[We now return to the regularly scheduled programming, joined in progress…]
I suppose that’s the thing with imagist and story-driven poetry. The brain starts to paint scenes and not a blessed word can be retrieved that’s salient. I remember what I saw between my ear. I recall the experience of the poem, but how did he put it now?

George Sipos read from The Geography of Arrival and Anything but the Moon in Ottawa June 12.
As he read, I was thinking this reminiscence on making a model airplane as a kid — the joy augmented by the glue fumes, the way the plane all came together after such effort looking like it had already crashed — would make a great animated film, or book trailer.
It was a bittersweet comic sort of tale of how the toy was embedded and coming from its time and yet is a different thing. With his adult mind, he realizes that the fighter planes were ominous and symbolic, and yet he can still step into child mind at that time, and how that it wasn’t about being a supporter of air raids. He was a kid in the colony. Planes were buzzing Europe. It was just that little piece of plastic bomb being set on straight. That was the thing. And yet with the context of reflection the whole memory has a further depth.
His story of the huge model of a ship transported by train across the country among the furniture as they family conveyed themselves in parallel by car would work lovely in an animated short. There’s a small plot arc. There’s pangs. There’s reminiscence of good times and a strong sense of place and time. It has a depth to it.
There was a dramatic tension to give the poems and prose shorts an architecture and prevent them from being flat. There was a historical depth of reflection that some poetry lacks.
He said he didn’t know what to call his book categorical. They were memoirs that found a place on a page in small chunks. The project started out when someone he knew moved to his old home town. He wanted to share with her all the memories he associated with a particular intersection or place but realized, she wasn’t the audience. But now the stories were all rising from memory. What to do now? Write, write, hone, and eventually, voila, a manuscript, a publisher, a book.
In a way, any discussion of what we call a communication is moot. Poem, memoir, flash fiction, anecdote, literary short…does it work? Does it “have legs”? What makes it work?
Wolff’s law of bones says that adding a load creates strength, while taking a load off weakens. The bone remodels its structure according to the need of use. Without tension there is no architecture.
The extension of that into literary, suggested by TA Carter at Tree, is that poems need a sort of tension and movement — a starting point, a stretch, and a return — otherwise the structure of the poem is weak, atrophies. For a poem to have legs, it needs some sort of heavy load to bear, to work against, to make it strong. If there is a vignette with no tension, it’s shapeless. The dramatic arc, expressed in some way, defines the work so that it can move to the reader.
There’s a push to create words that sing and snap and get at something worthwhile. What counts as worthwhile?
In the attempt to be modern and fresh, there’s an attempt to break away from story of self, and there’s a sense of taboo, in some circles, on anything that (tsk, tsk) might suggest self, because that is self-indulgence.
To engage on sound alone is music. What does that leave for poetry? When there’s a push to leave narratives to the domain of short story, novel, movie, news, story telling and carve a new domain for poetry, how to give a hook to poetry that anchors on something that a reader or listener can feel? What engages at deeper than superficial level to make it engaging and not just an intellectual, huh.
When there are rules on what qualifies as worthwhile poetry, it seems a little off. Rules are useful. The limits are suggestions of what works for what end. We can’t lose in the shuffle the main point of gratification of the writer. Sometimes an exercise in device and methods serves the intended purpose of creating tools for the toolbag but the real use of poetry is when something needs, for whatever internal or external reason, to be expressed.
Each person is trying to work something out in their head, work thru something, explore or prove something. Why should there be advised or prescribed routes?
Here are some popular binaries: Only use sentences. Never use sentences. Repeat for emphasis. Never repeat the same medium- or low-frequency word in the same poem. Keep in the same speech register. Vary the diction. Keep the density even. Keep the density and syntax uneven. Avoid articles, first person pronouns and prepositional phrases. Never use any tense but simple present tense. Disturb conventional syntax. Don’t bring in an omniscient narrator. No editorial asides. Have no point of view. Play with multiple voices. Tell only things which are true, or emotionally true. Avoid autobiographical.
There’s something suspect in an insistence to only tell things according to rules intended as guidance. To use rule without understanding the purpose is misuse, a jot and tittle literalism. What does the rule aim to create or avoid?
This insistence on writing poems in the present tense only, whether they are poems of current experiences or past has limitations. It’s great for low literacy textbooks but is it necessary for poetry? Simple present tense doesn’t automatically confer vivid immediate writing itself. It’s trying to avoid sloppy discontinuity, poem skipping around thru time like the mind does. It aims to smooth flow.
Backforming to give a narrator precocious awareness of the context at the time of the event is a mechanism to avoid the sense of an omniscient narrator stepping in. One doesn’t want to be told what one is being told. It’s a tricky thing to get around. In writing we are working out what occurred in some past and in the present. It can take a lot of lot of decades to get a eureka. We want to be true to the past, real or imagined, in the context we are building with words, but have the other foot in the present. How to smooth that out? There’s an art to doing that.
To stay in the stream and stick knowledge in the historical narrator’s head retroactively is a kludge, a shortcut. It can feel forced and Sipos avoided the pitfall. His narration is in two timeframes but there’s no jolt and no sense of imposition on the past nor editorial aside to the reader in present.

