SA Griffin is touring with a bomb.
In news of his tour, it’s explained that he bought a Cold War-era bomb and is filling the metal with poems about peace. The idea is to create the constructive from the destructive.


the poetry bomb securely fastened into the tour van
Originally uploaded by buniwabbit
(More tour photos)
Griffen has been a poet, publisher and editor for over 25 years. “I worked on staff for underground alt poetry zines Shattersheet, The Moment, and Nuthin’ Sacred, then published and edited my own zine (Sic) Vice & Verse with Rafael FJ Alvarado for 9 years.” A veteran USAF, he’s part of the Outlaw Poetry Network.
At RL Brewer‘s post on S.A. Griffin, the poet/actor said,

Democracy and community depend upon the ability to disagree! To agree before the fact is absurd. Agreements only come from civil, and informed, disagreements.
Violent language/rhetoric becomes violence.
In general, it seems that our cultural and democratic landscapes have become void of depserately needed disagreements. Thru poetry, and poetic action/dialogue, let us sow the seeds of disagreement so that we might possibly begin to agree and move forward together.

Want your work to ride in a bomb for peace? Submission details:

It can be previously published or something new, all good.
One submission per person, please! Subs must be flat and NO BIGGER than 8.5×11 inches. That means that your submission can be smaller than 8.5×11, but no bigger. Text/image on one or both sides.
If you are writing in any language that is not english, it would be nice if your native language were on one side of the piece and a possible english translation were on the other. I am an english speaker only, and I do plan on reading some of submissions at each and every stop along the tour.
Also, please note on your submission where you are from along with your name/signature. Not your address, but where you are sending your submission from. In other words, something like this: “S.A. Griffin, Los Angeles, Ca., U.S.A.”
Please make sure that contact information is included with your submission, both your snail mail and your email addresses.
Nothing hard or solid, like wood, metal or hard plastic. Must be flexible so it can conform and share space with the other submissions.
If you expect to get anything back, please send with s.a.s.e. to:
S.A. Griffin
P.O. Box 29171
Los Angeles, Ca. 90029-0171
I will not accept any submissions that advocate or are violent in statement or purpose.

Griffin’s tour is currently taking him thru North Carolina, Tennessee and Illinois.
On June 2, the Canadian Poets Against the War will protest again at the next ammunition show at Landsdowne Park.

Rengay is not the plural of renga.
They’re both linked forms made using haiku and a 2 line connect to next haiku that run in a chain in a group or in pairs. Renga wants to hook and pivot without doubling back. Each shifts can be as in a ghazal. The connection might be tenuous as something tall or long in the one stepping stone poem, and a different type of thing sharing that property. It might be two things of the same color, or same mood. It is a turn at each addition.
As I understand it, Rengay is like linked cooperative storytelling. It goes somewhere, like haibun or narrative poetry, but in the form of S1 (3 lines), S2 (2 lines), S3 (3 lines), S4 (2 lines) S5 (2 lines) S6 (3 lines) or the turn taking goes alternating thru 3-line and 2-line stanzas.
The shifts are still comparable to renga but the leaps aren’t as sharp. Whereas renga roves seasons and moods and any sort of tangental direction words and group may lead to, rengay is more controlled. They are like vignettes building to something along a pre-selected theme, which may be as broad as moving day, or sipping margaritas.

I was graciously brought into the group process of doing rengay in Ottawa. The resulting chapbook of various pairings of people added up to a set of 21 rengay series to be at Haiku Canada in Montreal this weekend.
KaDo also did a group broadsheet in 2 editions…limited set fancy and photocopiable mass edition. The fancy one is so architectural that I’m not sure how to photograph it. It is a collection of senryu and haiku.

