The Writers Festival of Ideas is coming in a month or so. The schedule is starting to go up. It begins April 22 and has a new venue: the Mayfair Theatre in Old Ottawa South (1074 Bank Street at Sunnyside).
So far,

• changing how we eat — foodies, 100-milers, urbanites, farmers, gardeners and chefs
• Jane Goodall in town talking about hope for animals (April 12)
• a murder mystery sequel by Alan Bradley
• a talk on making sensible changes for the environment in revolutionary—not just incremental—levels for the way we live and work
• a walk thru indigenous cultures versus globalization
• a panel discussion on new Penguin biographies including one on Marshall McLuhan
• getting off our oil-based economy

No poetry yet except for inherently how lives are lived.
It’s a lovely week for literature. As usual Blue Metropolis Writers Festival in Montreal overlaps. They’re having Master Classes — poetry with Paul Muldoon and spoken word with Bob Holman.

Looking for other photos from Montreal or Toronto launches of Rogue Stimulus I found:

Kinda close…

The snowmen salute Parliament.
According to CPAC

The Speech from the Throne is almost always delivered mid-afternoon. But the October 2007 address was held at 6:35pm ET. Amidst heightened election speculation, critics accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives of reducing the opposition’s ability to respond before that night’s newscasts and newspaper deadlines.

I hadn’t realized that the Governnor General acts as a figurehead not just for the Queen but the government as well in this regard. The same page says,

The government writes the speech, which MPs debate for up to six days after returning to the Commons. The process begins with a motion by two government backbenchers to consider an Address in Reply: a short statement of thanks to the Governor General for providing the speech.

This year the Speech from the Throne is scheduled to begin at 2:30 pm.
Here are the main points of promises.
But cut back a few days to the Parliamentary pause…on the Hill, Rogue Stimulus launch…

Getting going with Caesura for the new Caesar by Mike Buckthought and mic getting set up by MC/editor Stephen Brockwell.

Nathan Hauch and Claudia Radmore Coutu reading “newsflashes to the PM” and “prorogatio imperii” respectively.
Jamie Hawes poem “the Right Tie for the Grey Clerk at Parliament Hill” included the lines,

Can we get away with this?
Will a shock of warm silk below his chin
Keep their minds from the debt, the war.

Laura Farina asked as her poem and answered her stab at What did he Do on His Winter vacation?

He took off his wingtips, wiggled his toes.
he discontinued his long-distance plan.
He watched YouTube videos of sunsets.

Like its particular take on seeing him as an everyday human trying to work out this mess of life.
I liked How Ridings Swing by Jonathan Bennett and O Stephen Harper by Jonathan Ball. Tongue in cheek as much as cheekiness. Bennett takes the tone of everyman and like pot knows kettle, watching with detachment of rhetoric, and a sort of laid back savviness the spectacles, the grandstanding of speeches

with good local bits so you can see
yourself kind of in the greater thing, and feel
really connected to the economy or maybe
Afghanistan or Obama. Do you not find
we say the word actually an awful lot lately?
I like how he mentions Tim’s because everyone
has that in common

Tara Azzopardi, a visual artist gave another appealing take written from the issues of the grateful worker of the Tar Sands. From that perspective, life, holding on, at least it’s no worse.
Adam Dickinson‘s Parliamentary Plastique. Rather fun, in ideas and in mouth, and hard to excerpt with the way it accumulates, but I’ll give you a sampler,

He tried to keep it moving, amorphous and crystalline, nylons running
     with leaks, acrylic accounting and covalent committees
     covertly dispersing available light, but it all became rigid
     at room temperature
He had no choice but to gum, melt or craze it – his epoxy, his prosthesis
     a Plexiglass house with a picture in every room
     melted and cooled, melted and cooled,
     made to fracture easily,
     predictably,
without trying

More on launches prorogue rallies. Greg Santos in Montreal, in Toronto, Sandra Alland from Scotland, Mark Dunn from Ottawa and Gary Barwin in Toronto who will soon be in Ottawa for an AB reading.
P.S. Another place I’m online: I’m pesbo @ twitter

