The story centers around a girl named Alberta. It is a story told thru snagged vignettes of a girl growing up thru the first two years after her father’s death thru new home life and new school. p. 60

Long after her classmates reduced her to the girl with the dead father, she held it. It was hers. She held onto it like a blanket, a shroud.

She’s finding her place, and placelessness among her community and peers and in light of her mom’s rebound to new boyfriend. We see shifts in her relationship with her mom, and with herself as she finds and defines her powers.

Ten thousand miles from her last birthday, Alberta and her body, Alberta and her thickening body; she swore she could feel her thighs and hips widen, and her breasts grow. She welcomes her curves with a snarl pressed between her teeth.

Her mind, body and awarenesses are finding new definitions. Alberta is a girl apart. She carves her own decisions and breaks away from the pack of kids she was with. For example, kids hang out in the back forty shack, learning to smoke and drink, and burn the place down. Instead of hanging about literally onto the back of a boy, when she gets uncomfortable with the scene she’s in, she takes his snowmobile and drives off. And when it runs out of gas, she walks.
There’s a lovely self-sufficiency to her that makes her a gratifying sort of person to read. She’s a stronger female character than I’ve usually seen in fiction. It seems too often the basis of female character’s motivation comes from a history of violence. She does jujitsu, or became a police officer or, assassin, or werewolf, or any normal strong male role because of some anger imbued because of a male boundary violation. There’s something seriously messed up about this. And it’s wonderful to find that absent.
She’s not condescended to as a youth, nor is she raised as a spoiled enfante terrible while the adults are portrayed as inferior. There’s a sort of parity that’s respectful instead of caricatures of age. Her mother and her live parallel, rather independent lives.
Problems are dispatched with, acknowledged but not dwelt in, and not glossed over. It’s a tricky balance, but well-balanced. The structure of short scenes gives it some elements of a mood piece yet is not misty nor gauzy. It reflects lives I’ve seen — teens and pre-teens getting drunk while adults pretend to chaperone and/or don’t making any trouble. She is troubled by changes and this gets told by what she observes and is paired with dialogues so we see what it looks like on the outside and inside.
She navigated with a solid head on her shoulders, you see her cooly weighing the lecherous looks in town. She installs a lock on the door against mom’s boyfriend she feels an intuitive threat from. She admonished her friend who cuts herself. Her story is followed, panning in to overhear her with her mom and to survey her rather desolate scene, like many kids, eyes middle distance, focused on getting out of this dead end town or “this ridiculous backwater” as she puts it.

Here’s a video clip of rob mclennan‘s March reading at Dusty Owl when he did the Ottawa launch of his novel Missing Persons.

For those who missed the last tree and subsequent announcements, Tree is shaking again. The unrestricted open mic is back until at least August. You no longer have to be published by particular publishers to read at the “open mic”. And there will be two prizes…the Origami Crane for best poem of open mic…won last year by Cameron Anstee, and a second award with judge and prize tbd for best taped performance at open mic.
If you haven’t been in a while you’ll see there are sometimes a panel interview of feature poet inviting a poet for discussion after readings and a new addition of a poem by a pre-selected or pre-volunteered reader to remember a poet who has passed on, years ago, or centuries ago. Poem talks about craft happen sporadically as well.
There also will be a new focus on lightening the mood to make it a warm friendly space whether you are new or mature in the craft.
The free pre-Tree workshops continue year round. Come for 6:45-7:45 on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month and a facilitator will do small group poetry discussion. How Poems Work, or prompts to write, time to share your poem in a safe environment, focus on one particular poet or style. The focus shifts with the instructors. 2010 facilitators include rob mclennan, Cameron Anstee, Terry Ann Carter, Guy Simser, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Ronnie R Brown and myself.

Pictured is the last feature reader, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen with workshop facilitator rob mclennan.
Kevin Connolly is the next feature reader at Tree on May 11. I mentioned reading his last book and seeing him at the OIWF 2 years ago.

