What’s today? Fried day, Herd’s day, Wends day, Toes day, or MmFun day? A Funday Poem by Amy Barlow is in part [read it all],

Barefoot on the sidewalk/Deliberately stepping in dog poop just to feel the squish/and leaving human pawprints behind as she/heads for the library to read Ayn Rand/backwards

Barlow’s participating in the One Single Impression prompt game.
“Glowers
/by glow are overcome, flowers by flow.” ~ Heather McHugh at Jacket Magazine.
She has a new book from Anansi, upgraded to serious. If I hadn’t seen the Arc review, I’d have missed that. I got her eyeshot and enjoyed it cover to cover.
I like this Arc issue with its hefty percentage of reviews and the dueling reviews where one review is rave and the other, ahem, pardon, what’s this book? With different positions noticing the same thing, then we have data.
Have you see the video Slippery by sandra alland? [ via Matrix New Feminisms issue from February]
Coach House still has their backlist sale. Tempted (again) by Excessive Love Prostheses.
At Open Book Toronto, Porco interviews Barwin on among other things, punctuation in its general particularness and The Punctuation of Thieves (Hamilton, Ontario: Serif of Nottingham, 2010),

The book presents a series of prose-poem meditations or excursions, each taking as its inspiration a punctuation mark. You transform each mark into an icon that contains a multitude of meanings. For example, “?” begins, “A small island, a curling flame rising, obsidian, a djinn hissing from the prison of its tittle. // An exclamation mark bent by the wind, a cupped hand seeking purchase on the sleek face of the page.”

Enjoying still, bit by savored bit, the old book by Steve Venright Straunge Wunder like p. 51, Picture

one by one she removed her fingers from his suit pocket he drew a pistol then shot her a glance of deepest longing and handed her the picture he had made no attempt to conceal from her its violent erotic symbolism.

Love how the brain has to work at continually at discarding yet keeping as it reparses the grammar.
Back to that idea from influency salon that to mix the hierarchy of language is to break the referent’s hierarchy. It nags, yet feels wrong.
It’s like the whole idea of subverting language as some little man heroic kick at the Big System. You can in in the system and overturn the ideas or use the style and syntax of “radical” and reinforce the tired ideas.
“Nothing says “radical” like a well-written grant application.” ~ scream.ca (heh. cute.)
To trouble the language may help the mirror of the narrator to realize there is a barrier between referent and reference to use a fish eye lens but the actual doesn’t change, only the perception. Is that enough to change how future referents are made? It reminds me of the test on mood: clench a pencil between the teeth to force the physical shape of a smile and it back-creates the mood compared to the control in the study who just did the test with their mouth in any shape they defaulted to. Would it force a new route to get to the same thoughts or does a new route force a new destination. Neither is ensured.
David Mason Books made a chapbook by Brian Fawcett entitled The Northern B.C. Riles with The Regulations for Snipe Hunting. it’s a hoot. Had to read it all twice with delight. The segues between chapters are fun, such as the last rule of Survival in the Bush when logging is

22) Knowing when to shut her down and go to town is the most important survival skill you’ll ever learn

(Turning the page, the next chapter is Surviving in Town)
One of my favorites might be under The General Rules where

10) If you say ridiculous things with a straight face, 50% of people will believe what you’re telling them

I’d add that 40% of the rest will believe that you believe what you’re saying and nod somberly and not let on that they think you’re a fool. The remaining 10% will get the joke and laugh with you.
My Literary CV, such as it is, is finally updated.
swarms by derek beaulieu is out.
When asked what her hopes are for what readers will take away from her book, Pearl Luke said, “I’d like them to have no regrets that they spent twenty bucks on a book, instead of a movie or a bottle of wine.”

I uploaded 3 dozen pictures and put captions on a public FB album of the Ottawa small press fair. (Awkward that I can’t put captions with iPhoto and that cover Flickr and FB to not duplicate labour with cut and paste.)
I got only a few from reading of the night before and they’re mostly grainy. Will put up those half dozen that I can recover somewhere. To my knowledge this is the only picture with me in it that was taken.
It was lovely to see the couple dozen who made it out to the reading and to get well-wishes from people. I took notes on the reading as is my junior scouts journalist habit. I’ll post them sooner or later, probably.
Spending an 8 hour day talking, moving from person to person, meeting and meeting people again was fun. My voice is stripped today tho and energies are flatter than old roadkill. Quiet R&R day today…
My Flickr album of OSPF is here

