A good reading can bump up a weak poem, and a lousy reading can kill a great poem. The tricky bit is correcting that, or at least correcting the latter. If you can entertain for the duration of a weak poem, good on ya.
But how not to stand in the way of people hearing your poem as you read it?
Some of the principles are straight from toastmasters and common sense as in any conversation skill yet it’s funny how much one forgets when it comes to Poetry as if that were something other than Communications.
I missed most of the Marnie Woodrow workshops on the subject of giving a great reading, (I got 1 hour of the 6). I caught Susan McMaster’s talk on it, also via Tree.
Here are a few ideas.
The speaker-listener distance is skewed from normal conversation and the turn taking is longer and that messes a person up. Some people when they don’t get the feedback expected slow down and overexplain. Others rush onwards. Others clam up and become self-conscious. You know which way you generally respond? Counter your habit. Listen for sub-vocals to see if anything you’re saying is catching out there.
Beforehand:
a) Experiment with speaking, alternating with things you didn’t write. See how your voice comes out differently.
b) Go as quickly as possible thru your poem and see where you stumble. Go as slow as possible and see where you want to hurry yourself on. That can set the speed and last minute reading version or print version edits.
c) Do it wrong. Just like write the worst poem you possibly can to clear the cobwebs, do a completely bad cover of your poem. See if that will show yourself how to do it right. Or just make you laugh and relax. Poet voice is partly an attribute of taking your presentation and self too seriously.
d) Be familiar with what’s on the page in case you go blind. Rote memory can run on automatic. Page is more for back up to glance at.
e) Think thru all you’ll say beforehand, including thanks. Have a plan B for a word or two about the poem written down so you don’t blank out and don’t prattle on overexplaining. A rest of non-poetry to clear the palate can help keep the audience fresh and catch up to the end of the one poem before the next starts. Be as brief.
f) Reading poems in an order that segues tone and inserting pauses can help with the same issue of listeners missing one poem because they are still trying to digest the last and/or can’t shift mental gears in time for the next.
During the Reading
a) Talk on a full column of air with relaxed but upright stance. Feet apart, shoulders back so you’re pointing your noise maker in the direction of ears.
b) It is about the poem, not about you. Step behind the words and then into them. Don’t get ahead of yourself. An out of body reading isn’t good on either side of the podium.
c) Take a breath and don’t run out. Talk from the gut not from the throat in order to project and not strip your voice while being inaudible at no extra charge.
d) You set the tone. If you diminish your poem, ears turn off. If you appear comfortable, the audience can relax too.
e) Vary speed and pauses. If nervous and head chatter is high, slow down more than you feel you need to to give people a chance to process. Pick up the pace and vary it.
f) Inflect what the meanings are on the page. You’re just a conduit. Relax, stay connected to the meaning.
g) Stay for a few beats after you finish the last poem to let it settle and let you settle before you say thanks and rush off.
Between Readings
Get over jitters by presenting any chance you can. It’s a no-loss, no-win game, especially once you decide to have fun with it.
Check local events to find places to read.
Happy reading, for you and the audience.

At Influency some thoughts on Phil Hall’s White Porcupine is worth a read. I like how the Jenniger Lovegrove poem in the In Other Words column is taken apart in a how poems work way. And this Phoebe Tsang of Tightrope has been leading a fascinating life.
Book store and in-person book buys are put in perspective by Amazon. Take Locavore: From Farmers’ fields To Rooftop Gardens – How Canadians Are Changing the way we eat which was on hand with the author yesterday and at the local bookstore but if you order it online, it promises to “usually ship within 1 to 3 months”. Imagine if groceries were like this? It would be like arranging food orders in the high arctic, subject to ice pack and storms. Huge crates of freight seasonally. Or representing the labour it takes to make a book by proportional wait. Online instant gratification of order doesn’t transfer to instantly in hand, unlike the analogous purchase of in person which is instantaneous transfer. The bookstore at the festival is in the balcony of the Mayfair Theatre.
Anyhew, Saturday and Monday are the poetry events at the OIWF at the Mayfair Theatre.

