• the re-lit short list (including Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, (Coach House), The Others Raisd in Me, Gregory Betts (Pedlar) and Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, Stuart Ross (Freehand).)
• an excerpt from Metonymies: Poems by Objects Owned by Illustrious People, a new chapbook from Stephen Brockwell for the reading this Friday (Sept 3) with Gwen Guth (with new chapbook Good People launching) and rob mclennan at the 17th anniversary of above/ground press
• Heather Haley shares her memories of Sage Hill this year
• On Thurs. Sept 16th, I’ll do a reading at 7 pm reading at Blink Gallery with the Barely Their art show which is a collaborative totem with Jean Jewer, Lynda Cronin and Maureen Sandrock. Expect excerpts from the manuscript been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010).
• On Saturday, Sept 18th, 2 p.m. outside Blink Gallery, a group reading with people including myself, TA Carter, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Sandra Ridley, Rona Shaffran, Sean Moreland, Margo Gallant, LM Rochefort, Gillian Wallace and Laurie Koensgen.

Brooke Shaden, photographer on a post, Are you in Style?

it is easy for artists to believe that they have a style when in fact they are simply producing the same photos over and over again. I see it happen, I’m sure you do too, where someone receives praise for a certain type of photo and then suddenly they adopt that aesthetic or concept (or both) as their “style”. I think that the fundamental difference between artists with a style and artists who *think* they have a style is the repetition of the process.

Must be competent in many styles to be well-rounded, well-educated in field, or is it about telling your story your way and choosing typecasting if people want to call it that? A recognizable look is useful for marketing but is it good for the artist? She debates a lot of point which applies well to writing.

Platonic ideals are not actually out there in the ether past all the relativism.

Especially if you believe yourself, one gets in trouble with categorical statements. They can take an eye out with their gestures. The tumble to work out rules is fine so long as we all remember it’s a bit of nonsense to pass the time when there is no real meaning past the construction.

There’s a joust over this notion of Poetry which is all roughhousing romp, until someone needs an eye patch and it’s not even talk like a pirate day yet. Arrr, ready for leave before she comes to shore, mateys.

Internal consistency is hammered home thru schooling. Stay in register. Write yourself, your experience. Don’t appropriate voices. That’s not empathy nor creativity, that’s stealing. Lying. A funny concept for literature which is about fudging and mashing up what knows and cherry-picking whatever you see.

Varied voice is an absorbing idea. It appeals because it is a disavowal of this insistence on everything being about identity and self-expression. The notion of the primacy of self, and that hall of mirrors, is very cultural. One should defer to and grow the group is also a value. and instead brokers in ideas and being sharer of lives.

It’s more interesting to go eventually towards less funhouse brainfuck dazzle, more towards facets of understanding.

I suppose it all comes back to not taking self so terribly seriously. At the end there is no net gain. It’s all a wash. Darlings who win nobel prizes a decade later are a blank look. Devote your life to something or nothing, there’s no crown, just whether you made yourself feel miserable or pleased along the way and helped others enjoy or were more an impediment to their growth.

Does that mean there’s no sense to the question of good or bad poetry? Good or bad for what? for who? for when? There are people who are better at communicating. There is an outcome to putting in your 10,000 attentive hours but at the end the yield is more complex than one bottom line.

There’s no question that some poetry causes a visceral response as too emotional, too emotionless, too verbose, too stripped back, too dense, too dark, too light, too varied, too same-same, too derivative, too out there or in the grand buffet of bear house porridges, just perfectly right.

Is it best to find that perfectly right to your tongue? Or is that a romantic indulgence? Does that lead to fossilization or specialization? Temper tantrums more than pleasure? Reading is comparable to everything else, including dialogue. As Patti Digh put it:

Two monologues do not a dialogue make.[...]

How you have dialogue is more important than the subject matter of the dialogue. That’s important to remember. The subject matter seems primary. It is not. The way you conduct yourself in relationship to other human beings, and particularly those with whom you disagree, is the most important part. Forget the subject matter. Forget the vehemence with which you believe in something. The point is this: have you improved upon silence? Have you allowed yourself to hear another human being’s point of view and not just sat waiting for them to get to the period and shut up so you can dazzle them with your Truth (and brilliance, obviously)? Have you allowed for the possibility that they are as fully human as you are, even if they hold an opposing point of view? Or are you mainly playing to an audience?

One can read whatever one likes or whatever one dislikes but is one willing to be changed?

One can’t be so absorbent that each thing taken in, trumps whatever was there. That would make for vacillation worse than vaseline over everything.

It can’t be healthy to be all ease, nor all stretch. Mixing up what you read makes sure it isn’t a closed information loop. For my attention span and interests, I prefer to read many things in parallel, constantly washing my palate. It allows me to hear each one. The idea of “finding yourself”, “finding your voice” I’m skeptical of. Finding your best presentation of subject, maybe. If you can sustain one thought on one subject…but the dazzle of facets pulls me more.

Feminist Review recently looked at Elizabeth Robinson‘s book from a few months ago from Apogee Press (“Apogee Press publishes the work of innovative and experimental poets. Culturally and formally diverse, our poets share an original use of language.”).

In Also Known As (Apogee, 2009) Alicia Sowisdral says,

Robinson “interacts” with the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Passoa [sic] in an effort to “explore the opportunities and limitations of persona(e).” What is interesting and challenging about this task is that Passoa wrote most if his work under “heteronyms,” alter-egos with distinct personalities and unique poetic voices.

