I am trying to read more in translation, more from earlier times, some for poetry research, more from people with different life experiences. I aim to finish up books started months ago.

Every day, some reading, some new writing and some editing.

Those are the goals. I’ll bold those I’d particularly recommend. The only I wouldn’t would be Blindsight. Anomie and paranoid menace and somehow a sustained anti-climatic. End notes were good tho.

• Amoebaverse by GayDemonicDisaster (AO3, 2024): only 3 pages but casts Good Omens in a microscopic world.
• Hidden Canvasses by Catartkid and Vampiremama (AO3, 2024)
• Wales Haiku Journal, fall 2024, edited by Joe Woodhouse and C.X. Turner (Wales Haiku Journal, 2024)
• Yankee in Quebec by Anson A Gard (1902)
• Sky Clear Blue by klikandtuna (AO3, 2024) pairs time travelling and queerness, in 1800s vs. an affirming now where friends have each other’s backs.
• Sweet Vinegars: poems of wildflowers by Claudia Radmore (Shoreline, 2024), elegant concise varied poems that are hard to summarize, about flowers and as a framework
• Uncle Sam in Quebec by Anson A. Gard (1902)
• Heliotropia: poems by Manahil Bandukwala (BrIck, 2024) are love poems without the grief of loss partnered with the galaxy and reference to Star Trek in a few cases
• The Weight of Oranges: poems by Anne Michaels (M&S, 1997), the first half in particular are meaty slowly built poems that are lyric in a way I can appreciate
• Small Arguments: poems by Souvankham Thammovongsa (M&S, 2003, 2023) is her first book, reprinting what she self-published. Extremely concise and minimalist.
• Blindsight by Peter Watts (Tor, 2006)
• The Gospel of Us by Owen Sheers (Seren, 2012) I’d boldface conditional on if you also saw the movie.
• Light Carved Passages by Frances Boyle (Sundress, 2014, 2024)
• Gusts: Contemporary Tanka, Issue 40, fall/winter, 2024, (Tanka Canada, 2024)
• playing into silence by Tina Biello (Dagger Editions/Caitlin, 2018)
• the twilight saga: the official illustrated guide by Stephanie Meyer (Little Brown, 2011)
• Another Boring Canada Day: Ten Micro A–Zed Acrostics by Kevin Stebner (MODEL, 2025)”
• Inverse Omens by Fyre (AO3, 2019)
• The Sky is a Sky in the Sky by Stuart Ross (Coach House, 2024)
• The Unworn Necklace by Roberta Beary (Snapshot Press, 2007) I’ve read several times and it never seems like the same book. She utterly nails the form.
• Haiku Canada Review: Vol 18, Number 2, Oct 2024, edited by Mike Montreuil (Haiku Canada, 2024)
• A Further Introduction to Bingo by Jason Heroux and Dag T. Straumsvåg (above/ground, 2024) is offbeat whimsy and strange and surreal and delightful.
• To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024)
• Who’s Afraid of Virginian Woolf? by Edward Albee (Penguin, 1962)
• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Simon & Schuster, 2024) reinforces the value of gift culture and adds nuggets about how the old model of forest as do-or-die-competition has been shifting towards a collaborative model where at root level there’s sharing resources.
• From Desire Without Expectation by Jacob Wren (above/ground, 2024) as mentioned in a previous post, a pondering essay on writing, self, community.
• Crying Dress: poems by Cassidy McFadzean (Anansi, 2024)
• On Beauty: stories by rob mclennan (University of Alberta, 2024)

Those I’m reading concurrently.

• Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, trans by Christopher Fry and Johan Fillinger (Oxford, 1867, 1970)
• The Edge of Europe: A Kinetic Image by Pentii Saarikoski, trans by Anselm Hollo (Action Books, 1982/2007) oddly enough references Peer Gynt as he also translated it. There must be some logic to what I read from disparate sources.
• Birds of Happiness Aren’t Blue and 85 other very Funny and Somewhat Educational Nature Essays by Paul Hetzler (Paul Hetzler, 2023). The third of his compiled columns books I’ve read. Lots of details of particulars on everything from pill bugs to erosion to sleep patterns.
• The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, trans by Robert Bly (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994) is one of these I’ve long owned and meant to read. Past halfway. Thanks goodness for footnotes. It is a bit of slog.
• In Search of Dracula: a True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends by Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu (New York Graphic Society, 1972) is a hard haul to be certain. He was insane, paranoid, and cruel on a scale that makes Stalin and Palestine look moderate. He tortured and killed 30,000 people over an Easter Weekend, and those were the allies.
• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2025). The 9th book of hers I’ve read. It’s creative and a new structure for her, and based in contemporary world of non-magic, but kind of tiring. Smirk, cry, smirk, cry, but there’s personal growth and growth of relationships, I’m 82% so dammit I’ll finish it.
• Divergent Paths: Family Histories of Irish Immigrants in Britain, 1820-1920 by John Herson (Manchester University Press, 2015) is fascinating and incredibly researched. His blog delved shallowly but this deep-dives to follow the long game of family and chosen family instead of individual immigrant overcoming and losing to adversity.
• Everyday Life in the Viking Age by Jacqueline Simpson (Putnam’s Sons, 1967)
• Provenance by Annie Leckie (Orbit, Hatchette, 2017)

Other books have submerged in the piles and may rise, and who knows what will come by mail or library or chance.

Why not organic poetry with artisanal salt? Where does creation and the superstructure of Arts? Canada Council says “Together we bring the arts to life” and in The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer says we need to stop modelling from default scarcity and instead to default abundance and a gift culture of connection and gratitude.

In The Marketplace ™ how does the individual citizen fit? Not the consumer, not the artist, but the person inside the machinery?

There is attention on needs of formal structures; festivals, reading series programs, social media, granting bodies, professional writers organizations. This is all made as a mechanism to reach outside the immediate 2 or 5 people a life has room for.

These complex social tools are all designed to support the individual who wants to meet the individual through the medium of a page, digital or paper.

These support structures facilitate trade of A, your ideas, for B, goods/cash. And to reach the group of 200 or so that we can keep in our heads as “ours”. (And next, world domination.)

If we live among people who are in a self-sustaining sufficient closed community, we don’t need to access the superstructure.

It’s superfluous. You don’t have energy to cast about when there’s soil to be tended. Besides, I like what you do which I can’t do well, and you like what I do that you can’t do like I can. We are both satisfied. This makes all the rest unnecessary. 

If we want more? 

Our human population is absurdly large and writers and readers can be in insulated isolated pockets. What is exactly your wavelength of tickle might be hard to find. 

That’s okay, we have, oh, publishers, reviewers, marketers, networking, presentation forums. An attempt at centralized market so there isn’t so much duplication  of labour so we can spend less time looking, more time consuming or creating. 

If you sell carrots and I sell carrots, why should we each go door-to-door? It would be mutually beneficial to share knowledge and resources. 

A bunch of the carrot growers talk, agree to meet at noon in the square and people learn to come there to haggle for carrots. It’s cooperation more than competition. By being together, people know where the carrots are all at. Some carrot-chucker doesn’t allow a parsnip grower? Fine they go to another corner at 10am. Soon there are a lot of booths.

A person who doesn’t like growing carrots and isn’t good at it but like carrots just fine decides the community needs someone like themself. A middleman decides they can streamline and make the growers life more efficient at doing what they do best. The middleman will handle the markets, signs, word of mouth, even pick up the carrots and handle the money. Carrot growers just grow things. Everyone gets to specialize. It will be easier for growers and eaters. 

Now we have these structures but once they have life, they want to self-perpetuate. They need carrots for their truck fleet taking carrots to the network of freezers, and restaurants and dog food factories and export contracts. It all gets complex. It is a perpetual motion machine, a process of product and production. Some people show up every week expecting to buy whatever is for sale and are disgruntled at what gets delivered or become armchair critics but not producers. Others are just happy to enjoy what is grown.

There’s a lot of noise and someone starts a news sheet reporting on the people who sell carrots instead of the carrots. It’s fine. Things start getting a little peripheral as center as people start trading photos of people who give ribbons to their favourite carrots marketers and carrot bag designs. It’s fine. It’s still about eating, right?

Not many customers are going to drive around on the chance occurrence of seeing carrots or parsnips when they are being harvested. They’re too busy tending to their own life of widgets. 

True carrot aficionados are few but will track when and with whom to look, but most of the public want a bit of root for the stew now and then.  

Only carrot growers with huge egos want a monopoly of everyone buying their carrots. Who wants to industrial scale grow that many carrots? 