Defining terms, or “poetics taxonomy”
People debate words. I’m used to arguments on what counts as poetry and haiku and the resulting bruised toes or public accept anyone’s self-nominated place and self-defining inclusion while no longer associating with that part of the fold, or else trying to educate that way of doing poetry into the right way.
[Sidenote, speaking of haiku, an article on the day in the life of tinywords, a haiku journal, via GotPoetry News]
Defining any word for forever, realistically, is trying to can the ocean to stop storm waves. The larger the population, the larger number of people who can get quorum and diversify definitions and affirm each other and go off to their own colony of poetry.
As with language itself, isolated small populations grow and into accents, dialects, short-cut idioms, eventually becoming a whole other language. How to keep it mutually comprehensible? Does insisting on a Queen’s English for poetry tie everyone together and keep a united empire of literature or just prevent evolution while suppressing creative forces of change? Who gets to be the queen and who has to learn to understand the Queen’s Poetry while speaking their local poetries? Royalists of the canon have no quibble with there being a queen and their careers go on the same. Others want revolution to become the Head of State of Poetry themselves. Others refuse to recognize that anyone should be more recognizable than any other and want a flattening of hierarchies of long tail effect by resenting big names and deifying small names. It’s a variant of raising the embattled Common Man as romantic ne’er do well hero. But what happens when Common Man starts to get recognition. You can’t be an anti-success to the degree of becoming successful. That breaks the model.
Both models of is based on status thru limited access. Not everyone can be the Queen’s Poetry of state addresses and transcendent hope of the right binary triumphing in the just the right level of delicacy of subtle dance thru meter and chance resonance with a wide group of mainstream of the street.
Not everyone can be the rebel at the cutting edge of syntax, subverting ideological systems of all, one non-phrase at a time.
Both are niche-based. Each engage the idea of establishment from one end of the stick. Is vispo trying to overturn the empire, carry on as if empire didn’t exist, running on both sides of the imaginary fence?
In the comments on the post at Ed Baker in April there was a discussion of what fits under the umbrella.

Conrad DiDiodato: Visual poetry, descendent of 20s Concrete, Dada & Fluxus poetics, is by nature an amorphous beast: by nature designed to stand any establishmentarian notion of Art on its head.
Bob Grumman: Well maybe. I think it’s “just” a fusion of poetry (words) and graphics. Which bothers people I call “segreceptuals”–for segregating their modes of perception from one another and thus being unable to appreciate an art that is both visual and linguistic.
Conrad: It’s in spirit and practice anti-art.
Bob: Possibly for some. Certainly not for me. For me, it’s one very effective road to Beauty, hence, an art.

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Why are we doing poetry the way we are? Maybe it’s a conscious decision to look for new questions or new answers. We’re doing it for ourselves as individuals, to find that groove in ourselves, no matter what the outward look of the end or transitional point results.
Ok, maybe we could compromise and find the overlap of gratifying ourselves and stretching to please another and explore but that’s still about ourselves. Maybe we do it to avoid ease, or to create ease, or to be anti-group or to be group, but the impetus is internal.
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[I don’t get any of it. I’m in a maelstrom of confusion; have been for three sessions of Influency now. But I keep coming back. Stubborn. Stub-born. Born stubbing my toe? Born. Stubbing. Born.]
~ Chantal Perrot on Meredith Quartermain at influency salon

