Curtis Dunlap related the news. Sadly veteran haiku poet Bill Higginson passed on. f/k/a has a tribute to Higginson. Words can be left in memory there, and another space at the Australian Haiku Society.
Higginson was in Ottawa for the 2007 Haiku Canada Conference. Higginson did a photo essay of the weekend. When I met him he had the warm composed air of a gentleman scholar.
Bill Higginson’s resources on season words, renka and technique include the book The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, which was called by Booklist “the standard work in the field”. He and his wife Penny Harter wrote about haiku to spread the beauty, advocate for literature while they did small press publishing and promoting the clear path.
Over his over 30 years in field he’s written or edited more than 20 other books of poems and other literary works. How can we calculate how many hundreds or thousands of people he influenced to gain greater understanding of the nature of haiku.
The prompt at One Simple Impression this week is Never Ending. May his impact continue to spread.
no buds this spring –
cherry tree, frost-killed
O² made, stays.

I can find more than enough poetry event programming in conflicting time slots locally, surely, Thursday and Friday alone, without looking to do the same in two more cities.
The season launch of BookThug (motto “Our books aren’t for anybody — so we encourage you to become somebody today.”) is November 18th. Opposite it is The Art Bar reading with Margaret Christakos (who I’ve been meaning to hear/read somewhere for months) with David Clink and Maurice Mierau. It rains, pours.
It may be moot anyway since I may not be able to get to Toronto in a weekday anyway. Likewise with New York wistfulness. Each night has so much on. Still, covet tickets to get to NYC’s Poetry Project which has Jane Sprague as a feature in November.
The restless push of the possibility and her poetry flutters.

I sit in a chair rather underneath your feet. the most strident and pinched utterance. once a week. I feel you shifting. Above me. where I cannot go I cannot even utter. I watch your colleague lick me with his eyes I watch this. I do something with my lips. I maybe lick them. Things I do. It unsettles. I do it again. I stretch. A cat. I feel you up there. You’re heavy through the floors. I feel you busy. I feel you feeling me that was this morning or was it yesterday. the time confounds me as do ceilings. floors. rules. I opened a door once this was several weeks ago I opened there you were. before. we were lovers. you in glasses. I did not know. there was a long moment a long moment of: oh. in that moment I knew you knew and I did too and so it begins. again and again it is beginning.

That’s an excerpt from Jane Sprague’s break/fast in Tarpaulin, V2n2/V2n3Spr/Sum 04
What more could one want than even one really well written part of page? Makes one feel greedy to even suggest wanting more. And yet resonant writing does spur more appetite than brain can hold all at once, let alone the schedule.
And speaking of appetite whetted and other lusty things, the 10th annual Chocolate Show is in NYC Nov 9-11th, with over 65 chocolatiers, 40,000 square feet of chocolate, cooking demos, fashion show of clothes made from cocoa sources…25,000 people roaming it.
And lastly, and not beastly is this poetry resource link: David Clink’s Poetry Machine

Locus Novus is an online synthesis of text and sound of text and image. It is made by collaborating people to make movie poems. It uses the potential of the online medium to add motion, movies, soundtrack and have sometimes mutating, mobile, text is the star.
For example in life imagined as a slither of syllables, the words are by John Olson, art design by Faruk Ulay and jazz music track by Robert Ikiz & group mosaic.
The words are lists of statements bunched into paragraphs where each line doesn’t relate to the next. Some statements that struck me (from the 12 pages/screens)
“Electricity flashing prayers.”
“The brutal tattoo of a clock on the skin of a conversation. Jelly in the testicle.”
“Equations get fat with neon.”
“Please take this cow as the sincerest mirror of purgatory. I see the cowboy cradling another fetus of morning.”
A lot of work going into avoiding sense. Why not? As opposed to the efforts of a lot of work going into constructing sense when all sense is nonsense. This just shows the nonsense directly.
Words have sense of meaning yet avoidance, surreal parody of profound sounds while avoiding referencing direct world. It’s a strange mental space. Like decontextualized snippets of conversations or jingles or songs that are silly and counter to your belief yet ride neurons.
In O,P by Janis Butler Holm she says it explicitly in one of hers,
“It’s a kind of parody. Hard-edged abstractions can sweep you off your feet.”
It is movie and poetry hybridized. There’s animation and music but beyond that the medium of flash controls speed of reveal. In text I’m used to fastforwarding. In conversation I can encourage the pace, go back without restarting at the beginning. The element of control is lost. I resist that structurally similarly to how I resist movies for setting the pace. Speed and to go back and forth is a constraint I like to own. Does this impact my perception?
“In situations in which a person is not in control, they’re more likely to spot patterns where none exist.” – Hanson on bias
Back buttons can be done in flash but rarely is. I can choose when to move forward but as done, even in plague, only linearly forward, although there are two narratives overlaid with background shifting images being urban and the next meditations from countryside.
There’s nothing preventing a format of make your own mystery as well. It would still be a finite set but use the options of online more to not be as lockstepped forward. The fading and replacing and moving texts can break that up from the presentation point of view but from consumption point of view, it’s more set, less modelling life where there are always many options from any given point. The animated text behaves more as sound, not waiting for you at it would when letterpressed but will zip off like spoken word.
Interesting projects.
In O,P nothing fits together in content or tone. It’s a rummage sale of ideas and yet by not fitting together, it suits some engaging way.
“Here’s a spoiler Tinker Bell: we’re all going to die.” is set in juxtaposition to other column’s text box:
“The bloody itinerary had to be changed. These cushions beg for velveteen. Rocketing ratings kept his show in the air.”
Tone contrast gives continually clappers while inviting the reader/viewer to come look thru this keyhole of perception now.
Is it eye-candy or deeply meaningful? Meaning and value are something inherent in text or in construction of challenging text. Is there something to get out of it that was placed there? Or meaning and value are not consideration and play and pleasure are the things. Importance or use are things the viewer/reader applies or adds?
The magazine also uses the possibilities for storytelling, comparing in parallel two minds, Burma’s Suu Kyi and Giacometti.
Significance of story is based in relevance and that itself based in access, persuasion and decisions.

