hey non-poets

ryan fitzpatrick wants to write you a poem. With content of your choice. And a form of your choice. The only thing he doesn't seem to promise is that it will be any good - a smart idea!

If I could play, I'd want a lipogrammatic English sonnet using no vowels, on the subject of eating dry toast. Just saying...

p.s. See you tonight?

a person speaking to persons

Poets don't need dream readers, they need real readers - readers who sometimes criticize what they cherish and cherish what they criticize. But we've forgotten who these people are. Instead we make ourselves giddy whipping up new art-organisms and poem-shapes - stuff that doesn't know who or what it's for. Getting a poem under someone's skin and lodging it there: does anyone give a fig about that anymore? The theory-speak idea of the "other" has, with its fetishizing of difference, killed any sense of obligation toward the collective experience, the shared sense of what it means to be human. As the late Stanley Kunitz once wrote, the true vocation of the poet is to be a generalist, "a person speaking to persons." And for me this is the challenge, to burn through the specialism of our art and touch some rock-bottom sense of the reader's lived experience. And it's the boredom of that reader, his indifference to any special pleading on behalf of the "originality" of our poems, that keeps our art honest... I've always liked the old-school idea of poetry as simply another kind of reading material that intellectually curious folks can take an interest in. It's an honorable notion worth preserving, and a welcome corrective to the avant-wankery of our era.

- Carmine Starnino, from a 2006 interview in Northern Poetry Review. You can read the whole thing here.

ogov ftw

I recently found out that Daniela Elza's poem "Savannah Rain, West Africa," which was originally published last year over at One Ghana, One Voice, was selected as a finalist for Sundress Publication's Best of the Net 2009 (the full list of finalists is here).

Though Daniela's poem wasn't selected as a winner, I'm still incredibly proud of her and OGOV. Daniela's poetry is excellent, so her inclusion isn't that surprising. OGOV's, however... well, whoda thunk a little website like ours, which only accepts writing by Africans and on Africa, would get a poem selected as a finalist among poems by Sherman Alexie, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, etc.?

I'm continually impressed by the poets at OGOV. It was very difficult for me to pick only five poems to nominate for Best of the Net 2009. Though just Daniela's poem made it to the final round of consideration, I like to think of the submission as a team effort - Daniela's poem being picked to represent them all. The five nominated poems:

Dry Season in Eremon by Edith Faalong
Ananse’s Grave by Kae Sun
Savannah Rain, West Africa by Daniela Elza
The Train by Prince Mensah
Odomankoma’s Drummer by Kwadwo Kwarteng

Thank you to OGOV's writers and readers for your continued interest and support, and to the people at Best of the Net 2009 for taking a look at our little site!

p.s. Daniela has blogged about this here.

some last may-nute readings

Worst post title yet? That was my goal...

Two more readings before the month is over, added both here and to the big list:

Spiritual Smorgasbord: An Evening of Poetry
Wednesday, May 26th, 7:00 PM
The Wired Monk
2610 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Kate Braid, Ken Klosky, Susan McCaslin, Richard Osler and Sandy Shreve
$5


"Henry Chao and Other Stories" Launch
Saturday, May 29, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
CK Choi Building, Room 120
1855 West Mall, UBC
Featuring: Evelyn Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Paul Yee and more!
Free!

Oh, and don't forget that I'm reading, along with Taryn Hubbard and others, this Friday at One Cool Word 's 4th Birthday Party. The details:

One Cool Word 4th Birthday Party
Friday, May 28th, 8:00 PM
Blim
115 E Pender St., Vancouver
Featuring: Trisha Cull, Taryn Hubbard, me, and more!
Free!

Hope to see you there!

