Friday, November 27, 2009; doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm with 5 readings by:
Michael Dennis is an Ottawa poet with several books to his credit, most recently Coming Ashore On Fire from Burnt Wine Press.
Michelle Desbarats has had work appearing in Arc Magazine, Decalogue, Transpoetry, Burnt Toast, Speak!, Meltwater Review, and on CBC Radio and at the Writers’ Festival in Ottawa. Michelle was a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. She has received writing grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa. She has also participated on Jury boards and as a judge for writing contests both in Canada and the US. Her work has been described as luminous and Don McKay, on the cover of the sold out Last Child To Come Inside, writes “This is poetry full of quick and acutely angled insight, moving with great sureness to glimpse the raven’s wing inside the ordinary.” Michelle is currently teaching poetry at Carleton University and working on two manuscripts.
Spencer Gordon writes and publishes in Toronto.
Garry Thomas Morse has two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007), and one collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009) published by Talonbooks. His work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, dANDelion, filling Station, memewar, The Vancouver Review and West Coast Line. Morse has received the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayors Arts Award for Emerging Artist and has twice been selected as runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. After Jack, his poetic homage to Jack Spicer, will be available from Talonbooks in April 2010. He moved to Ottawa from Vancouver but a few short weeks ago.
Lisa Pasold has been thrown off a train in Belarus, been fed the worlds best pigeon pie in Marrakech, learned to polka at Danceland, and been cheated in the Venetian gambling halls of Ca Vendramin Calergi. Pasold grew up in Montreal, which gave her the necessary jaywalking skills to survive as a journalist. Her first book, Weave, appeared in 2004 and was nominated for an Alberta Book Award; her second book of poetry is A Bad Year for Journalists, described as “critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical” by The Globe and Mail. Her work has appeared in publications such as Billboard Magazine, The National Post, The Chicago Tribune, New American Writing, and Geist. Her first novel, Rats of Las Vegas, has just come out from Enfield & Wizenty.
The semi-annual pre-ottawa small press book fair reading is lovingly hosted by rob mclennan at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Armstrong at Parkdale, Ottawa. Admission is free.
Here’s more information on the book fair. The Ottawa small press fair is starting day at noon on Saturday the 28th and runs until 5.
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At the same time as the reading is Bill Bissett’s performance and 70th BD party in Ottawa. “bill bissett’s charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate sound poetry, chanting and singing, the verve of which is matched by his prolific writing career – over 70 books of bissett’s poetry have been published.” It is at the Mercury Lounge in the ByWard Market. ($10 admission, $8 for students/seniors) There will also be readings there by Luna Allison, Kevin Matthews and musical performances by John Lavery and Roland Prevost.
P.S. Here are photos of the bill bissett BD

Join Master of Ceremonies and host Rob Winger for a Night of Poetry featuring the Modern Poetry Collection housed in the Archives and Research Collections of the Carleton University Library. Listen to poetry readings by poets Michelle Desbarats and Armand Ruffo. View material from the collection while mingling with other poetry enthusiasts from the university and the greater Ottawa community.
The Modern Poetry Collection contains material from Canada’s small press movement (1960s and 1970s) including rare broadsides; first and rare editions of modern and contemporary Canadian and North American poets; and print editions of some of Canada’s “little magazines” like Arc Poetry Magazine—there is something for everyone!
Date: November 26th, 2009
Place: Library Staff Lounge (Room 153, on the lower floor) Carleton University Library, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive
Time: Doors Open at 6:30 p.m. with event beginning at 7:00 p.m.
Refreshments will be available.
For more information please contact Lloyd Keane, Archives and Research Collections at lloyd_keane@carleton.ca or call 613-520-2600 x2739. [source]

MJ Carson is succinct about the basics: “Don’t bore me, have something to say and put some amount of craft into it. Is that too much to ask of a poet?”
That’s from the discussion afloat in the Amazon forum of what do you hate in a poem?. The phrase “mispunctuated prose” was tossed around in the mosh pit for a bit. One should understand what one is doing but not be bored or boring in the doing. It is a pleasure when one can tell the writer has perceived, thought, read and interacted, not just blindly vented and then abandoned the idea and run on.
How clean should a poem be? What is past the cutoff lines for explicit and oblique, structured and free?
maximus says:

here’s an interesting juxtaposition between Robert Frost and Charles Olson, one of the leading figures in “free verse,” writer of the influential “projective verse” (a very interesting essay for those wanting to know more about “experimental poetry”) and a major “minor” figure in 20th Century literature (he was one of the first, serious scholars of Herman Melville):
Frost — “”There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form”
Olson — “Whatever you have to say, leave the roots on, let them dangle, And the dirt, Just to make clear where they come from.”

