Pivot Readings at the Press Club
Featuring Jon Paul Fiorentino, Pearl Pirie and Carolyn Smart
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
8 p.m. at the Press Club
850 Dundas Street West
PWYC.
—
Jon Paul Fiorentino is a writer and editor. His first novel is Stripmalling (ECW, 2009) which was shortlisted for the 2009 Hugh MacLennan Award for Fiction. His most recent book of poetry is Indexical Elegies (Coach House Books, 2010). He is the author of the poetry books The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006) which was shortlisted for the 2006 A.M. Klein Award for Poetry and Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004) and the humour book Asthmatica (Insomniac Press, 2005). His most recent editorial projects are the anthologies Career Suicide! Contemporary Literary Humour (DC Books, 2003) and Post-Prairie – a collaborative effort with Robert Kroetsch, (Talonbooks, 2005). He lives in Montreal where he is the Editor of Matrix magazine and Snare Books.
Pearl Pirie writes from Ottawa. Her collection been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010) (www.beenshedbore.com) chapbooks include over and chapbooks, my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010) and boathouse (above/ground, 2008) are in tree-print. She blogs at pesbo, Humanyms, and a few other places. Poems have appeared thru dandelion, ditch, Dusie, This Magazine, PRECIPICe, 1cent, Ottawater, unarmed, Peter F Yacht Club, pooka press and gar.
Carolyn Smart‘s fifth collection of poems, Hooked – Seven Poems, was published in 2009 by Brick Books. An excerpt from her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001) won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and since 1989 she has taught Creative Writing and Contemporary Canadian Poetry at Queen’s University.

Murray read a couple poems at the open mic. The second of which had a pun at the end that I was not swift enough to get before I heard the laughter from around the room.

Grant shared some romantic and comic tanka.

Guy shared memories of being in the military in Germany in the 60s.

The presenter of the dead poet tribute I missed the name of. He introduced us to Lope de Veda who had at least the stature of Shakespeare in Spain. He was prolific enough to make Honore de Balzac look lazy by comparison. He wrote a few novels, a few novellas, 3000 sonnets and 1500 plays. And his children may have numbered somewhere between the number of sonnets and plays. 😉 His image was displayed in a comparable way as rock star posters might adorn dorms today.
In the new tradition of Tree, a local poet is featured and is invited to bring in a poet from out of town. At Tree Feb 8, Rhonda Douglas invited George Murray.

Rhonda Douglas read from her last book Sometimes I think I Know Things and from new work. They seem far more musical and less ideological than her Cassandra poems. One I particularly liked dedicated to her choir master/leader which contained the idea of how to cooperate for music, listening to one another: “there are fortissimo times and voce sotto times — listen for the dynamic.” A prose poem on the idea of editing had the advice “never let the draft drive!”

George Murray read from his Aphorisms book which had its start at Tree. He test drove a few and got such a warm response, pursued the idea of a book of aphorisms as poems. He also test drove his new manuscript (to be released in 2012) which is rhymed balladic and common meter verse, an area he didn’t go to in previous books. He said he was inspired by Simon Armitage’s Travelling Songs.
I’m afraid my mind went left at one point in his poem about Schrödinger’s cat when he exhorted, don’t listen for the mewl. I heard “mule” and visualized the cat in the box, silent, but with a toy plastic mule being batted around. But point taken, yes, why do we pretend that the cat can’t be heard as an indication of it being alive or dead? They aren’t the quietest of beasts.
Both readers were having some parallels in work, beyond both being from Newfoundland, both having a previous book that was something of arm’s length and the upcoming being a more confessional-type book.

Next time, all open mic. Come and vote for best poem. There may be a plebiscite or sorts.

Join us at the Dale Smith Gallery on Friday, February 11, from 7-10 p.m. to toast the opening of playlist, a massive body of work composed from lists of songs found on an iPod. Searched by keywords, the resulting works on paper playfully explore the whole range of human emotions that characterize popular music. They will engage you in a game of recognition, association and exploration. It continues until March 6th.
And… the closing of the exhibition will be marked by the presentation of a joint literary project entitled playback ; as part of the A B Series at Gallery 101 on March 5th. Christine McNair, Sean Moreland, Glenn Nuotio, Carmel Purkis, Sandra Ridley, Steven Ross-Smith & Grant Wilkins will read, reconfigure and respond to the works in playlist. (abseries.org for more info)

