Call for Eco-Poetry
Do you have poems for performance on the subject of respect for the environment or against damaging the natural world?
Short, long, spoken word or made for stage, let us know you want to engage the subject. Any humour, light or satire, around the subject is also welcome.
Let us know you’re interested in going on the bill for a few minutes of the set, ideally by March 12 so we can get the schedule set. Email Pearl or Sheila at jestus@pagehalffull.com
What for? Eco-Jest-Us, a day for Ecological Justice paired with fun
When: noon-9 pm, April 9th, 2011 (for poetry, two one hour slots of 4 pm and 8 pm, time to be confirmed.)
Where: Arts Court Theatre, 2 Daly Ave., Ottawa
Why: Pointing towards Earth Day, an event to bring together arts (theatre, improv, poetry, music, etc.) and thinking about environmental wisdom and folly.
Entertainment, booths of eco-friendly business, room for chatting and whatever else develops. Games, booths, time and space for performances by children, youth and adults.
Reduce, re-use and re-gift? If you have items for the silent auction table, or if you you have or know a company or organization that would like to get a table among the eco-friendly booth area, also email jestus@pagehalffull.com for more details.

As a one-time thing, I’ll take a page from Gillian and do a Watch Me Edit. My last workshop in the 4-part series on editing with Pre-Tree is at the Arts Court Library room on Tuesday the 22nd.
A poem underway here…
first draft:

some bend at the waist and dash
the one man walks boldly, slowly
as if it were sunny midday. he can’t
get any wetter perhaps, or
perhaps enjoys the pelting
of rain-snow, the 50 km/h gusts
at his back which make his jean
cuffs billow like toy sailboats.
the traffic lights bounce, swing.
at intersections, cars nose ahead
hesitant about where that bang came from.
plastic sheets lose their homes
ghost across the yellow lines.
block after last the street lamps
look like shower heads pouring.
no stars, no sky except what comes
to meet us. see the awnings pick
at their skirts, nervously rock, threaten
to take off end for end like umbrellas
down the blackened street to the river,
its white caps lost to the dark
choppy beats, its stones grinding
on each other like teeth.

I think it has legs. It has some useful bits. The ending works but it’s diluted by taking so long to get there. It’s baggy and prosaic and report of observation without a lot of punch.
Some phrases in there. Like concept of choppy beats of waves in the dark and a blackened street to the river. The sailboat points ahead to the river coming. Like the image of umbrellas going end-for-end but that’s an expected sort of image, even if it does say wind without saying the word wind again. What else would shower heads do but pour? It’s not a marked state. Flat and redundant.
Problems with order of reveal, among other things. Where is the viewer? Walking in this storm? That needs to be addressed sooner. Can the narrator hear the squeak? Accuracy-wise, how much wind does it take to make things rock.
Toy sailboats are whimsical and don’t exactly link nor set up for anthropomorphizing the building nor that for a sense of bruxism stress enacted by the river.
There’s adverbs and extra articles. The time and space of those might be used by more load-bearing, content-bearing sounds.
What’s the point of the utterance? It’s blustering about and shifts mood for no reason and not building towards something.
It has problems. It’s got a bounce to it tho. The excitement of the storm comes thru.
Maybe should just keep the last 4 lines and put something else front end?
medial edit (around 10th draft):

jackets bend at the waist and dash
as highrise gods, we’re
uninvolved, palms pressed
to this aquarium glass.
a vestigial self-definition, gods.
frogs calling themselves tadpoles.
the traffic lights bounce, creak.
pontiacs nose into night’s cracks.
plastic sheets lose their homes,
ghost across yellow lines.
for blocks into streaks street lamps
stream like shower heads.
and one man is bold, slow,
as if it were sunny midday. he can’t
get wetter, perhaps, or
perhaps he enjoys rain-snow,
sixty kilometre gusts at his
peacoat, how his jean cuffs
billow, threaten to shear,
sail end-for-end down the
blackened street to the
river where the white caps
are lost in their own choppy beats.
the river’s stones are grinding
on each other like teeth.

