I saw this info card around town for Petite Mort Art Gallery and it got me thinking about venues.

It can do private or public functions, book launch, workshops, poetry readings, press conference, wine tastings, film location, music recitals, etc.
How much of ambiance is who shows up and who speaks, the personalities in the space, and how much of ambiance is the space itself that sets in tone?
If one presents material in ratty leftover spaces, among 40 year-old room dividers, on wobbly chairs, in the back of abandoned transport trucks, there’s a superficial difference than in state-of-the-art, still off-gassing plastics and paints, under halogen fixtures in a office tower on chic clean chairs. Does it change who is attracted or who stays or what gets said? Are there implicit incentives? How much impact does that message have?
How much does it make a difference to vibe and repeat returns, once people get settled, if we transpose the same poetry group to a coffee shop or church hall, art gallery or pub basement, gazebo or private home, lecture hall or bar, bookstore or restaurant?
What message of who is encouraged to come does the physical space indicate? Does timeslot make a bigger difference?
One is best to anticipate as much as one can. People don’t complain to organizers. They just don’t go and may spread word to others about general sense, sometimes without even consciously being aware of what in particular inhibits.
One can’t please everyone. That’s why there are more than one person doing the pleasing. Being aware of who is ushered in or discouraged out helps planning.
How are the acoustics? How many people can hear and see well enough for the level of noise interference and echo and lighting levels?
What would make the most people the most comfortable so there is no disincentive before they are even in the door?
Some come only if there’s alcohol. Or if there isn’t.
Is there is a way to mesh the event schedule with food on site?
How much of the target audience/participant demographic drives and needs parking? Or takes public transit and needs it close? Is access by flush with ground, stairs or elevator?

I’ll be out of province until the end of the month or so, but posts will continue here in my absence on a reduced schedule, every second day or so.
I’m probably offline, so I won’t be responding to comments.
P.S. Robert Peake says poetry’s negative capability teaches transferable life lessons of how to relieve “the intellectual anguish of trying to parse the world, like a chess board, into squares of black and white.”

I think Gustafson had me At the Cliff’s Edge. p. 33 when he said “the rake/and noonhour leaned against the wall.” Scalp tingles. That pays attention to the world keenly.

p. 9 of Ralph Gustafson‘s Tracks in the Snow, (Lantzville, B.C.: Oolichan, 1994)
I love how he presents. There are slow turns that balance each other. The title is immediately deepens the opening line. Without “the burden” setting it up, the opening line would be flatly ecstatic. Instead, I’m wondering, sarcastic or what does he mean by burden. The flavour is nuanced. It takes a wide stance of embrace then in stanza two becomes completely the opposite. One catches oneself with what is at hand, common. There’s a sense of tongue in cheek, “so it is known just where you are”. This saves it from being the narrator bored and stupid but a double sense of knowing where you are on what you measure, or by whether you use metric or imperial, your age, your country, perhaps your loyalty.
Stanza three confirms this suggestion. Measurement is bout continent, old wold or new. Forward or backwards looking. The scope is broadened out again to worldscale general but with specifics. There are concretes. Still all the content is pretty neutral yet phrased in a way so it is not bland. You can see the mind working.
Stanza four twists and extends. Still teh everyday language, the offhand manner, and yet we’re talking about commonplace here, eating and measuring and commonplace as that, murder. We are delivered grisly but in a concrete, matter-of-fact way.
Stanza five segues. Our associations from news are all murder from the middle east and yet here he twists again. He brings back the wood from the ruler, the measuring, the concrete everyday and reopens it to hope. People everywhere just want to build their houses, help who is their peer. And thus we cycle back to the ecstatic beginning. And the title and the burden of knowing these world of senseless violence and sense of non-violence co-exist. This is a kind of burden, this background of our informed world, far off and near.
Beautifully rendered and rich for re-reading. He can anticipate the flowers of what he seeds reference to. Because he addresses our assumptions, he demonstrates he’s aware of what we’ll think next but the departure from that direction doesn’t feel like yanking one about but redirecting to another vantage point so collectively it adds up to a more complete whole.
There’s a structure, logic and progression without making one feel wrestled down a chute of perspective. Even though he makes abrupt shifts and covers a lot of ground, it all hangs together and parts complementing and anticipating other parts. There is plenty of grace and skill and the person seems like he has his head together. He has peace with the ugly without it displacing the good.

