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.

A few days after the fact, I can say I’m home again now. I went from Sage Hill Experience directly to Purdyfest without wanting to touch the ground and all the nattering errands and practicalities that involved.
I wanted a lot from each…to change myself, as I usually do, except this time thru a route of new routines, new input, new questions, new people. Time will tell how much the global goals were achieved but what is clear is that I enjoyed myself.
Amazing sets of people. Purdyfest was 3 days of mostly camping but also reading in the round and a roundtable talking about the influence of Ted Plantos who I knew nothing about. He seems to have given a timely shoulder tap to encourage a lot of people to continue. Hanging out was sweet, except for that blasted mourning dove who tested my love of nature at all hours. The hardness of ground made bed that much softer we we got back.
The people at Sage Hill were phenomenal and the environment nourishing for mind, spirit and body. I talked at more length over at Humanyms on that.
It was something like Katamavik meeting writers coast to coast, but of all ages and equals in this experience of being able to relate to the experience of doing this odd obsession without needing to justify or get blank looks and need to define terms. People were curious and convivial. I was struck by how, East to West, Fred Wah kept coming up as an influence from various people. I had associated him with West coast sub-set but regardless of style, people referenced him.
Being in that time machine going nowhere but being present in that sealed context allowed new access in various ways. I haven’t arranged my life to get much exposure to short stories, novels and non-fiction — for those streams to be mixed with poetry readings showed me the unity in writing skill. The genres are not so worlds apart. I heard people and stories I wouldn’t have otherwise.
There were dozens of new and long-standing voices who weren’t on my radar at all, whether in person (John Lent and Ted Barris, and too many to list), or in book form (Gary Geddes, John B. Lee and Tim Lilburn). More Daphne Marlatt, Pat Lowther, Erin Moure and nathalie stephens to spend time with in person or page with the time to focus.
In the case of Susan Stenson I had heard her before on the page, but to hear in person puts a new depth and I now have a new book to watch out for: Her next book, Nobody Move, is coming from Sono Nis Press this fall.
For Sage Hill, part of my practical goal was: I wanted to pare down the unwieldy manuscript that ballooned from a few poems, shooting past chapbook length to somewhere near 190 pages. By the time I left home to go west, it got cut back to 130 pages but still too much and I was unclear on how it held together or didn’t. I have more of a sense of a couple routes to cluster poems, see where gaps are, blind spots in what I say or omit or oversay. Having people who don’t know me come and up and say, this part was good kiddo gives a sort of double-blind test of assurance.
Then there was the value of seeing other people in the midst of their projects and seeing how they think about its development was interesting. I liked getting into the meat of one idea, like space in a poem and just brainstorm around that as a group for 3 hours. That feeds the brain.
It was interesting to meet people I’ve only known on the paper or digital page, or known the literary effects, but not the name. And I was glad that meeting a literary hero worked as I was more impressed upon leaving. (You never know how such things might go in-person. Sometimes you love the work but then the person is a misclick. Or changes how the work reads for the worse. Not in this case.)
*
I was largely away from the internet for 2 weeks and any composition was in my head then to longhand, with re-writes literally being writing it over again. (My usual often starting with jots digitally or in hand enough to jog my memory to do rounds of editing in typing.)
I inhaled as much books of poetry as I could absorb. I aimed to keep myself open by Susan Jeffers motto: don’t say no, can’t, will try, would like to, and shouldn’t. say yes to life.
Part of the Sage Hill included tips on giving a good reading, exposure to great readings and things to read. It was structured with focused time and downtime that allowed the brain to percolate.
I have more of a sense of project, top-down point of view of what does what. A poem can work by itself. I wish I could remember who rob mclennan interviewed who won a CBC Literary Award with some poems but cut them from the manuscript because, although, strong, they did not gel there.
One-off poems or short series I can do but project level is a different management skill. I’ve been watching the model of how to hang a manuscript together, for poems to be a book rather than a heap bound together ever since Stephen Brockwell was talking about the distinction 4 years ago.
My eye has been on the lookout for how people understand this notion of collection versus, best-of gathered together. When is it a gallery show of art, versus a gallery with incidentally in the same place art. At 40-words I’ve played with the same notions of gallery hanging of poems, how one affect the one beside it, changes flavours by juxtaposition and keeps the palate fresh, or with too much change back to back, bounces energy frenetic.
What is the ratio for mixing it up? In readings I’ve been watching how people make a mood-arc or narrative arc with poems. Start strong but neutral, end on a light night like a dessert seems to work well. In linked poems in haiku-world, the same principle applies. At Purdyfest last year, we did renga and it was explained the opening is a handshake with nothing too risky, eventually you can get serious, then risque then you bring it back down to a calm handshake again.
*
So lot’s still to process. I have notes to go thru and questions to ask myself.
I actually applied for a federal grant for travel. This is the first time I’ve entered the grant system for anything. Even when eligible for EI, each time, I never applied. We’ll see eventually if there’s a pay-back in a financial sense. It’d be nice, but when I was teaching I just took unpaid leave, paid for national conferences out of pocket and absorbed the financial loss rather than enter the lottery of being knighted with approval. One does what one must. Working p/t or f/t for the cash economy, I was doing poetry the same. I’m not going anywhere. Been doing this poetry thing for what, 25 years (with my internal requisite earnestness). Provided I’m still alive, I expect to be still at in 50 more years, regardless of the money factor.
Gains are knowledge but more than understanding, gains are walking alongside people you appreciate, who wow you with their lives and words. And I met a lot of those people.

