Such a busy town…Feb 20 and March 6th are Dusty Owls with Christian McPherson and Sean Moreland respectively. After Dusty Owl at 5-6 p.m. on the 20th and the 6th, move across town by 7:30 p.m. for pre-Verse Fest and the AB Series with David McFadden and Angela Carr then on the 6th, Steven Ross Smith & Chris Turnbull. On the 5th, with the AB Series is Steven Ross Smith & Sandra Ridley.
Then it all blows wide and the festival of poetry starts with VERSeFest with a program of two to six events daily from March 8th (International Woman’s Day) to March 13th.

What: Eco-Jest-Us, a day for Ecological Justice paired with fun
When: Afternoon to evening of April 9th
Where: Arts Court Theatre
Why: Pointing towards Earth Day, an event to bring together arts (theatre, improv, poetry, music) and thinking about environmental wisdom and folly. Booths of eco-friendly business, room for chatting and whatever else develops.

I will be interviewed on Literary Landscapes by Kate Hunt, Feb 17th, 6:30, CKCU, 93.1 listen live online
We’ll talk on the subject of performance.
[A recording of the conversation is here in mp3.]

A good photo represents animated performance. That is a photo will report what is good for a photo and not be loyal to represent what is proportionally happening in poetry.
Some poetry can’t be excerpted and convey a sense of what it is and how it works. Some performance has to be experienced rather than summarized.
How to portray poetry in the community in words or photos? Why do we perform poetry as we do?
Is poetry performed each time we type a poem out and email it? Or photocopy it? When John Baker shows us Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz without a word, is that a performance of poetry based on it being expressed, in a context of words around, in a font and with that spacing of page in the world? Or lend a book and urge someone to read it?
Poetry is an internal thing between the ears. How would that be portrayed visually and distinctly to be different from a face at resting pleasure or a critically thinking face on any subject?
Why do we perform poetry as a band plays music live? Why not static page or CD as the sole expression? Is there not more meaning with more variations, a poem finding another self as it collects a patina or reaction, non-reactions from different people, learns itself and its different potentials based on intonations, based on competing with interrupting or competing noises, a bad room vibe, a wonderful vibe in room, a context of poems that set it up for fitting or contrast? Can a poem be alive when only in print or in one definitive recitation? Or must a poem be carried forward longitudinally to be more than a foetus of a poem?
Why would we build a formal context for expressing poems? Why not just read it to a friend or in a friendly circle, or to a hostile indifferent room not built for ideas but, say, not blocking the screen as some sport is being played, or another art is portrayed on orchestral stage? What does a performance or a poem do for the poem?
One doesn’t want to stand in the way of what is to come across and block views with distracting obstructions unless obstructions and difficulty are part of the point, but that takes a certain audience to tolerate and play in the mixed message of “listen to me” and “I’m going to make this hard for you”. We want listeners/readers to be playing the same game. A book, a set form, like pdf or web page or CD or broadsheet, allows a participant in the poem to pick a time to engage that is asynchronous with the making of the meaning. If there is live performance, the readers/speaker/writer collaborate to make a meaning with a chemical reaction of being present with one another. The interaction makes a different version of the poem, nuancing. That bring it to storytelling, communication, responsibility and responsiveness and adaption to the listener and listener responsibility or responsiveness or adaption to the teller. It can’t be abstract idea. People are involved.
But why poetry as entertainment, as chairs in a row, as lights and designated time and space and area of the room?
If people can’t speak up, we need mics. If people don’t naturally stand up and create a commanding presence in the room that draws people’s attention, then we need the structure of a podium and lights to signal ‘pay attention to this person who appears to want to hide’. If people have the skill set to perform the idea and communicate with an intensity matching the poem, it can be poetry anywhere without a self-conscious filter blocking. One can slip in and out of poetry register without tools of page nor stage. Like musicians who need only tap a table to be recognized to each other, a natural gravitation, an intuitive forming of a circle where people throw around ideas cooperatively. A jam session of making something from the sand at hand. It’s not about if people show or don’t, or the light or mic works or doesn’t or if someone totally blows their piece or gives a riveting performance. (Although the latter is nice when it happens.)
A reading series is a facilitator for the real process which is people coming together who can hear and respect one another and want the same sort of play with the same sort of language or rhythm and sound toys. People who have a greater than average chance to be able to hear one another convene. It’s not about performance nor about the poetry dominantly but about the sensation of connecting over something engaging.
[Repeating and exploring further what I said in comments where it is more visible.]