p. 24, Tracks in the Snow, (Lantzville, B.C.: Oolichan, 1994)
He’s willing to change his perspective, admit his sense and expectation fooled him and do so in a way that is not preaching and not self-denigrating. And then he takes that experience and expands it out to a sense of receiving kindness from the world. Even in deep winter, all is not stripped away to the harshness of bark. Perhaps it is whimsical, personifying nature as benevolent when it is nothing but parts summing to nothing more, really. But still, as spins go, this is one which opens hope rather than sense of threat.

p. 13 Let us Examine by Gustafson starts with statements of how the world is. And then counters it with quoted speech, with the reference to who being where the neighbour lives. That is the second pivot of expectations since “editorial comments” are not often paired with everyday dialogue. The third pivot in the stanza is a biblical reference yet densely packed. Implied are the speaker as Jesus about to be martyred. The neighbour as being callous against him by speaking openly, dismissively against what he knows his neighbour loves and makes a life of. And yet in this emotional response, there isn’t vindictive, bitter lash, but circumspect mind watching mind.
He leaves the poem not happy with his neighbour calling him out as impractical dreamer and uppity bourgeoisie. The poem is the argument on the line in a rebuttal. Shall we examine this poem as a case example that one can be excellent and exact? Let us broaden this across history, not to hitch your wagon to a myth but to be as critical of self as one is of one’s neighbour. The relationship is rich.
It’s nice to see a poet committed to what he is saying rather than a vague dabbling in here are some things that happened. If a poet doesn’t care about what they are talking about, it doesn’t make a great argument for anyone else to care.
I love it when something has had so much intention put into it that it will bear up to a close read rather than be all dry-waffle flakey.
(Nelson Balls’s Bird Tracks on Hard Snow was released the same year so probably was a coincidence. I wonder if there was a nod to Gustafson’s title in Well’s Track& Trace?)

Opening page of Natalie Simpson’s Echo Localial (Edits All Over, 2008)
The poems don’t come unpacked. More Ikea model than Leon’s. Clint Burnham said of the book from 2 years before this chapbook, “Simpson is interested in whether words still communicate when shorn of their grammar. Her book is evidence that they do, and the poems that result reward our close reading.”
When shorn of grammar, I expect something like reason (by claire edwards). These stay in parallel lines on the page but its how the words move the mind not what posture they have to the plain of the page that matters.
Simpson’s poems are interested in turns and fractures and sound. The junctures come often but there is a movement away to out there and back to home base of wrestling with the notion of center and home. What it is doing works against a straight thru line of story. It is about feeling siphoned thru head to pick up vocabulary.
“Shale tight./ Shale slid./ eyelids by day.” That has a nice sound to it. Clipped and sounds play catch between words. What does that evoke?
Tight as shale. So tight it doesn’t even look like its has those sedimentary layers. Solid rocks, tending to scree. Home is an accumulation of layers that despite being stone, and despite looking like blue inert bedrock, can collapse and scatter easily. An apt sort of metaphor for the fragility of constants. Before your very eyes, that balance of stone. The vision itself is comparable to the unstable nature of the stone. Eyelids like shale, heavy and moving and opaque. Each phrase is a breath burst then a full stop of a sentence. Laboured.
It’s rather a dark vision of vulnerability. “And day all equations” suggesting that one is calculating how to hold this all together, or perhaps, how to save oneself, or detonate the loosening?
Harpy. What an ugly-sounding word. As chosen to be. So what makes this whole home of shale feel loose is someone nagging and scolding?
Natalie Simpson’s chapbook-length poem circles around the idea of what home is. What is it? Small bills, a damp place, she suggests. Home is where “some trucks blather past./A home is trying// Oh, blind, formidable. / Apology forks.”
A rock and a hard place, this home. The idea of world instability and low mood is continued from her accrete or crumble (LINEbooks, 2006). In the excerpt at ditch,, there’s a similar sort of pitch of playing sounds that are energizing to the tongue as it darts around assonance here of ah, ah, ah,

we fasten odd rhythm to our bodies: lantern and transom. a
climate of fallacy clatters. our bodies, you gather, are graphite
and pallid.