2010 Pandora's Poetry Awards - Go Vote!

The finalists for the aforementioned Pandora's Poetry Awards (for community involvement) have been announced. There are four categories, five finalists for three of the categories, one selected by the Collective:

Organizer/Promoter

Steve Duncan
Heather Haley
Ariadne Sawyer
Fernanda Viveiros
RC Weslowski


BC Writing Mentor

Ivan Coyote
Brad Cran
Jen Currin
Eileen Kernaghan
Betsy Warland


Publisher

Warren Dean Fulton (Pooka Press)
Memewar Arts and Publishing Society (Memewar)
Paul Taylor (Downtown Eastside Newsletter)
Alan Twigg (BC Bookworld)
David Zieroth (Alfred Gustav Press)


Pandora's Collective Citizenship Award

Daniela Elza

Congrats to Daniela for her well-deserved recognition. And to the finalists for the other awards. It's refreshing to be reminded of all that's happening out there in Vancouver - and to think of how many more individuals and organizations could have been included among the finalists (a list many times longer than this one)!

Alright, now go vote for the winners!

poetry in transit contest

Win lots of free books from the BC incarnation of everyone's favorite poetry-where-poetry-should-not-be project. Yeah, Toronto Poetry Vendors, I said it. Good try, tho. You're top three for sure!

poetry + democracy + bourgeois comfort

Given the ability our poets have to write poems that penetrate differences and discover connection, and given poetry’s ancient predisposition for moral persuasion, surely America’s poets are uniquely qualified to speak openly in the public square among diverse or divisive communities. That’s why for an American poet to be something like a subversive today would mean not pushing further inward into the huddles of poetry, but the opposite. The poet who engages democratic dialogue and political life is the renegade, while the one who lives on the margins, settles into tenured existence, or remains committed to engaging only other like-minded types has aligned himself with something that in its best, purest, and most satisfying form is bourgeois comfort. What’s missing in our Republic’s public discourse is the poet’s mastery of reflection. The — I swore I wasn’t going to use this expression, but here goes — “unacknowledged legislators of the world” is one of poetry’s great, self-glorifying characterizations. But perhaps some acknowledged legislating on behalf of mankind wouldn’t be such a bad thing either — for poetry or for democracy.

- David Biespiel, from his article "This Land is Our Land" in the May 2010 issue of Poetry. You can read the whole thing here.

one (final) cool word

One Cool Word is having one last birthday party under its soon-to-be-former name, and they've invited me to tag along and read a poem or two. There will be readings and music and buttons!

Hope to see you there! The details are below, and on the big list:

One Cool Word 4th Birthday Party
Friday, May 28th, 8:00 PM
Blim
115 E Pender St., Vancouver
Featuring: Trisha Cull, Taryn Hubbard, me, and more!
Free (tho you should bring some money to blow on nifty things)

an answer

In answer to my question about the decline of my favourite poetry blog, Al Rempel passed on the link to the new plan for Harriet (Thanks, Al!). Apparently Facebook is where it's at now, which means I'm out of luck. No one tell the folks at the Poetry Foundation about this story:

Google Canada reports that the top online search related to "Facebook account" is "delete Facebook," while the fastest-rising related query is "deactivate Facebook account," up 40 per cent over the past 90 days. Worldwide, the search engine's results on Facebook account deletion ballooned from 15.9 million to 19.5 million between Tuesday and Thursday alone.

You thought you'd break us by taking our favourite poetry blog, didn't you Facebook? Ah, but this has only strengthened our resolve. Facebook resistors, unite! Our moment is at hand. Take it away, William:

Poetry Blogger: Blog? Against that? No! We will join. And we will network.

William Wallace: Aye, resist Facebook and ye may lose a few flaky readers. Join, and you'll network with them... at least a while. And sitting at your computer, many pokes from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days of networking, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell Mark Zuckerberg that he may take our readership, but he'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

All: BLOGA U BRÀTH! BLOGA U BRÀTH! BLOGA U BRÀTH!

a question

Can someone please tell me what happened to Harriet? It used to be my favourite poetry blog. Granted, last month's seemingly endless run of posts about a writers' convention made for lousy content, but at least it was content! Now it's just another news aggregator. If I wanted to read event listings and excerpts from other people's posts I'd read my own blog...

