Gillian Wallace won the Diana Brebner Award for 2009 with Crow, of the family Corvidae.
The contest is open to any poet living in the National Capital Region who has not yet been published in book form.
A reading was held at Collected Works on Feb 16th. It was a full little room with a spillover of a dozen into the next room.
People read from the latest issue of Arc as well as poems by Diana Brebner from Ishtar, and told memories of her. As it turned out, the host this year, Lesley Buxton, was a friend of Diana’s. She noted Brebner’s strong and dark humour which lasted even into her last days with cancer.
Jacqueline Kawaja was the runner up for the Diana Brebner Award. Funnily enough she also had a personal connection to the person behind the award. She was a friend of Diana’s daughter. As a teen tremblingly asked for feedback on her poems. Diana was the first to treat her like a real poet and read her poems with respect. Diana advised she take out all of the emotion in the poem and set it aside for 6 months. When coming back to it, try to recreate the original feeling.

Jennifer Dales, Claudia Coutu-Radmore read.

Ken Victor and Barbara Myers also read.
The deadline schedule shifted for the next Diana Brebner Award so all submissions to the 2010 competition must be postmarked no later than March 1, 2010.

Rogue Stimulus on Parliament Hill!
Feb 27th, 2010, at 2pm, join speakers, poets and performers together in a lighthearted protest against the prorogation of Parliament.
Later that day:
Gallery 101, upstairs at 301 1/2 Bank Street, 6 pm
Stay at Gallery 101 after the launch for a poetry reading and concert from The AB Series with Monty Reid and the Call Me Katie band starting at 7:30 pm.
Rogue Stimulus will have launches in other cities:
February 25, Montreal
Divan Orange, 4234 boulevard Saint-Laurent, 5-7 pm
February 28, Kingston
4 pm, The Kingston Brewing Company (upstairs), 34 Clarence St.
March 2, Toronto
7:30 pm, The Monarch Tavern, 12 Clinton St.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament (for the second time in a year!) on December 30, 2009, he punted many vital bills into oblivion. But he also inspired hundreds of poems after Mansfield Press announced this government-toppling anthology. This book gathers a range of responses—from outrage to slapstick—by acclaimed poets (including Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate and several winners of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry), previously unpublished poets and, to paraphrase Stephen Harper, ordinary working Canadians.

The anthology features poems by:
Sandra Alland ✺ Larissa Andrusyshyn ✺ Steven Artelle ✺ Tara Azzopardi ✺ Jonathan Ball ✺ Gary Barwin ✺ derek beaulieu & Andrew Topel ✺ Jonathan Bennett ✺ George Bowering ✺ Shannon Bramer ✺ Stephen Brockwell ✺ Mike Buckthought ✺ Alice Burdick ✺ Stephen Cain ✺ Chris Chambers ✺ George Elliott Clarke ✺ Stewart Cole ✺ Claudia Coutu Radmore ✺ Linda Lee Crosfield ✺ Michael Dennis ✺ Ann Diamond ✺ Adam Dickinson ✺ Christopher Doda ✺ Mark D Dunn ✺ Amanda Earl ✺ Hermann Eberl ✺ Amatoritsero Ede ✺ Maureen Egan ✺ Chris Faiers ✺ Laura Farina ✺ Andrew Faulkner ✺ Jesse Patrick Ferguson ✺ Laurie Fuhr ✺ Patrick Gass ✺ yaqoob ghaznavi ✺ David Greer ✺ Gwendolyn Guth ✺ Nathan Hauch ✺ Jamie Hawes ✺ Jason Heroux ✺ Joanna Lilley ✺ James Lindsay ✺ Jeanette Lynes ✺ Nyla Matuk ✺ clay mccann ✺ Marcus McCann ✺ Christine McNair ✺ Peter McPhee ✺ kevin mcpherson eckhoff ✺ Bruce Meyer ✺ George Murray ✺ Leigh Nash ✺ Lillian Necakov ✺ Fraser Nelund ✺ The Poets of Nova Institution ✺ Vincent Ponka ✺ K.I. Press ✺ Robert Priest ✺ Michael Eden Reynolds ✺ Stan Rogal ✺ Joe Rosenblatt ✺ Stuart Ross ✺ Ingrid Ruthig ✺ Jeremy Sandler ✺ Greg Santos ✺ Brenda Schmidt ✺ Guy Simser ✺ Jim Smith✺ H. Masud Taj ✺ Daniel Scott Tysdal ✺ Priscila Uppal ✺ Steve Venright