Barry Dempster read at Plan 99 in Ottawa June 12th from each of his 3 latest collections, Blue Wherever (Signature Editions, 2010), Ivan’s Birches (Pedlar Press 2009) and Love Outlandish (Brick Books, 2009).
I meant to get back to mention more of this reading earlier. His reading was a lovely mix of tones. Some patter but not undirected filler, rather brief set ups for the mood of the next poem when changing gears. Some comic, some achy, some nostalgia tempered by hindsight. There are poems that drop sweet phrases like one about feeling utterly fulfilled and sated by an art gallery and asking himself, “is desire sustenance?”
Poems of his Every Person don’t come across as some noble lowest common denominator of grit but something more innocent, such as being in love with singer after singer and the accumulation and the nimbly sketched scene brings its own tragi-comic sort of framing — teenager’s little room dreaming big. And then the delivery of pause of half a beat, then, “or was it Linda Ronstadt I might have married?”
There’s a sense of humility in the humour. It’s a hard balance, not raw, not proud of mistakes or sounding bitter and sarcastic, but compassionate with an astute observation that nails a moment, gently.
In his Blue Whatever there’s a poem on p. 55 called “If I Can Dance”. It exemplifies that, and the brave position of admitting ones own foolishness. Here’s the start,

Muscle-strained thighs ache
to shake loose, reconnect to hips.
Dance diagnostic: my body a blueprint
of sway and groove, a little orchestra
jamming my chest, slamming/swishing,
blood swirling in an upside-down tambourine.
To hell with child post or eagle flying,
this new oomph is a goose with clothespins
on its wings, a major wriggle

What lovely, lively images behind the image of dance-floor disaster, yet while I cringe at the picture of this improv chicken dance, I’m rooting for him. Some may armchair referee from their safe positions, but they lose out on the fun of learning and he’s going for it. He has the nerve to try to dance and keep going until he does figure out the footwork. The joy of the scene comes out in the sound.
The three books have some lovely turns of phrases and sounds that give multiple readings extra boost of depth to get more from. It’s a pity I was running late after my dawdling talking to person after person, and rushed off before a chance to say how I enjoyed the reading. I also appreciated how he looked entirely present with whoever talked with him afterwards. He gave his undivided attention. It’s a fairly rare skill and/or personality.
I like how he’s telling stories that I don’t know. I can’t say at any point, I’ve heard this before. Such as the story of a horse whose face had reconstructive surgery. I don’t know anything from direct experience of that, although I lived with horses for 20 years. It starts (p.23),

The barn is ripe with geldings and mares;
how well they get along without
the bother of balls and fidelity.
The one stallion snorts by the far door,
as if disgusted with the easy
equanimity, knocked the gate
with his hammer hooves, letting everyone
know they’re unsafe. A sheen of nervousness
in the air, flecks of hay drifting
in the sliced sunbeams like tiny flares.
Except for Sprout, across the way,
one of the castrati, whose head-bends
beg a bold friendliness. From the left,
he’s suede and apple butter, a profile
fit for a coin.

From the first phrase, we have the sharp sensory ripe. And a pivot. We expect, perhaps manure and there is but already, expanding to more…the gendered smells, the mare urine distinct. You get the sense of sexual hormonal air. And then another pivot, if you did or didn’t know what gelding is, you do now, or in a few lines when we get to castrati. The room gave titters at “bother of balls and fidelity”. It’s fitting the context and yet not expected.
The stallion is disgusted by the “easy” and the line break completes meaning enough, but the sentence expands further as if the stallion needed a moment longer to think past his testosterone for the word. In the poem in the air is a pleasure of sounds. On the page the line breaks give such extra interesting weights, another “easter egg” for the visual. Read line by line it is not just the stallion but equanimity knocking the gate to come in as the animal kicks back.
There’s the turn from the expected phrase “let everyone know they’re safe”. A line ends, dangling on the word drifting. The sunbeam in the dusty barn is given a fresh view. It adds to the richness of context. Then we turn to the main character and in contrast to the nameless snorting stallion, he has a cutie-patooie name, “Sprout” and even the rhythm shifts around the introduction to him and it prances with less critical content words. His harmlessness is even stated freshly with “head-bends”. He looks like a cat wanting a scratch behind the ears. You have the set up of his character and beauty and then another pivot. But I’ll lead you to read the other 2/3rd of the piece.
During his reading, his intro to this poem, entitled Blindness, gave another layer. It doesn’t matter to me if the story is true or composite or fabricated but to hear about the anecdote of context makes it extra interesting. Apparently he does Poet Walks with students, like a ginko walk, where they focus and observe what’s sensory around them.
One time they went to a stable and met this horse that became the source of the poem. After having had urged his students to explore the world, taste dirt, sniff this, sniff that, he didn’t have much margin to shy away from the horse he was shy of. It’s just a nice thing to know on top of the poem.
The book’s not all patted pretty nor gratuitously nasty. It has some humour, some pathos. It is carefully built. There are nuggets to reward thru the length. A lot of it demands to be read aloud because it’s fun to the tongue. One last excerpt I’ll show you is from page 35-36, “Temporary, A Lament”, in which the Graceful Letting Go of the Transitory has transitioned to Fed Up.