Words come together in unexpected combinations.

Natalie Simpson, Echo Localial (Edits All Over, 2008)
“Points of light flicker in oxygenated/sentiment” is an evocative phrase. Is sentiment a fuel for ideas?
Some have so much pent up that they backdraft with their projected feelings. Is that it? But the wall of firey ideas is hardly delicate like flickering points of light. The metaphor grounds the abstract sentiment with flames.
The turn comes quickly as the narrator recants “Sediment more/ faithfully records”. Which would mean word play of sentiment vs. sediment. Sediment suggests death, fossils records, ancient history, after an historical calm. I’m not sure what to do with the word faithfully suggesting diligent history having good intentions.
So the net is that feelings and ideas pass away, but what lasts are the structures, as in ideas expressed in settlement, or in the reality of burial?
I appreciate the sense of humour making light of itself in This side of the comma, this side of the comma. A touch of quirk of truth. 6 of one, half a dozen of another and there is not a this and that binary because as you move from this, you eye is on the next this. To each phase, it is the this not the that. One is present. Grab humour where you can in this all is relative context.
“Some kind of owl makes the news.” has an implied disinterest of I don’t care which owl. Particulars don’t matter. or perhaps owls don’t matter more than to mention that someone mentioned that they exist. Moving right along.
This is followed by “Some kind of/mental breakdown trumps others.” The hook of suspense is in the line break pulling attention to the grammatical parallel. It draws equivalency thru grammar between nature and nature of the mind.
Although they are real objects, the owls are in the abstract. Mental health although not visible is the palpable of the two.
The owls sets up neutrality of world out there, reported in contrast to the world that isn’t media, but immediate. There are mental health competitions and a pecking order. Does an episode of schizophrenia or bipolar beat a bout of monopolar depression two to one? What about nervous breakdowns? Do they win, but only if they go postal?
There are many things to vie for our attention. “Rub up slip shoulders./ Ship yard, flames./ Dark surges. Hobbled/ loose to lame.”
There’s a sort of symmetry and lullaby to sounds yet the imagery is nightmarish and monolithically, internally consistent dark views.
The selected elements from life to comment on are urban and seem to have an underlying world view that all is not recoverable, that things are messed up.
Rather than shelter, look at the bill. Rather than ease of stride or pride in being able to move, the hobbling and lameness is emphasized. Since grammar is stripped back, am I reading tea leaves? It seems unambiguous that the upshot is a downward trajectory.
Would it be cutting the legs out from under the message to admit more vantage points? I’m probably uncommon in that poets around me say they love the dark stuff. Crying at a movie or theater play or book for some people is lauded. I don’t get that. Don’t people have enough grief of their own and of those they love without vicariously adding more to their life?
Sometimes one shouldn’t read two authors simulateously. They curdle each other in the mouth. A palate cleanser in between would have helped taste both flavours better.
Simpson, in contrast to Gusafson, seems to work at selecting fragments that are stressful without any closure. I don’t understand the motivation of holding onself in such a headspace. Is it staring down the difficult to win? Does it seem that anything else is deluding onself about the nature of reality which is suffering? Is it like appreciation for tears in ones ears as valid? (Which it is.)
Gustafson in that work — and I compare him because they are both on my lap and head at the same time by chance — displays a charitable worldview that there are some issues but an overall sense of survival as a connected species that needs joy to live. p. 43 So the axel is broken and pleasure is fleeting…in Funeral Music he says, “Let us make music//Out of condition/ Out of pitch.”
Are we out of pitch? Off key or no tar remaining? No matter, one sings what one needs to hear to oneself. Letters and stories, one doesn’t want to forget. Rythms that soothe and talk beyond the language. Simpson isn’t anti-aesthetic but seems more the canary in mine than canary in living room’s cage.

Ottawa’s literary interview radio show on CKCU has a rotation of 4 hosts: Christine McNair, David O’Meara, Kate Hunt and Neil Wilson. McNair has made a Literary Landscapes Archives of interview shows she did starting in November 09. So far there’s audio of Kate Hall, Johanna Skibsru, Spencer Gorden, myself, Sandra Ridley, Jennifer Londry and Amanda Earl.