Meredith Quartermain on Michael Boughn:
“Blaser, Boughn’s teacher and life-long friend, saw that the problem of certainties is in the way we use language,[…] We go wrong, he said, when we use words to dominate the real and when we rely on violently repressive grammatical relations in sentences; in that language, we see only dead reflections of our tiny selves.
Instead, he called for breaking up conventional syntax, or relations between words, so that another powerful force inherent in language itself—“an immense untapped laughter” (The Fire 30) —can speak in the poetry. […] disturb conventional grammar and particularly its subordinative relations.” Blaser explains:

The statement I drive the car is much less interesting than what the car is doing. A key, silver-silk, gas, burns, gears, motion, outer parts, wheels, hubs, spokes, fellies, tires, Fortuna, distances: I drive. Perhaps Amor hitches a ride.
The first example is arranged according to hypotaxis, the “subordinative expression” of what is going on in the sentence—I’m in charge. The second is arranged according to a kind of parataxis, one thing beside another without “expression of their syntactic relation.” (The Fire 98)

That’s the best explanation for the mechanism of how messing with syntax works to add up to more than a burden of a list. It’s not what you’re doing. It’s what you’re not doing.

You know the sensation when you find really good poetry so you can finally fully exhale? It’s as if this is what your body had been waiting for and didn’t know it? Now that you’ve read and reread, you can end your day happily?
It makes an Iota of difference: This little California letterpress place makes some pretty things. The hand feel is lovely. My second delight was the back inside note that it was “Hand-set in Ehrhardt 12 pt. type, & printed on Mohawk Superfine paper with a 1913 C. & P. supercool foot-powered platen press.”
Like an attention to detail of the medium as well as form and content. The paper is a kind of subtext, don’t you find?
I got a copy of Lank, Beak & Bumpy. The sample poem they have there is about music so I’m kind of tuned out, being remarkable clueless on such manners. I can collocate some musician’s name as being a musician but that’s about it. Still the sounds in the poem and the conscious attention to line breaks strike me as being not your run of the mill composition.
I’ve reread it 3 times, and uncharacteristic of poems I read, I enjoy more each time. One

Later on our Wedding Night, Two Silences in the House
Like a Shaker bowl
the house contains the silence
of belief, and
like a Navajo basket
it is keeping quiet,
deathly still, in fact,
about God’s plans.

There’s something delicious in how the lines unfold, shift without jarring yet expand the vantage point. Each pause is considered like a foot attending to floorboard squeak in a darkened home.
The objects are simple and tactile. If it were a glass bowl and a generic basket, the impact would have fallen out completely differently. The difference is material between the objects, but also cultural background, the sense of Other and that people think have disappeared. Both we associate with place and history but both still live and continue.
What is the poem talking about? The newness of relationship, people “made one flesh” in legal, religious and physical sense perhaps. But each blinks into the dark. This new life has started. Now what?
The joined house is both empty and full of belief and expectations. It is simple, but descended from an entire lineage of belief and unstated assumptions.
In the marriage of the house, each are still separate, complete vessels onto themselves. Both are carefully made and yet outwardly different, one decorated, one plain, both rustic.
The future is contained without, and from out there, in the unknown at the same time. Such a lovely set of paradoxes.
Throughout the chapbook there are great ringing phrases such as “the flame of your attention” or “breathing wanted nothing”. There’s a careful tread that doesn’t feel like poet voice proclaiming that something transcendent is about to be said. There’s a lovely blend of emotive and level-headed, circumspect. There’s a minimalism and a telling of story but not a wordiness or overt hand of craft drawing attention to its cleverness. A pleasant balance.
It is not all somber. He shifts up with poems of the minimalist with lines of 1 to 3 syllables and ones such as “Possibly Why the Buddha was Fat” which has a tender kind humour to it as well. There’s a sense of being well in the world in these poems. It’s like a movie where you can see the actors actually like one another. The relationship of poet to the world comes thru in tones.
As the Buddha poem title suggests, even his titles are attended to, such as “Remembering when I found that place behind your knee”. There’s none of this habit of toss on a bland title, and get on with the “real reveal of poetry” within the body of the poem. The title is the first hook and Jackley consistently does that well too.
A pleasure to read. I’ll be on the lookout for his name.
Wayback Post: from 2004, Ghazals, particularly Lorna Croziers.

