Alison Pick (Far to Go, Anansi) and Peter Richardson (Sympathy for the Couriers, Vehicule) read at Tree at 8 pm tonight.
Before that, 6:45 pm in the same Library Room, Floor 2A of the Arts Court Building I’ll be doing the first of 4 workshops on editing down poems.
If there is a dead poet you would like to introduce people to giving a few minute overview of life, career and sample poems or poem excerpts there is a sign up list put out with the open mic list.
Tree: The second and fourth Tuesday each month.

The deadline for the annual Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry is January 31, 2011.
Do you have a poetry manuscript just waiting for the right opportunity? Do you know a Canadian poet who deserves to be published, but hasn’t managed more than one or two books yet?
This may be your dream come true! If you submit a manuscript, and we select it, you’ll not only win a book deal with Snare Books (!!!) but $500 in cash while you’re at it!
Full details are here: snarebooks.wordpress.com

Michael Dylan Welch is spearheading NaHaiWriMo, or, National Haiku Writing Month.

Write one haiku a day for the month of February! Why February? Because it’s the shortest month—for the world’s shortest form of poetry. Join poets around the world who pledge to write at least one haiku a day during NaHaiWriMo, the shortest month of the year.

See the for links on Why “No 5-7-5”?, participation and haiku in general and tips like these:

Get a notebook and start jotting down your poems each day, based on things you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Haiku are poems of experience that create an emotional effect, first in you, and then in the reader, if you craft the poem effectively.
Share your poems with others to get feedback and see which ones work best. Sometimes just sharing is enough, withough seeking feedback, but pay attention if your readers particularly like certain poems but not others, and try to figure out why.

If you can’t wait for February, you can start now, or segue in with InNaSmaStoMo for January. In a Small Stone Month. What is a small stone? A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention.
A river of stones, a project to cultivate awareness of moments sort of like a bigger version of one million footnotes. Or isolating that sensation of moment like Odd Inkwell does. Any of these are about paying attention, being in and valuing the moment you are in.

Oulipo, its nature of constraints, appeals. It isn’t coding language to manipulate the hormones, ready the heartstrings for the manufactured roller coaster narrative. It isn’t taking itself seriously, exactly.
Harry Mattews on his path to Oulipo in Lacanian Ink:

During a recent stay in Berlin, I became friends with the poet Oskar Pastior, no Oulipian but nonetheless addicted to combinatorial stratagems. Each of us proposed methods unfamiliar to the other: I sestinas, he anagrams. We began exploring their possibilities.
The projects I then undertook were ferociously hard: a three-part composition based on anagrams of our two names distributed according to 3 x 24 permutations; a sestina consisting entirely of anagrams of its six end-words. I ate frugal, hasty meals; slept little; neglected my friends. During those long hours, I have no doubt that, to an unobtrusive observer, my face would have manifested the oblivious intentness of a six-year-old girl playing hopscotch.

It’s engaging, the puzzle making. Any primate, dolphin, octopus or goat can be pulled into curiosity of how something might work or be undone. Anagrams, palindromes, like 142 Pantoons for a funeral, challenge us to interlock and make formulaicly consistant yet freshly. Tom Lubbock mentioned dom sylvester houédard “invented the beautiful palindrome “drawninward” (it reads both ways, but it’s drawn inward to the “I” at its centre) and the brilliant word turnover “deus/snap” (in which God snaps himself).”
The doing is fun. Consuming the pwoermd is enjoyable. The boundaries of fusions and confusions in his NTST is based inside our culture on a rich context of what the reader brings forward. Seeing a good one represents a huge amount of process and processing of fiddling around for a click.
At the same time it all appeals like soccer appeals. I can understand the joy of running about but not why anyone would want to be in the stadium for a sustained period and stay attentive? The main gratification of game is play, not watching play. Do we need to watch in order to play? By nature mammals learn from modelling. Only watching isn’t enough. Only playing isn’t enough. In Absurdist Monthly (aug 09), Kenneth J. Knoespel talks about Mikhail Bakhtin’s Ideologies of Reception.

A fundamental mark of Bakhtin’ s critical philosophy involves his challenge that we become aware that the language with which we work is never ours alone. In sharp contrast to poetic theory that would individualize the experience of language —a kind of Cartesian poetics— Bakhtin reminds us that we are in continuous conversation with others.

That clicks against what derek beaulieu just said in his 12 or 20 interview about NO press:

Poets in ostrich-like ignorance of the potential of sharing—as opposed to hoarding—their texts, are ignoring potentially the most important artistic innovation of the 20th century: collage. What’s at stake? Nothing but their own obsolescence. If you don’t share you don’t exist.

Meaning can’t exist in isolation, not of an idea, not of a word, not of a person. The parts of language in themselves are arbitrary, having no inherent symbolic meaning, as linguist Saussure said a century ago, but are made by their relationship to other parts. Context is what makes meaning for its parts, whether letters or words, phrases, sentences, works or lives.

much like Absurdism, semantic content is of little importance to Letterists, who, by emphasizing the sound value of words to produce emotions, originally sought to demonstrate that beauty and worth lies purely in auditory sounds ~ Pascal-Denis Lussier, The Anti-Art of Art Built on Un-Creating Past Creative Creations

The Letterists tried. Did it work to ascribe sound to be meaning, as sounds could be a bypass around the perceived, direct connection with the real? I remember discussions when I was 15 with a friend, how he schemed as a painter to arrive at the colors that could transcend all cultural and linguistic differences and directly mean the same emotional experience to different people.
I suppose it says something that my opinion is unchanged. I want to be that optimistic, even looking at the shine of his idealism and his desire for unity and connection and direct sharing. But ears vary, eyes vary, from person to person, from age to age before we even heap on the associations and the contexts. One blue beside an orange will be entirely different than surrounded by a green-tinted white. Habituation of sounds change the perceptual filter.
No matter how perfect the arrangement of shapes or sounds or gesture, no matter how much your elaborate into story or cut down to molecular simplicity, you can’t eliminate differences in how something is perceived. You can’t winnow down to one possible response.
Yet, some things can reach universal. A grief of a bereft horse, of an old dog, of a widowed bird, of a dementia human may make gestures that most species can read. Is it a sound, a movement, a context of knowing comparable grief that allows a compassionate knowing and seeing? What it signifies may be conveyed but what you do with that signification varies. Innocence to a father is to protect. The same innocence to a wolf is opportunity. To each the response may be mingled but one prevails. The base vulnerability may be equally visible but to one whose own perceptual filters are clogged, there may not be bandwidth enough to look past self to perceive vulnerability of grief for example. The signification is there to be read which does not mean it will be read. Is it communicated if there is no audience? Ah, into the forest and wind-fallen trees. You need to come to the gesture with a desire or toolbox to perceive.

Messagio Galore take VII is coming on Sunday January 23, 2011, (doors 7 p.m.) at Ottawa City Hall. An evening of sound poetry (& similar) with the voices of jwcurry, Lesley Marshall, Christine McNair*, Alastair Larwill and Grant Wilkins doing a host of works by: Antonin Artaud, Richard Truhlar, don sylvester houédard, bob cobbing, and Ernst Jandl among others. It’s exploring vocal range meets music and anti-music. More details.
*Christine McNair also reads at Voices of Venus, Umi Cafe, January 11 and hosts Bywords Warms the Night, a reading as part of the the 8th annual fundraiser for the Cornerstone Women’s Shelter & launch of the winter issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal