Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
white, a first novel by rob mclennan
Friday, October 26, 2007
On Tuesday, after a meeting with Emily Falvey at the Ottawa Art Gallery (about a secret project), we went to the Empire Grill, where Ottawa Life was launching their issue celebrating fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts. Artist and photographer Jef Harris was there, and snapped this picture of myself meeting his friend and model Alexandra Rodionova. What do you think of me newly-acquired leather and long hair?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
(for angela
what does her matter
, her divide
unanswerable schemes
, a hotel is a meditation
of her unbreakable thus
, if she troubled water
& I ask would do
or do you
the view from her window lit
, of fire beneath
we talked about children
, modified by breath
we separately were
& did nothing else
blood in the blood
, respecting
a sonnets time
& franklins passage
Monday, October 22, 2007
[ottawa] festival notes: october
Saturday, October 20, 2007
The Peter F. Yacht Club, issue #8 (the Edmonton issue)
lovingly hosted by your captain, rob mclennan
with readings by:
Paul Pearson
Marita Dachsel
Jonathan Meakin
& Christine Stewart
Tuesday, November 6, 2007 ; doors 7pm/readings 7:30 at The Black Dog Freehouse, 10425 Whyte Avenue (downstairs)
info: az421@freenet.carleton.ca
author bios:
Paul Pearson lives and writes in Edmonton where he has been a member of the poetry community for almost two decades. Paul has had poems published in, and been an editor of, a number of small magazines including being a founding editor and chapbook publisher of the Olive Reading Series. Paul spent a number of years working for the Alberta Government and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts as the Writing and Publishing Consultant. Since being bumped up to other, non-literary duties last year, Paul has re-discovered both the time and energy to write.
Marita Dachsel's [see her "12 or 20" here] first full-length book of poetry, All Things Said & Done, was published this spring by Caitlin Press. She was born and raised in Williams Lake, BC, and has lived in Kamloops, Dawson City, Vancouver, Auckland and Montpellier, France. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC and has been published widely in Canadian literary journals. She had been a contributor to the online magazines sweetspot.ca and sweetmama.ca and has written for The Globe and Mail. She's dabbled in playwriting and screenwriting, but finds herself most at home with fiction and poetry. She currently lives in Edmonton with her husband, Kevin Kerr, and their son, Atticus.
Jonathan Meakin emigrated from England to Canada in 1992 and has since lived mostly in Edmonton. He co-founded The Olive Reading Series and has had poems and reviews published in England and Canada. In addition to writing poetry and fiction, he researches and writes on late nineteenth-century Canadian literature. Currently, Jonathan works part-time on a Ph.D. in English and full-time as an arts development consultant for the Government of Alberta.
Christine A. Stewart [see her "12 or 20" here] is from Vancouver and currently writes and teaches experimental poetry and poetics in the English and Film Department at the University of Alberta. She is researching the work of experimental women poets in Western and Eastern Canada, and exploring alternative forms of scholarly analysis. She is author of the chapbooks Pessoas July: or the months of astonishments (Vancouver BC: Nomados Press, 2006), From Taxonomy (Sheffield, England: West House Press, 2003), Daddy Clean Head (Vancouver BC: Lumpe Presse, 2000), A Travel Narrative (Hamilton ON: Berkeley Horse, 1994) and The Barschiet Horse [with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang] (Hamilton ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993).
link to issue here
Friday, October 19, 2007
[ottawa] festival notes: october
It's been said for years that if Toronto writer Stuart Ross was an American writer, he would have been famous a very long time ago; I think the same thing could easily be said of Montreal poet, fiction and critical writer David McGimpsey, author of a new poetry collection (his fourth), Sitcom (Toronto ON: Coach House Books). Writing a collection of soliliquies and sonnets based on the works of his literary heroes, McGimpsey's poems bring in classical references from Greek literature and Shakespeare, mixing it in with the most banal of popular culture, whether scenes from the sitcom Joey or Lindsay Lohan.
Precious
Precious as the love between a man
and either Betty or Veronica,
sweet as spending the night in a van
with a bottle of no-name Goldshläger.
Into the thicket the gnatcatchers go,
grey winged with high-pitched mating calls;
I take you to my parents' bungalow
after three Big Macs at the East Side Mall.
Sweet as toffee muffin without the muffin,
gentle as a less-howly howler monkey,
soft as soft-serve, cute as a postcard puffin
riding the back of a ceramic donkey.
Mom's on meth and Dad's left for Vancouver,
so let's skip school and love one another.
I have to admit I did like the way Neil Wilson introduced David, referencing a story of eggnog paralyzers from the Edmonton part of the 1998 Great Canadian Via Rail Tour that the festival organized (I remember that morning well), and referencing Dave's piece "Sweet Poetry or Mystery Meat?" [also included on Poetics.ca] from side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2002), that includes:
I don’t write poetry for respectable reasons. By that, I don’t mean to suggest I'm some kind of rebel, writing things so beyond the norm that traditional niceties and conventional rewards leave me unimpressed. On the contrary: whatever hokey, half-baked, self-aggrandizing, obscuring, mythologizing, self-defeating, daydreaming, flaky, effacing, please-love-me, log-rolling, "I'd like to thank the Governor General" sins that are alleged to plague poets, I'll cop to those same sins and more. I guess what I mean is that I'm still not entirely sure why I write poetry. After a long time writing the stuff, some days it doesn’t feel worth it, some days it still kinds of feels too personal to talk about. Though, unfortunately for my friends, some days it's all I can talk about. I agree with Tennyson when he famously said "I sometimes hold it a sin / To put in words the grief I feel" (181) but, as with so many sins, I haven’t letWhat makes this collection different, with the threads and twists of bizarre mixture of base and highly intellectual humour that McGimpsey's work is known for, is the way he's returning to more traditional forms (his first poems in school, years ago, were sonnets about Batman). What made the event even more than spectacular, after killing the crowd with piece after piece, was Clare Latremouille's ten-year-old son Sam at the back of the room, barely able to contain himself; he has such a wonderful laugh, too, and it was infectious.
guilt stop me.
Poetry is still wonderful, isn’t it?
At one point, too, the technician had to go on stage to replace McGimpsey's microphone, which prompted Dave's response that this was "not the first time in the throes of passion, someone told me that the batteries were dying."
I was very taken by the 7pm event, Richard Gwyn in conversation with Charlotte Gray about Gwyn's new biography about Sir John A. MacDonald, John A: The Man Who Made Us. An extremely interesting speaker, Gwyn said that the book came about after the realization that there hadn’t been a major biography on our first Prime Minister for half a century, whereas American and British culture produces many books annually on their leaders past and present; why shouldn’t we at least be able to do the same? It's a constant complaint, that we are so unaware of our own history (and didn’t Pierre Berton, in fact, create the whole "Canadian popular history" genre? Where would we have been without him?). Gwyn argued that MacDonald was Canada's most successful politician, with six wins and even brought to the table the idea that women should have the vote, perhaps being the first world leader to do such a thing (it was voted down by all but four members of even his own party). Gwyn talked about the lunatic ideas that MacDonald had that actually helped create a country, including the fact of putting in a national railway pretty much for the sake of only 20,000 people in British Columbia; lunatic!
I'm always fascinated by the non-fiction titles about Canadian history, and somehow these talks are always the highlight for me (I remember the 1812 talk from the previous festival; or was it the one before?). Gwyn talked about some of the 19th century differences between Canada and the United States, including the moral superiority that Canada felt over their neighbours to the south, simply because of our stronger ties to the church; can you imagine (or perhaps you can), Canada not wanting to be part of the American system in part because of their increasing secularism? Because the Americans believed more in democracy and the separation of church and state? It makes for an interesting shift now, as religion is thrust forefront on the table of every Presidential election, whereas our national elections talk far less on the topic, if at all. What happened?
I think the moral superiority is still there, ingrained and even programmed into us, even if we don’t always entirely know just what exactly we're feeling superior about.
Canadians didn’t want to be Americans in the 19th century, Gwyn said, for very simple reasons. The French were anti-American because they worried their religious culture, more important to them than anything else, would be threatened; for the English, it was the threat to their Britishness.
