Two Gaspereau poets had a full room at the Plan 99 series for their April 17 reading. On May 29th will be the next book launches at Plan 99 with Jennifer Londry and other Hagios poet, Sandra Ridley

Johanna Skibsrud did the Ottawa launch of her book “I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human” (Gaspereau Press 2010). Her previous two books, a novel and a collection of poetry she launched in Ottawa last year at Collected Works. (The Sentimentalists, Gaspereau, 2009) and (Late Nights With Wild Cowboys, Gaspereau, 2009).
I’ve heard her read twice before and this work resonated with me more than her previous two. She had some lovely turns of phrases using sound and play such as “the line of thought pulled taut” and observations of subjectiveness of time and times left behind saying something close to it is not the things that shrink but the spaces between that grow.
Whereas Johanna’s poems are more of the internal lyric personal journey, Paul’s are entertaining or poignant or both. He has a variety of poems in his collection, including an interesting reshuffled word poem. His subjects talk about “out there” in seriousness and with humour, of animals, creation, plants or late-life seniors.

Paul Tyler at the Ottawa launch of his book called A Short History of Forgetting (Gaspereau Press 2010). This is his first collection although many of the poems had found magazine placements over time and what is the first section was rolled out of his Rubicon chapbook a few months ago.
I always appreciate it when a poet reads a width of different poems like he does, rather than a tiny subset. There were only a couple poems overlapping from when he gave at the Factory reading a year ago. I think this is at least the 4th time I’ve seen him read. Possibly the 5th. Just as a factor of my going to so many readings.
At Plan 99 he was “on”, grounded in the words, present with what he was reading, and the room was giving back to him in a lovely palpable feedback cycle. He presented his poems well with a resonant relaxed voice — something I’ve been thinking on with three talks given on that subject of presentation from Tree lately.
In his poem on midges he described them as “pin pricks / in the fabrics of the air /which is joy.”
If I find time and figure out how and get clearance, I may be able to post a snippet from the reading.

New Pages has compiled a list of literary contests, American and Canadian with deadline and details. It’s pretty comprehensive. [via JimK]
A contest is, by nature, an artificial way to create hundreds who lose and one who wins. (Or less charitably, hundreds of losers and one winner.)
On the other hand, it’s a gamble, a game, and the rule of gambling (and stock market and egos) is to never invest what you can’t afford to lose. It’s all for the pleasure of playing a game not the winning or losing.

At Bookish Us Jessi asked last fall, Why Don’t Aspiring Writers read more literary magazines?” and her answer was: price and size,

You can subscribe to Harper’s for around $17, which includes 12 issues; a subscription to Crazyhorse, one of my favorite lit mags, is $16 and includes two issues. […] I just can’t personally afford to buy very many of these magazines, and neither can most of my friends. This is why I pick up Poetry magazine fairly often even though I’m not a poet. At under $5, it’s high quality, and it fits really well into my purse.