It’s been a year since Joseph Massey‘s Areas of Fog There’s a sudden upsurge in the amount of Joseph Massey…he interviewed Rae Armantrout and has two new chapbooks coincidentally coming out at the same time Exit North from BookThug and Mock Orange from Longhouse.
The poems are characteristically minimal in Exit North. The palette like the words are controlled, colors of hazy white and greys with a spot of color being a rusted paint can in a sludgy river. It’s a pity to quote it online in that each poem segues to the next and is in such a pretty font. (No note of what).
Even among the short lines that interrupt each phrase, there’s not the sense of disruption so much as continually linking forward and taking time. It doesn’t feel like a poet voice intoning unnatural breaks. Because there’s such interlocked enjambments it’s hard to excise a bit without removing some of the effect but in the title poem there’s this bit. p. 18

Plastic
drifts into hydrangeas
The pause before
one perception
extinguishes another,
extinguishes nostalgia.
Late winter waste
clumped shallow over grates.

With such attention to sound, it would be easy to become comfortable reading and yet there’s the idyllic disrupted by trash and yet that itself is offset by the word plays provoked in the last line, shallow grates suggesting shallow graves, the waste being a shallow layer over the greats, the greatness of the beauty that keeps breaking past whatever we as humans literally throw over the earth.
There’s a quietness, a mindfulness, and desire to embrace the transitory glints among a sort of roar of blind masses shuffling past all the messages of resurging earth. There’s an element of eye for the world and I against the world. An alienation, a making strange paired with an intimate familiarity with place, tetheredness to notice each egret and change from the sidewalk or hilltop. There’s a sort of fatigued hope. We impose so much artificial and yet nature keeps pressing past it. p. 14 in the Backdrop there’s the force of change turning even traditional church bells ringing to the hills into

Electronic church bells
peal past overlapped
crow calls —
one left
circling,
recircling
a car lot.

On one hand there’s straight observation. On the other there’s the suggestion that the crows will outlast the digital dings and like vulture’s they do circles over the cars, and perhaps the implied people.
I’ve heard his writing described as post-apocalyptic. I could see that. There is a grittiness and an absence of people. People are evidenced everywhere in broken remnants left behind but there are no conversations, no motion of people. The closest it comes to having a sense of being not one sentient soul in the universe is the poem on p. 28 in One Take where,

Even speech
sputters out
— an echo
fallen around us.

There isn’t the sense of complaint so much as a sort of acknowledgement of grief and beauty incongruously coinciding. And this collection isn’t entirely unpopulated. In Found there is the sound of children or dogs at the point where they play and are indistinguishable.

There’s also an irregularity in the uniformity of noticing grit where the landscape’s grandeur humbles. It and impulse to reach for a word, that feeling inside, is sufficient and satisfying by themselves. There’s a centred calm.
Some of the poetic meditations feel like disappointed nostalgia for a purity of natural world. There is longing and wistfulness and embracing of the beauty inclusive of all the graffiti and cigarette butts.
The sweeps of landscape are the focus but the garbage is included, unblinkingly. Pollution is never pulled out of the scene. Is it prettified or just allowing a different depth and nuance to the ache of land. There’s a suppressed or not so supressed distress as the eye gets pulled to each thing out of place in a place, foreclosure signs, plastic bags caught in flowers, broken bottles. It is a desolate sort of vision and yet there’s the sense of small elations within it. For example, p. 25, in Motion

Highway overpass —
tagged concrete,
trash-stitched fence —
anchors sky. White
and yellow limbs
lean in
traffic’s opposite direction.

Love the accuracy and beauty in ugliness of the trash-stitched fence. There’s the gang tagging set inside a nature walkabout. It isn’t excised but noted. The underpass is and isn’t set in opposition to nature. The built world that we can touch is a connector to the sky and pulls the sky down. It works whether visually speaking of the concrete as being like feet of the giant sky, or the highway being a producer of such exhaust fumes that it is the mechanism by which sky lowers itself to us, visible.
There’s a cross-stitching in sound and the places of pause seem to set pace of footsteps not jolt at messing with the meaning.
The last line scanned on its own stands on its own and yet wobbles.
The earlier poems with the smog haze’s yellow over landscape and sun has now transferred to the body of the speaker, become the body of the viewer and yet while it all internalized thru this suggestion of color, there’s a leaning against the momentum, of traffic, of perhaps of self.