Lovingly hosted by Ottawa poet David O'Meara was the poetry cabaret, with readings by Ottawa poets Stephen Brockwell and Rob Winger, and British Columbia poet John Pass. O'Meara called Brockwell's fourth collection "startlingly inventive," and there are aspects of the formal mixed with his recent explorations with voice (as well as his ongoing classical references) that would make for an interesting comparison between this new collection of his and David McGimpsey's latest, especially when you consider the fact that they both came out of Montreal creative writing side-by-side (Brockwell was there when the Batman sonnets were introduced). Brockwell made a point of thanking the festival, and congratulating them on their engagement with not only international and national writers, but the diversity of local communites, which many festivals aren’t always aware of.
Brockwell's new collection is made up of monologues, he said, and poems made through procedures (again, see McGimpsey), including poems put through voice recognition and translation software; "made through the things it did not understand." Brockwell said he was working a series of "imitation" poems.
I love Rob Winger's suggestion of "meanders as a way of getting there."
John Pass isn’t a writer whose work does anything at all for me, but I found a number of things he said quite interesting, and would even welcome essays by such a writer (I hold Robert Bringhurst, Tim Lilburn and Robyn Sarah in the same regard; I don't care for their goals as poets, but find what they have to say in non-fiction prose pretty interesting). Pass, who won the Governor General's Award for his latest poetry collection, talked about the difficulty with engaging with beauty; our difficult love with it that doesn’t reciprocate, he said. Environmentalism, he suggested, perhaps even devolving from our high romantic notion of beauty; and that beauty is natural, and not man-made. Poetry, he said (very modernist, sigh), as a practice of the oblique, and by the end of writing the current collection, he was writing himself into silence.
Touring Utah; An Object Lesson
Tease (from the van's speed, mind's
slip-stream, the shif-
ty vistas) landform, fossil of a cloud.
Going where you think to
go: Four Corners, Inspiration Point,
Angel's Landing. Work 'round the case
of the Anasazi displayed in shreds
of sandal, 800 AD corn-on-the-cob.
Buy turquoise tumbled by the Navajo
and an arrowhead recycled as a charm
against the wind's slick way with it, them, you
(old earth entire on its lathe)
throwback, smooth-talker.
Can you ease down the sliprock, toes
to the river's exhaustive marginalia
and not know?
Pant up the trail
and to hand in the canyon
sandstone in flesh-tones
is hot for you. (Stumbling In The Bloom)
Again, the post-reading conversation was pretty lively, as John Pass said a thing or two about emotion being an essential part of writing a poem that Brockwell took exception to; I think Pass needs to be very careful, when he talks about poets who write about "only language" instead of the emotion being somehow less than valuable, working "word games" as some sort of dismissal. I think he has to be very careful to not equate, for example, word play with a lack of emotion (one has nothing to do with the other); I think he has to realize that not everyone has the same goals when they craft a piece that can eventually be called a poem. He can do whatever he likes, but he was certainly narrowing his focus as he went, being very clear (somewhat) about what kinds of things a poem should and shouldn’t be doing, and what he obviously doesn’t take seriously as writing. He made it sound as though the emotional intent of the poet was essential to the final piece; he made it sound as though reference was essential, as though somehow we all had the same referential points; what?
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Wednesday, October 17;
Why does everything seem smaller now that I'm actually home (including my apartment)? On Tuesday night, getting in actually sometime Wednesday morning, and going straight from the airport to the hospitality suite [see these photos we took at the spring festival, same suite]; nearly 1am with Carmel Purkis, Neil Wilson, Max Middle, Steve Zytveld, Jonathan Garfinkel and Simon Rose, as well as a few others; and jwcurry, who showed up an hour later.
Rob Winger is up for the Governor-General's Award for Poetry for his first collection [see my review of it here; see his "12 or 20" here]; have you seen the rest of the list? Wandering through Ottawa on Wednesday for the first time since August, all these businesses new & some gone; how much has changed? Still, the ottawa international writers festival is a wonder that I wouldn’t have missed for the world; they have managed to build a house that we are all allowed to live in, and created a community of people who are there for all the same reasons: a sheer love of books, stories, reading.
I'm disappointed that I missed a number of the events already, including the Ottawa Book Awards event on Saturday [where Monty Reid made Jennifer and I "award-winning publishers"], readings by John Metcalf, Leon Rooke and Kathleen Winter on Sunday, the John Newlove Award (sponsored by Bywords) on Monday, or Jonathan Garfinkel on Tuesday. It's interesting to watch him now, and see just what he's accomplished (over the years, through articles in Walrus and other places), since meeting him back in 2001, when he, Stephen Brockwell and I read at the IV Lounge in Toronto (or launching his poetry book at Collected Works in Ottawa to a crowd of three people).
At least other blogs have been doing their jobs; Amanda Earl (here, here, here, here), Pearl Pirie (here, here, here, here), Charles Earl (here, here, here, here, here), Marcus McCann (here).
Toronto author David Gilmour (preparing to be writer-in-residence at Massey College in January) read from a new non-fiction work, The Film Club. "When David Gilmour realized that his 15-year-old son was miserable in school and on the verge of dropping out, he decided that his son could leave school on one condition—not that he get a job or pay rent, but that he watch three movies a week with his Dad." I found this particularly interesting, since my 16.5 year old daughter Kate and I have been watching new movies in theatres practically (save for my leaving town for things like Alberta) every single Saturday for more than a decade; what becomes interesting is when she really started engaging with the film, and even recommending other films to me that she's seen, that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of (she's also since taken a filmmaking workshop at IFCO). I think I might actually have to read this one.
The "WRITING LIFE #2" event featured Quebec author Gil Courtemanche, British author Marina Lewycka and Newfoundland's Michael Winter. Winter was the author I was there for, honestly (father of the newly-minted Leo, born September 1), who introduced his reading with a kind of storytelling list of what stories he borrowed and altered, "I wanted to have ____________; that's in the book." He talked about accidents and safety and childhood friends. He spoke a list that could have easily have been the reading itself in a casual storytelling style. Winter's fiction seems to be about the deeply small and the deeply large and the deeply personal; I am looking forward to this one.
As much as I enjoyed the readings (and I particularly enjoy Winter's fiction), what made this event was the conversation that came afterwards between the three authors, sparked by Courtemanche. Gil Courtemanche seems to enjoy saying deliberately-provocative things in a matter-of-fact way, and then sitting back and witnessing our response, telling us that we can't handle him because he's "too real" (in a more elegant and intellectual "older Bart Simpson when Lisa was President" kind of way). Imagine: this is someone who began his reading by saying "I must say that I hate reading…" During the Q&A at the end of the reading (hosted/moderated by Phil Jenkins), Courtemanche finally said of North American fiction writers (responding to a structural piece of deflection Michael Winter talked about from his own work), "You don’t want to write books, you want to write stories," and told us that the problems with "our" fiction was that we all wanted to be filmmakers. It was no longer about words, he said. It was no longer about anything more than action. We all want to be screenwriters. He went on, of course, saying that he doesn’t bother reading North American fiction anymore, because something always has to "happen" in them, and writers can't just write anymore.
Where is the interiority, he asked. Accused, it seemed.
But perhaps I should go back a bit; Jenkins had asked the three authors a question based on the common elements to all three books, that they included descriptions of dinners. What about the family dinner, Jenkins asked them. I don’t write about dinners, Winter said. If I describe landscape or food, it's after something happens. He gave as his example, one character at the table saying "You should know that I slept with your brother," and then a description of eating fried chicken, and the description of the event, a family birthday to celebrate the father's seventieth birthday, etcetera. One point shifting suddenly into another point, making the single line load what comes next, and making the dinner description not about the dinner at all. This is where Courtemanche began.
Why do some authors have to do that? I'm clever or brave, someone decides, so then react to other authors as though they have some sort of moral or intellectual failing because they aren't as "clever" or "brave," etcetera? It seems a compromised position to begin with; that authority.
It was magnificent, and sparked a great debate between Courtemanche and Winter (with Lewycka in the middle), and one that, although overly-sweeping, I had to say I agreed with. Why does so much fiction have to be about plot? Who can paint a whole literature with such a brush, was Winter's response; who are you reading, he asked, to get to that conclusion? And why were all of Courtemanche's examples American? (Some my fiction models come out of French-Canadian novels in translation, I have to admit; but what about Sheila Watson, or how many others that Courtemanche hasn’t bothered to look up?) And then Winter gave Courtemanche a series of "classic" authors (Faulkner) who wrote scenes with action.
Give me one American stylist, Courtemanche demanded, who sells books.
Don Delillo, Winter answered.
Courtemanche paused, just briefly, before he went on to another point. I don't think he was expecting an answer.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The book tells its own story.After all this time, I finally read Thomas Wharton's [see his "12 or 20" interview here; or his current Edmonton Journal thriller project here] second novel, Salamander (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001), yesterday, on the airplane back to Ottawa; the book he was touring when I met him, some six years ago, at the ottawa international writers festival. Just what had been preventing me all this time? Salamander is a magnificent story within a story within a story, much like The Canterbury Tales or Neil Gaiman's epic eleven-volume graphic novel The Sandman. Written as a tale told by a young girl to a colonel in a bombed-out bookshop in 1759 Montreal, beginning with the story of a Count who loses his son and wife, even as he gains a daughter. Through grief and the luxuries that giving up on the world affords, the Count withdraws to a castle (and his own obsessions with puzzles and labyrinths) that eventually ceases to officially exist, living on the boundaries of two countries, and yet existing properly within neither. The Count eventually fashions a castle that exists with moving floors, walls and rooms in an incredible display of mechanics that would make this novel wonderful to appear on film (reminding me of Richard Brautigan's shifting scenes in his novel The Hawkline Monster; wanting to see a film version simply to see how such scenes can even be displayed). Become obsessed with his books, the Count invites the legendary English printer, Nicholas Flood, to come to their castle that does not exist, and create an infinite book, without beginning or end. It is once there that we see the absurdity and the brilliance of Count Ostrov's creations (deliberately working a castle that could be self-sustaining, without need for human interaction), and where Flood meets the Count's beautiful daughter, Irena.
Examine it closely and you will see the ragged edges of the type, its cracks and bumps and gaps, the letters that lie crookedly or ride higher or lower than the others, the ink's variations in depth, consistency, and hue, the motes of dust and droplets of sweat sealed within the warp and woof of the paper, the tiny insect bodies caught as the platen came down and now immortalized as unnecessary commas and full stops.
In these imperfections lies a human tale of typecutters, squinting compositors, proofreaders and black-faced printer's devils, labouring against time and heartache and disorder, against life, to create that thing not found in nature, yet still subject to its changes.
The pages stain, fox, dry out. Paper flakes like rusty metal. Threads work loose, headbands and tailbands fray. Front and back boards sag from spines, flyleaves and buckram corner-pieces peel away. Dust mites, cockroaches, and termites dine on paper and binding paste. Rats and mice make snug nests in the middle of thick chapters. And unseen, through the chemical action of time, the words themselves are drained of their living sap. In every library, readers sit in placid quiet while all around them a forest decays.
He held the paper to the dying spark of a candle and it crackled into sullen flame. She quickly relit the other candles and smiled over the bouquet of light she was handing him. As the paper burned up she saw through the green flames the image stamped upon it, melting and writhing. She asked him if he had chosen the phoenix as his symbol for just such moments.Wharton's story weaves through the fantastic (and even the impossible), and certainly invites comparisons with Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings (as well as Borges and Calvino) in some of the reviews quoted in the paperback version. The comparisons are apt, but I would compare it more to the best of British author Neil Gaiman, certainly through his series The Sandman, whether in the structure of story within story within story, or in Flood's commission, to create an impossible book (Gaiman's tale includes an endless library of books only dreamed, and never written). As one character tells Nicholas Flood, after hearing of his project, "In imagining your alam, Mr. Flood, you became a member of the world's oldest reading society, one that has existed for centuries, under countless names, in every part of the world. A society dedicated to the dreaming of fabulous, impossible, imaginary books." Like Gaiman, through his fantastic and dreamlike fantasy tales (it's interesting how Wharton places his science in a period where the supernatural and the sciences were still spoken of in the same hushed tones, seen with an equal sense of wonder), but darker and somehow with more depth, writing a tale of the search for knowledge and the perseverance of the heart (it helps, too, that Wharton is a better writer than Gaiman, who is still a master storyteller, but somehow stronger in the form of the graphic novel). How does a boy from Grand Prairie manage to create such a tale, a story within so many seemingly-endless stories? As one of his characters speaks, "A book is a confession, after all."
— Salamander, Flood said.
— What?
— The creature is supposed to be a salamander.
The little dragon that dwells in fire, he explained, without being consumed, was a reassuring thought for people who work with paper. Originally he wanted a chimera, but the engraver he hired had gotten his mythological beasts confused.
— We have them in the castle, she said. The real sort of salamander, I mean. In the underground crypts, among the gears, where it's dark and damp.
— It sounds a lot like London. The sort of climate where printers thrive.
— If that's so, she asked, why did you leave?
He felt his face burn.
— I can't resist a challenge.
He told her that if she wanted to know what London was like, the castle would give her a good idea.The book follows Flood as he collects knowledge, stories and supplies for his impossible book, watching what he loses, even as he gains. Watching everything slip away and away from Flood and the Count and Irena, Wharton's novel can be read as a book about story, and the impermanence of the world, writing his way out of the prairie "tall tale" of Robert Kroetsch into his own magical blend of history, fantasy and myth (they are not so different, after all). Watching everything slip away and listening to the tales the characters tell within tales, Wharton's magnificent novel can be read about the world, and about how stories, through their repeated tellings, remain their own sense of permanence. Empires might wither, and crumble and fall, but if even a single person exists to tell the story of that empire, then it was worth it, after all.
— People are always in motion there. No one stays in one place for long.
— Here the walls and ceilings and floors move, she said, and the people stand still.
He looked into her eyes and at that moment a truth that he should have seen right from the beginning became clear to him. The castle, the automatons, the clockworks, all of this was her father's system and functioned by his rules, but Irena had her
own system, quietly running on it's own inside the Count's. He was not sure why
she had disabled the great clock, but felt a rush of hope that she had done it to bring about this encounter with him. Feeling the colour rising to his face, he turned to his press and saw that Ludwig had wound down at the bar.
— And you, Mr. Flood, she said. How do you feel about the clocks?
He hesitated, and was aware again of what seemed an unearthly stillness.
— I like them at the moment, he said.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
15th annual open studio
opening is Thursday October 18th 6-9pm
sarah anderson jean-marie bélanger barbara brown kenneth emig colette gréco-riddle jean halstead danny hussey marika jemma karen jordon gayle kells julie mcdonald christos pantieras uta riccius daniel sharp hedda sidla cindy stelmackowich svetlana swinimer vivian tors amy thompson tavi weisz joyce westrop
from Danny Hussey's Signs Of Language The Icon Project
if you don't go to the writers festival in ottawa, you should at least go to this...
Monday, October 15, 2007
John Lavery is the author of Very Good Butter and You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off. Very Good Butter was a Hugh MacLennan prize finalist. He has twice been a runner-up in the annual Prism International contest, and his stories have appeared in This Magazine, The Canadian Forum, The Ottawa Citizen, and The London Spectator. Lavery appeared in Coming Attractions, The Journey Prize Anthology and Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec, with his wife and children.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; Stephen Brockwell at the Olive Reading Series
Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell [see his "12 or 20 questions" interview here] was through town to read for the Olive Reading Series, launching his Olive chapbook from Impossible Books (2007), as well as his fourth trade collection, The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007). Not the biggest crowd (given it was immediately post-Thanksgiving). When Stephen reads well, he reads extremely well, and this was one of those times, engaging with the audience, and reading from new pieces that engage with voice in pretty interesting ways. He talked about working his new collection as “memisis, or imitation” and about how “the public mind displaces language.” I very much look forward to getting a copy of his new book when I’m back in Ottawa and getting into it further, deeper.
