One of my poems is in the print anthology of Mipoesias under Didi Menendez called, the Best of Cafe Cafe, Summer 2007. It is 47 pages and sells for $6.99.

Other poets are: AnnMarie Eldon, Alexander Dickow, Amy King, Birdie Jaworski, Christine Klocek-Lim, Diego Quiros, Edward Nudelman, Elvie Shockley, Jennifer Bredl, Jim Knowles, Jordan Stempleman, Laurel K Dodge, Letitia Trent, Michelle M Buchanan, Rathanak Michael Keo, Rick Mullin, Rus Bowden and Terry Lucas.

Other Mipo Titles in print.

Sasquatch on May 27th had 2 guest readers, Sylvia Adams and Christopher Taylor.

Sylvia Adams read first after the open mic, from various books and chapbooks, including Mondrian’s Elephant and her latest book, Sleeping on the Moon. Since her voice was coming and going, she brought her daughter to assist with carrying out the booked reading. (What a trooper.)

A set centred around African safari animals with some comic images such as handcuffs coming off a cheetah and luring elephants with tulip beds. She also read a few word sonnets which Seymour Mayne steadily promotes.

One of her word sonnets was about the heart-rending challenges of caring for senior members of family in nursing homes pink door, yellow door, forgotten color of home.

A striking story was in her triolet of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a romantic painter in every sense. He wrote love poems to be buried with his favorite model and wife, then exhumed them to regift to his next love. Lesson? Always keep a copy of your poems for yourself.

The second reader at Sasquatch was Christopher A. Taylor. Taylor was a long-time resident of Ottawa although with nearly 2 decades here, now hails from Victoria, BC.

He read from his book of 2007: Shedding Knowledge. A Steady Diet(p. 35) talks about advice people give for life:

I have jotted everything down
and now my fridge is plastered with yellow post-it notes
telling me to relax, be careful, wait, stop, go, start now,
breathe, stupid, breathe. Ah, yes.
The light comes on when I open the door
and cold air spills onto my feet.

During this reading, he had a great to chance to show his good humoredness in not just the poems as just as he started to read the sax and bass of a band upstairs started. He decided to address it and said he’d roll with the mellow sax with some compatible poem choices.

Competing sound is all part of the live poetry experience. Like people in a movie theatre as opposed to recorded CDs at home, others can provide obstructions, or flavor, depending on how you look at it. Later in the reading, a loud-talker decided to do so in the stairwell. Chris Sorrenti went up to sort that. Taylor joked, you didn’t have to get physical with him I trust. Sorrenti said no, he could settle it peaceably.

Taylor’s poem entitled Festival got its inspiration at the Ottawa Folk Festival. It reads in part,

So lean you would think
she never ate solids
she took out her Tibetan bells
to ward off negativity
then set the air loose

This collection is not only covering some of the geography of the Ottawa Valley and Toronto but is owing to the Tree reading series. Because he was asked to be feature reader there in 2004 by James Moran, he collated up a lot of his poems, then realized he now had a working manuscript. The press he placed it with specializes in writing from north eastern Ontario.

Scrivener does a few titles a year including an anthology by the League of Canadian Poets called Spring-Fever a decade ago. They also published Roger Nash’s gentle-humored poem Geraniums, which draws the scene of old folk pottering about plants. They put out another title by Nash last year, Something Blue and Flying Upwards.

From titles I see, they seem to prefer quiet elegiac moments to capture the everyday with poems often grounded literally in rock, from Susan Ioannou’s Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth to ones set in outcrops, on bluffs, by lake shores, to the brush and spruce of Charlie Smith’s Resurrection.

That’s one of the beauties of just wandering out to readings on impulse. You never know what you’ll find.

[Partially cross-posted]

Anne Carson‘s book Men in the Off-Hours has a lot of intriguing fragments and spins on familiar things as she tries to pull up heartbeats from what has flatlined, such as what Lazarus felt like as he is drawn back from death.

It is poetic language in the lyrical imaginative sense to take the reader where one couldn’t go and come back from alone.
There’s an irregularity to her pacing but it doesn’t feel stumbling as much as organic, pausing to consider, dashing, pausing.
She meta-writes in a way that still amuses me in each re-read, such as in The Glove of Time

It’s not a one-note symphony. Although she curls around a few subject nodes, she shakes up the style of writing and pace. Although she pokes under carpets of ideas, she isn’t pat or patting around. She comes out with intriguing finds and looks at the world in an atypical depth of introspection.
Instead of the self-absorbed poet-fodder of why-me, she asks, why Lazarus, turning it about in her head and in her word to work out the internal logic of what God would do and why. It isn’t something I’ve heard pondered. She doesn’t seem to take his voice so much as speculate on how it could have felt in a way that feels fantasy/sci-fi.

It’s often just waved off as ours is not to wonder why. God does what he bloody-well likes and we should just keep our heads ducked down from thunderbolts is the reply I’ve gotten. She rotates thru religious ideas without being against them defensively, or piously advocating them. She walks in them and sees what there is to absorb is she is a fly on the wall.
I like how she ties this ancient story to Marshall McLuhan and a novel sort of gesturing about our existential state.