When I read from Taxonomies a couple years ago I was engaged with the format and the picture dictionary look it, but put off by skim vocabulary loaded with words like: precedes, mentality, pelagic, pugnacious, conspicuous symmetry.
It looks, in formatting, like prose, which is fine. It scans formal. It looks like it comes from the head, rolling in higher tier concepts abstracted away from life stories or gut (I thank anyone for the former). It seems evasive nonsensical and humourless. But.
The text is quite a different creature read aloud. There’s a sound play and it’s pleasant to the eye and tongue. There is a liveliness and a play but not because what you say doesn’t matter. It is considered and a sort of indirect route to questioning how we think. She’s not just mining vocabulary for some hippy playing about from stolen, half-understood lexicon. She’s engaged the ideas of boundaries of how we define our world and how we define what we define.
**
In an interview by Malcolm Sutton in 2008, Christine Stewart said,

“I was taught to mistrust the metaphor as if it promised me something it could not keep. Now I love its false promise, its ridiculous leap. It offers nothing–only itself. Why should it be true? These metaphors do not mind the gap. They point it out. Falling, crashing into it. I hoped to make this visible, this constitutive failure.
8. Is the work of the reader to move forward no matter the size of the gaps?
Minding the gap. Mining the gap. To move forward or perhaps to fall in and maybe (or maybe not) crawl out.
What would we be if we didn’t endlessly order, define and name? What else is there? […] The project of categorization that takes place in from Taxonomy works to reveal the arbitrary and delusional nature of such a response.

**
Here are a few excerpts of from Taxonomy which was published in The Gig in 2000, printed online there in 2001. The chapbook version I have is from England by West House Books, 2003.
2001: Species

Species is its own din. A strange and shiny pin, not intersection
but equipment and tight. Sensual and metal, penal and ribbed, species
strides the trembling air. It is turgid: the vegetable must not cross its
lusty animal path. It is febrile: the mineral must avert its magazine
gaze. To defy its earnest wrap is to melt into open chromatic skies—blood
red and yellow hair. Like a medium‑sized tent tumultuous with luxury and
haggard with resistance, species is the inverted bird in an anarchy of
suction—the suction of luck thought hill‑like. The suction of acanthus
thought breathing excursion garden. The suction of type thought strike
(our palms like flint). The suction of time thought light (our arms like flight)
Sudden and published, spawning and sheer. Kind is its sharp and silver aspic
—pelagic, all dark-pointed, high-polished and seen.

Species: 2003

Species is its own din. The sharp tick of a shiny pin — not
intersection, but equipment and tight. Sensual and metal,
penal and ribbed, species strides the trembling air. It should
read, turgid. It should bent, febrile. But it won’t. Vegetable,
you must cross the lusty animal path. Mineral, you must
avert its magazine gaze.
To defy its earnest wrap is to melt into open chromatic skies
— bright lips and yellow hair. Unlike the multi-coloured tents
by the soft and silty stream — tumultuous with luxury and
haggard with resistance — Species is the inverted bird in an
anarchy of suction. The suction of luck and hill-like. The
suction of acanthus thought breathing excursion garden. The
suction of type thought strike. The suction of time thought
kind.
Sudden and published, spawning and sheer, Species is sharp
as sliver, as crazy as aspic — well-plattered (not pelagic)
high-polished, and seamed.

Fun to be able to side-by-side texts as they were edited in different versions as it developed.
What she nailed she didn’t mess with like “species strides the trembling air” and ” tumultuous with luxury and haggard with resistance”. Great sounds and flows. They are intact.
She trimmed back where sound was pushing the meaning at least as much or more than carrying it: “The suction of type thought strike (our palms like flint). The suction of time thought light (our arms like flight).” She dropped the bracketed parts which by being marginalized in brackets, were already being squeezed out of the poem, in aside then entirely. It got tighter and with a stronger eye towards sound.
What she changed she improved: “the sharp tuck of a shiny pin” clicks better in sound than the more flat description from before, “A strange and shiny pin”. So far as turgid and febrile, the grammar and tone is more interesting and punched up in the later version that gives a mandate to the veggie rather than describes it.
The close with seen was overwritten with the less expected word seamed pushes it off from shore, reminding of how meanings are sewn, constructed.
We say species as though it were some foundational thing, but then our one orca whale by genes and social mixing seems now to be 3 species. Our polar bear and grizzly are thought to be distinct species, yet their hybrids are fertile. We insist our classifications of particular cases are right yet convergent evolution and unexplainables that don’t fit our model keep popping up.
**
She has since published Pessoa’s July: or the months of astonishments (Nomados, 2006).
Both chapbooks were described (by Jonathan Ball et al’s project), in brief, as “not the most immediately engaging” but the rhythm is gonna getcha.
**
Where would I have put Trees of Periphery, Alberta Series, 2007 by Christine Stewart? I know just the shelf it was on at the old place before we moved…ah, a pdf version is here. Quite a different set of poems. Also with some of a length of a line or two on an occasional page that keeps the rhythm of pages from being stodgy. The subject being largely about sex, torquing and toqueing the loaded language and the fecundity and fun and words.

