We’ll have a Symosium on Toronto Poet Ted Plantos, ‘the Cabbagetown Kid’, hosted by Julie McNeill and featuring a presentation on Ted’s place in the pantheon of Canadian People’s Poetry by academic Terry Barker. Kent Bowman, Peter Rowe, Mick Burrs, Carol Malyon and other friends and comrades of Ted will be holding an informal round table of anecdotes about Ted and his important literary contributions with the seminal Parliament Street Library Poetry Readings and Writers’ Quarterly Magazine.
Place: The William Shannon Room
The Marmora Public Library Building (traffic lights at the intersection of Highways #7 and 14.
12:30 to 2:30 pm Saturday, July 31st
Photo of Ted Plantos taken by Peter Rowe
ANOTHER DAM POETRY READING will be held at 4 pm on the small island in the middle of the Marmora Dam on the Crowe River. Musicians Morley Ellis and Kent Bowman will start the event. Allan Briesmaster will introduce new poetry collections by Kent Bowman and Quinte poet R. D. Roy. R.D. will then intro a new collection by Montreal poet Katherine Beeman. Anna Plesums will also launch a new collection.
After the music and the book launchings, a round robin group reading will give every poet attending a chance to read their work to a very knowledgeable and appreciative gathering.
Some limited rough camping is available in the Marmora area. All events are free & we encourage everyone’s participation. There are two excellent B&B’s in Marmora, and many small motels along Highway #7 for accomodation.

A call for pwoermds from Geof Huff and Dan Waber.

[Photo from Ridley’s Ottawa book launch in June]
Sandra Ridley‘s debut collection Fallout (Hagios, 2010) is one of those collections that accumulate. I could tell you lines that impacted but the impact in isolation would be meaningless. Rather like my babbling exclamations of major plot turns from a novel you haven’t read (but should). As in Miss Atomic, 1957 where the ending twists in an unanticipated direction.
The poetry collection isn’t built of a load-bearing stack of sound byte quips, or as JimK put it, built in the popular style of an overload “quirk-by-quirk surprises”. Although there are lines that stand alone and make one whistle, such as “Our failures have become the typical blur.” (p. 61) or from the Lift: Ghazals for C. chapbook which is rolled into this collection, “She cradles a nocturnal crescent, a lullaby moon.” (p.77)
Perhaps because it is Canadian we need to define it in terms of what it is not, rather than by what it is?
There’s no whimsy ruffles nor padded, baggy phrases. Each phrase counts and works but it is not so bare-bones that it feels harsh.
It talks about history and has a clear social criticism of nuclear testing and the impacts of it but doesn’t feel like an ideological waggling finger. The fallout from military is not just literal physical but social.
The language is not emotional and directive. It takes a hard positions on what to view and show. It is about showing not telling. Details are laid out, such as play by play of naive people pocketing shards of nuclear-bomb melted rocks as souvenirs, without judgement on the act. That is left to the reader to interpolate. This gives a respect for the intelligence of the reader.
The speech is vivid, crisp. Take the opening poem for example, p. 9

Funeral
First time the Officer rides in high style is four days after he dies.
His hearse is polished spotless, screw-you dignified,
reflecting the casualty he leaves behind.
She wears navy blue to spite him. No one looks at the lines she cut
into her hands. His affair’s denial stays unopened
in a clutch of his letters.
She presses a bouquet of tiger-lilies to her side.
Never given.
He said, flowers are for funerals.
The driver stumbles, fiddles with the latch on the hearse’s back-door.
She steps left to let the coffin slide out.
For a moment,
nothing else seems to happen,
but oh, does she miss him and regret.