Be bold, be possessive, tie Buddha into
knots, say no, you’re meant to be mine. Of course,
this will achieve nothing but misery,
but your misery nonetheless

Heh, that’s fun. Been there.
I’ve yet to read the whole book. Sometimes I say a collection is worth it if there’s just one poem I must own. But this has a few and the reward I get is enough to merit re-reading so getting thru the whole could take some time. The poems feel like a nice place to be with a personable sort of company.

My new chapbook.
You can’t tell in the picture, but the cover of “over my dead corpus” is shiny metallic silver. (Yay for book bling!)

Pearl Pirie’s “over my dead corpus” is a feast of sounds, playful and thoughtful poems culled from the corpus of the world.
The main source corpus is over 500 pages of scrap notes that served as fodder for recombinance.

Some of the poems in it appear in the current issue of PRECIPICe from Brock University, and in the just released issue of Switzerland’s Dusie 10: The Canadian issue.
The latter has new writing by: derek beaulieu, Joe Blades, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Emily Carr, Jen Currin, Amanda Earl, Lainna Lane El Jabi, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Judith Fitzgerald, Asher Ghaffar, Phil Hall, Sharon Harris, Peter Jaeger, Monica Kidd, Anne Le Dressay, Gil McElroy, Barry McKinnon, rob mclennan, Kim Minkus, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid, Shane Rhodes, Sandra Ridley, Stan Rogal, Natalie Simpson, Christine Stewart, Aaron Tucker and Chris Turnbull.
Tonight’s Lit Landscapes w/ McNair is on the ottawa small press fair w/ Amanda Earl on the air at 6:30 PM, 93.1 or CKCU
over my dead corpus is to be launched at the pre-small press fair reading June 25 at the Carleton Tavern and will be for sale there. There are 50 copies made. $5 each.
Also releasing from Angel House Press and co-launched at the pre-Ottawa Small Press Fair and OSPF is rob mclennan’s chapbook from AngelHouse, “house : a (tiny) memoir”, a combination of memoirs and polaraids.

“I want these stories not to be misunderstood; I want them to be seen as what I remember, what I believe to be true, from my vantage point of some three decades later, and thousands of miles. It felt like reclaiming something that had been far away for a very long time, but no longer. It felt like bringing out the good out from underneath all the bad that came later, overshadowing so much of what had happened before.” ~ rob mclennanM

Both will be available at the Angel House table at the Ottawa Small Press Fair the afternoon of June 26th at the Jack Purcell Community Center. Come and see all the tables and literary goodies!

A.F. Moritz was the feature at Tree on Tuesday. He took an unconventional tack reading not only from his work but some of his favorite pieces by writers who influenced him. He also read from The Sentinel (Anansi, 2009) [3 audio poem samples at that link].
A room of about 40 people trouped over on a dark drizzly day to see the reading by the winner of the 2009 Griffin Prize.
I wish I’d taken careful note of the poem of his that I liked best that he said riffed off (what). [Paper is superior to undertrained memory.] It was about a bus ride and from the point of view of a woman accidentally falling asleep on purpose on her attractive incidental seatmate and seeing on the sly if she could get any sort of rise out of him as the countryside passed. It doesn’t seem to be in The Sentinel. Which one of his previous dozen or so books? He brought a few. Still, not knowing that chance at re-reading, I still gained. I could see what people talk about of his gentle sense of humour and sharp eye for detail.

Moritz also rolled like the consummate professional he is when the venue changed, and the sound system squealed. He and the others projected without a mic. When the bartender shook a martini shaker thing, Mortiz made a maracas gesture and played with whatever came. An Elvis song coming over someone’s cell phone not turned off and being searched for for a few bars? No problem. What a pleasure to see such grace. What a nice man.
The tribute to poets gone before, was to Pat Lowther. TA Carter did a workshop around Gary Snyder, Cold Mountain and John Brandi.
The the room was friendly and cozy and people, authors and audience were good humoured about this life things. Readings are always a nice excuse to see people you know.
Things may not be what you expect, but that doesn’t preclude them from being good.
The next reading will be back the Arts Court June 27th with Olive Senior who won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her fiction collection, Summer Lightning, and who was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for her poetry collection Over the Roofs of the World. The next two pre-Tree workshops will be by Guy Simser starting at 6:45.