Before the writers festival gets underway tonight, I want to mention this Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen reading upcoming. She’ll be featured at Tree on the 27th, overlapping with the last night of the fest.
Last week, her third collection of poems, Lean-To (Gaspereau Press) won the 2010 Atlantic Poetry Prize.
I’m curious about what the fuss is about and what she’s done lately. The National Post gives a sample from her latest book which I excerpt further below.

yellowed edges of news—horoscopes, obituaries, sports. Fool’s gold
in burlap, Yukon potatoes groping toward plaster. Boxes of puzzles,
boxes of maps—we’ve been on the grey grids—the chisel, the rule, the
balance and hammer, the vacuum.
Normal ad nauseam. The mind narrows its focus by inches. Listen: the
friction of thoughts on thought, concentrated, the colour of gasoline. A
dream of diesel and steam—runaway train—cargo of things registered
and ignored.

How did she get there?
Where was she before? Her first collection of poetry, Clay Birds, was 14 years ago. It was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, and won a Saskatchewan Book Award. Lorna Crozier blurbed that book to say “her emotional intensity and lyrical passion are mitigated by a clear-eyed original intelligence.”
That last part is especially promising to hear about anyone’s writings. Her first book had some poems that played in the sandbox of phonetic spelling like a less extreme bill bissett. Here’s part of her Fish Tales poems, from Th Fisherwoman,

Th Fisherwoman falls to er nees but she dont say grace. Th tales tired er. I carry er to bed + hold er hed wile she sips er soop. I hold er hed + sing er songs noing it was for me she tryed to hard to tell th tale.

Some other are more narrative autobiographical-feeling poems like Aunt Verna’s Children

Is it raining
or is Mother crying?
She turns on the radio
to hear
what she already knows.
I climb into the front seat.
My father turns on the wipers. Shh,
she says, go back to sleep.
Already I have forgotten
Aunt Verna’s face. Like her children
dreaming through gunshot,
waking bewildered.
I watch my mother’s face, trusting
she knows
I want only what Aunt Verna’s children want,
bewilderment and going back
to sleep.

Structurally it steps thru the story, widening what is in view with each turn. The drama is tender and intimate, confined to the size of a car seat airspace, child and parents and rain. There’s something going on and the child is subdued as the parents are. There’s a mystery and it is enough to know one doesn’t need to know the details. Which puts us as the audience in the position of the small child in it not needing to be in the know.
Is it true account or not? I don’t care. Would a child want to not know what’s going on when someone in their family died? That’s more of a concern. But the Mom cues close your mind. Shush, this is not for you and child obeys and sleeps in awareness and curiosity.
Another poem from there, Eclipse talks about that in Hawaii where, on the beach, people “feel calm/press down on the ocean, hold it/ in its bed for seven minutes, the whales/ still as air.”
What a dark image for within the eclipse, the placating calm and armageddon by asphyxiation in one thought. The whales on hold, and the coral picking can wait until the event every 150 year passes again. Most of a page away she continues and brings some leaps that bring the scene to her unseen father and a situating of the grief in a person and relationship.

My father is growing old.
There are things he has meant to say.
One hundred and fifty years is a long time.
I wait too, knowing I haven’t found all the shells
left behind, I haven’t finished Moby Dick
I don’t know my father’s story,

Like how her lines were end-stopped except when it was weighted pointedly to pop something out by enjambment. I appreciate the use of present perfect tense which gets turfed from poems in workshops as being wordy, rather than kept for being more precise.
Her second book, Ör, was published by Brick Books in 2003. It won a John V. Hicks Prize, was longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards and was shortlisted for a Pat Lowther Award.
The sample from Brick shows an intermediary stage of evolution between the current book and the first with subjects being more external, more use of sound play, keeping the ragged lengths of lines

Lost
thoughts, soot-lined, silver-lined
concatenations
incense of coal, cumulonimbus…
pennies and ponies on the track
heads or tails, a chance
the sleeper
lugged backwards through France,
honey-moon, lune de miel
suite, sigh, tunnel of
tickets and black gates, fate line rising from the luna mount
mind the gap a porter calls
and we cross, linked elbow to elbow
ghost cars sparking the synaptic tracks…

