At the last Tree, (perspective: seated about halfway back.) Between 40 and 4 dozen came.
The tribute to the poet of the past was done by Mike Montreille on R.G. Everson of Huntsville, then Montreal Quebec. He was a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets.
The collective mind seemed turned Eastwards by chance. Jeff Blackman sang a Cape Breton ghazal. Sean Dowd had a rowing poem but bought his sachel across the road from the Cape Breton field of scarecrows that Murray Citron’s poem talked about.
The Hot Ottawa voices you can sort of experience a part of: Gillian Wallace read poems from her blog as well as some newer and older, published and not.
To sample the newest of Cameron Anstee, you can get some the chapbook version in the above/ground chapbook Frank St.or from the Emergency Response Unit chapbook, Water Upsets Stone.
Christine McNair also has a chapbook (contact her for that) and a call for another.
Call for Cartwheels: an artist chapbook. Submissions due before November. A samplette from her poem Cartwheel 8 “I write a word to stop a truck”.
To read a pages not quite the same as being there, but it’s also good.
It’s a well-read town. People who are new are still a few serious years into craft and exploring their bliss.

Canadians readers have probably already seen that the longlist is out but for those who haven’t, the Relit Award for fiction and poetry.

Claudia did her first workshop of 4 at Tree last night. About 8 people came to this one with a focus on metaphor, with some exercises and example poems (Pablo Neruda, Paul Tyler, Lorna Crozier, Susanne Buffam, Mark Doty and herself) and an essay by Mark Doty.
Any talk on metaphor seems more of a trip-thru than walk-thru since the comparison seems hard for people to get explicitly, even tho people do it as a matter of course. English does the word and thought structure everywhere. Maybe because the definition shape (noun is other noun) is so ubiquitous that we forget it isn’t true definition or equivalent? It seems a nature of being, the comparison invisible? Or people are looking for something more complex?
It was a nice mix of poetic principles and of practice. She had us do, as a group and individually, a brain storm for each word on each side of the “is”.
As a group the collaboration we did was “Death is a sofa”.
What are the associations with death? People volunteered words in brainstorming (black crepe, funerals, little deaths, shiva a mourning period, Shiva the destroyer, sadness, grief, release, etc.) She encouraged to think in the round of all kinds of associations rather than pursue one channel then asked, What are the associations with sofa? (cat hair, basement, crumbs in cracks, slouch, squeak, spring, back, arms, doilies, plastic cover, sex, antimacassars)
She led each turn. She solicited and scaffolded how one would weave the two concepts and edit and look for a good ending point to build a structure. A person contributed a line. She suggested a direction to go to extend the metaphor in another direction. People came up with one more description of a sofa that linked the ideas in a sort of braiding without dropping either. What’s something that is more positive? What about functions? What does a sofa do? How does a sofa support you? How does it feel? What does it sound like? and other question to see what people would bring forward. The first draft group result:

death is the sudden give of a sofa.
its leather creak embraces you.
it doesn’t care about the lace on its arms,
or the coin offerings in its folds,
or its broken spring against your back.
it will be put out on the curb on garbage day.

Rather than leaping from subject to subject, it is more radial, in a way. There’s expansion and contrast but within a smaller frame of reference. As Mark Doty said, study, examine describe and it will naturally “yield depth and meaning that lead me to insight”. You lead with the object rather than drag the object around to what you want to talk about. It becomes the oracle and implicit of psychic state without explicit unpacking of what you mean. It can be quite elegant and economical of words.
Making other word pairs of things that don’t naturally go together (thunder is matching luggage, money is a confession, a candidate is an argument, my soul is a polished stone, a tatoo is a rubber duckie, chef boy-r-dee is a tazer) and use the same method she encouraged us to keep using the method to brainstorm another set and to also extend the death is a sofa idea.
The next workshop is floor 2A of the Arts Court on Daly at 6:45 on August 24th.
I’ll have to return later get back to the rest of the evening…

Some of KaDo Ottawa at the summer haiku meeting.
I suppose some of you don’t know what I look like — I’m in the red Japanese jacket in the front. I won’t name everyone but I will mention a couple things — the papers blowing in the trees each have a wish for the winds. Mine I thought out, wrote it in careful script, and upside down. Ah. But, as Claudia said, it’s positioned for the angels to read it best.
Looks like we’ll have a public event come November. I’ll post news when it comes.
A particularly neat moment of the meeting was when Betty finished reading the prose section of her haibun and the wind chimes which had been silent all along gave a song that stopped within the pause before her haiku began.
3 of the senryu of mine I read:

a new basil leaf
late summer-small —
bee shoulders a petal
*
salvaging the day-
reset the plunger
in public toilet
*
belt it out!
projecting haiku
over lawnmowers

