“Even showboating technical virtuosity can be worthy of interest but merely vain people can’t bring themselves to care enough about the craft to attain virtuosity. You have to love the thing itself. […] If you never get beyond nurturing the writer self-image, it’s an irredeemable wankathon.” ~ Daily G

Thurs Sept. 23 is a special Voices of Venus for 2 reasons — it’s not in scheduling conflict with Tree so I can go, and it’s a line-up of 4 people who I’ve wanted to hear read or read again. They’re bringing in Vox Femina:

half of a troup of internationally known poets and activists. Comprised of Luna Allison (Ottawa, Montreal), Jill Battson (New Mexico, Toronto), Sandra Alland (Edinburgh, Toronto) and Adeena Karasick (NYC), Vox Femina promises an evening of unforgetable poetry that will stir your soul and make you think.

(thanks to Apt 613 and Christine McNair’s event listing in the show interviewing John Lavery for the heads up.)
And speaking of upcoming events, the fall writers fest schedule is up.
Venues are now scattered around town so have to read the listings carefully to give yourself travel time. My best picks:

• 14 artists collaborating for 7 performances 7 minutes long in music, spoken work, and digital art, presented by PEN, Arts Court Theatre on Oct 14
• relit awards at the Barley Mow on the 20th
• history of the cello on Oct 21 at Southminster United Church,
• Comedian David Rakoff at the Mayfair at 6:30
• Transgress is usually good, 22nd at the Mayfair, 8 pm
• Ken Sparling and Sheila Heti sharing novel excerpts at the Manx at 5 on the 23rd,
• Sam Kean on the History of the World from the Periodic table at Southminster United Church at 8 on the 23,
• Books and Brunch at 11 a.m. with Micah Toub, Charlotte Gray, Roy MacSkimming and Lawrence Martin at National Arts, Panorama Room, 53 Elgin St. on the 24th
• Sandra Birdsell, John Lavery and David Bergen at the Mayfair Theatre, 1070 Bank St. on the 24th
• John Newlove awards at Southminster United Church, 6:30 of the 25th
• Poetry Cabaret with Peter Norman, Sandra Ridley, George Murray
  and MT Kelly at the Mayfair Theatre, 8:30 on the 25th
• Soccer stories with Dave Bidini and John Doyle at the Ottawa Public Library Main Branch Auditorium, 120 Metcalfe, noon, Oct. 26
• Outsiders: 3 novels by Anchee Min, Emma Donoghue, and Alexander MacLeod (one on Pearl S. Buck) at the Mayfair, 6:30, Oct 26

A lot of talks of reinforcements of popular ideas: terrorists, torture, ghosts, WWII, depravity, murder, that predictions of future are off. Hm. I like the open university type things better. Noon hour author talks on craft are all gone. Still, at least one thing to taste per day.

Me with the sculpture by Lynda Cronin + Jean Jewer + Pearl Pirie + Maureen Sandrock

Looking thru the bleu.

Guest book.
The vernissage last night went well. Somewhere around 2 dozen filtered in and out. Gillian Wallace, LM Rochfort and I read at the opening. Poems are posted on the walls and chalk on the window sills. People are invited to leave their responses in chalk around the room.

Blink Gallery Exhibition continues at Major Hill Park:
Friday, Sept. 17, 12 – 6p.m.
Saturday, Sept 18, 12 – 5p.m
Sunday Sept. 19, 12 -5 p.m
In conjunction with the Sculpture the artists have invited other poets to perform on Saturday Sept. 18, beginning at 2 p.m. The readers are: TA Carter, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Sandra Ridley, Pearl Pirie, Sean Moreland, Margot Gallant, LM Rochefort, Gillian Wallace and Laurie Koensgen.

Karen Connolly signing copies of her novel at Tree Sept 14, 2010. Done with Burma and, for now, novels. Her previous books were about being away and this one is about being with both feet firmly in Canada, trying to parse politics and history, personal and public, power and gender relations. It’s about family and people living on the street with addictions but tells stories with a grace. She was reading from a collection of poetry underway. The poems built together so far are from between 6-10 months old and 6-10 years old. They made me look forward to their completion.
Ben Ladouceur read at the open mic a short poem about being on another continent from a friend, imagining them being in a hundred million years, carbon meeting carbon, as brothers. Gillian Wallace read a couple poems which you can read on her site. A little sound bonus of in person was how her poem about an outhouse ended with “walk back whistling” (pause, next poem) “Listening”. A lovely little tie to bridge poems. Murray Citron’s poem was dedicated to a CBC Radio 1 newsreader who speaks so clearly that, “like a verse by Donne, every syllable gets its oxygen”. T.A. Carter was in Paris with “her girls”, the left and right ones each having a name and habit of their own. I do hope you’ll get to come across that poem yourself one day. Perhaps it’ll go up on the Tree site. I read a couple new poems which I might mix in with the Blink Vernissage on Thursday.
What else? Have you heard that an umbrella organization for poetry reading series is getting going? (Announced at Tree last night.) It has representatives from half a dozen reading series around town. The group is still unnamed but will advocate for poetry in arts and cultural funding, help promotion of events and get this long-awaited Ottawa Poetry Festival underway.
You saw the sneak peak to what Apt. 9 has coming next?
Did you see on FB that months after Sean Moreland gets back to town, he, Aaron Kozak and Collin Campbell have started a new reading series?
And you know that the art-lit issue of Arc launches this Saturday at 5 at Plan 99?
Oct. 1 is the launch of the AB Series season with legends Nobuo Kubota and Penn Kemp. Oct 16th is Jay MillAr and Shane Rhodes.
In other writing news, Joanne Proulx is offering an installment of her fiction writing Snapping the Sheet: Creative Writing Course 1. (The spots snap up fast because she’s a great instructor. I took a novel-writing course with her last fall.) “Learn to write clean, creative prose and bring engaging stories to life. The course covers both writing technique and the art of story-telling. Together we will focus on where story ideas are found, effective openings, the shaping of the story, kinds of conflict, and satisfying endings.” (5 weeks starting September 21.)

