[Aoife, moving through books at Black Squirrel]
April is Poetry Month! You remembered that,
right? And the Chaudiere Books blog has been posting new poems every single dayso far! Manahil Bandukwala, Joe Blades, Ian Martin, Pearl
Pirie and Isabella Wang so far, with new poems still to come by Anita Dolman, Gil
McElroy, Jason Christie, Karen Massey, Conyer Clayton, Michael Dennis, Amy
LeBlanc, R. Kolewe, natalie hanna, Stan Rogal and Kate Siklosi (among others,
most likely). And above/ground press has been producing a slew of chapbooks lately, so keep an eye on the blog this month for plenty more, including a
handful of chapbooks specifically for that TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space conference at University College Dublin, Ireland, April 25-27, 2019, organized
by Gregory Betts, as well as an item of my own produced for a Marthe Reed
memorial coming up at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Supposedly a new poetry title of mine is out this season from Mansfield Press, also, so hopefully
launch information will be forthcoming soon (I should have copies for the ottawa small press book fair in June, either way). What else?
Ottawa: I was very impressed
that Avonlea Fotheringham’s Hussy Press, for the sake of our ninth annual
VERSeFest Poetry Festival, recently produced a chapbook by German poet Katharina Schultens. The small chapbook,
übersetzungen (2019), was distributed free at the event, providing her first
publication of work translated into English, and was made up of poems
translated by both the author and J.O. Morgan, from her untoter schwan (kookbooks, 2017) and gorgos portfolio (kookbooks, 2017), respectively. While I wasn’t able
to attend Schultens’ reading, Christine did, and spoke highly of both the poems
in original German and their translations. I can’t speak to the German (even if
I had encountered such), but these translations are grand. I want to see more
of these translations.
well i
thought we killed that
but it’s
everywhere
don’t you think it’s remarkable, after all
those years of outrageous uniforms
star-spangled, rebellious combinations of green
and gold, red, white and blue
after all those years of cap and gown, of
beards, berets, of ties, of foreign robes, now:
all’s in the hair, all’s in the hair, it
yearns: for razorlike partings, for puffs and pomade
so let’s say he’s getting ready for something
for multiplication maybe, he starts jumping,
swaying back and forth,
on the stage of his convention center, and
deftly, skillfully, as if he were
just breezing through the motions, he stabs
multiple journalists behind the curtain
he’s fast, he pulls the bloody knife right out
of his own back and starts protesting
so why does it sound hysterical if i say: this
is happening
right here, among us, this is an old song and
we all know its rhythm
Wolfville NS: I am fascinated by
this assemblage of prose-pieces by British Columbia poet kevin mcpherson eckhoff, his CIRCADIA (Gaspereau
Press, 2018), a dozen pieces each titled for a different month, opening with
January. Given his penchant for collaging found sentences and phrases, I would
be curious as to the construction of these pieces, which feel closer to an
accumulated series of single-sentence diary entries, collected over the space
of the month and assembled together. Either way, the effect is both
disorienting and lovely, achieving a sense of movement both rushed and calm.
October
repeat your pain in post-it notes, in last years poems, in
chronic plotlessness
Lyndsay Thornton
I dug up our garden. I ran. I decided that I didn’t
have an active desire to die, but more like a lack of will to continue living. I
was Stanley Kowalski. I made applesauce. I petted a cat. I awoke in a single
bed with my 60-pound 3-year-old boy in Port Coquitlam. I watched two episodes
of Luke Cage. I ate plum pie for
dinner. I ordered a lager at White Spot. I lifted some weights. I gave my
3-year-old a mullet as per his request. I clipped my fingernails. I went for a
hike with Laurel. I had a migraine. I ran. I went to the pumpkin patch with my
boys and Laurel. I lifted some weights. I went to the library. I fed some ducks
and pigeons. I hate poetry. I cried from Commercial Drive to the Port Mann
Bridge. I ran. I am tired of being a dad. I carved a pumpkin. I pretended to
skateboard. I felt like an anvil. I lifted some weights. I got my course
assignments for the next academic year. I drank many Mike’s Hard Root Beers. I toured
Batman and a lion around the neighbourhood, stealing their candy along the way.
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