from A Guide to the New Flora of Cornwallis IslandWe tried to find a karaoke bar afterwards (after a bit of time at The Black Dog) but got distracted by some other things. And of course, well before the reading, he arrived at my office and I made him take pictures... (since I might never have an office again in my life)
jars of moss shag deciduous trees
species of buttercup adapted to
distant but all-day sun: miniature
radio telescopes hooked to solar signals
at the roots of dwarf northern oaks
fungi evolve to spore in human tea
boot-deep in an unimaginable bog
shirts off, backs gleaming, humid
our tents ships without stars
sleep blinds, our green backs,
churning on this living bog
twenty years of water
ten thousand years of ice (from Impossible Books)
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; Jocko Benoit going-away party/reading
With Alice Major’s help, we had a little going-away party for Edmonton poet Jocko Benoit, who leaves at the end of the month for Washington D.C. (for the sake of a relationship); after all the work he’s done around town over the past two decades (he moved to Edmonton in 1988) it seemed the least the city could do for him, was give a little bit of love before he moves south. I even made a broadsheet of a poem of his, so he could have a handout in his new digs.
When It Came Down, It Really Came DownA good evening; afterward we went to the Garneau for drinks, a couple of us; for a guy who doesn’t actually drink, though, he managed to keep spilling my drinks on me more than any of us could find reason…
In the wake of the meteorite that killed
Millie Wentworth, astronomers
Were blamed for their irrational numbers,
Then government faulted for inadequate
Funding of telescopes on every block.
The rebuttal that Millie was killed
In an open field led to interrogations
Of all those who’d let her walk home
At night when a meteorite was more likely
To sneak up on her with its rakish
Whistle of death. This led to a by-law
Insisting citizens practice defensive walking –
Each hesitant step married to skyward gaze,
Though after hospitals cramped up with
Twisted ankles and stumble-wrenched knees
A step and downward glance
Was added to the binoculars-optional dance.
And several groups popped up with evidence
Of how TV was to blame.
Her insurance company forced the Vatican
To testify to the verity of God’s
Clumsy hand slinging star shards around.
The blue of the sky, in everyone’s eyes,
Was the color of choking before
The black of night – its face
Maggot-pocked with wormholes.
Meteorite reports followed those for
Wind chill, smog and UV. In the end,
People rightly stopped blaming each other
And joined in blaming the sky,
Because when it fell, it really fell –
And all passages in poems and plays
That referred to sun, moon and stars
As beautiful were stricken
From school textbooks so no child
Might be inappropriately mesmerized
By the glittering dots or try to connect
One to another in pictures that said more
About the child than about the cosmos.
Friday, October 13, 2007; LitFest and PEN Canada Cabaret
Last night I went to LitFest: Edmonton International Literary Festival, which bills itself as “Canada’s only Creative Non-Fiction Festival.” Why is it I’ve never heard of this festival before? I’ve certainly heard of Montreal’s Blue Metropolis (WHY WON’T THEY INVITE ME TO READ?), The Calgary-Banff Wordfest (why won’t they invited me to read?) and the Vancouver International Writers Festival (why won’t they invite me to read?), but not this one. Billed as “Hot North,” the event at The Sutton Place Hotel (Rutherford Room) was co-hosted by the very charming duo Ted Bishop and Todd Babiak to a nearly-packed house (including authors such as Shawna Lemay and Myrna Kostash, neither of whom I’d had a chance to meet previously; I even got Kostash to sign my copy of her first book, All of Baba’s Children [see my previous blog entry on her here]). Babiak talked about (something referenced by a couple of other people throughout the reading) the “challenge” put forth at last year’s festival by John Ralston Saul through PEN Canada for the sake of free speech, anti-censorship, an idea that came to fruition (one of the ways it has, apparently) through the appointment of Jalal Barzanji as Edmonton’s first writer-in-exile. Babiak [see his "12 or 20 questions" interview here] referenced, too, how one of the recent Alberta premiers (not the most recent one) had even tried to censor The Edmonton Journal and its Calgary equivalent, pushing them to write positive and not negative editorials; apparently The Edmonton Journal even got a Pulitzer Prize (the first awarded to a newspaper outside the United States) for refusing to be compromised.
