I’m trying to wrap my head around concrete poetry again. Better head than ankles I suppose.
I always try to go too deep, mining for meaning when reading. Thinking too hard. This is a step back and forward at the same time. What’s here?

derek beaulieu’s Fractal Economies thru bread bubble.
From an afterward after words concrete poetry attempts “to shatter the chain of signification” to play in shapes of language as Sianne Ngai in a way that “deliberately interferes with close reading”. It messes with assumptions.
It questions the practice of holy meaning making always. It asks by practice what systems one is supporting and promoting even one one criticizes from within because one embeds the culture in the linear dialogues even in the most subversive of narratives. Instead concrete is refusing to play by those rules.
Accidental text, machine-degraded or mutilated bits of language have meaning only to the viewer if the viewer choses. The words and partial letter shape or language-like shapes aren’t invested with symbolism to decode. It de-dramatizes when the prevailing thrust is to impose dramas into stories and hook readers. This unhooks the idea that letters have a mandate to make sound or sense. They, zen, are. Existence on the terms of existing proving existence.

This was amusing from W.H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis described inThe Buried Day by C. Day Lewis (Chatto, 1960)

we had a complementary repsect for eachother: it was at Appletreewick, I think, that we wrote down the names of all the living English peots we could remember: we then sorted them out into three columns: in the left column we put those whom we already excelled, middle column those we would excel one day, and in the right hand column (an extremely short one) the poets whom we had little hope of ever equalling.

[via Nigel Beale]
I find this comic because it’s so human to evaluate and so futile and likely inaccurate and cheeky.
I find it comic because the one binary dynamic collides with my bobbing cultural relativism.
I find it funny because so many aesthetics are incomparable. They descend from different histories of world views and from different effects motivations. Each may reach outcomes that seem convergent evolution or be unrelated. Apples and fox fur and polypropylene.

Historical Walking tours are this weekend [heads up via Zoom] in 60 sites around the world. Started in 2007, they are named in honor of Jane Jordon, an urban planner. One of the one hour Jane’s Walks includes The Poet’s Pathway which starts at Pleasant Park Elementary School parking lot, 564 Pleasant Park Road on Sunday, May 2, 2010 , 1 PM

We will hear a little history of the area, read some landscape poems by the Confederation Poets, see trout lilies, butterflies, and birds, and hear a poem by Ben Glossop [the NAC bassoonist?], who wrote about this walk.
We ask you to bring a poem you might like to read. Any stories or history of the area will be more than welcome!
Bring water to drink. Wear boots or sturdy shoes as there is wet/muddy ground in some areas.

A full list of the reasons to be optimistic about poetry’s future at the Torontoist: http://bit.ly/b4hvqZ
A list of the Globe and Mail’s National Poetry Month is here.
Poetry launch: Paul Tyler launches his new collection of poems A Short History of Forgetting. May 1 at 7 p.m. at Raw Sugar, 692 Somerset St. West, with music by the Dustbowl Daddies
Check the Bywords Calendar for ongoing news of Ottawa workshops, readings, launches and so on. Toronto readings are listed at Livewords.
Over in NY there’s the Chapbook fair May 3-4 that seemed fun last year
Books anticipate the future of theatre, TV and cinema: No need for lineups. No time mark to hit. No expiry of tickets. Order and start times completely in the hands of consumers.
Coming to the paper page this fall: Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson (University of Iowa Press, September 2010). It includes 99 short essays on teaching poetry by 101 poets including Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Oliver de la Paz, Linh Dinh.

Poets signing their books at the OIWF — Suzanne Buffam with The Irrationalist, Steven Heighton with Patient Frame and Michael Lista with Bloom.
There was laughter during Buffam’s reading, in the intro, and in the body of poems. She introduced herself by relating that one reader condescended to say that it wasn’t as enjoyable as her last book. I didn’t read her last one, but The Irrationalist seemed good, particularly the short clippings that were playful. She described them as possibly the only time she’d had fun writing poetry. One small sample: on geological time: enjoy the view while you can, Mount Everest.
The short poems were her scraps that closed themselves down but she eventually realized, they were short but self-contained and sufficient in themselves. She also read longer poems with an occasional meditative frame that was touched with the surreal such as one about experiences, which have taught that nothing is worth doing for experience alone, as they turn into small piles of smoking ash. The smoke rises again later in the same poem from the blue light of tv. Another line that struck me: “If it is desire I lack, I can sit, wait for my lack to dissolve.”
There’s a certain tyranny to excellence so that Steven Heighton when doing a great reading of solid excellent poems is pleasing but isn’t surprising. One poem reminded me of Chiasson’s Beattitudes. All the people who by living as they do in their small worlds saving the whole world. Beautiful litany of attentiveness and praise. A section of just over a dozen poems try to parse what to make of the human monsters in our society, such as ones locked inside hatred. Hard subjects that the heart tries to process and encapsulate in words so they remain vivid and accurate but blunted to prick the soul less rawly. Another section is of translations of poems. Another few are love poems including one to his daughter.
In interview on stage he spoke of how

if you write of what interests you, you will bore your reader. It must be your obsession because there’s an energy loss in the transmission to page and another in page to reader. You must write from your passion for enough of your original energy to make it through.

Several people remarked afterward — just who is this Michael Lista? Some have literally heard him thanks to Seen Reading recordings. His book is meticulously conceived and executed. The links cover some of the — how it takes Ulysses as a superstructure of it happened one day, and the contemporary story of a man in the 40s working on the Manhattan Project when he erred and it went critical. He died, while his assistant, who was having an affair with his wife, didn’t.
How the plot is expressed is across poems, each done in the spirit and effect of a different particular poet from Seamus Heaney to Alice Oswald, James Joyce to the Velvet Underground. He calls it English to English translation in that he mirrors another original poem by emulating style, and rhythm down to the level of syllable per syllable and line break matching as well as how the pacing of mood flows. What an interesting set of constraints to do simultaneously. “Your mind opens like a drawerful of forks”, “the opacity we wore as marriage masks” and “pull your genius over you like an overcoat” are sample phrases that stood out in the live performance.
Presumably as I read I’ll share more…and after a bit I intend to go back to more of the poetry at fest. It ain’t over until long after it’s over…
P.S. gestures of home of John W. MacDonald’s look at the 4 novelists as they spoke in The Writing Life.