What a wild literary city. 6 events in the evening time slot of Thurs., Nov 25th. Here are two:
Apt. 9 Press is proud to present a night of poetry readings from William Hawkins, Leigh Nash and Peter Gibbon.
8:00pm Raw Sugar Cafe (692 Somerset St. W.)
No Cover
William Hawkins – Sweet & Sour Nothings
Leigh Nash – Landforms
Peter Gibbon – eating thistles
See Apt 9 for further information on each book.
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7:00pm, Mother Tongue Books (1067 Bank St. Ottawa)
Claudia Coutu Radmore launches a moment or two/ without remembering
“These poems are in the voices of my actual direct ancestors and their close ancestral relatives between the years 1672 to 1792. Speakers were chosen who would best portray the history, culture and actual experiences of New France settlers.”
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Two days before those is the Ottawa launch of Pith & Wry: Canadian Poetry
Tuesday, 23 November 2010, 6:30–8 pm, Arts Court Library, (2 Daly Ave).
Please join us to lift a glass to celebrate with 21 contributors from Ottawa and beyond:
Amanda Earl • Ben Ladouceur • Blaine Marchand • Cameron Anstee • Claudia Coutu Radmore • Colin Morton • Dave Margoshes • Dean Steadman • dee Hobsbawn-Smith • Grant Savage • Gwen Frankton • Heather Ferguson • Mary Lee Bragg • Peter Gibbon • Rachael Simpson • Roger Nash • Ronnie R. Brown • Susan McMaster • Sylvia Adams • Terry Ann Carter
“New poetry, in a wide variety of voices and styles, from 45 living authors, renowned, established, and emerging, from sea to sea to sea…” Anchored by such figures as Margaret Atwood, Lorna Crozier and Don McKay, Pith & Wry brings together national and international award winners, provincial, local and specialty prize recipients, poets laureate, and distinctive newcomers, from Victoria to Iqaluit, from Windsor to St. John’s.
Followed at 8 pm by Tree reading series with Colin Morton and Dave Margoshes.
Pith & Wry is also available from • Collected Works • Mother Tongue Books • Scrivener Press at www.scrivenerpress.com

Tree of Codes takes a text and die-cuts so the text at each page turn has some of the pages before and after. It’s by Visual Editions
It nests nicely against what derek beaulieu posted, “Bibliocidal Tendencies”: British Publisher Information as Material Tears Into Literature for Art’s Sake by Ross Simonini at ArtInfo.com. When a text doesn’t read linearly, sensibly, when the works jumble against syntax, when the emjambments leap about, is it a dog’s breakfast that any old randomness can do or is it doing something else? Ross said,

We would agree with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that “cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.”[1] They allow one to find new poetic connections in an existing text.
But, it’s not a particularly current technique, you could trace it all the way back to Tristan Tzara and his infamous cut-up poem in 1927

Doing an exquisite corpse could get at the same sort of part of the brain. Chopping up one’s own text or a newspaper clipping and pulling parts randomly to assemble could do the same, although one might be tempted to make a narrative on top of randomness derived from the component materials. Stacey Wilson uses old texts, chopped up but is pillaging to make new unrelated texts with the constraint of that vocabulary, subverting the original context. It is use of cut-up and constraint of another pre-existing text but it isn’t working to see what randomness creates or to counter the idea of linear narrative stories.
Cut ups can also move against sense and be about the words as material. No amount of knowing about the author, no amount of squinting or suffering or study will make a pattern of covert meaning, illuminating details appear. It is the text itself doing what it will unconsciously.
Page two gets into how to understand such work which transcribe another work without comment, the act being an art of attentiveness.

These books are not necessarily meant to be read at all in the conventional sense. We know people do read them and seem to get something from that experience, but it is not essential to their function. Like any other traditional artwork they are propositions to be engaged with and thought about.

More than hitching your wagon to a brand in a symbiotic sales act of quoting/promoting, it seems on a different page. It feels comparable to me to haiku where the motivation is not literary, not artifice nor art primarily, but the process of meditative opening, paying attention. The “product” is a residual by-product. The real composition is the time spent and how that cognitively, chemically changes the doer.
The brain, the relentless pattern maker will try to bridge just about anything. It will try to write stories and read between lines no matter how widely or tightly leaded. Rather than work with that desire for meaning and lead someone down a narrow chute, make it more difficult to see what the intention is, by a mechanical process that has no hidden intention, by a group that has no common mind, try to cobble the story and the mind will still leap, but may leap new places. The brain needs very little to go on to build a whole structure of implications. The reader is then reading self like tea leaves of type.
What is the role of the person who scrambles and presents it? Only to play and let the wind of the readers do what they will? Or must there be a moral principle guiding the selection and preventing certain directions that would lead to readings that would make a case for the writers intending some particular pattern?
That idea of trying to do poetry as oratory, as trying to convince of a truth is still within the structure that there must be a persuasive act by the writer, in opposition to or cooperation with the reader to make something sway. It is within the idea that there should be an emotional payoff, some emotional junkie rewarded with a hormonal tilt thru the mechanism of the text which is not proprietary product but stuff to toy with that has no mystique and hierarchical controlled access of power. What if the game is not that and not so complex as that? What if writing is an act of exploring where it doesn’t matter where text comes from or where it is going? That doesn’t make it static but to a degree takes off some of the harnesses and reins and carriage and becomes more of a free animal. It gives more respect to the reader as a free agent to make what they will rather than sit, reading waiting to be told what to observe next and how to judge what next. It opens it up to the body and the head rather than words for head as tunnels to heartstrings.
So far as using and remixing text, such as that “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, the take in the article was this:

zombies are a clever way of aggravating the romantic, idyllic world that Jane Austen has been made to represent by the literary canon. What is interesting is the reaction of the literary industry to the book’s gesture of appropriation: applauded as a new, naughty maneuver, and represented as a game that can be accepted; subsumed, contained, and put to work against the strong challenges posed to the industry’s principles by other more radically appropriative writing acts.

