words not accountable to your pride or identity. Ego can go play with its toes for a while.
It’s a tricky thing for poetry to not be made unnecessarily hard, to get the bumps off without making it a pre-ordained interpretation chute. Cate Marvin has a poem up a the Boston Review about the “Poetry Machine” where extrusions of poems come out an assembly line, everything glossy and glazed as a metaphor, a a 2012 model year car under the gaze of the poet.
I hear her frustration. In the “poetic”, what about what is omitted? Does our word poetry shut out too much content of life? Which types and sizes of feelings or thoughts need not apply?
Conversely are we being hard to get along with, making our poetry some kind of qualifying round of being permitted to get to know the poet? If poetry is a communicative act between the poet’s usual round table of me, myself and I, is the harangue of words getting anywhere or just exacerbating self? Is the poem which refuses easy subjects for poetry and usual shapes for forms just a different consensus circle where no ideas at conflict are permitted to speak?
Dawdling in the opaque or dawdling in the straight out are indistinguishable acts. Clarity thru opaque or thru blunt straight likewise are the same.
A poem can be a word long and prove deliberated thought. Or be muddy and half-formed. Either may be formatted into a sonnet or free verse or spoken word. It doesn’t matter what form something takes. It is the shape of movement behind the words or images that make it distinct, not the ostensible subject.
Which is stating the obvious I suppose.

I’m doing mock-ups, digital and physical of the layouts for a group chapbook.

Designing all the elements to flow to set each other off and up is the interesting part, more so than writing a poem these days. The interesting part is the less familiar parts of the trip.
Next finding somewhere cheap enough to print it in color. And finishing the graphic designs and the tweaks that take all the time. Probably another 15 or 20 hours over a couple blocks of days. Wonder if I can squeeze in that much this week?
The other chapbook I’m fiddling with ideas for I’m getting designed in my head. Who knows how many weeks to go? By writers’ festival? I don’t know. Both by the Ottawa Small Press Fair at least.

Here’s a photo set of 35 pics from Eco-Jest-Us. It was 6 hours of performances in all. I can’t relate it all. But a few notes from the evening show portion:

David Chernushenko gave an optimistic look at people Being the Change around us. His hundred-mile film will play at the Mayfair April 27th. It’s easy to burn out and despair when we look at the distance to go and the resistance of habit to go against in making better choices for healthy air, water, land and lives, but by living lightly, thinking of the small stuff, and doing so with offbeat humour, we might just get somewhere.

Organizer, playwrite Sheila Forsyth making opening remarks and a short fiction at Eco-Jest-Us

In the dramatic space, Claudia Coutu Radmore read one from her chapbook Ode to a Rubber Duck including cloud-woman-duck poem on the unity of all things. And some new poems. She launches her next chapbook April 16th. It’s from Apt. 9 Press. Accidentals from Claudia will be co-launched with Site Conditions from Monty Reid and The Delicious Fields from Jeremy Hanson-Finger.

erica n white read some poems made for previous peace events and brought some of her chapbooks including Twigs & Leaves Hang and Bark and Griffintown anthologies. It’s good to get some cross-city cross-pollination. Griffintown, the former southwestern downtown part of Montreal, Quebec, is part of the Cultural Corridor and have their own Nuit Blanche.

Nathanael Larochette played classical guitar. He finds himself composing in natural spaces, in a headspace of landscapes. He feels that often we are sold on the gloom of environmental prospects but its is healthy and essential to remember the beauty that is there are well. He did a poem that was an acrostic for beautiful, each letter of the word beautiful prompting a word and the acrostic repeating cascades of reflections on the beauty of the world.

Arianne Dimond and part of her band played Rivers of Babylon, a song of plastic bottles, and a song about the Aliens who are the brain of her boyfriend.

LM Rochefort did a few poems including one of my favorites of hers of the suburban mom opening the freezer and finding a hole in time space in there.

You missed Carol Stephen’s poem about considering the cost of Hwy 7’s lane extensions to cut down driving time to Ottawa from 40 minutes to 20 minutes. Alligator Swamp is more of a symbolic hammock of lowlands now.

Alastair Larwill gave high-burst energy poems.
And for those who made it to the book table, they might have picked up his chapbooks, hello 18 or Short Stories About Gods. (When did he start doing short stories? If you want to read a tale of a hamster from his perspective, check it out. Its tilt reminded me of Amanda Earl’s Welcome to Earth: poem for alien(s).)

Host Sterling Lynch thought on his feet and was able to keep joining and linking acts. I hosted the poetry segment. Pics behind stage here.)

The improv comedy troupe under Phil Genest plays Yuk Yuks every second week and in this case performed for this venue. (I missed most of their show and picture is by Brian.)

Actress Jennifer Vallance did a theatrical reading of text asking what will it take to make people wake up?

Mike Buckthought also brought forward the politics at the root of some of the environmental issues.

Guest speaker Beatrice Olivastri has been fighting the good fight for good choices for 30 years. For the first 20 she said consensus and round tables was the way to go but over the last 20, top-down changes in governing seems necessary. Part of the problem stands with our need for the local. Common issues don’t travel. News wants a local hook. News of Halifax or Victoria don’t make the news of Toronto of Regina.

The finale was Glenn Nuotio with some humourous pieces including a Yoko Ono cover and one dedicated to a certain politician’s wife wanting to be Ordinary People again.