On March 11th at the poetry fest Marcus McCann gave a talk on what our relationship is to other people’s work. How do we relate our words to the ideas of permission, attribution? Plenty of interesting questions were raised including those around what copyright is supposed to do? By it, are we asking corporations to regulate art? He quoted The Frontier Foundation‘s byline which is: because not everyone has the same idea of copyright as Disney. How much is sharing and how much is stealing? Is the social contract being renegotiated? A bottom line in the debate on proprietary protection of language versus exchange of ideas and collaborative culture comes down to this according to McCann: Ideas can be widely available or tightly controlled but not both.
What is our practice or a reasonable practice for attributing source? How far do we go? Just say who, or also when and where so others can find the original context? Do we keep the original intent of what we quote or subvert it? Do we tell the person we are quoting or seek permission from whoever has copyright? What if they say no? When there’s a disclaimer in a book of ‘permission or attribution where possible’, what does that mean? We went thru all possible media and channels to reach a person, or called up to ask over tea to use their words, but they were out so, shrug? Or our clairvoyant tried to make the connection but failed?
If we quote someone, do we just attribute who said it as in an epigraph or in a news story quotation? Do we need or want to footnote academically? I recall this debate going up around Michael Lista’s Bloom. How much is sufficient?
We can quote in many forms
A Glossa is a form of using pre-written text as an homage. We take a piece of writing and write our own words to infill and work towards the spaces we put between the source text’s lines. The source author is attributed.
Plunderverse is where we use only one original material in the original order but erase some to make a new thing that works with or against or adds to the source content. The text mentions what and who was plundered.
Cento uses lines from many sources (no more than one line per author) cobbled together to make a new word quilt with its own character. (He said it is conventionally 20 lines long.) Usually the result has attribution in the notes.
A Found Poem is another case where no new words are added but the framing is changed, perhaps relineating from prose to poem-lines and the poet acts as a sort of curator of ideas more than creator.
Flarf where the content is generated by digital cut-ups, the process of plugging in a search string and collating the (pre-written) results as they come without an eye for creating a narrative. There’s no attribution of source material or and no permission of authors and no problem. Language is the material. It is like scrapbooking. Again one is more in a curatorial role but with no new material added and attaching your name as author of the context.
Literary Allusion is where one is openly stealing ideas from other writers except hoping to get caught because the recognition of a shared cultural talking point is part of the point. It is part of the economy of the form that it resonates with memory of other literary works.
When we do other forms of expression, do we attribute? Does an architect mention in the cornerstone, inspirational buildings or architects or where the cornice was ripped off from? When we quote a politician in the media, do we seek permission of the office for quoting and let them know it was done? When we blog we build in pings and plugins that notify and can set up google notification to increase the dialogue.
If we are giving nods to our predecessors or peers, should cash change hands? Wouldn’t that set literature apart from other arts and sciences? If we cite a scientific study and build on it, does divvying research grant get involved?
How do we compensate and get compensated if our commodity of a book is rolled into someone else’s commodity of a book? Or If we photocopy and teach another’s literature, should that writer get a cut? What is the role of sharing, of libraries, of fair use in reviews? Or remixing? What limits should Access Copyright have? When is it assisting and when is it a barrier to culturally cooperating to make new works?
On one hand, one wants to enter culture and yet also table needs bread. Do you know where the line: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; /Weep, and you weep alone” comes from? Is it better to attribute or when something is in collective conscious, we can stop sourcing? It was poetry from Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919), an American author and poet. Her best-known work was Poems of Passion (which is a free download on Kindle). Her most enduring work was in her collected works, “Solitude”, published 1883 for which she was paid $5. it contains the lines above. Who knew that the words had a source? (Crowd wisdom of wikipedia for one collective did.)
In the Q&A there was the question of how much change need happen before it is a new cannabalized work? Just swap in synonyms and openly say what the source was and frame it ironically or post-modly? I did such myself here.

Brenda Leifso read poems from her new manuscript Arsenic Hour, named after that metabolic dip in the afternoon that makes you want to either scream and quit or pour a gin and light a cigarette and let lips get loose. Some of the poems revolve around the profoundness of family. Her last book was Daughters of Men (Brick Books, 2008). Her poems include the fierce scene of motherhood loving the joy of a child’s affection and pivoting to protection as her child is under threat. A powerfully done poem.
She formerly was head editor with PRISM international. Her essay will soon be up at Women Doing Literary Things, a blog that does weekly column profiling women writers. A neat and needed resource.

rob mclennan and two of the other readers of the night: Aurian Haller and Teresa Yang.
Teresa’s back after giving a reading at the end of last year. She too has some tightly worked phrases and lyricalness. Hopefully they’ll be collected into a chapbook soon.
There was a travel poem about a bird. Saying that in itself conveys nothing I suppose, but it is all in the telling with the means she showed. Unfortunately my handscribles are nearly illegible. In her poem responding to the story of Odysseus were the lines,

[…] and you
were no longer young. Aged as you were
ladies still placed their hands on your chest
certain loneliness could be filled.

