West Coast Poetry Festival, Vancouver (coda)

Recently I was part of the West Coast Poetry Festival that happened in Vancouver from July 7th to July 10th. Only their second year of operation, it’s impressive, as Stuart Ross said during his reading, that any festival manages to keep all the events free, and still pay the writers. Called the largest poetry festival in Canada, there were crowds of over two hundred people at some of the events, including at Wayde Compton and Jason DeCouto’s performance at the Vancouver Public Library. Kudos to the organizers, including Sean McGarrigle, Michael Campbell, Inger-Lise and Marianne. An impressive feat, I do think (although a little spoken word heavy for my taste. Whatever.)

Some of the highlights included:

Larissa Lai, Roy Miki and Goh Poh Seng: I have never heard Calgary writer Larissa Lai read before. After this reading, I think I need to spend time looking at her work. Apparently a new issue of West Coast Line has just appeared, dedicated to her writing, but I still haven’t seen it. I haven’t always been a fan of Roy Miki’s poetry, but he read exclusively from new work, most of which I am interested in seeing. He read a long poem in progress that came out of a trip he took to Japan that was quite compelling.

Wayde Compton and Jason DeCouto, Hilary Peach and Alexis O’Hara: After years of hearing about it, it was good to finally hear some of Compton and DeCouto’s collaborative turntable work. Strange, though, the idea of watching two guys spin records, even as their own readings have been put on vinyl and spun as part of their collaborative mix.

Outside the festival but during the same weekend, Spatial Poetics had an evening of poetry and film that included a collaborative film between DeCouto and novelist Hiromi Goto which was quite interesting, and another piece that included Fred Wah, so it caused me to miss an evening of spoken word, that included Calgary writer Sheri-D Wilson, which was too bad.

Hilary Peach, who I’ve heard of but never heard, struck me as one of the strongest spoken word performers I’ve seen in some time. She’s a good writer and doesn’t overdo the whole performance thing. Like anything else, so much called spoken word isn’t interesting, but Peach was interesting. I would highly recommend any of her CDs. I have to admit, this was the first time I’d really enjoyed a performance by Montreal performer Alexis O’Hara, as she moved text and sound through various equipments that repeated and altered sounds. She knew what she was doing, and it was quite impressive. Still, as far as the text itself went, anything cut down by a half or a third, and she would have something quite good and quite dangerous there.

Tish Review: I would have gone to the George Bowering, Fred Wah and Jamie Reid reading on Saturday night (and I did really want to), but I was instead in a brew pub on Water Street with George Elliott Clarke. Clarke can be so elusive that once you have him, you don’t want to let him go, knowing it could be years before you see him again. You know how it is. And besides, Clarke is such a lovely man to spend time with. He has two poetry collections forthcoming, including Black, a follow-up to Blue, and a book of poems written to go with a series of nude photographs, scheduled to be out in November. Otherwise, we talked about kids, mostly. Our own, that is.

Earlier the same day, I had lunch with the lovely Vancouver writer and publisher Meredith Quartermain, who I hadn’t previously met, and we traded all sorts of chapbooks, between mine, and the ones she and her husband Peter Quartermain make as Nomados, including new publications by George Bowering, Lisa Robertson, Nicole Markotic, Sharon Thesen, Daphne Marlatt and Susan Holbrook, but I will talk about them more fully later on.

Christian Bök, who now teaches at the University of Calgary, performed exclusively sound material. His was a performance that had to be seen and heard, to be believed. Moving from a selection of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonata (a 45 minute sound poem), Christian performed a section of a work-in-progress, The Cyborg Opera, writing out a score of language to correspond with the sounds of a computer game. As he said afterward, he often gets audience who recognize certain “screens” in his performance. Perhaps the only truly conceptual artist in Canada working within the range of text, after the success of Eunoia, this is easily the work that will surpass it.