dreams of a certain register amount to inadvertent labor. In Giacometti’s instance. his dreams were an inadvertent, visionary labor, though he surely would have rejected the elevated designation visionary. – Harold Jaffe in Suu Kyi and Giacometti

Juxtaposition is humor or capacity to perceive out of the blur of data. Vision is based in part, in contrast. This medium aids that in a different fluid way than print.
“Art is not an unmoved mover; it is, one way or another, a reflection of and response to contemporary culture and it employs the techniques and references at hand.” – Harold Jaffe

Saturday October 18, 2008 Saturday December 13
Heartwood House (153 Chapel Street, Ottawa)
Dusty Owl Workshops
Learning to Repeat Yourself Well (9am- 12pm)
Pearl Pirie spent a decade teaching in adult education. Her articles on teaching and on poetry have been published in print and online since the mid-nineties.
This is a workshop that will help you explore new ideas and poetic forms including the sestina and the pantoum. Both forms show one can repeat without being redundant by placing phrases and lines inside new contexts. Examples and resources will be given. The workshop will include time to respond to prompts and do cooperative and shared writing with peers.
Get Comfortable With Creative Writing (1pm – 4pm)
Richard Taylor has published a collection of short stories, a novel, many feature articles in magazines, and a travel memoir. He has taught over 70 creative writing workshops in Ottawa, Hong Kong, Australia, Tuscany and an annual summer writers retreat in Quebec, Write By The Lake. Since 1995 when he was writer-in-residence at Carleton University.
This workshop will jumpstart you into writing. Together with various literary triggers, prompts and writing exercises, Richard Taylor will share his extensive knowledge about how to balance inspiration and discipline, finding a personal voice, choosing a subject and developing a sense of structure. Many of Taylor’s writing students have gone on to publish novels, books of short stories, poetry, travel and memoir writing, and innumerable magazine articles.
$30 for each workshop or $50 for both
TICKETS @ MOTHER TONGUE BOOKS (1067 Bank St. near Sunnyside)
Limited enrollment, be sure to get your ticket early!

Just to break my brain for fun, I’m cramming it with things that don’t intuitively go side by side. What’s that?

Hyssop: a novel by Kevin McIlvoy (Avon Books, 1998) [Such odd scenes, cutting the head off a wooden Madonna, stuffing it with stolen robes of the bishop and gluing the head back on. Or the bishop being banned from marrying a couple and the 3 battering the church doors open against higher church authority.]

A knight in dried plums by David McFadden (McClelland and Stewart, 1975) [almost in stack; still tantalizing en route by mail]

Avatar by Sharon Harris [after] 2 weeks en route [arrived, yah for pataphysics of love!].

I.V. Lounge Nights, edited by Alex Boyd and Myna Wallin (Tightrope books, 2008) [Series gone but the collection lives on. Does Toronto seem a bit downbeat? A dark tone to the peruse.] [Hear the IV Lounge via Taddle Creek Audio]

In Search of Harvey: the 1st annual pooka pub crawl (Sept 08)

Peter F Yacht Club #12: The Anarchy Issue edited by Amanda Earl, (above/ground, 2008) [art, vispo, stories and poems with a table of contents and layout that plays to the theme in a good way]

City Planning in Ancient Times by Arthur Segal (Lerner Publications, 1977) [funny how ancient Greece knew that a functional city was a grid with parks and retail through it and we’ve lost the design knack.]

KitchArt (local arts magazine, no url) [articles on Greg Frankson and Phil Jenkins this issue]

I want to be the Poet of your Kneecaps, edited by John B Lee (Black Moss Press, 1999) [Barry Dempster, Penn Kemp, George Swede, Ronnie R. Brown… and…curious – the library copy has Robert Hilles poem Arriving by Train edited lightly in pencil to change, among other things, train, laptop and words to bus, garden and plants. 10 bucks says some high school English teacher got the revised version turned in for a class assignment.]

50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know by Mickey Z (Disinformation, 2005) [quick reference, what was the significance of Betty Friedan, of Stonewall, the forgotten verses of Guthrie “some are grumbling and wonderin if this Land’s still made for you and me]

Hand Luggage by PK Page (Porcupine’s Quill, 2006) [dogs, “domestic as plates” is poetry as storytelling, rather like the chattier Poet of Kneecaps]

Open Letter Journal, Summer 08 issue. [various densities of essays on poetics and practice]

Oblique Strokes: The Wellington Street Poets (Fire Grass Press 2008) [a 7th anthology from the writers group]

Welcome to the Earth by Amanda Earl (BookThug, 2008) [good mail day. can sit in with this one]

and Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Fest has a youtube channel from 2006. [via PoetMom