There’s a new issue of World Haiku Review. Now online is the January 2011 issue. Among other things in the issue (reviews of anthologies and haibun) are new haiku in 3 categories: neo-classical (using kigo) and vanguard (including non-traditional subjects, moods) and shintai (new style which may bridge or be a hybrid of the other two). The range is narrow, all 3 lines. No experimental, no one lines, but a wide assortment of voices.
It’s unclear who write the opening editorial but there’s merit to the idea: “There are now so many different varieties of haiku that defining haiku seems to me to be almost like fighting a losing and pointless battle. [..the…] real and essential question: Is it then a good poem?”
The haiku are listed by first thru third place, honorable mentions and then more. The further down the page I went, the better I liked them. I was surprised that I enjoyed Neo Classical section the most. When writing such, the kigo can seem like a throwaway formality, a context line for form rather than being essentially dovetailed in and pushing the content’s momentum. The inclusion of season indicator in these were not a symbolic nod so much as necessary in many of these examples.
Here are 3 of my favorites from the issue:

stepping out
of a snowdrift
minus one shoe
Hans Jongman

I like the sounds that tie it together, and the pauses. The opening line goes to empty air. Where are we going? Ah, a literal stepping out of something. And we are in the body of the experience with the twist of the last line of the shoe being stuck. The surprise of that happening we get to feel firsthand in a way. There’s a gentle humour and I didn’t see it coming. Appropriate for the subject for that pivot to be done there and in that way.
Would it be a slight poem if there was less technical skill in expression? If there were less care for word choice and order of revelation? Snowbank would have a heavy sound, a clunk to it. If it were more prosaic as simply announcing context by “winter day” or “snowy day” and then saying “yanking a foot from the bank”, it would have the same idea conveyed but the way it was said would be a different tone than s, t, s, t.
He could have said, “less one shoe” except that wouldn’t have been as clear in the suction power of packy deep snow and the choice of “minus” gives it a sort of distance of a tiny bit of intellectual distance that conveys there is an awareness of the comic math of life. There isn’t a cursing the snowbank. There’s a gap there that has room for good humour.

In a tea room
overlooking a winter lake
69 tomorrow
Marie Shimane

Marie’s poem selects particular glimpses thru the keyhole. With tea room we have some sense of leisure time, wealth, tone range of moods. We expand from the table, silverware and silver hair to notice a scene outside the window. That frame expands the viewer’s point of view as if present. Then the whole poem deepens and widens suddenly with the appearance of the last line, a cusp of marking stone, mingled feelings, time passage. The poem becomes much more complex by adding 2 words and yet doesn’t feel tacked on or easily come by. It has a ring of lived truth to it.

a candy wrapper
joins the leaf pile
autumn dusk
John Stevenson

This haiku strikes me because it also expands as it unfolds. It does that zoom sensation. A candy wrapper is very concrete with a small set of sounds and associations. The narrator pans back and shows the leaf pile. The two objects relate in being similar in size, shape, sounds. We now have a season and temperature fed into the poem naturally without calling attention to themselves as hey, look here, I’m a kigo! And then the image fades to black. Whatever we feel about littering or the leaves and time’s passage and labour finished, all becomes hidden as dusk rushes in. Simple words, simple scene and yet it carries something more than the sum of its parts and does so with an elegance. He can bring a profound aesthetic, or rather an aesthetic that has the weight to it. Another haiku of his under the shintai section:

amateur night
a candle melting into
candle remains
John Stevenson

Sweet. Minimal. It could be unpacked a couple ways without a stretch. Scathing, snarky, bored, crabby while opening hands to the timeless in universe and letting it go. Contemporary grounded in particulars and looking at what lasts and doesn’t. Compact, rich, interesting poem to turn this way and that.