One Single Impression has the prompt of color. In consideration of this spring almost tanka:

dad’s brown garden
still, the only green is
the plastic tomato stakes –
dad, my world’s row marker
sleeps days indoors.

btw, it’s Billy the Blogging poet’s Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere election time. would you vote for rob mclennan? (listed as Rob McLennan, halfway down). Who does more for engaging and connecting the communities of poets thru his blog, and even posts occasional poems of his own…

I mentioned briefly here that I was reading Kevin Connolly’s Revolver a few weeks ago. Like Marcus I was anticipating hearing him in person at the Ottawa writers festival.
Connolly’s newest book Revolver is set up so that each poem has to be a challenge to be different from any other in the book. In form, voice, tone and style, each poem is. It’s quite remarkable. It’s got a sweet and sharp balance. Serious and funny, seriously funny and moving without the sense of trying to push and shove the reader down a chute.
They are 45 “contraptions made of words” which “morph you into heartfelt syntax”. He set out to challenge and entertain himself. He said in a writers fest panel that he enjoys the writing process but after publication, things are awkward.
He feels like the Johnnie Jackass of Canadian literature for trying so many things in one work but it works from the get-go, or in other words, it works from the title piece and doesn’t stop working yet doesn’t feel laboured. It fills the brain but it’s a good fill.
The title piece that opens with surrealism of A tiny acrobat walks a rope of milk/whitewash in microform, history pelted,. Other poems are as distinct like a Powder Keg where

Let’s decide now, it’s all euphemism:
“I hang my hammer by the claw
in your dewy branches….” Which
could mean anything, granted,
but you’ll have to agree
it’s pretty suggestive.
Like that the grass that grows
under your feet and over mine.

To pick any sample of poem is to mislead of what to expect on any other page, which I personally love.
One poem reads like those ubiquitous puzzle book logic paragraphs to figure out whose name did what where. On p. 72 Really Need Ted Lilly to Throw the Hook, it’s all dense sports jargon which on a literal level, I haven’t a clue about but it’s a sort of read me the phone book and I’ll listen to the way you can trip sounds along.
On page 30 and the next few there’s Litany where someone is cross examined for a cull of birds which plays against cliché of histrionic poems and badgering witnesses. Each question and matter of fact reply intensifying the other.

Did the moon weep and fret at their growing peril?
Yes.
Did you weep?
No, not initially.
But when it came, did your weeping fill a thousand barrels?
Yes, and ten times as many.
When your tears came, did they fill a thousand thimbles?
No, not so much as that.
Did the beach ache with your misplaced sympathy?
No.
Can you think of a more apt metaphor for your distress?
Perhaps, but not at the moment.

In questions Kevin Connolly, having written a couple collections of poetry, was asked to describe why he chose to make a table of contents in Revolver which doesn’t list the poems. He explained that a table of contents seems a vestige of the 19th century. What good does it serve in a book of 45 poems? It’s 70 pages at the most. He took an idea of Bill Knott. Knott’s book Autonecrophilia – people clapped at that title, yeah, isn’t that best poetry book title ever? said Connolly before going on – used a list of B Monster movies instead of the table of contents.
Connolly was inspired to do something similar. Each title is associated with the song on the page number and are tracks he was listening to when writing the book.
The book makes for interesting reading that leaps associatively and logically but with no sense of frenetic, and no sense of unconsidered, the next placement of verbal foot sure.

Saturday’s Writing Life #3 was Sean Wilson hosting Mary Swan, Elyse Friedman (Long Short Story) and Diane Schoemperlen. Friedman’s stories were entertaining to my brain. The offbeat twists on expectations were light and there’s underlying compassion for her characters that was warming.
I found myself rather distracted by non-verbal in the panel.
They were all explicitly in agreement and conscensus seeking and agreeableness was at extraordinary levels. How aligned body language was in the combination of these 4! The mirroring body language would go round and round. One would lift a hand to tuck hair and 2 would immediately echo. One would go from palms together to clasped hands and the Simon says would zoom around. The hands of each were as if on a track sliding lap to knees with one remote.
I missed a lot of what was said verbally.
They responded as one person to questions from the audience with synchronized head bobs that started and ended together. Even their gestures were largely using the same box of space of mid-chest, hands open, facing upwards with very little finger movement, except when Mary Swan made gestures backwards and to left behind her.
Tidbit: The high concept: a spine you can hang the meat of the story on, the 8 words that explains your story.
The next Writers Life panel will be May 1st, 7:30 p.m. at the National Library and Archives featuring Steven Galloway, Anthony De Sa and André Alexis.

Lynne Alsford and L.M. Rochefort were among those shortlisted for the CAA, poetry category. On May 13, the top place finalist will be announced.

Not including the library books, I have a weighty tower of new titles that I got in April. Looking at all the ducks like that that, I’m thinking this couple dozen could take a while.
Geist [which I couldn’t find in Chapters and asked 3 clerks to get blank looks and assurances that they are sure they don’t carry that magazine. Then I found it myself under some non-literature section.], The Puritan Magazine, Unquiet Desperation (vol 1, issue 20, vol 2, issue 1 from when Warren Dean Fulton was reading in town.), Rampike [which Amanda reminded me was out there, delicious poems in this issue], The Malahat Review, Me Sexy (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008) by Drew Haydon Taylor, Hay West: A Story of Canadians Helping Canadians (Red Deer Press, 2004), The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that inspires them (source books, 2008), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon press, 1983) by Monty Reid, Bird Tracks on Hard Snow (ECW, 1994) by Nelson Ball, Shoot & Weep (Nomados 2008) by Rachel Zolf, Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by robin robertson, The Dream World (M&S, 2008) by Alison Pick, Floors of Enduring Beauty by Steve Venright (Mansfield Press, 2007), These Lawns (Red Deer Press, 1990) by Monty Reid, Les Scribbliste (Produce Press) by gustave morin, From the Monestery, (gesture press, 2006) by Nicholas Power, Spiral Agitator (Coach House, 2000) by Steve Venright, The Story of the Cannibal Woman by Maryse Condé (Washingston Square Press, 2005), Carnegie Pocket Companion, 1923, Engineers, Architects and Builders Tables, Steel, and the ones I already mentioned that also arrived in April: Out of Light (Kitchen Press, 2008), by Joseph Massey, Mornings Like This: Found Poems (Harper Collins, 1995) by Annie Dillard, and Subject (University of California Press 2005) by Laura Mullen.
I think that’s them all but they may have started to drift around the house.
Oh, appetite, get ready…
And I still want to reparse all the rest of my notes from the festival. And keep up the 3 poems a day. And start to edit the (somewhat meaningless number since it includes in pageage various copies of drafts of poems too) 60 pages of 75 new poems drafted in April so far. Dear me. Looks like May is well-spoken for already.