It might have been the biggest turnout for the reading series so far at the usual City Hall venue.
Around 50 people came, with standing room only. Host Max seemed pleased with how it went. A lot of diverse and wonderful poetry came out and seemed to be enjoyed by the audience.
John W. posted a photo of Janice Tokar reading her vividly-rendered poems (including one from the perspective of timeless lizard as Fidel Castro’s era ends) at the AB Series, Ottawa night.
Amanda Earl read from her newest (still hot from the press last week) chapbook, The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman, a liturgy of lovers, and the surprises, like the average man who had an apartment full of bears of all shapes, and was entirely covered in bear tattoos. Memorable images such as the slippery scum of spilled beer and ashes beside the mattress on the floor.
Pearl Pirie (that’d be me) read a couple poems from the Oath in the Boathouse and that never-ending series of poems about the experience of train travel which I seem to have written myself into. (90 pages and growing.)
Sean Dowd was back from vacation with a new chapbook St. Paddy’s in Costa Rica. He performed excerpts from memory from that and from a long poem which was a take off of Macbeth, spun for ecological responsibility and sustainable economy. The air system was gently whooshing away like a backup chorus.
Rhonda Douglas read from her Cassandra poems, with the news that her book of Cassandra will come out from Signature Editions this fall. She picked up the thread in her poems which were a call of protest from the trees. The maples refuse to make sweet sap and even the oak can not endure air pollution.
Jacqueline Lawrence took us back to her manuscript, with news to come in May on its completion. She read her poem speculating on how her life or her relationship with her dad would have been different, were she around when he was growing up. She also read a poem on the empty chair. From a friend from Benin she discovered the other side of the slave trade, how in villages raided for centuries an empty chair was kept for the family that went missing. If you come and visit, it doesn’t matter where you were born, or how long ago you left. The chair is yours to use. She also did her popular poems of love on a beach, for which the air system obliged with a sort of wave sound.
LM Rochefort closed out with poems of she and her dad walking to the moon and looking back at the blue marble of earth during an eclipse, the extension of the Dawkin’s Spaghetti monster in the sky story by giving him a Mother. She also did a poem about tobogganing and painted the scene as kids fell off down the curvy slope, one by one, all except for the dad, still aboard and getting smaller and smaller, disappearing towards his birth home.
The next one, #7 is March 28th, with a spoken word focus, is to be guest-curated by Kevin Matthews at the National Archives.
[cross-posted at OPN]

I’ve been looking back at archives of what I’ve posted here. Since Aug 5, 2005 I’ve made 340 entries. That’s 310 pages in this occasional poetry journal. (That’s a lot more than I expected. About time to make a backup, isn’t it?)

I seem to have shifted substantially from posting poem drafts to writing about what I’m reading and who I’m hearing. Interesting.

When there’s no spark, some exercises might be flint.
Margaret Wilkinson of Northumbria University does a column of Mslexia’s workshops. It has a few dozen prompt directions and under each a few idea of directions to spin from there. For example find a fresh eye for the day by list-making your way to a new spot by putting things in the head that might not normally follow by comparing lists such as:
Things I’ve never seen
Advice my mother gave me
Things that should be kept uncovered
Things my lover hates
Things I have forgotten
Who knows what might turn up.
Another prompt is how to monkey with writing you can’t chuck yet. “it seems generally unwise to use already problematic poetry or prose as the starting point for a new piece. […] Still want to go ahead? Okay. You’ve been warned.” Use recycling by writing it backwards, read things as its opposite, as if you are in Taming of the Shrew, switch up the pov or systemically remove every example of one part of speech.
Other writing prompt sites: Dragon Writing, Poefusion of Friday 5 word prompts and 3 Word Wednesdays

In the Doing it in Public Performance Poetry Symposium in Peterborough, Feb 29th and March 1st there were 3 nights of poetry readings, a part day with panel discussions, and a part day of workshops.
The performances showed the diversity of what falls into poetry – from feedback loops of Jill Battson’s part words and instruments overlaid to Motion’s plea for young mothers and young men to stay clean and blow people away with their words, staying away from guns. Ziysah did a hip hop sort of reclamation of the words people shout out car windows in I’m a mofo and I’ve just detonated all your ammo. Lebo asked what defined the edges of spoken word and did we need to decide. She said that Trent’s slam series someone came to the open mic and did a set of several beatbox pieces. Not a word, not an instrument, but a mood in pieces of vocal expression art.
Motion in one of her spoken word pieces interwove song snippets, a word, a line into her spoken narrative. She sings beautifully and it all hooks together into a rich tapestry yet it is a kind of intertextuality that some people seem want to want to avoid. Our cultural references must be sly, clever, a tribute quote, a embedded references tagged with our own spin, but the direct insertion of a chunk of quote seems less done, especially in page poetry. Spoken word seems to be more comfortable with giving honor to what came before and is happening now in that direct way.
If we have a song in our head, why not directly quote? a.rawling in her workshop remarked on how one wants to automatically resist some thoughts, such as when a refrain comes into the head as you’re doing free writing. A little self-censor-flag pops up saying, hey, that’s not your own thought. But you can let that flow as well and write thru and see what comes after. Resisting where your mind goes may not be as fruitful as letting it chase its own bliss without reprimands.
It seems to link to what Pema Chodron talks about in Learning to Stay

The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay. Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog. If we train a dog by beating it, we’ll end up with an obedient but very inflexible and rather terrified dog. The dog may obey when we say “Stay!” “Come!” “Roll over!” and “Sit up!” but he will also be neurotic and confused. By contrast, training with kindness results in someone who is flexible and confident, who doesn’t become upset when situations are unpredictable and insecure.

Ciera Adams and a.rawlings ran a vocable workshop exploring sound, breath, vocal range, projection, how the body positions shift the physical sounds you make. One exercise was throwing an invisible ball to someone in the circle and making the noise of the ball before throwing it someone else. We did all kinds of huffing (in the breath sense) and sound improv circles of taking a a few words of text and as a group making sounds, verbal or non-verbal.
The workshops were a chance to explore in a controlled space other elements of expression and poetry. In the concrete poetry workshop derek beaulieu gave out materials (transfer rubbing letters, typewriter, stamp pads, crayons, markers, etc) and instructed us to explore textures, text as an object.
He mentioned how the standard page width is a kind of score. We are used to thoughts that wide and the pause it takes to return to the left column. What if we use the whole page, not just the left and the ragged right margin for meaning? He taught how to do a couple kinds of book binding at the end.

Good to let the lines visibly relax for a bit.