How can we remake the narrative of a poem and poet so that it isn’t a case of structurally “subject acts on an object?”
Subject Verb Object is pervasive. Even in languages with different or flexible word order, our thought structure says in life and meaning and poem
a) there must be agency in the form of subject
b) there must be action or a state of being which is action of living
c) there’s an object wherein that action must have an outcome large or small.
What if one of these things is not necessary? How would we get ourselves out of the dramatic frame of mind that project constellations onto stars?
*
Can vispo be a route hermetically seal us away from culture and the habit of narrative arc?
Letter forms or phonemes in isolation like specimens studied under glass, scientific isolation apart from behavior or context.

• What is the form saying?
• What is the botany of a serif?
• What is the natural range and co-species in the ecology of the non-seriffed h?
• Is the non-finial nature of j indicative of anything?
• If we alter that, does anything significant and unexpected change in the natural selection of syllables available to hunt?

*
I don’t know what I’m doing but that’s no prevention nor cure. Not knowing what you’re doing on a sub-text level, doesn’t prevent the sub-text from being spread thru your words and doesn’t take away culpability and excuse agency in the bigger system you are building.
Todd Swift’s essay on poetry and world politics goes 23 pages deep into response and responsibility of a poet to news. He surveys what poets have said, Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Adrienne Rich. He relates how Tom Paulin feels, that poetry is never about the ostensible subject anyway so there’s no need to sully a poem for being about contemporary news on the basis of subject. Rich says

I know I learned two things from [Yeats‟] poetry, and those two things were
at war with each other. One was that poetry can be “about”, can root itself in, politics.
Even if it is a defence of privilege, even if it deplores political rebellion and
revolution, it can, may have to, account for itself politically, consciously situate
itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language.
– Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet (1986)

[More by Swift at AngelHouse Press Essays]
If poetry is by nature moving and potent, why should it be proven against petals rather than for social change? The Peace Rally last month brought poets forward with protests against weaponry. (Vids there of speeches and poems.)
Knowing what you want to do on a sub-text level doesn’t mean you can direct it.
Can silence or speech be a good deed for a day? Preventing one meaning isn’t so much a finger in a dike as pressing your finger to prevent water from moving against a submerged shell.
*
Can anti-meaning really be meaning-avoidant? What does it signify it to write only about dew drops on a flower? To use humour or never stray from earnest? Or to make patterns with letters with no intended meanings?
What effect does it have on the writer to choose a path of asserting what is right and model healthy world-forming word behavior versus to call out damaging behavior?
If you want uptake is it better to be subtle or blunt, oblique or talk thru parable?
If silence is brutality, what is compassion when somewhere there’s a death, a bomb, a protester, an injustice?
Are poets to be storm chasers? Wouldn’t that say that the only thing worth attending to is big picture or big picture thru small picture? Does it matter what any individual thinks, says or does? It all matters.
*
What is it to not tell a story? Reactionary, away from the media and mind’s relentless insistence on their narrative heroic story arc. It’s a rebellion form the propaganda and a refusal to engage in the construction of myths of the moment. Can you step outside of construction?
*
Can art and self and culture be separated? Some take automatic writing to machine macros generating flarf or spam as being poetry. It is towards the clockmaker view of creator where it is wound up and goes. Some works and generates more of the same, and some fails. There is no intention to make the success but it happens. Sometimes what should work, by chance, is obstructed from generating more. This poetry made of shape and sound rather than story still might ride the roller coaster the way music can, setting up tension and release, suspense and surprise but it disrupt the cliche expectations.
Rather than a model of poet as god of close micromanager or small things, every gnat on the sparrow’s feather attended to, the clockmaker just tinkers and that’s enough.
The lyrical poetry makes a romantic personal universe where things connect. Objects and animals are there to used to tell about self, anthropomorphize into models of self. The bottom line becomes self-serving, a sort of sycophant planted chorus. This is tiring. All things get directed thru therapy or lesson.
An alt reality of randomness says it is ok for things to not connect. Disjuncture is not as bitter stab at revolution, or to annoy the reader, but a gesture of acceptance of observing some things with an equal hand.
Some give a nod to dadaism as nonsense out and out as the only logical response to political social nonsense. Others are just admiring the purity of form the way painters would. Creating symmetry is an act of meaning. Refusing to create symmetry is a meaningful act as well for creator and viewer. Refusal to use all the oratorial gambits for good propaganda is to lay a different set of choices out for self and audience. It doesn’t coyly bait the reader/viewer listener. It can be a conversation without the sales pitch for ideology incoming. No right-cross punchline. So it’s flat sometimes. Ironic, jaded, absurd, comic, or noise pattern with nothing presented and nothing to pull from it. Why should everything serve story?
*
Hugh Waterhouse said, “my opinion, subject to all of my prejudices and ignorance, and may be safely discarded without damaging the writing ecosystem.”
It is all an interconnected system, writing and life and cultures. Is communicating the subject and angle, omissions and inclusions, innocuous or dangerous or transformative? Is silence complicit and cooperatively promoting or smothering while relegating as best ignored? Is what is talked about creating a telling negative space that is conspicuous, the silence acting like arrows pointing at something else?

It’s always a tiny minority that get the signal’s crossed and smoking.
On the sexual mores in publishing thing…would the solution be upping the percentage of overt ogling of male writers by women writers to balance things out in the culture?
Women check out and rate males, but generally not within male earshot. Funny how women can openly ooh about the cuteness of a male’s voice or eyes and not remark on the content of his reading performance at all. Men doing the same for a women’s performance would be handed his fuzzy dice.
Men are such delicate creatures, easily threatened. Too firm of hand and women can scare them away. Too subtle of hand and they don’t perceive the interest. Maybe that’s the problem. Subtly. And rule difference? Men in mixed groups tend to police men who do where women in mixed groups tend to support the practice.
Is the issue males not protesting so vehemently when harassed? And not being listened to when speaking up when feeling miscued?
Appropriate, early frank directness and listening between people not between gender reps. Maybe that’s the key.

RaiseIt.ca is a new online magazine dedicated to covering, criticizing, supporting and elevating anything arts in Ottawa from the perspectives of local artists, promoters and community members.

The name “Raise It” references the title of an iconic slam poem by Kevin Matthews (dubbed the uncle of Ottawa’s slam poetry community), a phrase that is now ritualistically shouted in support of poets before each performance at Ottawa’s Capital Slams. It is a call to unite a group of people, speakers and spectators alike, around similar feelings and the desire to express and share in them; RaiseIt.ca aims to harness the same grassroots energy to address all forms of art in Ottawa—from music, theatre, film, and dance, to photography, poetry, painting and graffiti—to bring all forms together to grow in their abilities and their influence under the same sympathetic roof.

On July 5th, we’ll be celebrating the launch with an event on all three floors of the Mercury Lounge (Collection, The Mercury Lounge, and Bar 56).
7pm to 8pm (Collection) — Meet and greet, info session
8pm to 12am (Mercury Lounge) — Music and other performances by:
Members of The Recipe (2009 National Festival of Spoken Word Champions), Louis-Philippe Robillard et Keur Fidèl, The Three Little Birds, The Magic Beans, Free Will, Hyfidelik and Kevin Matthews
9pm to 12am (Bar 56) — Jazz with Crimson and Blues

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