The drafts were to make language and images shaper, tightens, add more sound, roll in better parts of interim drafts, address the order of reveal of where the speaker is what the narrator can see and know. This version makes the end slant rhyme at the end more visible, for better or worse.
After 3 and 4 line stanzas, couplets then back to triplets. I seem to default to couplets but it clusters better as thoughts in this size. I played with double-length lines and matching more or against syntax.
It’s the same scene but doesn’t feel like the same time. Some momentum is lost.
Comparing the two in filemerge, the last line is the only one the same. There are only about half a dozen phrases and 3 dozen words in common from the original.
Is it done?
After the title, the entry point is more abstract than the immediate idea of a particular person. By the end of the poem, we’ve forgotten about the man, a dropped stitch. Maybe he should loop back in. Or maybe he’s implied, and the humanity of others he represents, with the teeth image?
I like the pair of binaries, god and ghosts, person on high removed and poor soaked sod out there who doesn’t know someone would see and feel sorry for him. The speculating on how he feels seems more remote and cerebral than need be.
With the pant cuffs flapping, whereas it was whimsy, it’s more hypothetical pondering where the editing hands shows rather than feeling like a natural musing/imagining. More happens in the brain of the narrator (such as imagining the cuffs shearing off and pondering our nature) and so is more telling than the descriptive showing, making it less grounded, more editorial.
Feels overworked. I want the compression of more editing without losing the sense of improv spontaneity. Could be shorter as well without losing anything.
The changes change it. Does it strengthen or weaken?
What are my objectives for it? To have something that hooks and amuses.
Am I invested in the story? Do I want a reader to be? Do they need to know the scene or me to tell it? What’s my subtext? Here, this happened. That’s more for a letter home than a poem isn’t it?
I like the extending of fishbowl high rise to aquarium since it is high density housing and made of planes not curves (Too clever so “kill your babies” applies?)
I’m taken with the idea of frogs calling themselves tadpoles and out of date self-definitions. Maybe this isn’t the time and place for it even if it a wet environment. To put it at the end would be an expected profound pondering which is tired so far as the poem arc goes. If that’s something I want to express, maybe I should express only that. Keep the storm a storm rather than an excuse to expound on our sense of our place in the world explicitly.
The nature of the story, being an observer safely tucked behind glass as someone struggles in the wind and wet lends itself naturally to considering the ethics of how one positions oneself to others. Maybe this treatment pushes the idea too far into retrospect and verbose and pat. The idea might be better served with something more minimal slipped in. If I were to cut out the first two stanzas, the attitude is still there. It’s like editing a novel and removing one principle character and the gaps and inferences around the gap make the impact as well or better.
Is it as simple as it needs to be and no more than that? Where next?
What’s the core idea, if it were boiled down to a sales slogan? We are connected equals, slob and vain god-self.
Ok, then if that were the message, what’s missing? The person on high needs to have a come-down, a humbling satori moment, something equalizing to realize self as wet and small? Is the person recognized when close enough as a friend not an other?
Is there resentment housed in the phrase “as if it were sunny midday” that can be exploited and spun? Does something happen to street person to cause empathy to surge? Flying buttress flying off or some evidence of struggle? Does the viewer wants something spectacular, a blood sport mentality of wanting thrill? A shift of sometime would cause energy…that would need to be seeded back or a crumb trail thickened thru in order to strengthen the fit of the ending.
It need to have a rest and I’ll come back at it fresh.

Sandra Beasley at Chicks Dig Poetry talks about a factors which could be contributing to the gender gap — aggregate choices made in a key decade.

in my mind, the question is How do we create a support structure that encourages women to prioritize and privilege their writing during their 30s? Because I think that’s where the gap is really opening up. Same as so many other professions–law, business–we’re losing a very specific decade of incredible women to the demands of their loved ones.

