the VERSeFest 2014 schedule is now online,

The schedule for the fourth annual VERSeFest, Ottawa's annual poetry festival, is now on-line. Running from March 25 to 30, 2014, VERSeFest is comprised of various literary and spoken-word reading series (including The Factory Reading Series) collaborating to organize and host a wide-ranging poetry event, featuring readings and performances from Mary Ruefle, David W. McFadden, Brandon Wint, Marilyn Irwin, Margaret Christakos, Stephen Brockwell, Andrew Faulkner, Blaize Moritz, Billie Jane Kearns, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jenna Tenn-Yuk, Kathryn Mockler, Karen Connolly, Kaie Kellough, Mary Pinkoski, Nina Berkhout, Peter Richardson, Shane Rhodes, Flilosi-Fire, Sarah De Leeuw, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Stephen James Smith, Sue Goyette, Suzannah Showler and others, a screening of Robert McTavish's documentary on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, The Line has Shattered, as well as a post-screening panel discussion with McTavish and conference participants Roy MacSkimming, Robert Hogg and William Hawkins.

For a full schedule and list of readers, as well as information on tickets, check out their website.

The Capilano Review 3:21

Athena

I had not known it, but I lived

inside my mother’s head—her face God-like,

white, a cast. Neck coiled in a snake,

ready to strike. My own eyes

slits beneath the heavy chalked lids.

How did I come then,

to haul myself up the scaffolding she’d left,

fist after fist, to crawl and stretch—

the glowing oval of her mind

hanging like a moon above me.

I cracked the crown—

pressed out and through, black bird

singing in my chest,

no light, no breath, my voice

still clinging to her lips. (Emily Kendal Frey)

I try to keep away from discussing issues of journals I’m actually in, but the new issue of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review is too good to not at least say something, with new work by (among others) Sylvia Legris, Emily Kendal Frey, George Bowering and Jesse Grey, collaborations by Ray Hsu and Michael Park, as well as an interview Robert McTavish conducted with Charles Bernstein, “Undone Business: Charles Bernstein on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference.” For those who might not be aware, documentary filmmaker Robert McTavish has been working on literary subjects for some time, including a documentary he did on the late poet John Newlove, as well as editing Newlove’s selected poems for Chaudiere Books. More recently, McTavish released a documentary he produced on the infamous 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, The Line has Shattered: Vancouver’s Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference (Non-Inferno Media, 2013), deliberately appearing just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the conference. McTavish recently said that he had far more material than would ever fit into the documentary itself, and it seems that he’s started working to place some of that research in literary journals, which can only broaden any scope of articulating the significance of the historic conference (I can only hope that other interviews begin appearing soon in further venues). The interview opens:

Robert McTavish: You’ve got the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference recordings on the PennSound site. Does it have a profile, to people here in America?

Charles Bernstein: America! Sure, I mean, I think those interested in the New American Poetry know about the Vancouver conference. Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, came out just three years before the Vancouver conference. Famously, for those few for whom anything about poetry can be famous!, the anthology included different configurations of poets: the Beats, which would have included Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs, who were represented at the conference by Ginsberg; the so-called Black Mountain Poets, which would have been Creeley and Olson, two very different poets but affiliated; and the San Francisco Renaissance, which would have been Duncan at the conference but also Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, and Whalen too. Vancouver ’63 and Berkeley ’65 are milestones in the history of the New American Poetry. It’s also very important to me as somebody who was in Canada early on in my life and had a deep connection to Canadian poets and also who has a great interest in, and knowledge of, the relationship between the US and Canadian poets. Seen the other way around, of course, the Vancouver conference was pivotal to the reception of US poetry within Canada through the TISH group. It’s a crucial point of contact. From a US point of view its significance is more tenuous, but it is one of the key events of New American Poetry, along with the Berkeley conference, Black Mountain College, the first reading of “Howl” in San Francisco, and the like. It’s fascinating that these poets came together in Vancouver when they were so young and relatively unknown. A number of interesting Canadian poets came to the conference and as far as US poets go, it was important for Michael Palmer and Clark Coolidge, which makes it important for those of us who greatly admire their work. Coolidge and Palmer connected up to the New American Poetry in a more visceral way through that conference and remained connected to it throughout their lives, though I don’t have much evidence that they connected up to Canadian poetry.

The issue also includes a selection of works from an exhibit curated by Michael Turner, A Postcard from Victoria,shown at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, May 2 – July 7, 2013. Featuring Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour’s video A Post Card from Victoria (1983), the show included new postcards Turner commissioned for the exhibit by artists Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer and Julia Feyrer, all of which respond in some way to the original sixteen-minute film. Turner’s introduction moves from the history of the postcard to the show specifically, “an immersive exhibition,” as he writes:

The final element in the exhibition, near the west wall, is a carousel that includes postcards that were for sale when Morin and Dufour made their video, interspersed with recently-commissioned postcards by artists asked to “interview” the video (just as the Northern English woman was interviewed by the owner of the cottage). The resultant postcards reflect the eerie quality of Morin and Dufour’s work (Did you notice that when the maid pours the cottage-owner her tea, nothing comes out?). Raymond Boisjoly provides a lurid image of the video scanned from his smart phone; Julia Feyrer a staged still-life that implicates an infamous Victoria-set book from 1980 on satanic cults and repressed memory (Michelle Remembers); and Geoffrey Farmer a drawing of a ghost-like figure seated “within” an appropriated drawing of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage at Warwickshire, England.

