Rather than double-post I’ll point to the other blog: Leifso at Tree her new Brick Book and the issues it raises.

I’ve got a hankering for Emerald green. Looking at lit events in Ireland is exacerbating it. I’ll add Listowel Writers Week to my watch list. I can’t know if I want to attend yet because they don’t release their schedule until April.
At least Montreal’s Blue Metropolis has their schedule up. So does Ottawa’s writers fest. I wish the two did not overlap by half.
To be sexist, a yah that female are top candidates for poet laureate in Britain, Carol Ann Duffy and Ruth Padel.
I like the new Amazon side-by-side charts of “The most helpful favorable review” beside “The most helpful critical review” All the Fun’s In How You Say a Thing. Part of the problem with online is that there’s no grapevine to link the millions of people who use Amazon to weigh the source to know the value of who says what. People falsify names and the reviews stand alone. You can read more words of reviews than of what is being talked about.

“Because a metrical poem modulates individual phrases against the scaffolding of a rhythm and line-length that is mutually expected by both poet and reader, the poet can indicate, even on the page, the exact timber, tempo, and other physical characteristics the reading-aloud process should take at each point in the poem.
General readers of free verse have now learned to read poetry with their left brains—the way they read prose—privileging ideas, images, and rhetorical shape over line, rhythm, and physical vibrancy…They were reading not musically, but discursively. And this was a completely understandable way for earnest, educated general readers of the current day, trained as they have been by a century of free verse poetry and poetics, to approach an unknown book of poetry.”
– Annie Finch at Poetry Foundation

Susan McMaster was the first poet to launch the new section of the Tree reading series where 10 minutes goes to someone to do a mini-craft talk. She did a poetic overview, a retrospective of her voice and focus as it developed and changes. She said that as she goes on her sense of poetics gets briefer and simpler. It has always been truth-oriented. She gave examples with each phase.

She characterized her earlier work as a tangled venting, self-absorbed and harder to enter. She still values it because it speaks to some people who are a comparable place. At a later phase she moved to expressions that aimed to be accessible with a language that would admit as many as who would be willing to enter. The wider world entered the content of the poem. The most recent works try to engage with those necessary, difficult things. Subjects connect her life to other lives to sort out sense of truths.

Joe Blades was the feature reader at Tree. On March 10th he read from some older material as well as current writings from his newest of 30 books and chapbooks to see print, from The Book that Doesn’t Close. The Serbian translation of his book title caused a eureka and an upcoming spinoff poem series on prisons.

From older works was a poem called I am Tree, in light of the name of the series about pollution and the state of trees that can’t move, just stay themselves, solid, self-assured, and state of labels. We call carbon dioxide poison because we expel it but for trees, it is life. If humans get cancer from sun and can’t adapt to less Oxygen, maybe we should live underground and learn to breathe what most of the air is. Interesting spins.

from the Book That Doesn’t Close is a dual text in the sense that one text runs along the top of the page and cullings from notebooks run under that ribbon of text, sometimes chiming, sometimes jangling. It’s something of a meta book of poetry, journaling life as a poet, a poet thinking about poetry, poems, critics and other poets. For examples, nothing exists entirely alone; everything relates to poetry “must not be deluded into thinking poetry is their true mind” or critic tears off arm of writer. immediately replaced by another critic with arm of a corpse. [Italics rather than quotes where I may have mistranscribed and have no line breaks]

Interesting to see how page converts to air. I’ve seen notations for privacy of Mr. R________ and not knowing how that would be put to voice. Joe Blades did the long underscore with a pinch of finger drawn arms length in sudden silence from phrase so anyone listening without eyes would have to look up and see the text’s analogous gesture.

Interesting mention that while in Serbia Blades found out that the practice for poetry reading is not so passive as here. One reads for 5 minutes and discussion runs for 50 after. People then can dialogue about the subjects interactionally as the norm. Nice, that.