Author Ken McGoogan (it was good to see him again) read from his book about the Northwest Passage and the doomed Franklin Expedition, Fatal Passage (I tried to convince him to sing the song but he wouldn’t do it; at least, not there, he said). A good opener; McGoogan is a strong, compelling reader, which was a great way to start, but unfortunately, didn’t work out with the soft-spoken Annette Woudstra as follow-up. She’s so quiet and low-key, the fit didn’t fit (and I could barely hear her). What I could hear was pretty interesting, from a first book of essays , The Green Heart of the Tree, Essays and Notes on a Time in Africa (University of Alberta Press).
The biggest reason I was there was to hear Janice Williamson, who read a piece on Burma and Burmese action, including the protest she was part of at the University of Alberta on the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend. It was interesting to realize just how much Williamson is a passionate writer, and how much her detailed (and well-researched) thoughtfulness manages not only to not diminish that passion, but instead bring it out further. She talked about Doris Lessing doing the Massey Lecture in 1985 and talking about the “prisons we choose for ourselves,” and how “literature as a kind of tonic against madness,” even quoting the short Bertolt Brecht poem “Motto,” that reads:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
She talked about her ten-year-old daughter being a part of the “day of action” with her, who was but a few feet away from her, listening; I think Janice’s daughter, when she gets older, will probably have extremely interesting things to say about growing up in such a household.
The best part, in many ways, of going to an evening such as this is being able to hear authors who I otherwise would probably have either never heard of or overlooked; Toronto author and journalist Marian Botsford Fraser read a piece of hers that had been published in Granta 83 (“This Overheating World”), the piece “Bone Litter.” There aren’t that many readings or pieces that make me go “wow,” but this was certainly one of them; an “impact piece,” as she called it.
It was interesting, too, to hear Montreal writer David Solway at this festival; he and I had a conversation during the break. I told him my frustrations with his pseudononymous work being “outed” in print by Joel Yanofsky. I remember it feeling very offside at the time; very cheap, even. What exactly is the anti-pseudonym bias that makes one want to “out,” and thus, giving the permission to dismiss the entire work, the entire project and point? How exactly is this "hoaxing," or "pulling wool over," exactly? I have never understood. Solway read a couple of pieces from his poetry collection Franklin’s Passage, referencing Ken McGoogan (a good close that met itself back at the beginning). He talked about the north and about the formulation of north (“its cold”); the, as he called it, “semiotics of representation.” When he said that, I thought it interesting too, that really, if you go south enough, wouldn’t it be equally cold?
It reminded me of Nancy Huston’s book Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self (Toronto ON: McArthur & Company, 2002):
And then, after the readings, a couple of us retired to the hotel bar, only to find Ottawa’s own Tom Green playing guitar and singing songs; apparently he’s here for an entire month filming a movie with Chrispin Glover (who, fortunately or unfortunately, wasn't part of Tom's small group at the bar). How small a world is that? We talked for a little bit (why do I find it so surprising that anyone remembers me at all?), and thought about just how long ago it actually was when I was a guest on the Tom Green Show back on Rogers Cable 22 (1995; the third “poem” leaflet I produced was actually a handout for his studio audience).To be disoriented is to lose the east.
In French, “losing north” means forgetting what you were going to say. Losing track of what’s going on. Losing your marbles. It is something you should avoid at all costs. Something that’s always spoken of negatively, to say that one hasn’t done it. “My, he certainly doesn’t lose the north, does he?” is the way the expression is used. Never “Ah, too bad – he’s lost the north.”To be all abroad is what my excellent French-English dictionary suggests by way of translation. An expression which, taken literally, means to be in a foreign country. But if, in turn, you take the English-French dictionary and look up the expression To be all abroad, what you find is to be scattered every which way, or to the four winds, to talk twaddle, to be off one’s rocker – which is not at all the same thing!
Dictionaries confuse us, they lead us astray, they plunge us into that frightening magma between languages, in which words lose their meanings, refuse to mean, start out meaning one thing and end up meaning quite another.
The North is what I intended to say.
What I should have said. Theoretically. What I was supposed to say, in the event that I had something to say.