Once, years ago, I heard someone say that it is an act of respect for your own material to have it memorized. I can’t remember who stated it but I recall the challenge was put forward that if you, as the writer, won’t take that time with it, why should the audience?
At the Guerrilla Poetry Series the guy at minute 5, off camera, later explained how there’s a tradition back to ancient Greeks of composing poems with anchors so that at regular intervals, there are cues to remind you of the next part. Like the device of rhyme to hook you forward through the poem, mnemonic devices can assist but inaudibly. Only you may only know the associations but they can assist if you get stage fright.
At Raise it, there’s an interview with Sean O’Gorman, aka OG that talks about reciting and performing your poetry.

TN: What is the best advice you’ve received?
OG: The best advice I’ve received has come from Rusty Priske and the members of The Recipe who ingrained it into my head that the best delivery comes from memorized poems, and from Brad Morden and Nathaniel Larochette that helped me find better/faster ways to memorize a large amount of material in a short amount of time.
Nathaniel pointed out that I wrote out my poems in half sentences that took up only half of the paper and I broke the lines up to follow the rhyming scheme, but if i wrote them out in paragraph form it would allow me to find the poems natural flow and help in my delivery.
Brad Morden showed me that by memorizing a poem starting at the last stanza and working my way back it would keep the build up throughout the poem sharper because the ending is the part that I would know the most and at the peak moment of the poem I would have a stronger delivery.

At Purdyfest people ran about half and half of people who read off the page, with or without stumbles and those who dropped a poem from memory. Jim Larwill off the top of his head took requests and could perform from repertoire off the top of his head. Jeff Seffinga even when talking at the round table structured his thoughts with oratorial dramatic pauses that hooked the audience. Poems he belted out. Other poems he writes are quiet pieces. Some fit stage, some better fit page.
At Sage Hill people who performed mostly referred to notes except Gerry Hill who performed his poems. He also was able to create an ownership of words by speaking from diaphragm to audience ears, with the sort of composure that many poetry readings rarely see. Others could also hold the audience rapt with performing with the written script.
The act of working it until it is memorized is an act of editing as well, reworking so it all swings freely from the tongue. It’s not something I’ve done but appreciate when I hear. Do it myself? We’ll see.