Reva Hill says,

I like wildness, but not wildness that is sloppy. I like poems where the wood of the poem has been sanded until it feels like a lover’s skin. I like the joints of the poem to be well-fitted. I like poems that move. The poet can have accomplished this by the line, the spacebar, metaphor, syntax, meter–whatever. I do not like poems sitting like well-mannered lumps on the page. Good poems do not obey. Even a good contemplative poem moves–by staying still. I like poems where the poet isn’t afraid of silence. I want what comes out of the silence to be surprising, original. I don’t care if I agree. I like poems that are easy to understand. I like poems that are difficult. I don’t like poems that sound like they were written with the admiration of friends in mind. I like wit. I like poems that make me chuckle, snort, throw the book across the room. But I also like earnest poems–as long as they surprise and have grace. I dislike witty poems where the wit is expected, the delivery ugly. I like the words indigo and akimbo. I currently hate poems with the words indigo and akimbo.

Ah, anything else I might add would be in that shadow now. Beautifully put by Hall.

You can’t help but frame a scene in words or in art. Something is included. Something is left out. Whether that is a scene of order or disorder, narrative or anti-narrative something is presented.
We saw on travels a famous statue and being with memory I have, I don’t remember the sculpture or artist. I was in high school and university art class. it was the rape of __some greek dudette__ and I thought it horrific. It is extremely delicate in suggesting rape, a hand grabbing a butt so far as shown force, but the female is portrayed as held in fear and threat. As gender portrayals, it it another point for male is angry beast myth and female is victim object. It seemed so far as portrayal, difficult to do in a non-film era. It is vivid and emotive and in mid-motion in marble. It sets in contrast the inertness of material and the permanence of carving with the volatile moment. If the artist chose the next frame where she won and knifed the dude (The title confers him the victory but ah, one wishes for not another iteration of female loss even if reversing genders gains nothing for changing the basic redemptive violence myth). Point being, if the story were contrived in still-frame later in the narrative, would be a stable diorama: Regret, grief and death are static. It would have less shock value for being at rest. Instead the narrator of stone doesn’t let such high emotion passes and he does not permit it to pass to her victory or resolution. It makes it more epic to be a dramatic moment of wrestling. This is what is heralded worthy of telling.
To bring that back to poems, there is a plethora of tying old myths, epic names, to everyday struggles. It is one acceptable depth of poem.
Shiki wanted to consecrate the everyday. Some contemporary poets want to validate the normal rather than the transcendent mountain breezes that shrinks a person small. It can be unintentional satire to be drawing connections between the banal to stub and the great cruelty of life.
Is it a poet’s job to give a better perspective, a corrective narrative, or just a personal one, or impersonal one? How close is the poet to the world? To the reader?
A lot of diversity in poetics comes down to ideology of what is worth mentioning. What is valuable? Is the everyday exempt from mention? Essential? The personal? The political? The extraneous? What mind must one be in? Does one get to write in “finished state” something which is petty? What if it is petty but comedic? Does that save its face? Do we speak of only permanent? Or archive only the transitional? If global? Or only if of this time and place? Or only if set in contrast, not to the rest of life outside the poem, but set cheek to serif inside the poem in contrasting weights? What about light poems of things that aren’t intending lasting resonance?
Does poetry have to be dense in the bang per beat of syllable? Or is that a preference. I tend to get fixated on what I like. Rule-bound is rather like bowel-bound. I get preoccupied with the term haiku or poem. Essentially it is communicative act. That might not imply a conceptual meaning. Autistic hand flap that disperses nervous energy, body talking to itself. It is a broad sense of communication. The outward form of a poem inhibits meaning or aids it but if walls go up on hearing the word or seeing the shape suggesting poem and the checklist comes out — the chance of hearing core meaning or appreciating the speech act or visual or spatial gesture — something is lost.
To repeat myself from other blog

Glad to sit in with some Zen River poems and haibun. They are comfortable, casual, restful sort of nature walks thru words. I love how it related being honored by being near an owl without adding to it something fancy-brained-justifying as symbolic or mystical. Reality being good enough is nice to see.
I like how the stories are interspersed with letters dialoguing with the stories, which themselves are sometimes haibun* as well. It makes the collection feel like a community in dialogue more than anthologies usually do. Anthologies often have blinders partitioning section from section. Here poems and people interrelate.
Haibun is a poetry form of a prose story with a haiku that relates and expands or concludes the whole, or are set out between sections through the whole story.

