Latosik’s poem won the P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry at the Malahat. No wonder. Gorgeous piece! If you’re in Toronto he has a reading at the Art Bar March 25. [Actually he’ll read regardless if you’re in Toronto or not]

Cornelia Hoagland was the feature reader at The Muses at Rasputin’s Thursday night. Between snow squalls, incoming snow storm and flu, the turn out was intimate. Q&A was conversation at tables.
Unfortunately, the organizer Mike Buckshot was ill but I could pitch-host and LM Rochefort ran the open mic. In the audience there were more people than readers. Lise Lise read, I read Mary Lee Bragg recited 2 poems. Colin Morton brought his book The Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007) which plays in Kurt Schwitters’ sandbox and with his story. That was a particular treat for me since 3 times I’ve been otherwise booked when Morton had readings. He read among others, All Hail the Party which fluctuates between the words bullet and ballot, the bullets getting thicker as he goes (sorry for that poem spoiler!). There’s also some vispo in there. Quite a change from what I expected having only read How to be Born Again (Quarry Press, 1992)
Cornelia Hoogland is a professor at The University of Western Ontario in The Faculty of Education. She writes plays, articles and lesson plans as well as poetry. She has a professional curiosity about the aesthetics of story in language and in mathematics. She has a long interest in the persective of women and Canadians, from Emily Carr to Canadian Women Poets.
Her list of credits and publications is long but this year she was shortlisted this year for Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem and for the CBC literary awards (30 poets were shortlisted out of 1153 entrants.)
She is the founder and artistic director of Poetry London, a reading series of 15 years plus in London, Ontario. (It recently featured Elizabeth Bachinsky, Stephanie Bolster and David
Hickey.)
Hoogland’s recent titles include: Cuba Journal (Black Moss Press, 2003), The Wire-Thin Bride (Turnstone, 1990), Marrying the Animals, and You are Home (Black Moss, 2001). She read from Marrying the Animals (Brick Books, 1995), and from a series she is working on using the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Marrying the Animals includes gems worth a revisit such as p. 25,

Such feasting
Days I’d gladly
give my life
for one glutinous swipe
through all the straight-backed
brownsuited years
of pews
to the red dress
one woman wore
and into which
as I child I poured
my future.

Such lovely pacing, enjambment, details, and sound flow. In another part of the book, she has poems inspired by Elizabeth Smart from which this is excerpted, p. 25

shovel for roots that would wither. Or sprout.
So ready you could have wrung
wild hyacinths from stone.

Part of what she teaches is critical narrative. She finds that people are attached to how the story is, as they heard it, but there are various shapes of the fairy tale where grandma gets eaten by the wolf, or stuck in a closet. She thinks that each person has a sort of heart-fairy-tale that particularly resonates. The filter of this story she refocuses in various directions as well as goes into a different head space than previous series of poems which she has explored. One poem was entitled Little Red Riding Hood meets the Wolf in the Grocery Store Some Years Later.
She is blending the sacred forest with power differential of adults to young females, infused with memories of fundamentalist strictures and structures and a cadence of speech that flows with dots of pathos and humor. There’s some lovely twists such as when sleeping beauty wakes up/ she’s 40, /she’s 50/ she’s divorced / she’s a he / she’s one of us.
[probably to be cross-posted to OPN once blogger.com is feeling up to the task.]

A chapbook of my poems, Oath in the Boathouse has been put out by above/ground press. 300 copies. $4 each. There’s a sample poem at the link.
In other poetry news, the A B Series #6: Ottawa Night in The A B Series is coming next week on March 14, 7:30-9:30, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery, Main Floor, 110 Laurier Avenue West.
Readers: Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Rhonda Douglas, Jacqueline Lawrence, Janice Tokar, LM Rochefort and Sean Dowd.
And coming up very soon is the Ottawa International Writers Fest, schedule now up.
Quote: On concrete poetry: “We can do non-figurative painting, non-figurative music, non-figurative dance, why not with language?”– derek beaulieu

In my haste to rush out of town last week [not pursued, just eager to go 😉 ] I didn’t mention the Factory reading series Feb 28.

Roland Prevost read some material from MetaFizz and excerpts from his new Dragon series. When I first saw him read, he seemed to be able to command the attention and perform the poem in a relaxed way but he keeps improving further as months pass.

Joanne Proulx read from her first novel, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet. It is about a skateboarding teenage boy, ill-equipped to handle life as is, who discovers he can foresee deaths of friends. He gets a 6th sense for their moment of death. We follow him thru all the fallout that descends from there of what people expect of him, how they react to him and how to make sense of his world as it shifts.

She’s an excellent reader, a storyteller who can hold an audience not just with the words, but how she tells it, although the content, at least part of the excerpt she read is gory.

The Max Middle Sound Project (writers John Lavery and Max Middle) performed a variety of sets, including their heritage apple piece (somewhat lost to the bouncy acoustics of the room), a sestina broken out to two voices, Fetterly’s garage, and a few light pieces including one by Lavery entitled Ontario that was Elvis spotted at the roadside by a lake with end rhymes pulled out and Max popping out behind with cha-cha-hand waving like old musicals…it’s always hard to describe what it is that they do. A novel’s narrative is far easier to relate. But some people seemed to be catching the rhyme or chuckling with the sound plays.

One Single Impression‘s prompt is change.

bland fruit for dessert
pops at morning’s hunger