Quite different than the trends of her first book and from her most recent. That’s natural enough. Different influences. Different decade.
Life naturally shifts. If one were writing identically in one’s late twenties and one’s early forties, there might be some cause for concern. Would what one cares about not change? More experience collected. Different exposures to literature and life. At the time of the first book she was out west living with her husband. Now she’s down East and with husband and 3 sons.
The form of her poetry most recently (that first sample) with its prose-block of text and short phrases and playing more in discontinuity and a forward run of thoughts. It splashed in the river of some contemporary waters.
It gets me wondering if poetry as subject to fashion as architecture being dislocated from the local place and more influenced by the time?
The sample poem to the Tree site is invokes coyotes as does a poem in the first book. She moved from Saskatchewan to Halifax and still coyotes comes into the poems. (They get into one’s soul.) It’s also playing with disjunctures, prose poem, disconnect from personal heart narratives.
I suppose there’s no standard trend line. Some people start writing while unable to speak freely and some start freely and then play in the complex. It’s natural for writers to want to be somewhat autobiographical the be finished going thru that headspace and need new subjects at a faster rate than they can live. But then, some live fast, some slow. Some write fast, some slow. General patterns. They elude.
I’ll end with a quote from Torontoist’s Optimisms Project “I’m often labelled an optimist but prefer to describe myself as hopeful. I will be disappointed. To suggest otherwise dilutes life’s complexities into a pablum of self-help books and cheap heart glyphs. I crave the poetics of flux” – Christine McNair

Penguin Books is 75 years going. Design your variant of a cover from their templates and add it to the flickr set.
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This is a page of a poem by José Garcia Villa from 1949. I put it online 3 years ago and it is consistently one of my most viewed images at Flickr with about 7800 views.

The post about his article in Horizon Magazine keeps bringing in new traffic. The Filipino poet died 13 years ago. According to wikipedia, “he is known to have introduced the “reversed consonance rime scheme” in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet.”
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Today is Al Purdy Day, and the 10th year anniversary of Purdy‘s death.
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Going on what may feel like decades, Dan Wells of Biblioasis is stuck away from the London Book Fair in Amsterdam but with train tickets out, at last word.
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I started pesbo in August 2005. This is my 600th blog post on pesbo.
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Going into its 14th year, the Prince Edward County Author’s Festival is the last weekend in May, celebrating Canadian literature by established and emerging writers. This year includes readings by Marianne Ackerman, Dani Couture, Steven Heighton, Helen Humphreys, Carolyn Smart, Cordelia Strube, Paul Vermeersch and Catherine Gildiner. It’s been described as being “the best small-scale literary festival in Ontario.”
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Most things are cyclical. Like How to get unstuck? Try something, watch, correct, try, watch, etc.

It’s only a month until the Haiku Canada Weekend in Montreal. I’ve been reading How To Haiku, edited by Bruce Ross.
It’s good to brush up since the brain drifts off models. It’s easy to slip off down short-cuts or along interesting sideroads. I have a mental habit of insisting on wedging in playtime. Word play is fun but in haiku one tries to keep the sense of playfulness to the pique of the comic moment seen rather than the games of one stage of disconnect of being intellectual. One can pun but it’s not the central concern of haiku. It’s an experiential awareness more than linguistic.
It’s easy to punch up the haiku into drama. There’s that built in structure of two images and kireji shift that suggest contrast and pivot. That seems to align with drama and drama is made from imagination but that’s a fast train carrying the form away into becoming spark-fiction, micro-narrative.
It’s one moment, an awareness, not a plot. If it is people-centric you might be working out a senryu or a tanka. In haiku the camera pans back with one cut. It is one is pause inside one moment, but not get too effusive there. To make a mini-lyric is to nudge it away from ideal.
One can make allusions in haiku but it’s a balancing act. You want to imply not thwack by being too leading. One tries to make it unmediated experience.
You feel something, but you don’t make feelings or self forefront. You are present but it’s not first person point of view in view.
To capture a haiku in the wild requires being present and presenting that present to someone else to evoke an analogous feeling without telling them what to feel. It is showing not telling and explaining, but it is not flat description either. There’s evocativeness in a concrete image. It is about something that matters without falling to too emblematic nor symbolic. You don’t want it to smack of gimmick but to be a humble sharing among equals.
One wants beauty but there’s a sweet spot in the use of language — subtle, not pared back so much as to be telegraphic and not indulging in sentimentality nor the poetic devices of western poetry. Nothing is to distract from the content. Slant rhymes can draw attention to themselves over the content. An alliteration can distract from the moment into the artifice of words.
To have an ambiguity over which line the middle line goes with, the first or last line, seems to be a popular permitted device to provide a sweet morsel of surprise and shift for the reader. A haiku is to appeal to the reader with something worthwhile sharing. It’s a range of stylistics for how and what.
One writes of what is, not fanciful things. A make believe personification can squeak by. On one level there is straight description and no implication except that the mind is an insistent story-maker. Take this case of comic haiku, or tragi-comic.