“Does anything we say ever leave us?”, Rodney Hall writes about the body as the space/house for the voice. [via Leigh Warren]
Laurie MacFayden has this Spatherdab poetry blog that knocked me back on my heels. Perhaps part of that is medium; I get used to speed over refinement in the internet press for current frequent words. But then, in any medium devonport is elegant and sylvia hotel is a poem to rest in. An extra bit of coolness was staying there a year ago. And, yes, I’m sure the table linens were linen.
Poetry New Zealand has as its sample poems one by my cousin Barbara Raeburn. Cool. Sample of Body Talk My clothes strew the floor like wildflowers/in summer – pink next to mauve next to/ orange. […]I meet my friend and her husband, listen/while he corrects her, she corrects him./We know what we are losing, know/ that memory’s a poor substitute/for time held motionless, that pretence/cannot call a sleeping heart.
Have I mentioned snapfish photobooks? It’s a minibook 24 color pages 2″x3″ for $6. It seems ideally priced to set out a self-published book of haibun for the Haiku Canada Conference in May in Montreal. That’s rushing towards now soon.
Book Ninja mentioned an observed New Yorker predilection for poems about writing poems. Slate’s Chris Wilson did a count by a word search of meta-words, poetry, poem, writing, reading, words, lines, or verse. Wilson

“granted clemency in cases where words or lines were clearly used in a non-poetry-writing context. By this measure, 84 poems—27 percent of the whole lot—mentioned poetry, including 32 that used the P word explicitly and 15 that mentioned writing in the title. […]
I bend to the open notebook,” […] (Here we would normally stop reading, according the game’s rules.)”

Robert Peake has a column in readwritepoem called What you should learn from rejection letters where he suggests, if you don’t already, to make a spreadsheet to track results in aggregate as well as to recognize nutritious feedback, distinguish between “what to take to heart, and what to take on the chin”.
Ooh, a new review of Soft Where. Ashly Dyck says McCann’s “poetry reflects a playfulness toward language that can stem only from an extreme sense of familiarity with the tools of his craft.”
John Brandi’s haiku at Basho Road. Nice to see another tidbit of his measured humourous view of the world.
Gary Barwin asks himself where his handwriting came from Now I rarely see any to be influenced by. And I wonder why I was impermeable to handwriting of my folks or friends. I remember resisting the round loopy handwriting of one friend as girly and the spidery of another as being not open-faced. My mom’s I’ve sampled on pages, intending for a decade to make a font from it. It’s utterly regular and steady. My dad’s? I wonder if remnants remain or if she chucked his copious notebooks as “of no use”. (Our senses of “useful” are inverse of each others.)
I remember choosing letter forms according to a handwriting analysis book, carefully noting at age 8 or 9 never to color in my dots or loops or risk being fingered as a serial killer, or force myself by handwriting to become one. Also tried working with pencil bit in mouth to force cheer.
Apt 9 Press will launch a Stuart Ross chapbook tonight. Cool.

This season we are featuring:
Susan McMaster – Autobiographical Poetry (March 28)
Patrick Gauthier – Play Writing (May 23)
Marie Bilodeau – Fantasy Writing (June 27)
All workshops will take place @ Sushi 88 (690 Somerset St. W)
Join all three workshops for $30!
Tickets go up to $15/workshop after March 29.
Seating is limited, so be sure to pick up your tickets at Sushi 88 or to contact a Dusty Owl Workshop member!
For info updates, please check out: Dusty Owl

OSI, Insomnia prompt
in Somnia’s Song the Sheepish
look at superstition, a pug’s glare at it: don’t you fail me.
I have my lucky sock on. sleep is inevitable.
the outcomes are all ad hoc. waking proves sleep
like death proved you lived once.
nah. the hammered thumb of rule: try and you fail.
fail to try and fail slightly less
but care less about the wins because when being action,
you’re too busy being a moving target.
even you can’t hit yourself. your limbs are each to their own
dimensions and dementias.
you are the 5th plane of existence or distorted petty what-ifs,
a fretful mess or curious whimsy
at the fluffy moon-comforter. sleep doesn’t care to hear
about your mood, witness. it shrugs.
nothing for it. sleep frequently. wake at 2, 3:30, 4:45, 7,
7:30 still winter storm night
and the solutions are still hours
of mistakes out of light.