Tree’s new format with time-limits of 4 minutes per open mic and a limited set of 4 or 5 readers and more but shorter breaks gives a more digestible flow to the evening. Not everyone can digest 1 or 3 hours of poetry at a sitting and now when your brain fills, you don’t have to go to your happy place and stay seated, nor disrupt to leave early.

Jilly points out that March is Small Press Month, for the 13th year apparently. What better time than for the government to announce cutting funding to all magazines that have less than 5000 subscribers. A coalition to talk back at that notion is forming.

History repeats peats peats, bogs, burns, settles, grows, repeats. We run around in circles insisting small scale is valuable too.

Endings are beginnings
ouroboros
seems fatal until the life-cough.

How to define Small Press? It can be small print runs, online only, ephemera only, smaller scale publishing and are often one person operations, or very few. It is many niche markets, small runs, coming from people who do a one- or few-sheet run to regular small ephemera pages or series of chapbooks, to videos or periodical blogzines to indie or smaller-scale publishers of spine-books like the Literary Press Group may represent to start-up “online magazines” of sites with a juried choice of who to put in the spotlight…there are huge numbers of people involved.

In Canada there’s a huge but dispersed small press set, regardless of where you draw a cut off point for scale of disseminating words and ideas short of Random House and McClelland & Stewart. Sales garnered are not in the thousands or millions of copies. Lines vary. Small and steady.

Some to spread ideas widely, organically and for a living and some priding on counterculture and being under the mainstream radar and being personal-scale distribution. It’s quite a mix. Poets & Writers magazine have an accessible searchable database of small press listings.

An incomplete list of groups and people in the small press literary sandbox who have web presence:

above/ground press
Angelhouse Press
Aeolus House
Aliquando Press
Alias
Allan Weiss
Anik Press
Art by Ruth

Barbarian Press
Big Pond Rumours
Buschek Books
Believe Your Own Press
Beyond Blacklight
Bigge Ink
Boheme Press
Breller Books
Brick Books
broken pencil
Brooks Books Haiku
Bywords
BookThug
Broken Jaw Press

Chicoine Enterprise
Chaudiere Books
Coach House Books
Cormorant Books
Ditch
Dusty Owl
Dundurn
ECW Press
The Emergency Response Unit
Exile Editions
Existere
Frog Hollow Press
General Store Publishing House
Gesture Press
The Grunge Papers

Imago
Insomniac Press
learn/yeats & co
Leaf Press
Life Rattle
Maisonneuve
Misunderstandings Magazine
Mansfield Press
The Mercury Press
The New Quarterly

Playwrights Canada Press
The Puritan
The Ottawa Arts Review
Proper Tales Press
The Porcupine’s Quill

Room 302 Books
Rampike
Running The Goat Press
serif of nottingham editions
The Shore Magazine
Twoffish Press
Underwhich Editions
White Wall Review
Wolsak and Wynn

Canzine with 150 booths of art-pieces to glossy to photocopied scribbles. Dozens of zines and small publishers at anarchist book fair in Montreal… to a couple dozen small press publishers were at meet the presses. The AWP‘s bookfair, which will be in Colorado in 2010, always has loads of tables of people who publish, and sometimes even for cash rather than the swap economy. A couple dozen listed at the Toronto Small press fair. The best of the 300 at Expozine will be at the Awards for it in Montreal, March 3.

There’s constant creativity.

Jessie Carty of Folded Word Press made a trailer for small press month to promote some little guys. She says,

Please spread the word, and this video and any links to spread the awareness for all the hard work that small presses provide to their authors and the literary world by providing a variety of voices to be published.

