Sasquatch was a reading featuring DC Books authors.
DC Books, out of Quebec, was founded by Louis Dudek, and for the past several years has been led by Steve Luxton, formerly of Matrix. The press has its 20th anniversary launch at Blue Metropolis this spring.
Since I arrived partway, I missed some. I presume Peter Dubé had read from the short fiction collection he released this fall, At the Bottom of the Sky.
Luxton read from new work, poems with a political, satirical sort of slant, which caused some appreciative chuckles around the room. He also read pieces in consideration of it being remembrance day as well as ones from his Luna Moth and Other Poems work.
I was there in time for Newfoundlander Angela Hibbs to read from her first book of poetry, Passport. She mentioned that in taking a workshop from Richard Harrison almost a decade ago, he advised her to not reach so deep for profoundness.
She says she tries to eschew phrasings in poems that wouldn’t come off the tongue normally in speech but that isn’t to say she is unread or making her domain the plain-speech or raw-discord or chatty poem.

Much of the book, as sampled by choices of reading, is a walking thru childhood, and teen years. For example, p. 10, Hydrology

I thought I should be allowed inside everyone’s homes,
to look at their photos & clippings.
I still do. In dreams
strangers walls are upright streams.

What a fantastic image. I like her use of pause and the thought and line lengths suggesting the very unsteady river that is memory and the uneven nature of us retaining for a while, a dam breaking and much washed away and then a catching sticks in a place again.
In teh series of linked poems Hydrology she contemplates a family with the trait of fear of water, how one averts the eyes from the tough veteran uncle whose soldier’s hands shake at needing to bathe, using a sponge over sink for fear of water, how this thread pops up thru various people in the family, something which struck home since it runs thru a branch in my family too.
She also did some less linear literal explorations with space on the page and with dream memories such as p. 70, Vision III

music pours into the living room
alters the blank white tiles

First rule of reading: keep cash on hand to pick up books that you’d like to look thru at greater length. First rule of not putting myself in the poorhouse: don’t carry cash when books are around.
Cross-posted with improvements at OPN

Not that I need another poetic task a day but I’m happy to read some else’s results – American sentences of the Ginsberg-inspired observational line [via Watermark]

It’s a little late to relate the Hallowe’en tanka but still cute. It comes via M Kei from Sounds from the Unknown edited by Tomoe Tana and Lucille Nixon,

At Hallowe’en

The baby goblin

Looking so happy,

Whispered from under the mask,

“This is me.”


~Totaro Matsui

Further on the site, something more timely. A call,
SUBMISSION CALL : NOCTURNE 
Closing Date: December 10th 2007

From January 2008, it’s lights out at 3LIGHTS! Our first open-submission exhibition of 2008, Nocturne, will be a celebration of the dark hours that fall between dusk and dawn. If you’ve ever stayed up into the night, sipping black coffee, collecting the haiku, senryu and tanka as they fall onto the lamp-lit page, then you may have the poems we’re looking for.

Submit up to ten haiku/senryu/tanka to threelightsgallery @yahoo. co. uk with a brief biography by December 10th 2007.

See our submissions page for more details at www.threelightsgallery.com/submissions.

Idea passed via Rob Mack
Your Messages which are literary word prompts, each stylistically different, to be replied to with 300 word response, daily in November.

The form of the dismissively satirical structure makes it one of the more unique book reviews that I ever started to read. [via Mathilde]
On the Recent Publication of Kahlil Gibran’s Collected Works by Alan Jacobs:

I
Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,
And weary grows the mind doomed to read it.
The hours of my penance lengthen,
The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine,
And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert.
And for each of them Kahlil Gibran has prepared
Another ornamental phrase,
Another faux-Biblical cadence,
Another affirmation proverbial in its intent

Or he could have just given it a pass to someone who would actually attempt to read with interest. It’s more of a book retort than a book report.
Although he does get the meat of his criticisms against as well as a brief bio and seems to be informed POV with his spin for flavor. When someone is cranky I find it hard to weigh how much someone attends to accuracy to make an arguments. How much is in light or jest? He touts the exaggerated nature of the poetry he’s talking about. To what degree does he take up that in his review? How much is exaggerated? Why do reviews anyway? as Shane Neilson in NPR article chatted about. I can understand what he railed against – one wants to be supportive and not do sloppy throwabout words that are defamation critical, about the writer, not the writing, which is the range satire can easily fall into. We’re all on the same cooperative team as writers.
At the same time, if we keep it all in a positive band, the band gets corrupted with gradations so a lukewarm response becomes adjusted to mean a slam and a fabulous raving positive become adjusted by the reader to mean, it’s solidly ok. It coaches everyone to be more (over)sensitive hearing and eggshell walking.
To have something really negative be a negative, allows negative to be negative and postive to be real without the extra exercise of reading between the lines. At the same time, is it playing nicely with others? Is it reasoned? Is it tactful? Is it useful? Is it primarily about the book or primarily about the reviewer of the book?
I would have to read the original book and the review in detail to decide on any of these but I can say this: The review is effective in the catchy sense. It flagged to me the book coming up and primed it to my mind. My sense of humor fails in it being critiquer-fronted and feeling badly for the person who is writing earnestly, but on another page of aethetics which this guy doesn’t want to appreciate, only mock. The tone is prancing about. There can be room for that tough-fluff of satire.
At the same time I’d like to read a complementary and a complimentary review to round out the view respectfully and reflectively.