I’ll stop fussing with this one. Set it away here rather than in backlogged files:

Who Drives?
“And so we plough along, as the fly said to the ox”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every moment is measured;
Every step is counted.
I didn’t come here to tell you
how this is going to end.
I came here to tell you how
it’s going to begin: All
men die, few men really live.
Create enough hunger and
everyone becomes a criminal.
A single grain of rice can
tip the scale. He didn’t fall…in-
conceivable. It seemed
excessive, but that doesn’t
mean it didn’t happen.
Not everybody gets corrupted.
You have to have a little faith.
You told the truth
up to a point. But a lie
of omission is still a lie.
The fool looks at a finger
that points at the sky. I can’t
express anger. That’s one
of the problems I have.
I grow a tumor instead.
A member of my own race
getting above himself; Angel
of Music, you’ve deceived me.
I gave you my mind blindly.
Assemble the monkey warriors.
I want my environment to be
a product of me. I won’t be
the one who vanishes.

—
A cento of movie quotes to see what new context appears from the quilt pieces of sentences. I don’t know what the effect would be for people who have a soundtrack in their head of these movies.
quote of Longfellow
Lisa Berndl (Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1948)
Neo (The Matrix, 1999)
William Wallace (Braveheart, 1995)
Ra’s al Ghul (Batman Begins, 2005)
Emperor of China (Mulan, 1998)
Vizzini (The Princess Bride, 1987)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Tracy (Manhattan, 1979)
Captain Picard, (First Mission, 1992)
The Sacré-Coeur Boy (Amelie, 2001)
Isaac Davis (Manhattan, 1979)
Tillie (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967)
Christine (Phantom of the Opera, 2004)
Rama (Sita Sings the Blues, 2008)
Frank Costello (The Departed, 2006)
Lisa Berndl (Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1948)

Other people’s reaction are a way to calibrate one’s own sensibilities. A sort of sonar blip of where they are at to map, interpolate, where you must be at. Maybe some people know their mind inside their head. It’s easier for me to tell what I’m thinking once its in text or mirror or gesture or bounced back to me by some deflecting off someone else. I don’t think that’s what’s meant when one says one needs community.
But as I meet people who have different permissions, loves and hates, I can stretch. Some stories can only be told with an audience that can hear it. Some only make sense spatially, or in sound or in movement or visually, or thru verbiage of symbols and metaphors. To find its shape is a cooperative act. If an idea is shut down the unconscious still may putter at it, but the development has to go like runners, twisting, searching access to audience of sun. If an idea is welcomed, then one can see if it to good, neutral or bad effect in a context. Ack, abstract.
Robert Peake is mulling over the distances between the known and the unknown, the gap between stated and unstated in poetry and how something becomes inherently poetry as distinct from general utterance.
What ingredient do you need for transcendent leap that is independent of stylistic? It seems poetry is a catalyst but that which reacts is the audience. Does the analogy between science and actual fail the leap of comparison?
I am not fond of “feeling it” as the Ultimate Arbitrator of Everything. I’d rather put more stock in long-vision. Emotionally-based brings up my skepticism of smoke and mirrors. I am not fond of relative-everything, but also am.
But poetry often is about relating, connecting, even yes, feeling, the words or the story or the sounds or the patterns and pattern breaks and the rhythms and being moved to more completeness.
I’d go behind the idea of poetic camps as unnecessarily limiting and sometimes counterproductive. Is the dichotomy of good poetry (and implied bad poetry) useful?
There’s my sense of words and that seems cut and dried, then I watch those around me respond to the same stimulus and give radically different response. Reactions that visceral aren’t faked, or if they can, to what end is opaque to me. People move towards whatever lights them up the way amoeba move away from too hot or too cold.
Something leaves me cold as what seems canned makes another enthusiastic. The rules that rile don’t apply universally. That sense that poetry develops like human evolution, building to make the previous obsolete seems false idea of progress. What is contemporary is everything that has gone before, remembered and reinvented for each individual and things which have yet to reach a groundswell of ubiquitousness. Radical new sandboxes are still sand.
How do you cut across the relatives and see what overlaps? Why some reduction to some definition instead of directive to go to what nourishes? Here’s how to prepare your own dish of what appeals. Eat this. Here are the principles: too much of this function and it will fall flat or go sour, or become something different where these traits are central. There’s no panacea more perfect, more superior. It depends on contextual need.