Tonight I’ll be speaking at Tree after Sandra gives one of her typically spectacular readings. A surreal transition, this being back in town. Months Weeks of no one but Hub and I then a whole crew.
Which reminds me, here’s another tidbit from The Trip…while cycling in Paris we came to a red light and I saw this,

What’s that? A tabac devoted “Au Chien Qui Fume”

Naturally I thought of Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, the short story collection by Stuart Ross.

The Giller Prize list is out and what an amazing town. Between Writers’ Fest, and Plan 99 I’ve heard read 1/4 of the dozen novels and novelists in person within the last year, namely, Martha Bailie for her novel The Incident Report, published by Pedlar Press, Jeanette Lynes for her novel The Factory Voice, published by Coteau Books, and Shani Mootoo for her novel Valmiki’s Daughter, published by House of Anansi Press.
I never envy judges for having to award a top person. It must be like a beauty contest. Just draw lots and be done with it.
All this and relit award winners too, including Mierau. Oh, and you did see Gary Barwin’s thoughts on presenting and performing poems, didn’t you?

And now for some holiday travel heroic couplets that fall a little short…
The Roving Detective Returns to the Scene at Midnight
The sock, which at dawn, was wrung
within inch of damp, was hung
yet at day’s end of “drying”
is wetter off, dead sopping.
Holmes, what do you make of it?
The spout from which it hung — a drip!
From it slow wicked a wicked
tomorrow. Some shoe-squelched tread
Or a baring that slips on its
own sweat and steam, footwear pits,
as sock rides in mesh, in air,
with backpack cum rickshaw flair.

In Paris a marvelous ex-pat bookstore is jammed to rafters of 2 floors of English books. Naturally I beelined to the poetry corner. Downstairs is a rabbit’s warren of new and used books…

I could see multiple full collections of Paula Meehan. I could flip thru Ciarán Carson in person. Something I browsed gave the phrase “concussive months”. There were all these publishers and authors that I’ve read reviews of titles but never seen page to face or can’t access locally, such as Salt, Bloodaxe, Wave Books (such as Take It and Each H), Ugly Duckling Presse, Salmon, Carcanet.
They have spine bound and chapbooks from England, Ireland and the U.S. as well as online entities like Red Hen Press (whose site crashes my browser so I won’t point). They have as big of rack of indie publishers as I ‘ve seen at a generalist bookstore. [Although miniscule compared to This Ain’t the Rosedale Library in Toronto where I went to earlier this year.] I found a book that I tried to order online or at book mooch to no luck for more than a year, Sheila E Murphy’s Green Integer classic, Letters to Unfinished J. (which rob mclennan riffs of in letters to unfinished g.) I can’t say that Murphy is new to me. I have 3 of her titles already but just listen,

6. It is possible to unlearn all arithmatic except subtraction. Need more time to savor what is posh or not. She specialized in deals inversely proportional to the guilt that blocked them.
[…] 9. We want so much to earn a common dialect but syllables emerge instead. Pump out the spine if no stomach is available.

Why would one not want more of that?
But about the space, the buzz in the place! There’s the respectful hum of book lovers. It was more holy than some of the places we toured that were in architecturally churches but had people in tank tops, shorts, baseball caps staring apathetically until they start loud conversations. But that’s a whole other place and time for another time and place.
The bookstore had people absorbed in books. The space is tight so people navigated sideways to get past, paused, got caught up in shelves. They hold readings in the upstairs space.
Upstairs there are reading rooms with nooks, chairs and sofas of books not for sale. And a typewriter if you want to use it. Anything on the top floor is for reading only on the sofas and chairs, which were occupied so I didn’t intrude with the camera. Except this one seat was free momentarily…

There’s an area for chat and a wall and ceilings of gratitude where ex-pat readers leave their spontaneous thanks for finding this refuge and institution of English literature in Paris.


There’s a lit mag section to take or leave issues so now 2 copies of PFYC #13 is there along with a few copies of Sandra Ridey‘s above/ground broadsheets and and a few of my oath in the boathouse.

The past issues of literary magazines have a space where you can drop off or pick up for free. My goodness. I could have spent days but only spent, apparently hours, but it felt like minutes…

Mm, new books. An advantage of travel is finding new voices, whole communities that happen to be elsewhere speaking a dialect you can hear. Case in point, I came across The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry: 1967-2000 edited by Peggy O’Brien. It was at the Poetry Library in the Southbank Center, London. Here’s a picture of me there by the periodicals shelf.

The Irish anthology had poems by new-to-me Irish writer, Paula Meehan. p. 219 had a poem called “The Pattern” which had these lines,

She stares out as if unaware
that any human hand held the camera, wrapped
entirely in her own shadow

Although it carries the female as passive, cloistered into privacy and literally and figuratively dark, at the same time there is a criticism of the portrayal, hinging on that word “seem”. Is she instead an active participant in the construction of her own public caricature? Or is it a self-aware of a projected hope of the feminist of not seeing yet another iteration of the false-schmalz construction of female as unapproachable, distant and mourning the tragedy inherent to being second class citizen suicidal goddesses? Whose interpretation swirls like Balzac.
There’s something in that pivot from private moment on film to being deep inside self, under and inside a personal cloud and yet, perhaps, like a guard sleeping with an eye open, tracking the ones who watch. The language play of being wrapped in your own shadow, the mix of paradox and truthiness is interesting.
Meehan has put out a few books with 6 collections since the 80s. In her 2002 book, Dharmakaya, p. 24 in a poem called “the exact moment I became a poet”, she talks about the notion of women’s labour, the devaluing of home and factory work, how “the words “end up” robbed/ the labour of its dignity.”
Kerry Hardie is also in the anthology. She writes quietly, without the anger and frustration-edged sadness of Meehan, but Hardie’s lyricism has an intensity as seen on p. 261,

I have always been one for paths myself
the moles view
[…]
the return
the flowers that stood
privately
giving birth to themselves

There’s some sort of torque, such as brought out in her last collection, Poetry Library, the librarian pointed me to a new work, out just one month at that time, by Peter Riley. Greek Passages is 105 prose poems put out by Shearsman Books. I tried 4 bookstores to no luck in London. It did mean a pleasant search, including going to Foyles, which is kinda like Chapters where I picked up some TS Eliot to add to the Faber books selection of Nick Laird’s To a Fault which I picked up at the Writer’s Museum in Dublin. I checked at Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road, and Blackwell’s which had Bloodaxe titles including Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (got it). Blackwell’s has a rack where people handwrote reviews as a dustcover around featured titles. There’s also the books-on-demand printing machine…

All interesting, but ineffective to the goal. I ended up ordering Riley’s book online. At least I’ll be able to read it again soon. In his words, “an erasure / across the forehead”. On p. 86 [and he uses slashes as part of his prose poem structure.]

/look/ at it there, the plurality shining in the night/seeking questions for its answers

It’s the sort of book that I can open to any phrase or line or page and it is evenly tight, thought-out, considered. Delightful relief to not have to read on fast forward, skimming to the good bits. His 4 vacations to Greece near Argos are pulled across time and space into wide and narrow contexts.
Something about a new place that brings new questions and new answers. For instance, in Trastevere, Rome, I found a bunch of essays by Octavio Paz in “Nearly on the Corner Bookstore”. There were shelves of classics, literary crit, heavily weighed towards British publishers but still, an English bookstore in Rome with well-chosen titles, rather than whatever comes along or more shelves, of, bless him, Muldoon, who seems to be in cahoots with Emily Dickinson to corner the monopoly of poetry titles in generalist bookstores.