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.

Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés — for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that’s almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves: Call it ______

TV sitcoms?
(Ok, maybe cheap a shot. They have solid grammar.)
Blogs instead of “proper news services by trained journalists?
Wikipedia instead of a “proper” encyclopedia?
The printing press that common citizens can own?
Literacy for the masses who are not even trained in history, logic and reasoning like priests and lawyers?
Which threat is this that’s impending?
The slush pile according to Laura Miller at Salon.
The paper and digital marketplace may be overrun by an evil — people able to communicate. Like with text and stuff. (Maybe even with pictures allowed.) With more choices of voices. Egad.
I knew from sentence one I would get prickly from the slant. The 2000 words start by comparing a dictator’s death to the Death of Publishing. It presumes publishing will die, and argues this will cause worse chaos: More options for knowledge.
Comparable arguments as against sex ed and porn: can’t let people learn ideas or they won’t learn it perfectly and perfection’s steady march will be impinged on by the masses. The masses will be impaired by too much access to too much. Peoples, they can’t handle it.
Why does change get rung in with Armageddon fear that all will go to hell in a handbasket and (gasp) it won’t even be a Gucci one? Isn’t this a case of popular argument, substituting speculation for investigation? (Yes, my reference is a comic strip. Your point?)
Isn’t that selling people short? People work out ways to get to goods they want, and to convince others they have goods worth wanting. The means may shift and so do people.
Some things are best left unremarked on and should be left dangling to just swim past, but seriously, leave this ignored?

One thing is true: Aspiring authors have never had more or better options for self-publishing the manuscripts currently gathering dust in their desk drawers or sleeping in seldom-visited corners of their hard drives.

How dismissive is that? Wait, is this The Onion?
Right, because authors will be able to place work faster than they can polish it and want so badly to pad their CV with half-baked work for the millions that will bring in that people will be forced to deal with low quality reading material. Result? Human genius will never leave obscurity. The solution? All thoughts lesser but perfected genius must be silenced so these can be heard?
Apparently it is the fault of not enough gate keepers to keep unworthy things from the market. The wisdom of crowds and the capacity of people to sort out this issue isn’t up to the task.
And what’s this notion in her article that people go to book superstores and Amazon and find what they want thus don’t need more books on the market?
(Double-check) Nope, I didn’t read that wrong.
Even when I know books exist, sourcing them is hard, even by request thru indie stores. Superstores have many things, but like general stores do not preclude speciality stores from existing.
Yes, open a big box store and people to herd over from small family businesses. People short-sightedly buy whatever is cheap without considering where it comes from or the effect on local economy.
That won’t change if we limit producers and product.
Some of the market will want to buy local and small-run, at any economic cost because they have the ideology so inclined and the disposable income to allow them to pay more for products that are made in places where the cost of living is higher. Some people will make trade-offs to afford more expensive, harder to find, vetted, objects to read.
Some will want to buy cheap and internationally masses-vetted or marketing-corp-vetted, regardless of any systems cost. Printing overseas where paper and labour is cheaper using the economy of scale, shared distribution networks lower unit costs of any given distribution, centralization of warehouses and marketing, having automatic systems instead of man hours bring down the costs. This scale of printing has a winnowing effect of what makes it to print and wide distribution. It represent one niche of the market. Some people love books that are cheap and can be blown thru quickly. Not all the diet has to be artisan fibre.
Some will do both. But individuals choose that. Making more gatekeepers to prevent people from joining the marketplace as producers won’t change the market behavior.
Being able to get more reading material in more forms means more high carb reading material may zoom thru the system, but also can be the means of access for more high nutrient, high protein ideas to come.
She reports,

Bowker, a company that tracks industry statistics, calculated that, in 2009 alone, new titles published outside of “traditional publishing and classification definitions” numbered 764,448. Yes, you read that right: upward of three-quarters of a million books in a single year. Not all of those books were intended for a general readership, but

Intimidation by big numbers? Being able to know everything was never the case. Even Renaissance men, when scientific knowledge was smaller, never contained all of human knowledge nor could know all that was said anywhere.
The long tail effect is very long and people have lived in parallel lives with each other, away from each each other, in text and not in text. We have always accessed knowledge by what comes by us, one life at a time, worked out routes to ideas that resonated.
A canon of a dozen titles “everyone knows”, for example, imposed from above, would create one kind of world from one kind of world that omits some aspects of existence. A world where there are 6,830,586,985 of us human ants able to move around, communicate cross-culturally, travel by jet and internet, creates a different set of dynamics of what can be accessed. This is an advantage, not a threat.
We have 1 billion of us living in squatter slums. 82 percent of the world’s adult population are literate in one language or several. [UNFPA] That makes for a lot of people who might want to communicate with a group in text instead of one-on-one face-to-face. Is that the end of publishing? Or more people born and publishing and more people who wish to read?
It’s not worth the energy to call her on some of that, in a way. She’s upset. The economy is shifting. Businesses are closing. If people don’t buy enough books to pay the rent of authors, publishers, bookstores, the whole economic superstructure built on market expansion to sell communication, who’s to blame?
Selling words when people offer them for free is hard at any times. Market is fickle and most people don’t trade their time and cash without consideration. The time to consume words for any given audience is finite. That puts more pressure on the system.
I’m part of that problem, offering words for free, just as if we were talking in air without making anyone buy any of them here. Free undercuts the competition for time. Time is the finite resource more than money.
Those who sell ideas in text, like in newspapers, chapbooks, magazines and books are in competition with everything in existence for time…sports, family, music, marathons, human rights, botany research and fridge sales. It’s all a closed system and trade-offs. That doesn’t mean we should try to cap any of the rest of the system in the name of protecting publishing. Ok, so I’m an optimist. it will all shake out.
Newspapers and magazines, did they take a downturn when people could photocopy handbills/broadsides? Or are they complementary feeding an appetite for ideas?
Is it like a shoe store opening beside a shoe store? Intuitively you’d think that would create a loss of business but then 5 shoe stores open in a row and people know to go there because if one store doesn’t have it, another one might. By cooperating with goods and information, in this closed system of the planet, we create more demand for the real product which is not paper, or calfskin or papyrus or Kindles but a means to get to ideas and ultimately each other.
(About 1370 words. Web-unfriendly length. I’ve been about as verbose. Pah. )

You know about This Ain’t The Rosedale Library? It is a small indie book store that got behind on its rent. There’s a movement to donate to see if it can float again.
A Jane Reichhold talk. I’ve read her so often and heard her referenced but I never heard her speak nor saw her face before. She’s talking about Basho.
This Saturday afternoon is the Ottawa Small Press Fair with readings the night before including me reading from my new Angel House chapbook.