I got a piece of the Darrell Project, a fan-folded ephemera from Jim Knowles. It is an accordian pleated broadsheet/pamphlet with 7 poems. It runs towards flarf and around language. It is a cutting away from a corpus of language to leave behind suggestions and directions towards meaning and withdrawing back from it to some higher noise ratio.
He describes the process:

The Darrell Project ‘anneals’
a source so there is partial sense, the place
between chaos and order where perhaps the
reader’s mind creates new thoughts.
Even anti-sense poetry has a sensibility.
Plucking truly random words from a hat is
not the same at all. Fractured sense is a fair
description for a lot of it….to make you think.

It isn’t inhabiting that pulled by the nose-ring-narrative space. It breaks against itself yet doesn’t aim to be comfortable or make comfortable so the reader can sit and passively look at the page. You can bring as little or as much as you like to it.
Counter to enjoying the distance in sound and sense plays, the one closest to natural syntax and to an overarcing seeming intention of words, I like best. It feels like someone talking revelations into the high wind and occasionally you miss bits as the face pivots away.

A dream of How
a dream of how
the object grammar
tore the hope open
ripe with sayings
on the back
of the downwind
a finger unplugs
before the glassy sun
little doubt
the perished validated
first errors
sensation is always
inside of some space
the host convinced of
backward convictions
so we want rules
if words
merely speak
coexistant context
then the crackline is
supernatural intervention
contents of last legacy
perhaps some
b.s. as conservative

It’s oddly didactic and meta and yet I like it for it being contemplative without aiming for holy.
Its humour comes early on within that realization that the conclusions we came to were the culminations validated and then thrown over. It’s got a little dark twinge there. it wrestles rather than lies flat. I love the phrase “the object grammar/tore the hope open”. It’s got something juicy in there. Each phrase hooks forward, not predictable, not utterly random. There’s grammatical ambiguity that’s tasty such as the “the glassy sun/little doubt/the perished validated/first errors”. Is the sun also the error? and the doubt? little as in no doubt in light of glassy sun, the passing away of truths? Is the sun the sun veiled in clouds or a glassy sun such as a screen or representation of something daily? A lightbulb thru a glass? A finger unplugs little doubt? There are many angles of emphasis of reading. Lovely.
In the last stanza we want to, strive to believe something. Words come from some context, some accumulation larger than self or than billions of histories. Surely this has some kind of intelligence, god or meme or purpose, function or intentionality proven by its continued existence?
Any abstraction is saved, grounded in the twist of the last line with the sense of poking fun at itself, the process, the very nature of trying to piece together perception which are carried as baggage on the insubstantial shifting wind.

Art Bar Poetry where you can hear it as live but gaps edited out.
Nice to be able to hear again Rob Winger’s ghazals were up there last month. And part is an interview on writing.

It’s a book I’ve fingered thru, even carried around bookstores, but in the end, hadn’t bought.

The stepped light. The aching. Fragmentary.
And deckle-cut pages. That physical touch alone brings me back decades, whispered privacy of written and read thought.

Finally some moments of morning with Anne Carson’s translation, Fragments of Sappho.
The side text in Greek could say or be anything yet there’s an authenticity by being present. It adds weight to the social contract of meaning conveyed.
It sits like a photo to glance at as you read a letter from the same person. Rationally, disconnected in time. Connected but searching the face will yield nothing of the now but figments. p. 12
]
]thought
]barefoot
]
Some concepts and phrases slide past my default resistance against anything I read — this idea to rid yourself of someone by breathing someone out, for instance. p. 115

you will go your way among dim shapes. Having been breathed out.

Such image and cadence. Powerful and yet not tripping the breaker panels as overwhelming. Yet rich enough to have to read only bits at a time and set away again.