Our haiku group had its summer meeting June 27 with an exchange of haiku.

The summer broadsheet had haiku from Ottawa members of the Kado.

Grant listens as Michael Montreuil reads haibun from his newly launched chapbook “Last Away Tournament”, put out by Bondi Studios.

Here Claudia listens in the circle as Sheila took her turn sharing summer haiku.

Luce and Mike shared their Rengoum (renga pantoum hybrid). and have a laugh during the release of broadsheet “How Close the Moon”. The broadsheet includes TA Carter’s Lucy Maude Montgomery Prize haiku.

Guy and Margot later at the picnic table where food and fellowship was shared as well as plans for the Haiku North America Conference. It is starting August 5th at the National Library and Archives in Ottawa. (The schedule is now up.).

At the end of the time Luce took down the scroll.
In other haiku news…Old Pond is a haiku comic strip by Jessica Tremblay and there’s a blog for Haiku North America to watch develop.
Haiku Chronicles is a podcast designed to provide a better understanding of the art of Haiku and related forms such as senryu, renku, tanka, haibun and haiga. Poets Alan Pizzarelli and Donna Beaver discuss the origins and poetic principles of these forms in English. (It’s now at episode 3, 50 minutes in all.)
Here’s a picture of the temple Basho wrote about and a handful of stones has some short poems.

A pair of performances by Paul Dutton was the conclusion of this season’s AB Series. It will be back in the fall with the Be Blank Consort, a group of American sound poets who have been performing together for 8 years.
I made some mention of Dutton being in town at 40 Word Year and Humanyms but that proper post got backburnered since the start of the month.
The first performance was help on the campus of Ottawa University under dramatic lighting. Max middle introduced and gave a list of thanks to all who contributed to another season’s success.

Dutton read some from his novel and performed a couple pieces that are on Mouth Pieces as well as some poetry that isn’t collected yet such as several times table. For example “several x plenty = enough”, “several x something = likely”. He has a French and English version of. He did the English version at Ottawa U and the French version at the Quebec matinee show. He did a mix of sound poetry such as anti-lyric gox, which being non-verbal is hard to verbalize. It plays with all the vocal and resonant potential of airways and mouth. He did other things with two microphones, one at mouth, one at throat creating a stereophonic experience.
He also did some word play poems such as one (I believe after a poem entitled Content) where he communicated “beyond mutter of fact”. He did a poem dedicated to John Newlove and another to Dr. Mustard of the sick kids hospital. And because this world is comedically tiny, it turns out someone in the audience had actually been treated by that very doctor when she was small.
After there was a book table an signing. Here you see Robert Stacey flipping through a book (he later won a signed copy of a piece for calling out an answer to stage) with Dean of Tree and organizer Max Middle.


A closer look at the books. Among it, there’s poetry aurealities from Coach House, visionary portraits and his novel Several dancing women from Mercury Press, a CD of free improv singing with Jaap Blonk & Koichi Makigami & Paul Dutton & Phil Minton & David Moss, Five Men Singing made by Disques Victo (from a broadcast by Société Radio-Canada) and aCCoMpliCes.
Dutton is well-known for The Four Horsemen but as he points out he’s been doing sound with the free-improvisation band CCMC (1989 to the present) longer than with Barreto-Rivera, McCaffery and bpNichol (1970–1988).

Dominique of Gallerie Montcalm curates and graciously allowed the series to hold a reading among the exhibits of Counter-Photography: Japan’s Artists Today. Included were light boxes by Hiroko Inoue where images of views from barred windows are printed on the cloth tops. Tomoko Yoneka has done a sort of urban topography thru wallpaper. Each image shows what was there after a room has been vacated. Wallpaper faded with a shadow mark, scorched from being over a heater, bubbled and peeling over a radiator. They are abstract and yet tactile. Interesting.
Competing for interest perhaps with the ambiant art were the walk-in who joined the reading. One sat front and center and between pieces raised his hand for a question. Odd enough. Odder? He said he’d always wondered about this line of poetry and said the line. Dutton asked Whose line is it? Leonard Cohen. Person in seat wondered what Cohen meant by that. Then the man ambled out again, waking his friend who was watching a video display. Ah, the flavor of going there in person. It’s like the sticky floor in a movie theatre. A DVD just isn’t as rich.
More interesting and absorbing than the sideshow was the reading itself.

He read a different selection from Several Women Dancing, a broken narrative of the interesting layering of dreamscapes of his novel, which itself has some lovely resonant phrases such as my guts succombing to a sag of desire and meditations around the love interest’s toes and their tiny several cleavages.
He did more sound pieces as well. It’s an interesting perception-space like walking in slow motion until time distorts, with a single phoneme looping pppppppppppp until it becomes voiced to bbbbbb to transition to wwwwwwww to ooooo to shift to sssssss and your brain tries to stack it back into semantics, not knowing the jigsaw borders. It could be a word, a phrase. The sounds fill out the room from the diaphragm and sometimes a resonance is picked up by the chair and floor. The voice sounds kind of like a didgeridoo by times. Eventually, (spoiler alert) the sound falls off and we’re left with Poissons.

Later Max and Paul relax with dinner.

Another small press fair has come and gone. Realized after how few photos I took. Was too busy talking.