UPDATE: An answer!

nikki reimer book launch

Gotta love being able to say you are hosting a "sic Launch Party" without feeling boastful. Deets are below and on the big list:

[sic] Launch/Party
Saturday, May 22nd, 8:00 PM
W2 Community Media Arts Society
W2 Storyeum, 151 West Cordova St, Vancouver
Featuring: Nikki Reimer, Christine Leclerc, and more!
Free!

there are more important things

An art that doubts or lowballs its own worth may also doubt the wisdom of anyone’s choice to devote a whole life to that art. It may address an audience itself not wholly devoted to poetry, an audience that has made the wiser choice. Such an art must acknowledge not only that it can learn from, but that it might deserve to lose, the competition for time and attention and energy that poetry mounts against any more practical endeavor: child care, certainly, but also the pursuit of public good through electoral politics, the transportation of freight by road, river, and rail, or the practice of medicine...


Devoted to an art that is easy to make, but very hard to make well, and not often prominent (as against, say, films or novels) even when it is made very well, we poets, we critics, we serious readers of poetry too often respond to inconsequence with self-importance: we generate interminable arguments about how much poetry “matters,” about how it can indeed “make something happen.” I do not mean to dismiss all such arguments (I agree with some of them). I do fear that they can lead us to overestimate the powers, and the moral weight, of poetry, and perhaps to neglect other goods, other obligations (including the laundry).

Poetry... isn’t worthless, but it is worth less than many poets and readers believe: however much we like it, it may not merit all the claims it can make on our time. There are more important things. That I feel so... does not mean that I want to get you to feel that way too; it means that I want to think about how such feelings manifest themselves in art. If we are to see this feeling for what it is — sometimes oppressive, sometimes unwelcome, sometimes a welcome consequence when a writer with obligations... has his or her head screwed on right — we ought to be able to see its aesthetic effects, the ways it can change the art that does get made.

- Stephen Burt, from his article "Art v. Laundry" over at the Poetry Foundation. You can read the whole thing here.

the best ones hang on like cockroaches

The Toronto Quarterly: Why should citizens of the world who are more likely addicted to reality television and more concerned about twittering details of their daily routines instead take poets of today seriously and read their books?

Jacob McArthur Mooney: I'm not sure if the two sets of pursuits are mutually exclusive. Twittering, though not something I'm really into, is basically formal poetry--it's concerned with the constraining of language into some sort of expressive essence. And "daily life" has been a key vein of poetic inspiration for as long as there's been the anecdotal lyric...

People are welcome to care about poetry, or not. It's always going to be there. It can be marginalized, surely, but it can't be killed. And there's nothing wrong with it being a minority entertainment. If there was ever a new poem with popularity equal in magnitude and pattern to, say, the popularity of "Jersey Shore", I can be pretty certain that that poem wouldn't be very good. The best ones hang on like cockroaches, clicking away at the periphery of the culture, for as long as the culture itself survives. The rest get flushed down the toilet...

- The Toronto Quarterly interviews Jacob McArthur Mooney. You can read the whole thing here.

ampersand launch

SFU's latest student lit-mag, Ampersand, is launching its second issue soon. An earlier English Student Union effort, iamb, was the first publication with a RobTaylorless editorial board to publish my work - so I know how exciting it must be for many of the contributors. So check it out! See tomorrow today! Etc.! The details (here and on the big list for May):

Ampersand Issue 2 Launch
Friday, May 21st, 2010, 6:00 - 9:30 PM
Cafe Montmartre
3941 Main St, Vancouver
Featuring: Mystery Readers!
Free!

prose v. poetry, feat. the slowest teller in america

You can’t keep prose in your mind. And prose... in some ways doesn’t love the world. It’s a disappearance from the world, for me. I think for a great prose writer that’s not true. But for me it takes me further away. It creates a world that sort of blots out the everyday. Whereas poetry, I think when you read a great poem you can put it down and be more awake and more enlivened, or as Shelley said “Poetry should make us more human”...

Prose favours information... and poetry favours music... What you get from poetry that you don’t get from prose (or what I get... from lyric poetry which is mostly what I read these days, or short narratives, poems of a page or less) is a whole artistic experience about as big as my hand. You can download the whole thing into your head and be standing in a line with the slowest teller in America, and you’re with John Keats, you become a citizen of the city of ideas.

