Added to my currently reading I’ve gotten back into Anne Szumigalski’s When Earth Leaps Up, and frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho by gary barwin and derek beaulieu. The latter dazzles my brain and makes me salivate at the all the ways that twisted. The former short-circuits any attempt to be linear but impacts in a way that non-representative painting does, going underneath conscious mind. Full on Jabber does the same. I find the sounds entrancing. Such a pleasure to read. Soundings I’ve dropped for now. It gets me down all the pile ups of death, suicides, regrets and dealings. Reid’s The Flat Side has some intense dark moments of women building roads. Powerful stuff, and some light ones of the Migration of the Zucchinni, for which I had to call someone immediately and read it aloud to. Monty Reid’s reading at Tree tomorrow. I must keep myself organized to go.

Somewhere, somehow I ran across Leaf Books in Wales. How they described themselves grabbed me (by the funny bone)

Each book we produce has a colourful, simple design and can be made into hats for animals if you’re mean enough to ruin them. Each one can be easily read in one sitting. Or one bathing. Or standing at the bus-stop if you want to be sensible about it.

Their chapbook titles cluster interestingly as well. The romance bundle, or the anti-romance bundle, love poems or out-of-love poems. (Not that they only do those.) The collections are the results of competitions exclusively. In the last one 35 poems were chosen from 525 entries judged by Sheenagh Pugh of Cardiff. She’s been publishing titles for 15 years and has poems on the curriculum in the U.K.
In the explore other countries vein, at the library I came across Good Poems Selected by Garrison Keillor. His is a name I know from a kurfuffle of offense of humor gone wrong or sensibilities shocked. He does The Writer’s Almanac on American public radio Program sponsors include, The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine. He’s big in some parts of the U.S. but Keillor has many lives, as a radio host of decades and is a fundamentalist of (and critical of) the religious right in the U.S. Still, this not being my bias I was a little hesitant to try what he would choose. I expect not high literary or high excitement, perhaps the easy listening of the poetry world, narrative, close-with-a-click, entertaining storytelling.
My prediction wasn’t far off but it’s hard to generalize. For sure it isn’t predominantly representing clever language play or politics or confessional therapeutic pain. There are a lot of stories of one’s own family and love of long ago. And rhyme. A lot of rhyme by moonlight.
It’s 4 CDs worth of selections that he says in a world of radio when a host accepts his role as a background hum, the best he hopes for is for someone listening to occasionally perk up and turn up the volume. These are poems he found that made listeners do that heads-up.
So far getting into CD 2, it’s got a lot that are gentle, rural and pastoral and prayerful, but there’s a bit of variety. For example, Ginsberg reading a bit of Song of Myself and I’ve Known A Heaven, Like A Tent by Emily Dickinson.
Another poem choice was Soaking Up Sun of midwest poet Tom Hennen reminiscing of a sunshine soak with his granddad when he was small. There’s a lot of introduction to new voices, and not all of them long-gone people, for instance, BBC commentator, Dana Gioia’s Summer Storm reflecting on the moment fallen into and out of. CK Williams’ The Dance was similar in tone of pausing. Sharon Olds’ Topography was rather interesting and lively in concepts that gave a bit of pleasure of surprise. And likewise Stephen Dunn’s After the Argument.
There’s enough good in it to keep listening, especially interspersed with refreshers bites of something sharper, all the better to taste with.

the catch gets harder —
dusk levels distinctions
between grass and frog

(Cross-posted to Summer Haiku 2007)

More Links: Here are Other Evening Haiku, Kigo (season indicators so we can avoid explictly saying the season, showing a part of it), and elsewhere a review of Rattle of Bamboo has some exceptionally fresh, dramatic and tight haiku, including Deborah Kolodji’s

There’s reading online as well of course but paper-wise, my current reading stack is on the edge of out of hand. However whatever the mood of the day I can pull out something I like,

• Modern and Normal by Karen Solie
• John Newlove and His Works by Bouglas Barbour
• Matrix, current issue
• Full on Jabber by Christopher Rizzo and Jess Mynes
• red earth by rob mclennan
• Soundings: an anthology of the Ottawa Poetry Group, 1973-2002, edited by Christopher Levenson and Brian Cameron.
• The Burning Alphabet by Barry Dempster
• The Flat Side by Monty Reid
• The Penguin Book of the Sonnet edited by Phillis Levin
• Hanging Fire by Phyllis Webb
• Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid by Stuart Ross
• The end of the Poem: Oxford Lectures by Paul Muldoon
• poems for jessica-flynn by Michael Dennis

I suppose I could hyperlink that to author or work but, eh, how about we leave that just as thinking about doing?

Update on how Tiny Words is doing. In part,

As of July 8, 2007, we have garnered enough book sales to donate funds sufficient to give three-and-a-half flocks of chicks.