I don’t have time for this poem.
Slot in other words for poem: person, moment.
What does that show?
Now leave out the slot. What is the essential aspect? Is it the object of the subject? Why the restlessness? Where is one speculatively rushing to? What is one doing to oneself by such dismissal of irrelevant or “done” data?
Sometimes certain poems are not at our wavelength. No amount of time on it of our willful, wailful, insistent volition would bring us up, down, sped or slowed to its amplitude.
A different hour or decade and boom, we can go at its speed, or thin-slice it with passion or impartiality. At some points, a poem just doesn’t.
We are at too much of a gap, or too much of an overlap to hear. Too same-same, too different and we feel there is no news or we are being messed with by a meaning being deliberately banal or deliberately difficult.
What’s that really about, the flip away from?
What underlies that closure snap, the frustration when a poem doesn’t fit the brain?
Is it the impatience to get the next hit of excitement, therefore a habit of passivity of being entertained as we like, when we like. A kind of being spoiled? Something that doesn’t click should be welcome to keep the brain nimble, rather than resented for not accommodating us the readers by reinforcing our envelop nor pushing it. The vanity of our envelop wants to be recognized. Selfish self wants a payoff on its own terms.
To step out of the envelop and make a departure, a jog to a different reference point, a rupture from it being about our narration and extend ourselves into getting into the headspace of another, disorienting as it is, to be imagine the backformations and transformations that would lead to the poem before, the reasons for this communication being salient to another and another’s groups.
That might be more useful and edifying than reading more variations on the same orchestra. More tiring. More isolating. Potentially unrewarding, but there might just be a payoff.

Part of the conference was a walk up Mont Royal for fellowship, exercise and maybe inspiration of some haiku.

The group spread out.

The park inspector wanted to know why were sitting there.
The talks and workshops and genko walk during the day were complemented by renku nights that ran to about 2 a.m.

People think of how to answer the next prompt, such as 3 line, autumn subject, or 2 lines, no seasonal reference, or 3 lines current affairs, 2 lines of moon without mentioning moon directly. It has to play off the one that came before in some way.
Lenard, leftmost, won second place in the genko walk haiku the next day.

There was also moving, laughter, noshing and gnashing but that’s harder to catch on film.

People write. Marshall is a fun moderator of the haiku and links passed in to select which ones ties best forward and back to act as the next prompt. Some people drifted in and out over the night. Some came one night, some two. Some handed forward a few. Me, I just keep throwing them ahead. 52 two line or 3 line haiku or links in 3 1/2 hour.


Marshall and Karen reading the 2 resulting cooperative pieces. They’ll get printed up in the Haiku Canada journal.

The book room ended making over $1000 in sales over the weekend and the silent auction had bids on all kinds of things that raised a few hundred as well.
Dave took lots of good photos from the conference.

ARMS UNFAIR – Ottawa, June 2, 2010, noon till 7 pm
Poets from Montreal and Ottawa will read outside the main gates of Lansdowne Park in Ottawa at noon on Wednesday June 2 to protest the Canadian manufacture and sale of weapons, ammunition and military components. CANSEC is returning to Ottawa City property this spring because last year a majority on Ottawa City Council shamefully overturned this municipality’s 20-year ban on hosting arms trade shows.
Readers include:
Hugh Hazelton
Susan McMaster
Jorge Etcheverry
Erika White
John Akpata
Gary Townsend
Czandra
Raymond Filip
Claudia Morrison
Jim Joyce
Paul Tulloch
and others
At 1:30 pm the reading will move indoors to Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank St. at Clary and from 5-7 pm back to the main Rally for Peace at the gates of the Park.
CANSEC is a significant symbol of Canada’s government-subsidized, military-industrial complex, a significant drain on our economy, as it artificially props unsustainable economic sectors. It facilitates rather than discourages wars, invasions, occupations, orchestrated regime changes and human rights abuses.
By opposing the influx of arms promoters, tanks and other war technologies into our local community, we can press for government policies that respect peace, human rights, democracy, and the environment.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Poets Against War and Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) rally

What kind of poem do you want to see in the world? Commission it and ryan fitzpatrick will write it.

Todd Swift of Speaking of Poems has a 12-screen interview between himself, rob mclennan and Marilyn Bowering pondering The Art and the Agony of the Poetry Anthology.
There is a problem of choosing. Every choice is an omission displacing another option. It’s a kind of tyranny. You anthologize what you know about and like, therefore are caught in your own filters. If it is an anthology by committee, there’s the risk of democracy and the pieces that cause reactions, positive and negative, to cancel each other out and leave one with the solid, but unexciting choices.
Do you choose what is well-known? If everyone has internalized the items as reference points, then who would buy it and why? To keep it tidier than a shelf of sliding magazines and scrapbook clippings?
What does an anthology do? It can be a 101 survey course. It tends to pick up the most frequently read pieces to get someone up to speed fast without having to live thru the decades that shook those items loose as pivotal and resonant, transformative for more people than your average thing. If it hasn’t been tested with large number of readers then it’s more of a gamble.
One doesn’t need just more data out there that isn’t chosen as exemplar, insightful, worth repeating on some grounds. It has to be discriminating in some way. Defining terms can help. Hashing out the use of the anthology — am expanded Cole’s notes of lifetime achievement award, or examples of skillful expression, even if it was a one-hit wonder.
Still, if it is to be the best of, that’s a bit slippery. Even in cultural relativity, you need a tether to qualify it, to make the word best meaningful.
To discount the question of good or best or any relative term evades the question. To say important, or skilled or interesting, is still relative to something. What is the post?
The more specific you can be would seem to be helpful, yet the best non-linear visual poems reacting to oceans in some geographical region in some short time frame among those who heard and participated in time gets to be…more like a magazine call. How does one compare except on the subjective, “I could feel that”. I suppose sometimes I read a poem and can recognize the dexterity and skill but don’t care for the intent or message. Sometimes I can see there’s a kludge quality more than an offhanded workman style but the net effect and message perfectly is what I need at the time, or what the culture wants to hear at the time. Right time and place rather than best worker. Is that as much at home anthologized?
To bind some poems together is to say: look at these. They tend to not be like an anthology of one person’s collected. They aren’t hung in a gallery to bounce off one another. They are more hermetically sealed in drawers of different chapters.
What would distinguish a magazine call of poems from an anthology except binding and total number of poems? How is the process different, distinct, or have an advantage vantage point over a poem or book of poetry winning an award?
What is an anthology trying to direct our attention to?
Hopefully it presents context bios of who was influenced by who so you can read further and see how the collection of people filtered the world.
Maybe someone who curates an anthology would put from obscurity someone who doesn’t get as much attention, making a revisionist history choice. By choosing from anyone in the world, in theory, the national or world of poetry subset anthology, may be able to sidestep cases where in the name of fair, everyone gets an equal representation, which serves to highlight inequality of skill in some anthologies by writers circles. It might end up more even if someone impartial judges blind.
In essence it is part of consensus building of what is worth carrying forward. What concepts and styles have currency according to the set of values of one set of people who are curating? If you find a curator who matches your poetic values, it’s easier to find a passageway to a new-to-you poet that will resonate with keys for some doors that are locked.