That seems astute, to call the remix as “naughty”. By sticking that label and call it a radical outer limit of remix, it excludes further radical acts/arts that are outside the game rules, the (yech, but what term fits better) paradigm and does not acknowledge they exist.

Tours, tables and talks at Dominion College, 96 Empress (near Bronson and Somerset), 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. this Saturday and Sunday
In addition to a fine collection of publications by local authors, this year’s version of the Ottawa Independent Writers Book Fair comes with new features— artisans, history, architecture, philosophy and literary readings. For over 100 years the limestone gem that is Dominican University College has been cloistered. With the November 20 – 21 event, DUC is throwing its doors open to the public.
Join Denise Chong (Saturday 2-3 p.m.) and Brian Doyle (Sunday 2-3 p.m.) as they read and discuss their latest works. Or take part in our lectures—Philosophy and the Art of Story Telling, by Prof. Jean-François Méthot, Ph.D (Saturday 11:00 a.m.) and Art, Craft and the Philosophy of Fine Art, by Prof. Francis Peddle, Ph. D (Sunday 1:00 p.m.). Those interested in networking will want to preregister for the workshop, Networking For Writers, scheduled for Saturday, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. (preregistration required)
Saturday, November 20, 2010
10:00 a.m. – 5 p.m. – Books, Art and Crafts on Sale
11:00 a.m. – Lecture by Prof. Jean-François Méthot, Ph. D., Philosophy & the Art of Story Telling
11:00 – half-hour tour of Dominican University College
11:30 – half-hour tour
1:00 – 4:00 – Workshop, Networking For Writers (preregistration required, $40 OIW members; $45.00, non- OIW members. Contact Donna MacLellan)
1:30 -3:00 p.m.- half-hour tours
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.- Denise Chong – Reading and Discussion
7:00 p.m. – Guitar Concert in the chapel entitled, Seven In A Blow, by the Canadian Guitar Quartet, le Duo Vice Versa and The Alla Grande Trio
Sunday, November 21, 2010
10:00 a.m. – 5 p.m. – Books and Crafts on Sale
1:00 – 2:00 p.m.- Lecture by Prof. Francis Peddle, Ph. D.,
Art, Craft and the Philosophy of Fine Art
1:30 – 3:00 p.m.- tours on half hour
2:00 – 3:00 p.m. – Brian Doyle – Reading and Discussion

A reminder that Friday evening at the Japanese Embassy, Ottawa, there will be music by Debbie Danbrook, a rare female Shakuhachi (Japanese flute) player performing with Catriona Sturton. There will be a reading of haiku and senryu and the launching a haiku chapbook by KaDo Ottawa. (KaDo is Japanese for “the way”.) The event is free but seats are limited (last I heard under a dozen left) and need to be reserved with the embassy. (Info: http://bit.ly/b27PDx)
If you cannot make it, or if your tastes run in different directions, there’s Jeramy Dodds and Lisa Robertson at Gallery 101.

been shed bore by Pearl Pirie, Chaudière Books, 2010
Review – been shed bore: Sandra Stephenson
Pearl Pirie’s new book flings ideas like shed clothes on a sunny Sunday. Flashing, panning and sizzling, a richness of words and density of image, layered without the distractions of prefab (eg. articles, pronouns, even preposterous prepositions) are like deep red velvet. In fact, the parallels between the dress Pearl wore, the trebuchet she used to toss applause to the audience so we threw our hands into the air with glee, and the poetry she read made for a seemless [sic] sleek rich experience.
In her plunderverse readings, Pearl read the originals from the authors she’d plundered, and showed them up with deeper, richer, more comprehensible versions of their own poems stood upside down, backwards and coloured in. I thought the presentation of the original poem in two cases was an unfortunate choice, though it was a privilege attendees of the book launch had over readers of the book, since the originals are not in the book. Pearl’s poems stand on their own entirely, and it’s really a matter of interest in craft rather than artistic expression that validates the reading of the original. I thought it led to a distracting tendency on my part to compare the two versions, which diminished the effect of the new poem. This was the only picky-person flaw in the entire evening of Pearl’s reading, however, and I include it only because critiques are supposed to have some edge and not just lavish and revel.
The book itself is lovely, with a painstaking list of acknowledgements at the back (no predictable capitals, thanks), and that, of course, is where everyone turns first, right?
A slim, elegant volume, just short of the right length in true connaisseuse fashion – the expression in French, “laissé sur sa faim.” Totally unique, quietly assertive and assured, circumspect, funny, contemporary and strikingly wise, Pearl’s trademark is her unpredictability and at the same time her consistency. A perfect choice for Chaudière Books.
Nov. 10
Sandra Stephenson