Is it about supplying demand or love of the next particular carrot and feeding the community that feeds you?

The core moment of nurturing a seed to nourish the self and other bodies can get lost. 

It is all predicated on one person and their seeds. One moment in a chain of moments and not buggering off to twitter to argue about sports tracks and trivets, and assume that carrots grow themselves. 

Social media can become white noise of hooks clanging. Each title and sentence can get relegated to the art of snagging. Reductionism and headlines and pull out quotes, headshots and packaging, ideal consumer and awards culture, that is all under the purview of market. 

Richness of soil, cultivation in private, nurturing what is worthwhile is the job of the farmers. 

Catching the market isn’t the work of the field or the seed. Being well formed or sexy or the right orange doesn’t matter to the hungry belly. Those are concerns of middlemen. Their busking may raise consciousness that you can eat something other than potatoes, but the real connection is teeth around what you grew. 

The work of the work is the essential bit. Without it, the rest has no purpose.

The social media, the reading tours, the articles, are all beside the root point. What is that truth? That obsession? That underground life that can bring its nutrients? 

The satisfying appetite or hunger happens one-to-one. 

How to find the one that wants your carrot in particular while you are growing more carrots? Maybe it is naïve but it is not your job. 

You learn the best practices, the principles, work from where you are and the carrot grows itself where you put it. Don’t let it die. Don’t let it grow woody, hollow, ginormous and bitter. Keep its seeds and replant the best of what grew. 

You hustle when it is the season, or else you partner with a middleman with hustle game, someone who can move among all the hungry people you’d rather not see as you stand in your patch of sun and rain.  You plan. You feed your soil. You rest when you can. You keep yourself and your plants healthy. 

And that’s that, except where it isn’t.

We need the whole society. We do not live in the confines of what we make. Or what we want. There is the stuff around and what doesn’t fit is sometimes the most interesting bits.

What kind of life do we/you want to make? Wha gives energy and what takes? Maybe you love the market to offset the solitude of growing your ideas.

In From Desire Without Expectation (which I’ve re-read a few times) (above/ground, 2024) Jacob Wren says “My intention here isn’t to celebrate my own partial ignorance. It’s rather to continue learning and include the reader in the process.” He talks of money vs. creation.

Over at Periodicities, Aaron Boothby considers the genesis of a poem, “what calls to us? I think that’s how a poem begins, and informs the whole rest of whatever it becomes.” And not only what a poem becomes, I’d add, but what we become, made by what we attend to and create.

It’s sweet to be invited to read and to read with people you like. What a wonderful room of people came to the launch. It reminds me why I’d ever shared any writing.

Warm welcomes, familiar faces, encouraging strangers, and that sub-vocal track of people being with you, hums, changed breathing, chuckles. There’s a sense of connection that you aren’t the only person on your own wavelength, that maybe you can communicate after all. There isn’t a resistance wall. There’s no despair or anger or lash only people wanting to latch onto the words shared by each poet. It suggests humanity could kind of work, a well-being in harmony like a unisong choir.

It’s such a pleasure to hear poems that were workshopped, nascent come into themselves as finished and to see poets over the years grow in skill and confidence. I workshopped with Laurie over a decade ago and with Lana over the last few years. There’s an increased precision and emotional reach in their poems. Beautiful to se develop.

It’s comforting to read when a quarter of the faces are familiar and you know they’re in your corner. It’s a little reunion. It lowers the stakes. After all when poetry is done, there’s no immediate fix so you might as well go with and present what is now.

I sometimes am anxious for days before a reading, sometimes not until after than jitter for days. Right before I go on, there’s nerves, but once I’m at the front, I’m centred in an uncommon way for me, alert, aware, clear and can improv in comfort.

The night sold out the copies of chapbooks but Pinhole is reprinting so you can still get copies.

It was a great turnout for poetry, at nearly 40 people.

I wonder, what if special events make for a better audience? Maybe I globalize from an instance of alchemy. But…

A one-off event is singular. People come for the readers in particular. They aren’t just bar patrons who didn’t clear out from the dim crusty room. They aren’t indifferent curious people wandering through the public space. They aren’t someone who pencil in a date to socialize, readers incidental. Is it something about a prevalently female space where there aren’t microaggressions to deflect? Or a male host who resonates more with his “side”. Is it both what is present and what is absent?