garter snake
and her ten suitors
pass the lone thistle

By constrast the thistle may seem as a plaintive singledom flower that one identifies with as being like a person. That is left for the head of the reader to make connections, and the comparison of forlorn or ample in love is not put in the poem directly. Is it necessarily implied?
When you have tight constraint, it’s easy enough to make up things to fit the slot but part of the goal is the mental stance as much as the product. It’s to be a synthesis of mood and observation, but not feel synthetic. One can smell contrived or knock-off, a mile off.
Haiku is a form of meditation and secondarily communication and as tertiary function, literature.
One can start at literature and work your way into falling thru communication into the word and into the moment. An asked, “When we do use technology as a shield against intimacy, and when is it a bridge?” To spin that, when do we use haiku for shield or bridge? We write haiku as a mental act but share a haiku to beckon someone over to look at something cool. When we are occupied with the idea of working a good poem, we can lose sight of the impetus and the world risk being a shield of structures and rules and effects and techniques and consensus and what have you.
In all poetry, I could argue that each character space has to bear the load and do work and the poem would lose something if it were eliminated. In this short form, there’s no where to hide or let slide deadwood of a word. Even punctuation has to be weighed carefully so as not to overwhelm the delicacy of the content.
To say it is delicate is not to say haiku is traipsing about maudlin as a petulant teen among field mice, heaving great sighs, any more than the long lyric form is that.
Haiku can be humourous or earthy, grief, convivial, urban-set or urbane but the aim is for that clarity of mind, minimalism of framing.

seed-heads sway
in the long grass
— mouse forages

There would be an implicit break even without the explicit dash. It dabbles towards using poetic device with so much sibilance suggesting an echo of the sound of autumn grasses. I’m not sure if I could get away with that degree of cross-pollination of tools.
There is no narrative advancement. There is an awareness of motion, a setting of tall field grasses and the awareness expands to the source. Does one see the mouse or figure out what the motion must be?
Is a feeling evoked? Does one eep or awwww? Does the opening of the haiku build a mystery to be solved after the break? Is some attitude towards the mouse implied? It doesn’t tell the reaction or add slanted language to label the mouse as pretty or ugly or fearsome or old. That would be telling how to feel rather than letting the readers come to the poem bringing their worlds.
The mystery of the motion in the grass is solved and no further action is needed. One can observe and lower guard. By giving the mouse a verb rather than ending with “a mouse!” one can assume that all is well with the world and the mouse in it.
As Pinball Playing Man says in the movie, “There’s only one instant, and it’s right now. And it’s eternity.”
For another example,

beside the paved path
the wreath — and sparrow
plucks a ribbon

That one is like a sonnet with a misplaced volta but I show it to illustrate the idea of haiku humour as gentle comedy and irony and the minimalism in content.
There are two images: trail with the wreath is one image of stillness and quiet and the activity of the bird hops within the image. Man versus nature. Memory versus the practicality of moving on. Where people placed a wreath last season to mark some runner’s heart attack, and see reminder of mortality, the sparrow just sees opportunity for nesting material. The grief and the cheer are cheek by jowl. The sparrow making nesting material acts as a nod to the connection to the season.
It succeeds as a haiku in being plausible. It fails to be haiku in the sense that it isn’t true. There is a trail with memento wreath and sparrows nearby. I didn’t witness the scene happen, so it is desk haiku and contrived.
Do the ethics of form allow for a likely story if it might have accurately happened?
As in any writing or speech or portrayal, one must get your facts right and don’t miseducate people as to the behavior in the world. Even if it is satire, paranormal, surrealism, comics, there is something that doesn’t ring true but kinda clangs. It’s like being a cartoonist who gets shadows wrong, or a photoshopper who evidently has never seen a human body before. If writing is going for emotional truth, rather than a cherry-picking of actual truths, does that hold true for haiku? Depends on the writer. It can be an assemblage like painting a portrait of a face when the facial expression was just like that moment, except removing the clutter of the awkward shadow that conceals unnecessarily.