U.S. Small Press month events include these people linked from the video:
http://www.saintannsreview.org
http://www.finishinglinepress.com
http://www.cavewallpress.com
http://www.poetryproject.com
http://www.mainstreetrag.com
http://www.uglyducklingpress.org
http://www.press53.com
http://www.raintaxi.com
http://ww
w.redhen.org/
http://www.catranslation.org/
http://northvillereview.com
http://www.poetryflash.org
http://www.etchedpress.com
http://www.dacajncritter.com
http://www.camberpress.com
http://www.powells.com
http://www.youtube.com/shapeofabox
http://www.spdbooks.org
http://firewheel-editioins.org
http://www.givalpress.com
http://www.coconutpoetry.org
http://www.one-story.com
http://theoddvillepress.com
http://www.oberlin.edu/ocpress/field….
http://www.hangingloosepress.com
http://www.seattlemystery.com
http://www.akashicbooks.com
http://www.puddinghouse.com
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/n…
http://www.notellbooks.org
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com

I’m done almost none of the following but in the midst of…

B a f t e r C, vol. 4, No. 1 has a raft of writing by people I always like to see more of, such as Joseph Massey and Gregory Betts and I like the nonsensicalness of Chuck Stebelton’s piece in there.

The Debaucher by Jason Camlot (Insomniac Press, 2008) is easily the book of poetry I’ve most enjoyed reading in the last couple years. Sheer pleasure of words and stories and yet meaty as well. He’s enjoying himself writing.

Panoply: poems on diversity, vol. 1, issue 1, a Jer’s Vision Publication has hit the bookstores. Anita Dolman is editing the annual chapbook. Although I’ve seen Domenico Capilongo’s book from Wolsak and Wynn I Thought Elvis was Italian (2008) I only went so far as the cover. A poem of his in this issue about observing an immigrant navigating the subway impressed me with its gentleness and keen observing eye.

Guerilla 18 is out too. I’m not fond of the huge page, heavy paper stock format, but the story in this issue by Lainie Towell about being taken for a ride by a man who married her for immigration papers is compelling and uplifting.

Antigonish Review 155 has a Donald McGrath poem on long johns I rather like, with a child negotiating its frozen width like a huge dried cod thru the doorframe.

Gillian Wigmore’s Soft Geography (Harbour Publishing, 2007) has finally got to my hands. The scenes of vet calls are striking with the brutality of illness and death that kids deal put against their age and legal status of not mature enough to vote, drive, have sex, marry, or drink.

Titles of Poems I Will Never Write by Diane Tucker is a fun chapbook of just what it sounds like. What you would you write in the space under “The Camera I forgot now remembers nothing”? or “My Brief but Illustrious Career as a Smoker”?

Judge Sewall’s Apology of his biography from the 1600s being a key points in American and world history. His crossing the ocean to speak to James II but while he was in transit there was a change of King and William of Orange was en route to his town to declare the new government. Strange that he should see the same sights as a tourist then as we did, that he would meal journal the trip and go bowling while at the same time at home there are native-settler wars and infant mortality at half of births. So same and so different.

echolocation by mani rao (Chameleon Press, 2003) caught me by the unusual binding and cover (chicago screws, metallic paper, and uncut pages) but the lines held me. They are terribly earnest but dense and tight sound bites that sometimes feels like a ghazal in leaps. “The petitions they might send to Koffi Annan. […] Children who take magnets out of their pockets and rally the universe into a new polarity” (p. 28) “( p. 15) “A bird’s eye: thinning rivers, half-eaten mountains, bending lakes, mild agitations of sea fur.”

Down the Unmarked Roads by Joan Finnigan (General Store Publishing House, 1997) are engaging stories of vivid local history by a good story teller.

Uncracked stack:

• Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour (Nuwest Press. 1984).
• Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel (Graywolf press, 1998),
• Bulgarian poet, Lyubomir Levchev’s Ashes of Light: New and Selected Poems (Curbstone Press, 2006),
• a haiku collection, Penny in the Grass by Allan Brown (Ekstasis Editions, 2006),
• Imagine No Heaven (The Shoreline Writers’ Society annual anthologies, 2008)
• Under the Sink (The Shoreline Writers’ Society annual anthologies, 2007),
• Hudson Book of Poetry: 150 Poems Worth Reading (McGraw-Hill, 2001)
• Mother Superior short stories by Saleema Nawaz (Freehand books, 2008)