Opportunity cost of what you can get otherwise may not be pertinent. If you go to buy a bicycle and compare prices of unicycles, how does that help the purchase at hand?
But size does matter. I like Magma poetry but I can’t take it anywhere. Anything bound square or larger than usual is just awkward to carry. I don’t want to fold or bend what I’m reading. Faber and Faber books get taken with me because they fit in a pocket and are light. Likewise Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior is bound small.
It sounds minor, but practical concerns matter. I’ve wanted to bring books with me but know they will tire my wrist while reading and tire my shoulder (and limit my outting’s well-being duration) while schlepping them about. [I have issues with joints.]
Part of newspaper decline is free news online. Isn’t a contributing part of it made of similar practical concerns? People reading their daily newspaper while they commute instead of before means Metro displaces some of the large page format newspapers that don’t fit public transit. We still have to deal with icky feeling of high acid paper on fingers and ink tracking on hands and clothes but at least there’s space to look at the page with a smaller page. The smallest bother can put a person off a purchase.
In place of Metro, it could be a book. Or magazine. Guerilla Magazine I’d hesitated to pick up because I’d have to mangle it to take it anywhere and even with a table to unfold it all on, it was unwieldy. It seems to me that the last time I saw one, they broad their format into a smaller size. Dandelion magazine also redeisgned theirs so it isn’t that awkward square that fits neither hand nor average bag.
It may seem like a superficial concern but reading material, is material. Who hasn’t, at least once, bought a book because it was just too pretty not to leave in the store? It’s like the rubberneck effect of seeing a beautiful person. For a minute or so there, you don’t care about immaterial contents, just the packaging.
Literary magazines at least avoid getting perfume makers as advertizers. There have been magazines I’d wished to read but can’t go near the scent. It’s the little things that can be deal breakers. Ugly computer font, unbalanced crammed layout, body fonts used for headers. Title fonts for contents. There’s making a strike against unnecessary conventions and then there’s convention that exist because they facilitate transparency to get to message.
But on her point of budget-breaker literary magazines…how to competitively price against multinational, high volume, high distribution with those costs already amortized?
The large companies have the advantage of distribution networks in place. They have a wide reach of cooperation. There is Magazines Canada to help marketing as a collective.
There’s still a matter of access. Smaller magazines are advantaged with subscription but I’d like to buy 4 or 5 magazines that will give a consistent cluster of things of interest to me before I invest in a subscription. That means I need to encounter the magazine face to cover. Because literary is niche, I’m not going to find it with the impulse rack of bubble gum.
I have to go out of my way to find a place that stocks issues, and go at the right time so that the 2 or 3 issues that will be stocked are still available.
Logistically it’s a wonder I ever get magazines.
There’s the budget for clerical that is different between Big Magazines and little lit. It took me at least 10 years to get free of Reader’s Digest once they had my home address. Whereas some literary magazines that only publish 2 or 3 times a year don’t send a renewal notice and after the last issue, they never contact you again. Sure, it’s my job to stay on top of this and I shouldn’t need to be courted to stay subscribed but it would be handy to be sent reminders should I not renew immediately. Instead I have had to send 2 or 3 emails to get my subscription actually started due to clerical typo of misentering my address. I’ve felt like I’ve hounded magazines to get copies when I already paid for them and clearly showed interest.
I know, literary magazines are often small operations of rotating volunteers and things get lost in the shuffle, like subscriptions but it’s easier to bypass magazines sometimes. I don’t want to but there’s only so much work I’m willing to go to just on spec and out of a position of ideological support for an organization or information conduit.

One last possible reason for my lack of commitment to these magazines is that I garner much more satisfaction from reading an entire collection by one author than a bunch of different stories by various writers. I like to let a writer’s voice and prose style really soak in; moving from one writer to the next in the course of a half-hour is jarring.

That’s the nature of the beast. Magazines are a survey of voices. A buffet, or sampler pack. Books are for the sit down slow meal. And if you want to fast track without reading the issues, you can sample the samplers thru The Best Canadian Poetry 2009.
I suppose once one has in the head hundreds of writers you follow longitidinally for decades, it’ll mean more when you see one piece by one writer on random occasion, but for now so much is people I don’t know. That isn’t an issue.
In her post, Jessi says of magazines.

They are the only way for a new writer to have her work seen, if only by a few hundred eyes. They nurture a community of passionate writers like myself who are in it for the right reasons.

They are a convenient amount of information to absorb, keeps one up to date on what’s not supernew and not long-old. the intervals are decent. They can be short enough for a quick read and not too long to invest the time in.
I’d add that experienced writers also publish in magazines. And that even if one has a chapbook or book it may get only a few hundred eyes, if lucky. But yes, magazines are snacks to tide one over between meals.
I seem to be back to the food idea again. Lunch time…

Billy “the Blogging Poet” Jones closed nominations for the 5th year.
Past English Poet Laureates of the Blogosphere were: Ron Silliman, Amy King, Tony Brown and Jilly Dybka.
This year there are about 2 dozen nominees. The poetry blog world is in many and good hands.
A lot of new names. Explore the field below…
Allen Itz
Geof Huth
Jessie Carty
Brandon Brown
Sam Pink
Robert Lee Brewer
Dana Guthrie Martin
xTx
Rachel B. Glaser
Donald McNeil
January O’Neil
Emi Matsui
Jeff Lytle
Ron Slate
Mather Schneider
Julie Buffaloe-Yoder
rob mclennan
Jim DuBois
Brad Liening
Sina Queyras
Shmish Whims
George Szirtes
Voting begins today for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere for 2010. Voting lasts 13 days, until April 29th. You can vote daily at maximum.