412 All flood and gush. All salt and spray.
Suck it up. ( We’ll not be sewn for these spurts and trickles).
Tragedy, washed us thus.
[…]
432 This is a science. I repeat. The blown brow of a thrown hill flickering. The sticky
weep of a ripe vine dickering: Resinous. I repeat. Je répète.

It’s more taking chants to play.
**

Steven Heighton extended that memo to himself I linked to a couple days ago. It now includes these among others,

1 Could anyone else have written this thing? If Yes, start again.
4 In the long run, curiosity and stamina trump talent.
14 There’s nothing less enjoyable than writing well, because it means excising the superfluous, self-indulgent matter that was the most pleasing to write.
29 Refuse to feel ashamed of the autonomous observer that more and more detaches from you and in times of crisis, grief, elation, humiliation etc. hovers to one side coolly jotting notes.
30 There comes a point when an hour of sketching objects from life or learning to play an instrument will make you a better writer than another hour of writing or reading will.

Read more: National Post column
The first I’ve heard come past often enough. What would it be mean to write something only you can? It could be this cultural habit of needing to be individualistic. Personal, distinct inflection or recognizable spin of pet elements, which can become self-caricaturing and an affect. Or it could mean writing what you have insight into because of lived experience and your particular eye for the kinds of thing you notice and how you piece a picture.
4. is encouraging and certainly the 10,000 diligent practice hours seems to be back it. How many people are competent or utterly brilliant, just not particularly interested in taking it as far as they might.
14. is a reply from another direction to the perplexing statement of one of the writers festival panelists who said she never has fun writing. Although from what she read from her book, the most interesting and enjoyable parts were those which she didn’t overwork and had fun with.
29. It never occurred to me to be ashamed of it. I’ve worked to keep brain in parallel frames of worldviews, flipping between various schemes of How Things Are just as mental exercise since I was a kid. It’s good to hear whenever there are others whose brains are tucking details away and working it to story in real time. How else can one be?
30. Have to agree with that. Trying to always shunt observation thru reflections in words gets one trapped in one’s own processing, an extra step away from perception. Direct drawing, or transcribing without messing with of sound or shape or motion still works with selection and framing one facet of the world but uses a different part of the brain and brings back to what is, not the writing of what could be, or what would work.
The next issue of the Influency Salon is up with more ponderings on poetry.

You have until the start of June to send in one line of poem involving numbers to the Tickertape Project at Concordia. The line you send rolls around thru the display.
At the university, one tickertape will run the usual stocks, the other with words. Spotted ticking along…Sheila E Murphy, Sandra Ridley, Warren Dean Fulton, Amanda Earl, and Gillian Wallace.
Btw, Facebook assures me that you don’t have to be on FB to see this page of photos from the Bywords Quarterly Journal Launch.
I got a shot, such as it is, of each reader and open mic person.
It’s an odd thing photographing readings because the audience is relaxed but you take pictures of, usually, the most tense people in the room in succession.
I take some shots to indicate crowd, from behind ideally. I don’t want people to feel their every outing weighed on the basis of whether they feel like them and their attendance being documented. A reader is choosing to make a public performance so that’s a distinct thing.
I can’t help but feel photos of readings are a trifle silly. The archivist in me says that if there’s no photo of an event, it never happened. I know the visual in a way isn’t pertinent because it is how a person sounds and the content that matters yet that gets all headache-complexy to document poems. A photo can be a nod of acknowledgement tho.