Stuart Ross: It’s always a delight to hear Toronto writer Stuart Ross, even if we somehow can’t have conversations. As usual, he had his small poem handout for the festival, that he read as part of his time on stage.

Because One Thing Bumped Into Another

I was just a young hamburger, a hamburger
wandering from bun to bun, I did not care,
reading Proust and Beckett and Eluard,
dreaming of a tiny apartment in Paris,

while the other burgers played football and
fought in the alleys with switchblades, spilling
their condiments in their reckless wake.
At night, I nestled beneath a bed

of sautéed onions and shivered,
an orphan of ground flesh whose
visceral nightmares made sleep a world
of terror. Someone once told me

of a thing called love, and also
a thing called lightning, and I
watched the skies for both,
peered longingly through the frail wisps

of cloud that drifted amidst
the airplanes. I was a young hamburger,
and Paris was just a page in a book
that was wrenched from my grasp

by a dark-suited man with a red necktie
who said that the world had changed.

Ross also wrote about the Festival on his blog, some of which is pretty entertaining.

Apparently during the first of his two readings, George Bowering read the entirety of the poem “Do Sink,” which I would have loved to have heard. The second, on the final night of the festival (promoted as “The Three Georges,” with Bowering, Stanley and Elliott Clarke), he read new pieces for his lovely fiancé, Jean Baird, and the poem “Lost in the Library,” a multiple part poem that originally appeared as a chaplet (Chaplet Series #84) in 2004 in the Backwoods Broadsides from Maine. Only a few nights earlier, Toronto spoken word performer Evalyn Parry also read a poem with the same name, saying it had been a commission for CBC Radio. I could only presume that CBC asked George the same, when he was still Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

I’m lost in the library,
stranded in the stacks.

I’m a standing huckleberry
wearing stained slacks.

I’m simply ordinary
and I’m loaded down with facts,

looking for myself
on the shelf.

*

I’m looking at my name
on a couple dozen spines.

I’m contemplating fame
in a field that’s full of mines.

I’m dressed up for the game
and I’m sweating out some lines,

knocking off a poem
far from home.

Of all the readings, I was most excited to hear Sharon Thesen and George Stanley, only because I had never heard them before. Unfortunately, Thesen had to cancel, but I was able to hear Stanley read. I’m still trying to get my hands on the selected poems that was published in the US two years ago, but so far haven’t been able to. There is such a precision to what Stanley is doing. Working in the lyric confessional, there is still much to be gained from working within such a form, and Stanley is one of the few who still makes it interesting.

While in Vancouver, I met with Brian Lam, publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press to discuss a book project I thought I should do as part of their Unknown City series, and am now confirmed to be working on Ottawa: The Unknown City. A non-fiction book for tourists and locals alike, they’ve already done titles on Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Edmonton and Calgary, so why not Ottawa? We only had a billion dollars spent by tourists in our fair city in 2004. Now that I’ve seen the contract and will soon be getting an advance, I’m very much looking forward to working on the project, one I think will be pretty entertaining to work on. Remember the Stony Monday riots? Paul Chartier, who attempted to blow up Parliament and only succeeded in killing himself? The story of Elizabeth Smart? The whispering wall behind the Library at the Parliament Buildings? Etc. The story of an old Victorian city working lumber and rail that became government and high tech. And it might even make me some money...

Other parts of my time in the west included going over to Saltspring Island for a few days to spend time with filmmaker Robert McTavish, who has been working on a documentary on the late poet John Newlove for about eight years. Currently in the final stages, he will also be editing a new and larger Selected Poems of John’s (now that Apology for Absence is finally out of print) for a press I’m starting next year in Ottawa with Anita Dolman and Jennifer Mulligan: Chaudiere Books. Target date for publication: fall 2007. Also, Robert is working on material for the book I’m editing for Guernica Editions, John Newlove: Essays on His Works. Mainly, though, we drank at the Legion where he works, and I got a cool ribbon that says: I was an honoured guest at the 92nd Legion, Saltspring Island. I think I’ll frame it.