Who is present and how they build on one another. People give up hours, set aside time and energy, rearrange their habits and come out to enjoy and support and empathize and be moved. The people are more central than the stuff around. The strangers who take that moment to say I liked x in particular. Those seconds give months of energies.

In a reading series, core audience knows that the buns-in-seat-count ensure continued funding thus creates a way to pay readers, but it means a certain percentage show up not even knowing who presents. A series may have a certain thrust of aesthetic, like a magazine or book publisher does. It’s a different animal, perhaps. Although in a reading series with a large admittance fee, maybe there is a keenness and desire to see that thing that matters in particular. In any case people are displacing something for the occasion. There’s a cost that the readers have to offset by sharing what they find the audience will gain value from. That’s a responsibility, in this sharing, this caring.

The act of public sharing of writing is a sort of gift economy of exchange. By being present you gift, whether speaking or listening.

Tidbits:

Andrea Gibson on eye contact.

There’s an above/ground poetry chapbook sale. 4 chaps/$20 (postage included), 10 for $40 + shipping, any 24 titles for $80 etc. I’d recommend: mine of course, and Ben Robinson, melissa eleftherion, Ken Norris, Lori Anderson Moseman, Kyle Flemmer, issues of Guest, Jason Heroux, Hugh Thomas, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Monty Reid, Jacob Wren, James Hawes (those are all direct linked in the linked post)

Sage Hill Spring Colloquium applications are now open. It was fabulous. I did it twice, once remotely and once on site. On site with strangers who were supportive was much better than sitting on a hillside in blackfly season trying to keep a weak signal enough to radio in by phone but experience varies.

“Secrets aren’t treasure, you know. Secrets don’t make you powerful.They make you weak. Vulnerable.” – Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning 

At the Woodlot, Rob Taylor’s mullings over being on a poetry jury.

“There are always a million different stories—you just don’t know which one it is you’re going to write. Bu that does doesn’t makes the others not exist.[…]As you define something. all the “might have beens” die as you decide things” Stephanie Meyer, the twilight saga: the official illustrated guide (Little Brown, 2011)

The Pi Review has been going for years but I didn’t attend before now. See this poem series by Monty Reid there?

Is an epigraph an involuntary blurb?

Reality is not static. It is brought into existence by notice, action and inaction.

“My mother’s superpower is turning my ordinary worries into monsters so huge and pervasive that her distress and heartache become almost debilitating.” – Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s daughter  (Squarefish, 2021)

The Gospel of Us by Owen Sheers (Seren, 2012) can be borrowed at The Internet Archive as well as poetry no longer.

“Compassion is more creative than contempt. Forgiveness – at its best – seeks to make space for surprise and the unexpected.” Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry unbound (Canongate, 2022)

How to get back into writing with confidence from Natalie Holborow.

Find your next read with the Reactor Magazine quiz for sci-fi/fantasy reads.

For the 10th anniversary of the collection, Frances Boyle’s Light Carved Passages can be downloaded for free.

Rachel Clyne’s advice on giving a good reading 

No next day is guaranteed as Samuel Pepys reminds, “from this day I should see how long 10 chaldron of coals will serve my house, if it please the Lord to let me live to see them burned.”

Centralized is great, under benevolent, community-minded rule. Consequently I am on pixelfed as pesbo (booed it up) getting on Pixelfed to replace Meta’s Instagram? It says I can import and pour it all to PF, except that is disabled. I’m feeling like the Pakled, Grebnelog.

I’m returning to MeWe after 3 years to see if anything’ changed. it doesn’t look ugly like it used to. So then we just need the social gathering aspect.

Jacob Wren is at bluesky.

I am pearlpoet at bluesky but I probably won’t return follow. I haven’t decided what to do about who to follow. I was planning to cap at 250. If/when I figure out lists I’ll add poets who say interesting things. I block or ignore people who don’t tweet. I want reciprocity not auditing and performance. I am spending too much of my time blocking soldiers, bots, evangelists and those who think it’s a dating site.

“The beginning is never the beginning.” Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Warrior (Viking, 2017)

If you deleted your tweets and deactivated it, the Musky ones may reactivate and restore including all your deleted posts. The download archive function is back if you want to save your tweets. I’m considering substack-tweet-like part for poetry twitter rrplacement.

“See/feel /what your body is/telling /you. /Stay there. //Feel that opening.” leslie roach, finish this sentence  (Mawenzi House, 2020)