Starting back where I left off in Frogpond Vol 32:1, I came to paul m.’s column on haiku writing practice. He hit on something that I have been mulling, and something which struck me about the ZenRiver collection. These experiences intersected with something said at the writers conference as well. Two lady panelist on stage collaborated on a sentence of how editing poems needs a light touch. (Lisa Foad and who?) They said poems/ ideas are like pie crust and if you overwork it, it fails. (It stood out as such a feminine domain metaphor at the time. That is another story.)
Intersecting with this is the awareness of how I tend to read thick and deep and want to send my words thru cross-checking so I cannot be misinterpreted. And realizing that when I write if there is not double-meaning I tend to not pursue something as if that level of complexity is the only option. I’m aware of being inhibitingly critical of failing to meet desired form so instead of changing form, I am silent, which goes no where in getting closer to meaning or function.
Part of that desire to write and promote multiple level of oblique meanings is coming from the pleasure of conversations with poets. I can be read symbolically and communication can be faster and more effortless since ideas can leap faster and people are willing to leap. (Non-writers tend to be more linear and pragmatic and I have to speak in low density and unpack every phrase in a way that reminds me of the satirical remark on Napoleon, who was a military leader of France. Not now, but a very long time ago. France is in Europe. It’s a country. What can we safely assume a fellow communicator knows?) Not every non-writer is like that. Not every writer is swift. But in general whitewash, there’s some pattern. A pattern where speaking on mutltiple levels at once is possible and rewarded with pleasure. To speak plainly and without weight is not parsed or is a non-event or anti-climatic.
The range of communication where there is no direction, only shooting the breeze, passing time, with no instrumental purpose is part of a healthy balance of communication. To say that one must not write an ill-thought-out poem, or bury it is to say one must never be given allowances for being sick, or tired or crabby. It is holding thru a narrow range of kinds of permittable perfection.
At this point in divergent sources of thoughts moving towards convergent I come to paul m. (p. 38-39) “I was raised in a society in which we are taught that things mean other things. Stars and tea leaves tell our fortune. A black cat can’t cross my path without my recognizing it as a bad omen.”
I hadn’t considered this cultural embedding for dual or multiple layers of meaning. Even if I scoff and find weak-minded superstitions of harbingers, part of me reacts because it fears it may be true or wants such mystical guidance to simplify the data stream from random into meaningful. Our culture is steeped in signifiers. And my rejection of ‘superstition’ was marked by only accepting a narrow subset, acceptable superstitions of sanctioned/sanctified superstition/symbolism i.e. rain can’t just be wet. It has to be a personal reminder from a personal god of forgiveness and mercy.
paul m. goes on to say,

I learned to approach poetry as if the poet was saying, “Let me tell you something through something else.” […] But instead of leading with what I am trying to say, with what I want the objects to say, I should listen to the objects themselves.
What is remarkable about letting an object speak for itself is that it allows you to discover something new about it. You will never find anything new, much less report on anything new, if you approach your subject with your mind already made up.”

While unconscious has a mind of its own and may force an unexpected direction, yes, largely, the scientific method of composition relies on an open mind, not forgone conclusion.
The issue of contrived poems, pat poems, come out of this same mould of trying too hard, forcing the poem, containing more than one needs to. Earlier in his article he mentions that there needn’t be a stigma against desk-ku. I suppose it isn’t the how or where of composition, but whether it works. As he sas later, (p. 40) “it is important to remember that each poem is two poems: the writer’s and the reader’s.” Writer and reader are looking to cobble pieces.
It is a fun constraint to try to layer in every poetic device you can without letting any of them draw fire on the subject. It is lovely to let things pop into different weight of significance. To mandate that to oneself is to mute oneself. It forces unuseful, unnecessary silences. What starts as a game becomes a death match of desk poems with the life well-trained, but mechanical.
We can make a papercut ending to a poem that triggers some memory of something like the statuary in death grip. We can make a two line envoi that makes the reader reevaluate that which went before in new light and new depth. To a degree, that can retell a truth. To a degree that feels like a parlour game, or boilerplate mystery. We want closure signalled somehow but having read so much as to predict the common ways, can we keep authentically doing the laugh track and gasp track, or do we widen the possibility so that observation without complications, listing as selective aspects of note can be poetry without stigma or contention?
Still my bias is for things that are either meaning-loaded (picture poverty-region overloaded bus with people hanging off) or meaning avoidant where there is no intent to convey something that could have moral or serious intent. That misses a middle range. There’s pleasures to be had across the range. When one way gets fatigue, switch. It is not the domain of the form to switch, exclusively, but the tastes of reader and writer that can be fluid.

Oh my. I see at 4 seasons haiku, One Single Impression regular Mandy has passed on to hospice care. Her haiga will remain up.
      jostling between the shoulders a small breeze disappears