Scream Festival events plays with Fahrenheit 451 idea, wondering out of our heads, how much of a book can we reconstruct if it were to vanish. Personally, without hard copy reference, I’d be sunk.
Let’s hear it for buying print text. Let’s hear it for buying the product of the writers. (And if that phrasing flashed you back to Denise Williams too, I’m sorry.) [I tried to say hangdog expression, but first hangdog, handdog, handgod, hangfog — think I should turn on a light?]
Mattew Tierney’s 12 or 20 interview was a fun read. For example,

Q: Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?
A: I’ve been toying with the idea that all poems are failures. The good ones are, anyway.
I don’t mean a failure of language, though that’s always the pink elephant in the room.
Something more particular about the kind of failure. It’s necessary for poetry to fail to be prose, for one. Or even to fail to make “sense.” Like the way quantum physics breaks from classical.

Knott and a haiku turned around and round.

this to…http://pagehalffull.com/pesbo
archives and comments included.
and I guess I could mention also the
food blogging here: http://www.pagehalffull.com/eatenup
and the regularly general life blog here:
http://www.pagehalffull.com/humanyms
and maybe even the bio shorts of impactful people:
http://40wordyear.blogspot.com

PURDY COUNTRY LITERARY FESTIVAL #3

press release June 11/09

The third annual PURDY COUNTRY LITERARY FESTIVAL (PurdyFest #3) will
again be held over the August holiday weekend. This year events have
been expanded to five days and four locations: Malone pioneer hamlet,
Marmora, Brighton, and Ameliasburgh. Co-organizer James Deahl has called
PurdyFests “Woodstock for poets”.

Activities begin on Thursday, July 30, with a HAIKU DAY garden party at
ZenRiver Gardens retreat in Malone. Haijin Claudia Coutu Radmore will
lead in the creation of a linked haiku sequence called renga, and all
poets are invited to participate. Popular Marmora singer/songwriter
Morley Ellis will perform at many of the Marmora area events.

Poetry activites continue on Friday at ZenRiver Gardens, with the annual
POETS FOR PEACE meeting chaired by Hamilton poet James Deahl scheduled
for 3 pm. This will be followed by a casual MEET & GREET and POTLUCK
SUPPER for participants. The elements willing, a campfire round robin
poetry reading will complete the day.

On Saturday, August 1, a SYMPOSIUM ON AL PURDY will be held in the
Marmora Library Building. Participants include poets David Day and James
Deahl, and philosopher/author Terry Barker. In the evening ANOTHER DAM
POETRY READING will take place on the island in the Marmora Dam. Over 40
poets have already committed to reading at PurdyFest #3, and many of
these will be reading their poems published in the special Canadian
issue of “Dreamcatchers'” magazine.

On Sunday, Aug. 2, events move to Brighton, where they will be organized
by Canada-Cuba Literary Alliance President Richard (Tai) Grove. Over a
dozen of the poets who attended last summer’s PurdyFest have work
included in the launching of AND LEFT A PLACE TO STAND ON, a fund
raising anthology from Hidden Brook Press for the restoration of Purdy’s
historic A-frame house and the possible formation of a
writers-in-residence program.

On Monday, Aug. 2, there will be another PICNIC WITH AL in the little
cemetery where Al Purdy is buried in Ameliasburgh.

All Purdy Country Literary Festival events are free, and in the
democratic spirit of People’s Poets Milton Acorn and Al Purdy, most
events will offer everyone attending a chance to read at least one of
their poems.

PurdyFests have become an increasingly important literary and cultural
event. The highly published and the yet-to-be-published meet and mingle
on common ground in the ruggedly beautiful countryside Purdy
immortalized in his poem “The Country North of Belleville”. Dr. John
Burke, who attended PurdyFest #3, described as “transformative” readings
by Ottawa poet Jim Larwill and Montreal poet Katherine Beeman.