Men are also marrying and having young families and building up careers in the same decade. How much is that a factor? What are the age and home life demographics of females who are solicited to publish but decline?
Brenda Schmidt pointed out what was said at Book Slut who says, make sure you don’t waste time meta-bellyaching when you could participating. I don’t know that that big scene drags energies that much. Or that excuses is a factor that disproportionally affects women. Men are no more likely to see a magazine with a 95% slush pile rate and quit, are they? Stepping back from gender assumptions and consider who you can hear and who can hear you with that gratifying resonance makes sense. Jennifer Howard there says,

Pick your mentors and role models wisely. Sisterhood can be a wonderful thing, but a supportive and productive working writer-editor/publisher relationship is going to be built around individual personalities, not gender per se.
You’ll recognize encouragement and good advice when you encounter it. Don’t assume that all female writers and editors will automatically help you; also don’t assume that all male writers and editors are intent on keeping you down.
Be alert for evidence of bias, though, and be prepared to contest it. You deserve equal consideration as a writer; you don’t deserve to get published just because you’re female.
Think about the published writers you admire who are also female and take heart from their example. They did it, ergo it can be done.

That’s a lot of points but beyond take heart and keep moving, what causes the skew?
Sure, the culture is misogynist, but also selectively, and it seems to a lesser degree, misandrist and misanthropic.
What is feeding into the pattern?
Many things are going on with gender.
What could build up the patterns we see?
Are females writing less? Less seriously? Sending out less? Getting work accepted less? Promoting less? Starting fewer journals? Sitting on fewer panels? Starting fewer discussions? Chiming in more? Following more? Emulating more? Giving more priority to things outside poetry? Doing the same things but interpreted as less pro when gender is known by men and women? Transmitting a subjects and tones that are gender-coded as marked lesser forms?
Decisions are made unconsciously in moments by individuals who want to believe they are a separate entity from the cultural air. Air varies by who you are immediately around. Who you internalize, what you notice.
But for there to be the skew we see, there could be a funny roll of a lot of random dice that could add up like this but for a holding pattern this long, that seems unlikely enough to look at causes beyond randomness.
Males are starting journals and magazines therefore internalized gender chooses encultured male-voice? To pooh pooh gender existing and just carrying on lessens the aggravation of inalterable but maybe the inalterable is changeable with an awareness of systems at work at various scales. It’s the legacy systems behind eyeballs that perpetuates. Jennifer Howard’s advice tempered with fresh eyes to remake visions and press on makes sense. Not denying nor being crushed by awareness but curiosity, not with upturning but radical steady awareness of minutiae and living a pressure for new internal biases.
Rules of engagement seem to teach males to pipe up, press forward. Males are more encouraged to speak up and when bashed down to take it or bash back whereas it seems more acceptable for women to cry foul.

Arc Poetry Magazine’s 10th Annual
Diana Brebner Prize for Poetry. Entrants must live in the National Capital Region and not yet be published in book form. Submissions must be postmarked by March 1, 2011. See guidelines.
We’re also bringing forward the poems by some past winners of this prize
on our website. Check out last year’s winning poem.

An interesting fellow with some excerpts of his book that he’s been 30 years at, and his thinking about it.

Verbal Paradise (preverbs) from George Quasha on Vimeo.

Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Zasterle, 2011) by George Quasha
George Quasha’s work as a poet, including Somapoetics (1973) and AINU DREAMS (1999) among others, has steadily broadened to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Preverbs, of which VERBAL PARADISE is the first book, has been a core vehicle of this exploration. His recent Axial Stones: An Art of Percarious Balance, foreword by Carter Ratcliff (2006), focuses on sculpture, drawing, and language (as text and installation) shown at the Baumgartner Gallery (Chelsea), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (SUNY New Paltz), and elsewhere. His axial video works with language, sound, and portraiture, including art is: Speaking Portraits, recording over 800 artists, poets, and musicians in eleven countries (saying what art/music/poetry is) and exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, and universities.