PRECIPICe is out with contributors including: Lillian Allen, Phanuel Antwi, Kemeny Babineau, Kate Braid, Caitlin Burt, Rita Dahl, Amanda Earl, Roger Farr, Julia Fiedorczuk, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, katrine marie guldager, Linn Hansén, Niels Hav, Tytti Heikkinen, Martin Högström, Keith Inman, Silja Järventausta, Satu Kaikkonen, Jørgen Leth, Lee-Ann Liles, Angela Long, Niels Lyngsø, Bartłomiej Majzel, Esa Mäkijärvi, Daphne Marlatt, Malcolm Matthews, rob mclennan, Leigh Nash, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Fredrik Nyberg, Malte Persson, Pearl Pirie, Niina Pollari, Dan Post, Cia Rinne, Jenny Sampirisi, Richard Scarsbrook, Martin Glaz Serup, Kate Siklosi, Chet Singh, Carolyn Smart, Bradley Somer, Morten Søndergaard, Kathleen Szoke, Sheila Watson and Andy Weaver.
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Coach House has a 50% off backlist sale.
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The bpNichol was won by Alisha Piercy, a Montreal based artist/writer. Her winning entry, ‘YOU HAVE HAIR LIKE FLAGS, FLAGS THAT POINT IN MANY DIRECTIONS AT ONCE BUT CANNOT PINPOINT LAND WHEN LOST AT SEA (Your Lips to Mine Press). The awards will be rescheduled for sometime in September.
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That’s Blog Out Loud Ottawa, 2010 where area bloggers do a live open mic of their most popular posts.
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Some interesting bits in the Torontoist interview of kevin mcpherson eckhoff

Jacob McArthur Mooney: Play gets a bit of a bad rep in contemporary Canadian poetry, despite the wealth of poets who’ve made it central to their practice. For me, play is about the joyfully ignorant, a willingness to engage with things I don’t know shit about. The opposite of this playfulness, really, is experimentalism, at least in the purely scientific model of the word, with its suggestion of the poet as master and overseer of the words, negotiating constants and variables in some controlled, specific, way.

Think this gets back to this ongoing debate of I’ll-talk-loosely-you-listen-loosely. How precise to be? How close to dog the step of the reader’s known path? How far to diverge from reader or fact or internal sense? Must it have a sense on first read? Or is a poem not only milestone but transitional phase thru information that people can get some of but don’t need to entirely understand?

kevin mcpherson eckhoff: Don’t expect. Most of the “meanings” are only (or less than) half-present. I suppose my hope is that readers become master-kid-observers themselves and approach this project confidently and curiously and individually.

Seems straight forward but I can see a couple circle where it would be contentious and antagonizing. In some poetry circles it’s changing the rules of the game from skill of being a cargo of meaning which is too subtle to be quite explicit but all the audience need do is receive whereas middle-distance gaze and poking about at possibilities like this requires the audience to engage but not clench and shake the poem down for all layers of meaning. I mean, people can do as they like, but it’s not structured with that kind of intricacy so that a secret pocket will drop some contraband ooh.
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The narrator is implied without an explicit I because without a narrator there would be silence not words.
A lot of poems begin with I, which is to say, let me tell you about myself but is that not like a business telling a customer: let me tell you how you can help our business. What the customer wants is to know how the business can help them.
That’s the nub of good communication. The speaker is interested in the listener. Not completely in a servile or interrogation way while giving up no vulnerability but not blithely ignoring the audience either. There’s give and take in positions taken.
The speaker makes room for the listener. Too withdrawn into royal we or passive voice and the speech does not come out to greet the listener.
Too far into monologued polished stories without a stumble, and the listener does not have space to take some floor too. There has to be demonstration of desire to hook the reader.
If a poem is didactic, with a slanted point of view to convince the listener who is spoken to, as if presumed a blank slate, there isn’t the respect that the listener arrives already knowing some things and can figure out some things. The densely packed phrase presumes a listener can parse faster. The loosely packed phrase may move slower than a listener can hear.
For example off of the top, embedding what can be implied:
A) The woman was nervous. She wore rings with tall setting proving her wealth. She sat at the metal desk. She adjusted herself, contained at his remark, her hands tucking onto her lap. Still you could tell she was tense. They heard the rain drum on the window glass.
B) At the desk, the gems on her rings ticked off the metal as they fidgeted in her lap more after he made a verbal jab. Rain on the window.
To get at what is most salient, it may be obviously rising out of it all or all may need to be expanded first. If to each person I’d tell a different slice, what if I take the story I’m forming and put it in an email to Person A, decide no, I’d tell person B, delete nothing but expand where that person would need, then to C, then D….Each person is a means to get to some aspect of self so by aggregating those, it’s not only a more complete picture but a recombined self.