Natalie Zina Walschots reads Supervillains at the Mercury Lounge on the 7th. (Link has an audio interview). And here is her postcard music reviews.
And a month and a half after that, it’s the pre-small press reading where I’ll be reading as well and launching my new chapbook from AngelHouse Press: over my dead corpus.
the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair
pre-fair reading; lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday June 25th
doors 7pm, readings 7:30
at the Carleton Tavern, upstairs
223 Armstrong beside the Parkdale Market
with readings by:
Mark Goldstein (Toronto)
Faizal Deen (Ottawa)
Pearl Pirie (Ottawa)
& Myna Wallin (Toronto)
& TBA
Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath, Mark Goldstein’s most recent book of poems, was published by BookThug in Spring 2010. It transtranslates poet Paul Celan’s seminal 1967 work, Atemwende. In 2008, BookThug issued Goldstein’s first book, After Rilke: To Forget You Sang, a series of homophonic translations based on Rilke’s The Voices. Accompanying these translations are a set of letters Goldstein wrote in homage to the late American poet, Jack Spicer.
Last fall, Goldstein’s Beautiful Outlaw imprint published Handwerk, a slip-cased set of six chapbooks by poets Phil Hall, Erin Moure, Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Jay MillAr, and Goldstein. Presently, Goldstein facilitates a course on Transtranslation at the Toronto New School of Writing. Goldstein lives in Cabbagetown, Toronto.
Myna Wallin is an author and editor born and living in Toronto. Myna’s first full-length poetry collection, A Thousand Profane Pieces, was published in 2006 by Tightrope Books. Her second book is also from Tightrope: Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She also received an Honorary Mention in the 2010 Winston Collins / Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem. Myna also hosts “In Other Words” on CKLN, where she has been interviewing authors since 2004.
After receiving her MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, Myna taught Effective Writing at George Brown College for several years. For Tightrope she has edited Sandra Kasturi’s The Animal Bridegroom, Phoebe Tsang’s Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse, and co-edited I.V. Lounge Nights with Alex Boyd.
Pearl Pirie writes in Ottawa and lives in her head (with outings for chocolate). Her poems appear in the AngelHouse Press anthology chapbooks whack of clouds (2008) and Pent Up (2009). Her chapbooks include over my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010), boathouse (above/ground, 2008) and a forthcoming collection from Chaudiere Books entitled been shed bore. She blogs at pesbo and a few other places.
Faizal Deen was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1968 and lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Land Without Chocolate, a Memoir (1999), shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry from the Quebec Writer’s Federation in 2000.
At present, he is working on two new books of poetry, The Best Ghosts in The World, a Film and The Pornography of Harry Persaud and hopes to read publicly from both of these works over the course of 2010. He has won several awards, including prizes from the League of Canadian Poets and from the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York, New York. His work was anthologized last year in the highly acclaimed, LAMBDA award-winning, Our Caribbean, A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (2009), edited by Thomas Glave.

PurdyFest #4 will be centered around the July 31st with events in the Marmora, Ontario area, with free rough camping nearby at ZenRiver Gardens. This will be the main ‘formal’ day for PF #4, but as we all know, the main day often isn’t the most important aspect of PurdyFesting. Camping and communing before and after. Some walks are in the works. The potluck is the night of the 30th.
This year’s symposium will focus on the life and poetic legacy of Toronto poet, Ted Plantos, “the Cabbagetown Kid”.
Julie McNeill will MC the Symposium, and the first presenter will be academic and philosopher Terry Barker. Terry will give an approximately 20 minute talk on Ted’s place in the pantheon of Canadian poetry, in particular People’s Poetry. Kent Bowman and Mick Burrs will then play a tape recording of Ted reading his poetry. The final item will be a round table anecdotal discussion by all present on Ted Plantos. Anticipated story tellers include David Day, Carol Malyon, Jeff Seffinga and Peter Rowe among many others.
The Symposium will take place in the William Shannon Room in the same building as the Marmora Public Library (by the lights at the intersection of Highways #7 & #14). It will start at 12:30, and end around 2:30 pm.
After a 1 1/2 hour siesta break, the second main event, ANOTHER DAM POETRY READING, will start at 4 pm on the island in the middle of the Marmora Dam. Musicians Morley Ellis and Kent Bowman will kick things off with musical performances. Around 4:30 Allan Briesmaster will introduce Kent for the launch of his new poetry collection. Katherine Beeman of Montreal, and RD Roy, of the Quinte area, will also launch new poetry collections. As has become our tradition, the dam reading will conclude with a round robin reading by all poets wishing to share their work.
Come fall, Wolf Fest #2 is coming back to Western Quebec. Watch for it the weekend of Sept 6.