Aurian Haller writes and performs with The Aurian Haller Band and works as an arts consultant and music teacher for the Anglophone school board in Quebec City. Here’s an interview of him in The Wig in which he talks about the alternative to write what you know — write what you’re curious about.
His book of poems song of the taxidermist (Goose Lane, 2011) caused a little scramble in the room as he was reading. rob had introduced him saying there was only one copy of his book brought out for the evening. As Haller read one person booted across the room to snatch the copy. Another audience member noticed the stack and grabbed a copy from there to get them before they all went. It seemed to be a healthy run of sales when he did close the reading. See if you’ll make a snap decision yourself. Here’s a sample excerpt from a poem of p. 31 entitled, “L’Habitante”

i.
Paint these walls. Wake up
elsewhere
in Peking orange.
Morning in the new room,
hand on the plaster, you are
transported. Spring is this decisive.
You worry out house
as if to convince walls
the roof can support itself.
They must think up something else to
stand for.
Curtains like old dresses
hemmed up (pink knees exposed);
the hat tree’s suspect foot; mint
sofa sulking in the hall
like an ex-husband
back for the blender, his mother’s china —

And it goes over for more than a page more with these pivots that are unexpected and yet fitting and following once you sit what’s around that bend. It’s as if his mind is enacting the river’s movement, as he says in an ekphrastic poem of a painting Untitled, 1982 (p. 26) “The way the river bends makes slow things / sudden”.

“You have 1,440 minutes a day. Use one of them to write,” says the banner at The One-Minute Writer. [via Ron]
The bonus side-effect is that, like meditation, is you can hang in for all the hours it takes for the first minute to pass, you’re off to the thought races.

The new issue of Chrysanthemum magazine is online. It’s multi-lingual, which is always nice to see so the world doesn’t feel so much like an anglo vacuum. Two of my favorites from the issue (is it inappropriate I only quote the English, having just said that?) are by Pia Lorentzen and Ellen Compton respectively.

The whitest of doves
flies over the battlefield
shitting on the war

I like how it takes the symbol and the real and juxtaposes. It takes expectation of peace and pure language and then adds the last line that twists it. Battlefield can collocate with noble but war has all the harsher associations and from formal language comes the word shitting that seems like a clapper of what is. Is Lorenzten calling the doves mere rockdoves, pigeons retroactively or do the birds become raised as the higher souls, the commentators on the fighting and people. Or is it just another grounded reality in the dirty war, that on the top of all the human rights abuse, you get bird poop landing on you too as an extra indignity.

January thaw
this rough language
a river speaks

We have the time of year clearly set and then the set up for ambiguity of clustering as each phrase reveals itself. The scene of cold and slush and discomfort and someone cussing, no, adjustment of scene as it expands to the river speaks the rough language. Is it the ice and rapids cursing or rough language as in, approximately a language, a creole of two seasons. It is full of sensory ideas.

Poetic Speed, OpenSecret and Brandon Wint came on stage for a few pieces.
One felt liturgical in a sense of cadence of Father I’m sorry of apologizing for atrocities from fgm to date rape and Montreal Massacre. They recited the names of all the women killed. Afterwards he said I’m sorry for that weight but it has to be said, which is a better transition than I’ve heard after heavy pieces, some self-conscious shrug, not knowing what else to do and seeming to dismiss what came before. Letting that silence sit and then softly shifting to something else was as respectful as the piece itself.

Some other pieces were duo or solo.

The audience was a wave of applause.

PruFrock also shared some ideas in a diversity of styles from rap to political spoken word. One particularly memorable one was this checkbox on forms where you check if you are a visible minority. How about a check box if you’re actually qualified for the position? That’d be handy.
He did a monologue of poetry including a beautiful one about how we think we lift ourselves up and then we look outside ourselves. We can’t fly like birds and compared to the scale of the cosmos we are tinier than tiny. It is humbling to see oneself against all that is.

John Akpata shared the same sort of range of force and delicacy of delivery including a love poem of joy. (I seem to be a sucker for love poems these days). Graeme came on stage with him for some pieces and accompanied on harmonica or guitar.
There was such a controlled modulation of energy, an awareness of what effect the poems are going for and tempering it. It was where poetry met theatre in the sense of performing a poem replicably instead of reciting a poem. Some poets read their word with a vast unfamiliarity with what they could have said here on the page, lost and mumbling. These poets could turn a phrase, turn an idea, examine the subtext of society and respond articulately, emotively or rationally or both and do it for entertainment of themselves and others. Pretty impressive skill sets.
Here’s an article on OpenSecret/ Ikenna Onyegbula who studies law, and on Tuesday will be leading the Pre-Tree workshop at the Arts Court, 6:45-7:45. Different member of their spoken word team, The Recipe, will be facilitating the poetry workshops over the upcoming few sessions.
You probably already saw Amanda’s highlights of the fest?