Underway or on the way down the mental hatch:
sylvia legris, Nerve Squall (Coach House, 2007)
Paul Wilson, The Long Landscape (Coteau Books, 1999)
John B. Lee, Variations on Herb (Brick Books, 1993)
Gerald Hill, The Man from Saskachewan (Coteau Books, 2001)
John Lent, Cantilvered Songs (Thistledown Press, 2009)
Bernadette Wagner, this hot place (Thistledown Press, 2010)
John Barton, Hypothesis (Anansi, 2001)
Italian Women Poets, edited by Biancamaria Frabbotta (Guernica Editions, 2002)
Suzanne Buffam, The Irrationalist (Anansi, 2010)
Katherine Beeman, A Swamp and Forest Inlander Meets the Sea (Kasus Books, 2009)

Book and Briar Patch in Regina is changing into an office where you can make special order books only.
Aug 2nd, the bookstore closes. The shelves are emptying out. This is what’s left of the poetry section:

Everything is 80% off.

There are other odds and ends (emphasis on odds) like this kneehigh stuffed beaver for $100.
Gets one to think about the economic strains on Indie bookstores in Ottawa too.

I heard live at the OIWF parts of Susan Buffam‘s most recent book, The Irrationalist.
Some set me into my happy place of good poetry. I guess at the time Michael Lista’s Bloom impressed me more, because I remarked more about him. That was partly because I wanted to look into his method of writing and see how he constructed all that. The poems themselves were enjoyable and worthwhile. It’s a story I don’t want expunged from memory nor a refund for time spent. It was not opaque to me. Still, it surprises me the staying power of Buffam’s pieces.
Buffam remarked in April’s panel on how she never found writing fun but protracted pain and sweat, but one section of this book surprised her because she enjoyed making it. (I cheered for her internally. May it continue. Maybe that’s me being hedonist but if there is no pleasure, what is the gain? Life is short for ant-labour. Need some cricket time too. :))
Anyway, she described this section as scraps, cast offs. She tried to expand them into something larger or Make Them Into Something. That process kept failing until she realized they are complete in small lines. Interesting. It seemed a useful insight. How often do I try to twist the arm of ideas, shove the hostage this way or that, jump hoops instead of letting the poem be what it is.
Even 3 and 4 months after her reading, there were still poems I wanted to hear again. Such as this bit of page 13, in Death Toll Rises and Black Sea Thinking

And if it is desire I lack
I can sit down on a rock
And wait for my lack
To dissolve.
I can do so
And so I do so

“wait for my lack/To dissolve”. That’s the sort of phrase that makes a day’s reading worthwhile.
The concept of an absence dissipating until it becomes a thing, even an abstract thing like desire, tickled the brain then and still does. There’s something impossible and true-feeling in it.
I like the assumption of reconciliation with the future, assuredness that what is missing will come. There is no other option but cyclical. Each cycle is imperfect and diverging and yet there’s a calmness that overtime, things work and to make them work is a combination of waiting it out and waiting is a kind of active process. It is a choice to wait and a choice to not leave one set of options to do something else. Wait for it.

This chapbook struck me for its beauty in hand, the weight of cover stock and page texture.
After reading the contents — biographical poetic stories of a woman having to make morgue-trips to identify two of her sons to two accidents within two years — it became obvious how the fit of form and content made the binding even more striking.

I’m not sure how to convey it’s 3-dimensions. Dan Coggins was the book designer but with a Dan Coggins working for Time magazine, it might be hard to find the right one.
Mary Maxwell’s short story appeared in This Magazine in the 90s.
It is hard to write of such stories with a critical eye. The small details the narrator notices, like the bitten back word to the undertaker who assures her the car accident was so fast, he didn’t see it coming. She sees his arm position as if to shield himself. The person who walked away heard him say no. She knows the man means well with her compassion.
She walks a fine line, not maudlin, not overly light.

The satin tie connected to the reference to the satin pillows of the casket. The stark grief fits the black and white, simplicity of the cover. The flap that comes over has the proportions of a caskets. The title broken as it is conveys how making funeral arrangements, however professional, however tactful and kind, is still a kind of brokenness of “arrangements” being fracturing. The syllables break into almost meaning sounds of “arr” of inarticulate frustration, an “ange” which is not quite angel, not quite anger, and “ments” that is not quite “meant”. The entire piece is considered.

Olive Senior will be the feature at Tree tomorrow evening at 8 p.m. at Art’s Court.

This week’s Tree will have the second free pre-Tree workshop session with Guy Simser. He’s pictured here taking questions after the last workshop.
He’s looking at giving a context for how tanka developed in North America in the 30s thru 60s, an orientation to the influence of Sanford Goldstein and showing examples and principles to writing in the tanka tradition.

Here are some recommended classic works. Salad Anniversary sold 11 million copies in Japan. Akiko Yosano was a ground-breaking feminist at the time of Manchurian wars and her poems still stand out as remarkable and vivid. (Goldstein was one her translators.) Hers are not the poems of the stereotypical receding asian female. For example,

Spring is short
what is there that has eternal life
I said and
made his hands seek out
my powerful breasts
[trans. Janine Beichman]

Kaleidoscope by Shuji Terayama also was a work with great impact on how tanka is practiced. In this case the poet was 18 at the time of publication but with a precocious intelligence that led him to writing plays. UbuWeb describes him: “Poet, playright, theatre director, filmmaker, essayist, agitator and lover of all things anarchistic, chaotic, and truthful, TERAYAMA SHUJI (1936-1983) is one of Japan’s most revered and respected artists.”
The open mic portion had several readers and a solid set. The suggestion was made that one could also read not only your own work but a favorite poem of another to share.

It was an all-open mic Tree but by chance, the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara was able to stop in and start us off. David Starkey is pictured here doing a book signing on the 13th. His poems are anecdotal, humourous poems.

Last session’s Tree had A few things you should know about the Weasel (Biblioasis, 2010)