Much to consider from the readings of stacks, from the reading by Shane Rhodes, the workshop with David O’Meara.
And meantime, body would like to have a lead-piped word with me about the upcoming one year anniversary of my dad’s stroke. Much sound inside and outside the ears to process.
But then there is this Jacob Polley poet who I’d not heard of until O’Meara’s mention of his Jar of Honey and the poem is a place to rest:

You hold it like a lit bulb,
a pound of light,
and swivel the stunned glow
around the fat glass sides:
it’s the sun, all flesh and no bones
but for the floating knuckle
of honeycomb
attesting to the nature of the struggle.

What a sweet piece for the ear.
Each word lands solidly and yet there are pivots of unexpected that can’t be anticipated yet fit, such as that pound of light, the heavy bulb of honey. There’s a natural language that has a grace to it. Like a dancer who also walks and you can infer the one from the other.
Its end testifies to something beyond the immediate and sees the honeycomb differently. Honey collected from so many bees and so many trips is like a national budget, the numbers involved to astronomical to hold in the head. And yet the suggestion of comb like knuckles, like a fight, like some part wrenched from the whole, which it is, the violence of the process of living.

I saw the comb inside in 2006 and thought, oh, neat. I held it to the light but for some reason took only one photo at night.
The presence of a piece of the honeycomb makes buying the homogenized honey like buying abstractions that cleave away any of the connection to the lives that went into the work that is the food. It’s an honesty and an an honoring. That’s a valuable sort of insight that Polley brought forward.
For all the attentiveness to being present with the object at hand and the sounds, there is the duality of the ugliness of the beauty and at the same time an allegiance with the bees like a nod to a fellow being and a tie between one’s own struggles and theirs.
It’s a thrust of a poem that adds a voice to the story of unity and interconnectedness while not doing so in a simplistic way by a refrain of exclusively beauty permitted on this flight, folks. It’s complex as it needs to be and is spoken in an economical way. All the L consonance ties it together but with the L at any position in the word so they are rather in camouflage. And some are a dark l and some clear l so they are different phonemes although to English mind they don’t make a difference in meaning in words (i.e. they are allophones) so are considered one sound. (For a Mandarin /t/ and (breathy) /tʰ/ are separate phonemes that are as different as /bit/ and /pit/.) There are all kinds of internal slant rhymes that cinch the poem tighter without being so overt that it draws attention to itself.
I had thought of consonance and assonance but I’d not tied together in framing of slant rhymes. Slant rhyme I’d framed as changed final consonant(s) only. The idea expands the tool box of there being consonantal rhyme (lit, light) or assonantal rhyme (light, sides or bones, glow).
Consonantal rhyme strikes me as something to watch for since I’d like to explore the idea of consonants as word base as exists in classical Arabic. For example, the root KTB relates to writing so Kaatib is writer, kitaab is book, maktabah is library, maktuub is written, mukaatabah is correspondance, kutayyib is booklet. Some part of our universal language machine automatically generates this as a salient feature in language, logical and intuitive to tie similar concepts together.
Each language must be itself of course and has its own innate qualities that resonate with the human brain, whether one speaks that dialect or language or not. It’s like, or it is, a kind of meat body language to use the tongue in certain ways. Something comes across viscerally whatever the “mother tongue”. Tale this poem in Scots by Bruce Lemming

Reid cluds lemin
at keek-o-day —refleckit
in the cray glaur

The effect of its weight of meter and sound is completely different when the writer translated his own to English as it is in How To Haiku edited by Bruce Ross in the appendix (p. 144),

Red clouds glowing
at sunrise —reflected
in the pigsty mud

The meaning is the same, even close with the heavy syllables of guttural mud and heaviness of the word pig. I wonder why he chose glowing instead of glow that would have less lilt. Why include the word at? What is that doing for rhythm? It lightens the line and slows it. And to slow down at a moment’s pause near dawn seems right even if one is within the pig stink of farm.
Sunrise is so flat to English ears against the delightful keek-o-day. Let’s start a movement to adopt that Scots word into English habit.
Reflected in both languages sit as a pivot word, the balance point in the seesaw, a bit of latin borrowed intellect between the sky and muck as one swings from the glorious exhibition on the cloud to presumably the practical task at hand.
It’s quite a workout of brevity.