God’s unknowable reasoning is a dark side of the moon? Our own dark side of subconscious as distant as a planet? How do we begin to map how the cosmos connects up to one moment in individual experience and connect all the diversity and universality into one coherant mass? She suggests it can be knitted together and that it can’t both but we must try because that figuring out how pieces fit is the substance of life.
There’s an almost archeological fascination to how she approaches data, of being a savior to endangered phrasings and ideas. For example, (p.166 of Men in the Off-Hours) she said about going thru the correspondences of Emily Dickinson, “cross-outs are something you rarely see in published texts. They are like death by a single stroke — all is lost yet still there.”
She likes old texts, as she shows in The Beauty of the Husband with John Keats. She wants to dialogue with history and the quiet of historical calm before the waves are entirely becalmed, such as the series on Akmatove and Lev’s story, rejoining their story periodically over their relationship and changing nation from 1910-1966. She likes what is almost extinct and to pull it back to the light, like what was going on in earlier Soviet ground space.
That series ended with the wife’s death where Lev was “kept out of the room in case seeing him killed her/It so happened death killed her“. I like the tongue-in-cheek cheekiness. And that is so much the way, isn’t it? People obscuring things in the name of protecting people. Like Goodbye Lenin!, by trying to prevent someone from over-excitement, absurd unnecessary lengths unreel.
She imagined snippets of history that have a pinch’s intensity from a mitered-close reading of historical accounts.

Even in her darkest, there isn’t a seeking out a romantic dark. Even the spark of red of glasses seem to evoke that there is spunk and more than beaten-down survival here. There’s rancor but an anchor in more than anger. There are flints of humor that is more real than artificially-sustained uniformity. There’s a fluidness that seems to have a subtext of life has bumps that you like and ones you don’t but you keep engaged and it goes.
She plays with what language there is and even through ideas are common and dark, in her hands they take on a fierceness
“They know how to die” / he often said as if it were a freedom (in VII Libertie in the Lev series, p. 81)
“inside the church/ikons glowed vastly” (p. 102)
Even stripped away from its context that last word somehow makes a greater than plain life to the pinhole into that almost mystic-saint-passion of scene.
How she blends the arcane and everyday, the long ago and the now, the abstract and the excruciatingly specific makes for a slow read but lots of meat to go back to around the bones of her dancing ideas.
—
As time goes on, the more I appreciate hearing as opposed to reading poetry. I am forced not to be passive as I expected as much as listening without futzing and flipping and pressing it into a shape that interests me. It forces me to the pace of the person who speaks.
Other Links: Guide for where to get free books (by swap and by online) [via The Hidden Side of a Leaf book blog]
Hear poetry read live: at AtWaterLibrary A random sample from the contents there includes: Anne Szumigalski, Oana Avasilichioaei, Nicole Brossard, Angela Carr, Fred Wah.
Pearl Books from Pearl Literary Magazine. Wonder how that caught my eye? 😉
The Haiku Canada Conference runs Friday evening thru Sunday afternoon in Ottawa.


See Shanna Compton‘s article in Poetry Foundation on Blogging and Poetry?
Rather good. Well thought out, idea and info rich. Here’s a sample snippet

Online magazines and print/web hybrids are getting in on the act as well, using blogs and comment features to fill in the gaps between issues, keep content fresher, and encourage reader feedback. The concept of the literary journal has undergone some pretty radical mods in the last 10 years, not only in content—such as podcasts and other audio features, animation and visual poetries, and YouTubed performances—but also in terms of scheduling frequency: biweeklies, weeklies, dailies, guest-hosted carnivals, and so on. These experimental formats are more responsive and interactive than their old-school print counterparts, and they’re working in tandem with the chatter of the blogs and each other to push the boundaries of aesthetic debates and critical inquiries.
***
I love these ripples. I love watching the ideas develop and the attitudes change and the positions soften or harden over time. Unlike the buzz my colleagues and I stirred up from the phones at the big publishing house where I used to work, the blogosphere’s trends aren’t manufactured. The debates may be deliberately entered, but they’re not staged. When poets grapple with each other or themselves online, they’re invested in their own opinions about the art they practice, not company profitability.

It’s watchdogging and passion, in part because of the volunteerness of it. Interactivity is higher and lower dependent on the longtail effect naturally enough but the strengths of the medium push the system and the field as well as patterns of connect and disconnect.
Poem Links: Intriguing play with language lots here (“Air/ marks the first / house on a block /that hasn’t/ existed) and some there (“John, hug “like a quilt truck.” /On the roof “Cooing a page / in the twilight.” /Quilts, quilts, quilts: how can I /describe their single-stitch tred?”) at XConnect (which has been going since 1995) [via this textual mix-tape]

A second section that stood out from the back issues of Horizon magazine was an issue from May 1949. A set of poems is by Jose Garcia Villa who founded Clay in New Mexico and who ran into a bit of trouble with obscenity laws due to his series of erotic poems entitled “Man Songs” in 1929.

In these he is experimenting with the comma as part of medium, comparable to pointillism.

Each image can be enlarged by clicking on them.

I particularly like poem III that starts below and continues on the following page.

I mis-numbered the image files somehow. The images skip page 3 but no page is missing. Next is page 4, page 5, page 6.