Messagio Galore VII was at City Hall in January. rob mclennan’s description gives some background if you’re not familiar.
In April there will be Messagio Galore VIII at writers festival, with a different take as each is, some of the same performers, maybe some more as well. Each performance is a unique thing with its own character and effect. The troupe changes fluidly as the material does.
This last performance was about 2 hours before about 5 dozen or so who attended. It is a very hard thing to describe, even for sound poetry.
Voices wove in and out of each other to the points where it became sound rather than individuals. Sometimes there are words, sometimes a range of sounds the voicebox or body can make. It would misconstrue to call it beatboxing because it is not so metrical as that. Sometimes it feels like choral singing but it is using varied emotional expression of tone not melody. Some of it was group improv, some rehearsed to the fraction of a second. Some was material scored to be sound poetry and some was interpretation of visual texts. People fell in for some pieces or stepped out of as instruments in an orchestra might in different arrangements for different amount of richness of voices.

Pictured are Grant Wilkins, Lesley Marshall, jwcurry, Christine McNair and Alastair Larwill in one formation.
People moved from piece to piece without introductions as one might through a classical music program. Programs listed all the pieces that were to be done. It was rather a gallery of sound with some being serious, others humorous. Some with cacophony, some with swells of harmony and resonance.
At points the audience seemed to fall as if into a group meditation where there was not an extraneous move, cough, shift or glance around, completely inside the sounds for extended minutes. It was a rare sort of transport to see performers own a room like that.

An excerpt of Shout of a Bedouin woman by Ella Bat-Tsion on Poetry International Web:

We love our land so much
If only we could live and die on this land
If only, if only, if only
How can one live like this?
From all sides, closed
On one side the border guard
On one side the nature warden
On one side there is nowhere to go
On one side —
I am a widow woman and have no saviour
I am a widow woman and have no saviour
I have no one but Allah

There’s something in the rhythm. It is ballad-like.
Part of my kneejerk goes ack, woman as helpless!, must not propagate the pattern but the other knee goes no. it’s not that simple binary.
Why a woman trapped and not a man? The answer is more situational than in ideology of the point of view of the poem. Is it an appropriation of voice or her voice, or a listening to story and rebroadcasting with skill from a useful position?
There’s something that feels compelling in the cadence, and it is a relief to read a poem that is not from middle class point of view of people waiting, traipsing about twisting a napkins or pining over a relationship rather than doing something immediate when something immediate is an option. It feels like a more necessary story. Much that is written feels like an unironic equivalent of Duddy Kravtiz with the ball of, what was it, tinfoil? gum wrapper? between his toes when it feels like there are more worthwhile utterances one could spend one’s life futzing over if one must futz over words.
People without status in unrecognized villages are in an invisible violence, a structural marginalization of a parallel society. An estimated 120,000 Bedouin are without legal status in Kuwait as well. This means job opportunities are constrained. They’re

“not granted official residency permits, birth or death certificates, or marriage contracts, only reports documented at the Ministry of Justice, in addition to their being denied passports. Article 17 grants passports to the infirm and students,” al-Salem added. “Likewise, the bidoun are deprived from registering at state schools or universities.”

This seems communication across an information gap rather than people who know an experience, communicating that to someone who shares the same or comparable experiences in the same context but perhaps with more or less flare or skill. The information transferral is small. The artistry must become more important because there isn’t a need to say something. There’s already an equilibrium of understanding between the two containers of speaker and listener.
If the medium is not words but sound, there can be an information gap because there is not a clear predictable conflict, narrative, resolution or marked pretty resistance to resolution arc. There is less shape until one habituates to the range possible and has enough exposure to see patterns. Until then the game between speaker and listener can be one of more exploration, rather than display what’s expected, with enough variation to keep it interesting and get the applause expected with enough variance in response to keep it interesting.
It widens out the range of what can be said. Instead of small captures of nuance and getting in a small but fascinating vibration of something of one’s own story, or doing the popular historical fiction on the other side of a safe historical calm, it is more real somehow. Why dabble in the allegorical or metaphorical when one could broker in change at present?
Part of VERSeFest will include responses to the the call for poems addressing Human Rights: women’s rights, migration rights, democracy and self-determination, social justice, indigenous rights, and/or other topics related to oppression and resistance.
And presumably there’s room inside that envelop for stories of success surmounting and leading.