Other events will likely be planned for PurdyFest #3, and times and
locations will be posted as they are confirmed. Limited rough camping is
available, and information on area bed & breakfasts and motels can be
obtained from the various township websites. For further information on
PurdyFest #3, please email Chris Faiers at: zenriver[at]sympatico[dot]ca

poetry reading

a succession of stories, above the nose foldings
somberness, a chin tightening with smiles, cadence
of chat, ambiant sounds in the room rising, bodies cotton
moving with, against the regularity of playback from page.
come even the tuning of fiddle the baby dozes, nurses,
lays content.

daddy talks and baby stirs. then the poems
and a room of cries. a stamp of wrong, distress.
ask, how much do we do this to ourselves, rehearse
grief’s postures from set text. some, those called
sensitive find poetry a downer; only want to be cheered,
comforted with pablum, airplane zooms of wit;
a reprieve from everything having meaning;
get a payoff of sugar or wish to reform, a map of
how; wish listeners would be considered by the egos
who impose sure confusions as if everyone else
had a shortage.

we buffer off the effects, screen ourselves
into words behind words. go to recourses
of other mandates (for peace, for humor),
nibble at silence with rhyme, but the baby
is restless, upset. at 7 weeks doesn’t know why
dad is unhappy, his projected voice is hard,
strange. baby wriggles in sympathetic discomfort,
fusses at his voice alone. this shows what
is news. shows how tender his usual tones
how often, how sweet.

Recently there was the reading by Brick Books. It was a fun night. Kitty kept things lively with her pop-quiz-style constraints, a sort of point at you, you and you next: read for 5 minutes, and now, speed round, pick a 2 minute selection. Reid, O’Meara and Mcinnis didn’t know when they’d be up or for how long. It felt more communal and interactive as an effect. An interesting sort of constraint where poets are in the awkward position of needing to know how long any given poem will take and egad, a time limit that means usual reading poems don’t fit. Not a now I do my thing for 10 minutes and I’m done. There was a lot of laughter thru. A gamut of good poems. Some new, some out of new manuscripts, some out of books. And the night was capped off with the Call Me Katie quieting-soul-beast music.
I didn’t take photos but John W caught Kitty at the door prize moment and Charles shows her with the Brick books table. Charles got a picture of Peter Midgley who was one of the features the next night at the above/ground reading.

Monday night, Midgley did poems with a mixture of languages in his dramatic poems. he included a cultural form called Praise Songs, which he prefaced by saying are actually not songs, nor are they praise. They are a speaker’s corner sort of call out of political criticism like the original Persian ghazal was. A vivid sort of speech. A cross-pollination of different spheres of cultures and intersections of is always refreshing.
Ken Belford and his newest book lan(d)guage
It also contained poetry that wasn’t contained in that de facto mandate that seems to exist where one talks of myths or personal history. It used the head and politics but wasn’t cerebral nor straining to persuade. Nicely balanced. One poem of his was of pathogens, how we swap them with money by trading animals, how pathogens pass invisibly at the river mud, may lie in obscurity and have no impact on humans or have huge impacts. One poem spoke to how economic systems of market forces impact the social. Lovely to see poetry with cognition involved and control of metaphor.
Clint Burnham with jw before the reading.
Burnham‘s poems were interesting. One poem was, on the page, like a vocabulary list which read continually coupled and recoupled meaning from set phrases so the narrative kept breaking and reforming. (Example eludes me just now.)
It was tiring to hear because it requires continual listening unlike some lyric narrative poetry that’s “baggy”, where you can blah blah fill in the expected for a line or stanza at the time and it goes directly where one might expect from the opening. In contrast his density reminded me of Crabwise to the Hounds.

We do tend to be a recording-oriented sort of town. Here, the Michele Denise Smith is being audio-captured as she read. I’m afraid being first, each thing that came successively displaced it. I’m trying not to take notes but rely on memory. This has repercussions occasionally.
Gregory Betts pitched hit on Monday since Christine Stewart had to cancel. (No wardrobe was forwarded, so he dressed as himself.)
He read from 2 poems, one of which was political and yet what I liked better was his erasure version of Shakespeare’s sonnet 51. From it he plundered words to make 51 sub-poems from it, each poem using the words in the original order. Interesting challenge and constraint. (I’m rather fond of constraints it seems.)
This selective erasure and slicing has a long tradition, sampling to make a new text. Saw this recombining elements to make a new narrative in a Canadian Bible Society tract at my feet in a parking garage. “I am familiar with all your ways…even the very hairs on your head are numbered… for you were made in my image …and in me you live and move and have your being.” (That would be Psalms, Matthew, Genesis, Acts across centuries slid togehter as one voice and thought.)
[Cross-posted]