Sunday, October 3 at Collected Works
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Terry Ann Carter and Frances Boyle read at Collected Works – 2:00 p.m.
Poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A Song for Simone”– a conversation between the poet and French mystical philosopher Simone Weil. Originally from Western Canada, Lorri Neilsen Glenn now lives in Halifax and spends her summers in Saskatchewan. The author of many academic books and two previous books of poetry (all the perfect disguises, 2003, and Combustion, 2007), she served as Poet Laureate for Halifax from 2005-2009.
Terry Ann Carter’s third collection of poetry A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press) will be launched in Windsor this autumn. Her chapbook, A Monk’s Fine Robes: Haiku from Cambodia, is forthcoming from Leaf Press, Victoria, B.C. Carter has served Ottawa as the Random Acts of Poetry poet for the past five years.
Frances Boyle’s fiction and poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Room (and its predecessor Room of One’s Own), Arc, Contemporary Verse 2, and Prairie Fire, and the anthology In Fine Form, The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Her poem “Momentum”, which won the Diana Brebner Prize, was also long-listed for Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009. She received second place in Prairie Fire’s Banff Centre/Bliss Carmen Award. Frances is happily at home in Ottawa, but draws on her still-strong ties to Regina and Vancouver.
—
A reading with 4 readers at Collected Works, the evening of October 5, 2010, 7:30
East Meets West II: Ariel Gordon, Tracy Hamon. Christine McNair and Pearl Pirie
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. She has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press, 2008) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press, 2009) and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms..
Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010) is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to represent adequately the wonder and devilment of being with child. Hump is a love poem written to a father and child, to a lover with a glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty and faded but still greener than most.
Tracy Hamon was born in Regina, SK and grew up traveling between Regina and her parents’ farm near Edenwold, Saskatchewan. She holds a BA Hon and a MA in English with a creative option at the U of R. She is currently the Program Officer for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. Most recently, she started a reading series in Regina called the Vertigo Reading Series. Her poetry has appeared in numerous Canadian literary magazines including Grain, Wascana Review, A Room of One’s Own, sub-TERRAIN, and Event as well as numerous anthologies. Recently her manuscript of poetry on Egon Schiele was short- listed for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards. Her first book of poetry This Is Not Eden was released in April 2005 and was a finalist for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Portions of her latest collection, Interruptions in Glass (Coteau Books, 2010), won the 2005 City of Regina Writing Award.
Interruptions in Glass (Coteau Books, 2010) bites down on the metaphors memory stores, exploring perceptions of everyday exchanges, familial relationships, loves, and losses. Is the language of our aging hysterical or historical? These poems supply a manual of conversations, studying the present by peeling back the past, letter by letter. Snowmen, plays, rice and even disappointment are some of the images that provide places for readers to park and devour the connections. It talks us through the metallic moments we continue to consume on the journey.
Christine McNair‘s work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, CV2, the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Descant and a few other places. Her poems were featured in Dalhousie Blues, a collaborative project with Sean Moreland, Jamie Bradley and Caleb JW Brasset (ex-hubris press, 2009). Her work was also included in the Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House, 2010) and Rogue Stimulus (Mansfield Press, 2010) anthologies. She is one of the hosts of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes program and works as a book doctor in Ottawa.
Ottawa-valley born, poet Pearl Pirie has had poems appear thru dandelion, ditch, PRECIPICe, Dusie, 17 Seconds, 1cent, and Ottawater. Her chapbooks include over my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010) and boathouse (above/ground, 2008). Just returned from Sage Hill, she is currently working on a couple collections as well as her usual several blogs. Her upcoming collection ‘been shed bore’ (Chaudiere Books, 2010) includes plunderverse, zips, remixes and a sonnet redoublé. In a poetry built on the strength of play, Pirie’s writing moves at the speed of sound, slipping up against silence. The poems in the collection are eccentric and perceptive. It is an examination of nation telescoping from the immediate macro view and the distance after historical calm. The combination of landscape poems and plunder makes for an original take on our world.