As I mentioned in an earlier there was an annual National Poetry Month in the Pontiac event in Shawville, population 1600. Fun fact, unlike most municipalities in Quebec, it has no Catholic church. This is an area I’ve been researching for family history and I learned that thanks to a person in charge of handing out land grants who felt the way of peace was to keep Protestants and Catholics sequestered, no Catholics were allowed under his watch. And it held and holds for a couple hundred years. Anyhew,

We had room for chatting before the event kicked off. All kinds of craft chat. That was nice.That doesn’t happen organically over email the same.

Since then I posted a poem over at Patreon. (Is it annoying to come to one social to be sent off to another link? I swear I’m not handing you your hat. You can go to that link after.) I like giving poems a dry run. Ideally, share a poem with test reader, then a group, then submit individually to a journal, then to a chapbook, then to a book, then to a selected works in a few decades. Some poems skip a bunch of interim steps. Some rooms like this one invited that sort of thing.

I’ve been in rooms for readings with crossed arms and cross faces with a g’wan-impress-me-I-dare-you attitude. Those are daunting. There was none of that here. Mellow and breeze-shooting.

Cheryl, Tom and Earleen and people at another table of the 6. Dale Shutt, local artist, was in attendance as well (pictured below)

There was an open mic with host/organizer Jennifer Mulligan reading as well as Tom McCann and Earleen.

Tom McCann read several poems including some fab lines. I wasn’t there to make an archive of it, but my nature prevails. One of his poems considered what is worthwhile and what gives value to a life lived in the context of talking to an older man, asking himself, “could I plan a more heroic end than melting in a wheelchair?”

Earleen Devine (sp?) has some striking poems about her husband, with insightful turn of phrase about aging, “our bodies are designed to rot”. (It’s a feature.) She also wrote of “that vaulted space of sorrow.” Andy the time Jennifer read I was too keyed up to focus.

In the unusual position of not being on a tour, to tout a particular title, I could read anything so I did a scattershot of 10 years of titles, surreal to family history to haiku. To my surprise, the haiku sold best. We have the idea that only the tiniest sliver of a niche that is poetry of the niche that is creative writing would like haiku but there you go.

A group photo of the readers.

For more or for different, check out the next Pontiac Journal.

Hey all,

Sit tight. It’s going to a longer one.

I used to do it a lot of testing out poems at reading series around Ottawa before the Great Crash of the Year I was Dead, and moved out of the province. I used to get out a couple to a few night a week year round. There was such a bubblebath of options. Unless you wanted a series at 8am, you were probably in luck.

The spoken word scene was packing rooms, halls, auditoriums with hundreds. John Akpata said he performed to 1200 in Ottawa back then.

It was a thing for a poet to pull in 60 or 80 people, sometimes more. Sometimes only a dozen but it’s the reaching a person, not the bums in seats that matter, well, except for funding applications.

The thing is every good thing runs on volunteers and volunteers wear out, get jobs, get sick, die, move on and planned succession doesn’t always get the torch across the river of time. And some trends pop like bubbles. A lot of reading series have folded and crowds shrunk.

Some events still are mercifully on zoom that makes for wider access. Facebook may be less functional for reach about events but still works to a degree.

Even having said that much, I don’t understand how people post weekly or more with salient things to say. (Or not in the case of a couple newsletters I unsubscribed from, not.) Even the energy to put a sentence together that’s clear can be taxing. (Boy, am I complaintsy today.)

What I came here about was to reflect on National Poetry Month more broadly.

I set myself the challenge of poems that stayed with me over at bluesky. With walls of books, there must be some I’d want to write on the interior ineffaceably. There must be among them pivots I treasure, moments that made me. Not promoting what’s new and cool but personal chestnuts of what others gave to the culture. When that challenge was over, I kept on more #NPM sharings. The account was originally for not-poetry but since I deleted twitter’s remains, I let poetry out over there too.

It seems I’m not exempt from the profundity hook. Meaning and significance is becoming more important to me again. Whatever could that mean?

Next I’ll write of the last reading I did then I might fall silent until the flip side of the next later-May event.

I’m thinking for fall I may restart phafours press from hiatus. So maybe a chapbook or two coming out for November.