On top of that, there’s new fiction by George Bowering, and stunning new poems by Sina Queyras, Emily Kendal Frey and Sylvia Legris, and nearly too much to actually discuss in a single post. There is something about Sylvia Legris’ work that is getting richer, deeper and more complex. I haven’t seen much since her Griffin Prize-winning collection, save for a recent title through New Directions [see my review of such here], but her work, already incredibly dense and powerful, is somehow improving. How does that happen? She has three poems in this new issue, triggered by sketches by Leonardo da Vinci—“Details of Articulated Skeletons, c. 1510,” “The Anatomy of a Bear’s Foot, c. 1488-90” and “A Skull Sectioned, c 1489.” The second half of the poem “The Anatomy of a Bear’s Foot, c. 1488-90 / (after Leonardo da Vinci)” reads:

Metalpointed (the forager forget). The white-heightened tendons silver-

tipped—by rod by wire by claw (ditto the dito grosso del piede, ditto the stony

ossi petrosi). Oddly nodular,

the small-seeded sesamoid bones; the flat-footed marauder off-gait, bellicoso.

Terricolous, the pre-anatomized bear’s bearing toe-in, direct-register, a

stomp-walk to mark scent (the soul that dwells within that architecture … a

thing divine…).

View the Premiere Screening of Robert McTavish's "The Line Has Shattered" on March 21 at SFU Woodward's, Vancouver

The Line Has Shattered, a documentary film by Robert McTavish on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, is being premiered on Thursday, March 21st at 7:30pm at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU Woodward's, 149 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver. Admission is by donation: $3.00 for students, and $5.00 for others.

The event is being introduced by Canadian Poet Laureate (and '63 conference participant) Fred Wah.

Narrated by poet Phyllis Webb, who chronicled the event at the time, The Line Has Shattered is a sixty-minute documentary film that revisits the '63 Conference and hears from a number of its participants half a century later.

The Vancouver Poetry Conference, hosted by the University of British Columbia in the summer of 1963, is seen by many as a landmark event in the history and development of West Coast Canadian and North American innovative poetry - and indeed a major early manifestation of the Sixties West Coast zeitgeist.

Organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and American poet Robert Creeley, the conference was an intense, freewheeling three-week program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings at which a rising generation of Canadian and American poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge, was exposed to and, in many cases, profoundly influenced by the personalities and 'New American' open-form poetics of the visiting poet-instructors Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Margaret Avison.  For many of the student participants the conference played a key role in providing them faith that the pursuit and practice of poetry could constitute a meaningful calling and life's work.

Robert McTavish is a Canadian documentary film-maker whose works include Ghosts on the Land (2001), Fiddler's Map (2003) and What To Make of It All?: The Life and Poetry of John Newlove (2006).  He also edited A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books, 2007, afterword by Jeff Derksen) which was hailed by the Globe and Mail as "a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration."

This event is being co-sponsored by SFU Library and English Department, with thanks to the Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

View or print the poster. Contact the library to reserve a seat. For more information, contact Tony Power in Special Collections, 778.782.6676.

Phyllis Webb documentary by Robert McTavish on CBC Radio's IDEAS, May 12, 2011;

A profile of Canada's great poet and the co-creator of the program IDEAS!
Phyllis Webb: The Art of Ideas on IDEAS on CBC Radio, 9pm Thursday, May 12th.

She has spent a lifetime asking questions. Her body of work was never satisfied with the answers. Poet, anarchist, intellectual, former radio producer, and co-creator of the program IDEAS, we honour Phyllis Webb in this documentary by Robert McTavish.

Robert McTavish has done a number of radio and film documentaries, including What to Make of it All? The life and poetry of John Newlove (2006). He later edited the collection A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books 2007 with an afterword by Jeff Derksen) which critic Steve Noyes described as "probably the best summation of John Newlove's inimitable poems that we are likely to get" and is currently producing and directing his fourth film, The Line Has Shattered, on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference.

The Line Has Shattered: Revisiting Vancouver’s Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference

Hey rob, Could you pass on this event information to all interested? I know a lot of people out there also attended the '63 Conference informally and if they have any photos or materials they could share could they contact rmctavish@hotmail.com as I am working on a documentary about the legendary event. -- Robert McTavish

The Line Has Shattered

Revisiting Vancouver’s Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference

George Bowering / Pauline Butling / Clark Coolidge / Judith Copithorne /
Maria Hindmarch / Robert Hogg / Lionel Kearns / Bernice Lever / Daphne Marlatt / Michael Palmer / Jamie Reid / Fred Wah

The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference was actually a three-week credit summer course offered by the University of British Columbia and organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and poet Robert Creeley. It featured lectures, readings, panel discussions and writing workshops by Charles Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov and Margaret Avison—in Roy Miki’s words, some of “the most influential voices of the generation described as the ‘new American poets.’” The Conference marks the beginnings of a truly transnational “North American” poetic avant-garde: many of the “student” participants have gone on to have far-reaching impact on Canadian and American poetry, as they include figures such as George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Phyllis Webb. Consistently referred to as “landmark,” “monumental,” and a “defining moment in the history of North American poetry,” The Line Has Shattered brings together 12 original participants 46 years later for a day of discussion and readings.