The small press fair in Ottawa seemed to have a constant thru traffic. Late in the day the guitar passed around thru a few hands including Laurie Fuhr’s and various people were serenaded. Laurie Fuhr read in the pre-small press fair reading from her new pooka press chapbook night flying: cold lake poems from which this excerpt of Kinosoo teeth comes from,

not enough to do in this one-mall-town we imagine brain tumours til they happen.
it’s just that my boss’s wife at the foodcourt realbeef donkey sandwich palace did
and a week before she went coma and died, we told her
it was just the sympathetic humming of fridges in the early mall morning

Pooka Press pooka Warren Dean Fulton is looking at a chapbook with David McGimpsey who read Tuesday night. What were they looking at? Might have been the Mapping Shadows: Ottawa (3rd annual pooka pub crawl) chapbook which debuted at the Small Press Fair and at Pookapalooza the next day. In it is one instant poem haiku by me

ice to left
muddle puddle to right
barefoot track straight

In these shabby seconds, something gets done. Prevents overthinking this quick jot plan. Speaking of doing something to a quick deadline, there was the 3 day novel contest…

Over Labour day weekend, try to write the novel, like John Kupferschmidt with his Garden of Men seen here at the small press book fair, Ottawa, June 20
There were tables for people with books to get out of debt, record family history, comics, and a fellow who did an oil painting a day year round. Those could be bought. There were magazines and spine-bound books as well.

Steve Zytveld at the Dusty Owl booth has the newly released chapbook of Dragon Verses by Roland Prevost. You can see a glimpse of his turn of the western soil in node’s throw, which starts

moon glints off as wide mute
spurs eat a prairie cloud
cells in touch where
wheat waves speak

Melissa Hammell and her husband are reps from The New Quarterly and of The Otesha Project bike and performing tours, seated with small press fair organizer extraordinaire, rob mclennan after the small press fair. He had the above/ground and Chaudiere table, including the newest title, Marcus McCann’s Soft Where.
Marcus is also in AngelHouse Press‘ chapbook, Pent Up which was launched at the fair. Here’s an excerpt from scene when a neighbour tries to break into his own apartment to give you a flavor,

Dropped
like a typo, like an amped
epaulette, stiletto,
foot pal
in a placebo of place,
mid air,
meters
over fence slats

AngelHouse also had on hand broadsheets by Jamie Bradley and Sandra Ridley.

Cameron Anstee with his sister at the pre-press reading where he gave out his last chapbook (which Must Be Here Somewhere. My desk vortices ate it. Nope, here we go.) Releasing Symmetry

plaster wrapped & cut away
& then a mould
shipped to British Columbia
an understanding of my body more precise
than I’ll ever have

Katie Argyle was at the spring small press fair in Ottawa with her flutterbooks. She’ll be running Urban Art at Minto Park July 18. One of them was called Newspaper Haiku where she did cut ups of phrases and pasted from various sources and fonts into a kind of found poetry, such as

because life is full
Florists rose to occasion
gaining momentum

(Picture that with each line in a different font and size.) She and a friend did an exchange project of making one per week for a year.

Oni the Haitian Sensation with Dusty Owl workshop organizer Sean Zio.
She gave a workshop May 31. Her talk was 2/3 autobiography. She’s had a varied life from qualifying for the Olympic handball team to touring with varsity badminton to becoming a single mom in a dodgy relationship in a impoverished part of LA. She has a degree in multimedia, has worked for the CBC as a host, was a headliner at the Austin International Poetry Festival, has toured Australia as a slam poet, has taught in France and Belgium and mostly works to educate kids on sexual health (birth control options, safe sex and HIV awareness) and get them excited about the concept of poetry.
She said preparation is the majority of the game. 80% of doing a good job is research and preparation and 20% is execution. (80/20 has been long a magic ratio) Being in the right place and time helps i.e. to be ready to step up “with slam spirit” and jump in with both feet.
Part of the importance of poetry is to be an ethnographer recording history to reflect on, research and curate the roots of community, such as when she was invited to write a commemorative poem for the anniversary of Dundonald Park and wrote about its place in Cold War History.
Part of the importance of poetry is expression, and when pushed, push back against stereotypes of “intellectual rednecks” who say poetry (or intelligence, culture, grammar or whatever) must be exclusively in x or y particular shape. Diversity enriches us.
Another of the importance of poetry is to make a positive, persuasive impact on what is your societal responsibility as a watchdog.
Part of her programming background may inform how she sees poetry, in part, in terms of numbers and geometry. For example, Shakespeare’s iambic pentameters are two pentagons. Alexandrines are 12×12, an area of 144 sound pieces. The shape of poetry is quite literal. The roses are red verse is memorable because of the rhyme, yes, but also because of the geometry of being a 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 grid of sound with an aesthetically pleasing square symmetry.
Interestingly when talking of slam history she clarified that slam poetry is not Poetry. Spoken word form is poetry, but slam is using the tools of spoken word in a competitive sport. Slam started in Chicago in 1986 and in germany where it is still a leader of the sport in 1989.
She said that to present poetry you need to practice prosody skills. Elocution is an exercise of cadence, diction and enunciation, and like dance, it’s about doing isolations, in this case the diaphragm and vocal chords. She assured that just because you don’t know the language doesn’t man you can’t speak the language and the impact on the mind is sound. Practice tongue twisters such as Natacha n’attacha pas son chat Pacha qui s’échappa. Cela fâcha Sacha qui chassa Natacha? at various speeds for dexterity. It can train the tongue and like any mental exercise keep you alert and fit.
Her current project is to do another National Film Board documentary and the next project is to explore cultural diversity and personal development through a Chalmers Arts fellowship grant to document the royal family of South Africa.

Poetry News: at the Small Press Fair this Saturday the 20th at Jack Purcell community center at Elgin near downtown, you can find all the new word toys in town courtesy of organizer rob mclennan. See the AngelHouse Press table to buy your very own copy of the fresh Pent Up. Only 52 copies made in the press run of this chapbook of the poetry of myself and the writers I am honored to write and workshop with: Sandra Ridley (nominated for the bpNichol award info), Amanda Earl, , Marcus McCann and Roland Prevost.