There’s a sort of humour twisted in there. Even tho the speaker doesn’t move and doesn’t say a word aloud, there’s drama. Particicular details are pulled out, lined up. There’s an unapologetic stance. There’s grief but it balances without feeling maudlin because there’s spunk and spar in there. Thru the collection are these senses of strong women, defiant against events and people out of their control.
It does not feel confessional autobiographical in romantic female tragedy style, yet it has dark, hard subjects from a female point of view broadened out as human-scale. For example, individual vignettes such as this are set inside the context of the U.S. employing nuclear weapons testing. Between 16 July 1945 and 23 September 1992 the United States of America conducted (by official count) 1054 nuclear tests, and two nuclear attacks.
That would be into the planet’s common air, water and ground. Can we presume this had no fallout, literally?
As a society we quickly forget history and yet living memory extends to the 1920s, if we choose to not let the present overwrite the past.
In some families, stories of parents and grandparents are points of reference of oral history that can extend living memory to the mid-1800s. (I get that number from my hearing directly stories of my grandmother’s dad, my grandmother having been born in 1901.) Junot Diaz was talking about how memory still ripples out across decades. My summary of what he said included how he

stressed that ignoring something doesn’t make it disappear. The impact of the negative immigrant experience is still with us generationally. Boston Irish have one of the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide and violence in the U.S. and yet there’s no conversation about how that is the outcome of negative immigrant experience and being placed as an outsider in stereotypes.
Latin America, America, Europe, all have been shaped by the genocides and violence that we erase from our collective page histories but these historical actions still shape us on individual and cultural levels.

One gives a dignity to experience to not erase the hard bits and another level of dignity to not wallow and whine.
There’s this, and this, and this. Know this. And we keep moving.

John B. Lee, Hired Hands (Brick, 1986)
Pat Lowther, A Stone Diary (Oxford, 1977)
Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills (M&S, 1994)
Gary Geddes, The Acid Test (Turnstone, 1981)
Erin Moure, Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love (Vehicule, 1992)
nathalie stephens, somewhere running (Advance Editions, 2000)
John Lent, Cantilvered Songs (Thistledown Press, 2009)
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Not without Parables (Ave Maria Press, 1977)
Rae Armantrout, Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007)
John Robert Colombo, Abracadabra (M&S, 1967)
Marianne Bluger, Gathering Wild (Brick, 1987)
Heh, the list is sandwiched between two Bricks.
[Two later in the day additions:]
Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane (Nightwood Editions, 2004) and
Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffrey and bpNichol (Underwhich Editions, 1978)
What a mouthful. Is that too much to bite off? Too much to chew? (Someone stop me.) (It’s okay. I’ve self-regulated. Thanks for the impulse to offer tho.)
The first two I’ve finished and am re-reading selectively. The others are at various depths thru.
John B. Lee I’ve read interviews of and seen fragments but to come across by chance was ooh. And the whole collection to sit with was wonderful. It works as an entirety and in bits. Hugely resonant.
This Pat Lowther book I can hear. I’ve tried before and blanked out on why people raised her reputation. Maybe I wasn’t in a place to hear, or maybe I needed some of the items of thought in this collection now.
Catherine de Hueck does wonderful short stories. They click up shivers at 1/2 a page from the end of each. Raising a response reliably. How does she elicit that sense of mystic suspense like ghost stories even back to back to back to back. A queue of stories. Normally I’m jaded and annoyed at such conveying me along but this comes in slant, unfamiliar. She’s a good storyteller.
I won’t go thru item by item.
It’s counterproductive to assess anything too early, or perhaps at all. So these jots only of what I want most to retain.
*
As my habit, the reading list is to check in with myself, to have a record and since it is typed, to share so someone else has the option to read it how they will. Which also goes for the following speech to self:
I try not to be weak-minded, not to scoff at divination from entrails nor its equivalent for our time and yield to lessons of loss of digital file.
There is. Good and bad butt in more than useful.
Software instability is not to be co-opted into labour hands for fate. It is not directive or indicative of approval nor rejection nor lesson to build character to persist.
Not a sign. To designify is to deconstruct my cognitive habit that I dressed with religious words once. So, it poofed back to ether unsaved as any parabled demon.
Life is sufficient with every myth and magic in quotations as make believe, to toy with the simple-minded part of the brain, satisfy it, but it is not the adult in the room and to give it self-determination would be reckless and to give self-immoliation to the whole collective of self.

Bytown Bookshop mentions a study (published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility) on books and success. They found a correlation between simply having books around the house and how many years of schooling a child will likely complete. Children growing up in homes of more than 500 books had the greatest advantage.
Relatedly, Hippy Ottawa has programs, especially for immigrant families but open to others, to encourage family literacy for families with pre-schoolers.