TA Carter will be reading from her A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press, 2010) (5 mins?) today on Rita Celli’s Ontario Today (CBC radio, 91.5 in Ottawa) around 12.30 EST.

How To Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper Collins, 2011) is a new book by Stanley Fish. Conrad snippeted from it:

[Sentences] promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world. That is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel. (7-8)

What images have surfaced from VERSeFest Ottawa 2011…
Charles Earl’s photos, great portraits and highlights of days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the ending event.
John Macdonald’s photos of, often backstage, VERSeFest
Nathaniel Westley‘s sharp images. Max Middle’s and my pictures so far uploaded.
And the video of feedback of attendees and performers

Two ladies extraordinaire from Voices of Venus, Nadine and Luna.

Christine McNair at at versefest, Ottawa, March 9th. It was good to see the spoken word poets, haikuist, rappers, and avante guards all mixing and in this case finger snapping.

After the Oneness showcase J. getting a signature from Ivy Lee Deavy at versefest, Ottawa, March 10, 2011

A DJ in background as Sergio calibrates the judges for the poetry slam March 11. He was also featured at the human rights poetry yesterday.

Loh El who won the $200 prize top spot March 11.
A lot of pictures not yet off camera or processed. And mental notes to write out I hope.
There’s such a huge amount of talent in this town and one day remaining for VerseFest.
[Cross-posted at Humanyms] [All my pics thus far here]

Interview between myself and Kevin Spenst: thoughts on the editing process.
Marcus McCann mentioned in his poetics talk at versefest last night, you can have dissemination of ideas or control over, not both.
And a quote ran across since that on creativity gets to the nub of pressing it forwards and moving on rather than a proprietary protection of poems for big payoff.

“The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale.
If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.” ~ Paul Arden – It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be (book)