- Mary Karr, from a reading and discussion by Karr and Stuart Dybek, recorded as part of the Poetry Lectures podcast series. Listen to the whole reading here.

there's life after poetry month

A good deal of it, actually. Here are some early-May poetry readings in Vancouver:


Cross-Border Pollination Reading Series
Tuesday, May 4th, 7:00 PM
W2 Storyeum
151 W. Cordova Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Camille Dungy, Marguerite Pigeon, David Zieroth, Ray Hsu and Mary Cornish
Free?


RED ZONE Book Launch Party
Saturday, May 8th, 8:00 PM
W2
151 W. Cordova Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Kim Goldberg (w/ Peter Trower)
Free!


Christian Bök - The Xenotext Experiment
Sunday, May 9th, 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
W2 Storyeum
151 W. Cordova Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Christian Bök, shockingly enough
Free!


Bernadette Wagner Book Launch
Tuesday, May 11th, 7:30 PM
People's Co-Op Books
1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver
Featuring: Well, would ya look at that: Bernadette Wagner
Free!


The Writers' Studio Reading Series
Thursday, May 13th, 7:00 - 9:30 PM
Rhizome Café
317 East Broadway (at Kingsway), Vancouver
Featuring: Adrienne Drobnies, Ivan Antoniw and more!
Free!


Spoken Ink
Tuesday, May 18th, 8:00 PM
La Fontana Caffe
101 - 3701 East Hastings, Burnaby
Featuring: Marni Norwich and Don Simpson
Free!


Ampersand Issue 2 Launch
Friday, May 21st, 2010, 6:00 - 9:30 PM
Cafe Montmartre
3941 Main St, Vancouver
Featuring: Mystery Readers!
Free!


[sic] Launch/Party
Saturday, May 22nd, 8:00 PM
W2 Community Media Arts Society
W2 Storyeum, 151 West Cordova St, Vancouver
Featuring: Nikki Reimer, Christine Leclerc, and more!
Free!


Spiritual Smorgasbord: An Evening of Poetry
Wednesday, May 26th, 7:00 PM
The Wired Monk
2610 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Kate Braid, Ken Klosky, Susan McCaslin, Richard Osler and Sandy Shreve
$5


One Cool Word 4th Birthday Party
Friday, May 28th, 8:00 PM
Blim
115 E Pender St., Vancouver
Featuring: Trisha Cull, Taryn Hubbard, me, and more!
Free (tho you should bring some money to blow on nifty things)!


"Henry Chao and Other Stories" Launch
Saturday, May 29, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
CK Choi Building, Room 120
1855 West Mall, UBC
Featuring: Evelyn Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Paul Yee, Kagan Goh, and more!
Free!


Also, Joy Kogawa House is running a salon series from April through to the end of June featuring novelists, poets and playwrights: Writing For Social Change Reading Series

no more optimism

April is over and so is The Torontoist's "Optimisms Project". Don't feel glum though, because whenever something online ends you know an exciting archive will follow!

Opti-curator Jacob McArthur Mooney has posted just such an archive, where you can read all sorts of optimistic things, here (though he doesn't link to his own great project-closing cento, using quotes from all the other entries, which you can read here).

Thanks to Jacob and The Torontoist for a fun Poetry Month experiment (and for giving me the opportunity to write "NaPoOpMo")!

my version of #3: the poet goes to take a drink of water and accidentally throws it all over him/herself

I have done that three times. My life is just one scene from "Airplane" after another...

Below are my top five warning signs that a reading might get into trouble.

1. Hair awry — you end up being transfixed throughout the reading by the constant dance between hand, hair lock/s, and head toss.

2. When the poet talks about how little time he/she has, it is a sure sign they will run over. “Just six more,” they say, as if to reassure us.

3. The throat clearing that presages multiple water gulps throughout the reading; exacerbated by water being placed in an inconvenient spot so the poet has to disappear from view (behind lectern) to retrieve it.

4. The unprepared reader — papers all over the place, multiple copies of books toppling off the podium, which leads to a painful running commentary on the progress in finding the next poem, or worse, an awful embarrassed silence during the frantic search for the poem.

5. Poetry voice — why, when it comes to reading poetry aloud, do so many poets adopt a pseudo-religious incantatory voice that actually serves to flatten the meaning into a single-toned chant that numbs the senses and the mind?

- Fiona McCrae, guest blogging at the FSG Blog. Read the whole thing here.