Friday August 14 2009

SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings), room 1400 (Segal Centre), Vancouver BC

Panel discussion: 1-3pm

Steamworks Pub: 3-7

Readings: 7-10pm

Moderated and Hosted by Stephen Collis

Sponsored by the SFU Department of English and the Kootenay School of Writing

Free and open to the public

an old poem embedded in thoughts on stephen brockwell

Around 2001, I started riffing poems off a concept pilfered from George Bowering’s poetry collection, Curious (Coach House Press, 1973). In his collection, he wrote his as a series of poems on other poets, I added an element, and started writing poems on other poet’s stuff (I think the first was written after a short reading tour with Andy Weaver, as he wore a borrowed shirt from Robert McTavish in Calgary). As I wrote around the same time, is there a difference? Part of the appeal was in attempting a kind of “recommended reading” list of authors, each working some kind of thread of the author’s own voice. Does it matter if you know the particular author, or what it is they’ve written? Hopefully not; the art without the essay should still make for great art, but instead, the extra information should add to the experience.

Stephen Brockwell's notes

towards a poem short that may take
years to solve, lone dictum
under black elastic.
who else would have known
to write a meditation
two lines thick from twenty
just to score them further
down to one?
precision is the answer, &
the question, here. what else
would be intention,
logging notebook miles
from international flights, a laptop
full of creature noise
& blackberry, logic bliss
between the notes
that ring out rare
& as determined
as any John Cage opus.
it would not matter, books are made
by human minds & bodies
who sit down, & know
how to listen. reordering chaos
into other chaos, order, Brockwell
writes his days into other days,
such a small fraction
out of human history. rotates
his wrist & think
to dust.

This is part of a manuscript of poems called “Apertures,” second in a series of response volumes I’ve been working on for more than a decade, after the other side of the mouth (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2003), with a third volume-in-progress, “variations: plunder verse.” I’ve heard the argument before that all writing is written in response to other writing, but where does the work go once it’s composed more overtly as a response, more obvious?

I’m intrigued at the idea of taking a thread of my own writing and blowing it up, partly to see where it will end up, and partly to get a particular thread out of my system, letting the remainder of my writing exist unencumbered, forced to navigate through other waters. When I started writing fiction, for example, the storytelling aspect of my poems reduced, and what was left in the poems shifted. Why continue writing if I am but to repeat my own structures?

In referencing Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, one of my closest friends, the appeal of writing this short piece was in the amount of times I tried to end a line with the end of a phrase, instead of the usual appeal of the line break within, breaking the line apart. The appeal was, trying to understand something and/or someone better by writing them out. Brockwell’s writing, much like his work as a consultant in the high tech industry, is highly deliberate, highly crafted, and wrapped around lines that don’t have a single accident between words, spaces or ideas. Unlike mine, his poems come from extended periods of copious notes, almost as sketches or studies before the finished work begins. Is this a sketch of Brockwell, or of Brockwell’s poems? Why can’t it be both?

A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove

edited by Robert McTavish

with an afterword by Jeff Derksen

published by Chaudiere Books








A LONG CONTINUAL ARGUMENT WITH MYSELF

As if human beings only lived one moment at a time!
– no past, no future; as if a part of the pain
of receiving that simple act of kindness
were not the memory of it occurring before –

as if there were nothing to hope for
when a stranger woman smiles and kisses you
at someone else’s kitchen door, as if
that tree of gratitude for humans would not bloom again –

which will:
silver in the silver sun.

Ottawa launch: Sunday, October 21, 2pm as part of the ottawa international writers festival
other launches (Edmonton, Vanouver, Regina, etc): tba

A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. It includes all the poems John Newlove chose for his previous Selected Poems with substantial additions from all his major collections. All of his later poetry has been included, as well as integral, critically-acclaimed works such as the long poem Notes From And Among the Wars, and many of the cynically lyric poems that established his early reputation as a black romantic. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove's has always been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in the words of Phyllis Webb, "doesn't struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking."

To call him "the voice of prairie poetry" misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton "the voice of Cromwell's London." ...This was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetry delivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. ...It will be seen again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place. - Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove: Essays on His Works, forthcoming)

selected links for John Newlove:
poetics.ca; University of Toronto's John Newlove page; The Canadian Encyclopedia; Dooney's Cafe obituary for John Newlove; wikipedia entry; OneZeroZero entry; Judith Fitzgerald entry; ECW Press author page; The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan; John Newlove Poetry Award; ABCBookworld entry; Parliamentary Poet Laurate, Poem of the Week; John Newlove's "Ottawa poems" by rob mclennan
$22.00 CAN/$20.00 US
isbn 978-0-9781601-9-7
available to bookstores through the literary press group
or directly through the publishers at az421@freenet.carleton.ca