I don’t know whether I want to first go to Pessoa, who, when writing under dozens of heteronyms, writing personas, sounds like the predecessor to Erin Moure (and according to Bloom included Pessoa as one of 26 writers who established the parameters of western literature) or to Robinson’s work and see it for myself. It sounds intriguing. She’s 6 books in so is a diligently practiced poet.

But I have so much unread as is, not digested as much as I’d like.

And everything is in the implementation and timing, not the idea itself and whatever spark it causes.

Or is it? Does resonance “happen” to you like inspiration happens to you the passive carrier? Or is the agency in part in the sweat and choice? Aren’t most things an acquired taste and contextual, mattering because of who and what you care about and who and what you care about are fluid? Fine to draw a line in the sand but not to pretend god drew the line and it is unholy damnation to cross it. It served it’s use but its a vestigial scratch. Move without needing a line. Or, if you need the safety of circumspect methodical progression, draw another line.

How do we find the books we need? Do we need what we consciously think we do? So much the sense of so much to sort out when sort or don’t, life keeps coming. Still I want a considered life, control, rather than happenstance only. How to choose? What to pursue?

Sheena Iyengar was talking at TED about 3 culturally based assumptions about choice. The third rule of operation is that you presume it is best if you must never say no to another option.

However, as big box options of 40 varieties of toothpaste compete, with no immediate limit on new varieties and brands developing, this makes for some quandaries and time-wasters. Sure, you could just use the same toothpaste because you’ve always used it, and really the difference must be negligible if all you’re after is function. So go with that, if you can find it among the shelves, and rebranded colors and if supply keeps up. But you might just have to shop around.

Iyengar points out that there is a point at which, or a cultural loading from which, “choice no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints. It’s not a marker of liberation but suffocation by meaningless minutiae.”

In population growth, literacy growth, more people with more priorities to spend on self-development, more people setting selves up as gatekeepers and more self-publishing, print and online, we have an exploded marketplace of poetry options. Some of it may be poetry and some Poetry but it doesn’t matter. There is a seemingly endless and increasing supply of poetry. Is this distressing deluge or refreshing hunt among the wonderful heavensent?

How to get what would resonate? Let me get back to that question: Is resonance a passive act that happens to you or is it a result of actively seeking to understand that which is out of grasp, and expanding one’s natural affinities and aesthetics? Would that be selling oneself short and closing oneself off unnecessarily? Or is that being reasonable and being able to hear, but still there is some variety of poetry that here and now pops as being It?

What’s to gain from more choices? Iyengar gives the example of giving 7 varieties of soft drinks to people and some seeing that as two options: soda or nothing to drink. When she added juice and water to make 9 things to drink, it was taken as 4 kinds of drink. I can understand that. A bar with dozens of wines and various beers on bottle on tap, or a few, the real options are reduced to water or more cranberry juice. If my interests of what I was looking for was wider, the real sense of good choices would be larger. If I wanted to open to compassion to listen to every individual’s story, well-told or poorly, thru bluster or raw, in abstractions or parable, then the sense of how much poetry there is grows. If I’m looking for what suits my mood and project and need and tastes, then it’s more of a binary, cola or thirsty choice.

Now one can see the usefulness of close-minded, stereotyping for stress-busting. False dichotomies save the time-suck of doing your own research into what someone is saying and why and from what and taking that in with an eye for how that would fit with your worldview. And most of the time, you might spend more time considering than the person did knocking off what they wrote as they were phoning it in until the next inspiration hits.

When you are on the verge of so much poetry whipping past, it all blurs into me-likey or me-no-likey and sometimes neither is more true than the other. Elaborate more. Refine to a checklist of qualities to automate the winnowing. That at least reduces what you’re willing to expose yourself to.

How something makes you feel matters. But how something makes you feel isn’t what something is. To be double-minded allows doubling back when what currently is It becomes a too familiar of staple.

Prejudice stays around because it functions; you have less data to consider. You can throw out more. Do that by any metric of form, aesthetic, gender of writer, age, subjects, mood, that one unpleasant poem back in ’87, what the writer said to you once, what is vetted by who one has pedestalled, who one knows personally, whatever’s handy to use to winnow it down.

It’s either that or laborious time investment. Some pattern will help make choices on who to listen to, where to spend that 3-hours you have squirreled away for leisure.

All of that is still assessment mode. Is one looking at poetry around like a mason at an art gallery, seeing commodities of marble and resale value and weight, or the statuary?

Collin Kelley was asking: How we can get back to the pleasure of the art rather than the jockeying for position, awards and writing personal attacks masquerading as “literary criticism?” [via Robert Lee Brewer]

Distinctions and observations can be made. Value judgements will be made. Value and values are a weave, partly inside you, partly outside you.

Read all the details on the Cartwheels Chapbook. Deadline Nov. 1. Production in 2011.

Should poetry transform itself as it develops? Or the reader? Or the writer?

If one is repeating the same theme and tone and skills, is there refinement? Is it radical enough? Is it slow and fine-tuned enough to not miss something key. Is it a kind of stammer, placeholder, affirming but does it need to do more, produce more? One always needs more data, right? Change your data set, change your mind set (as said in the David Candless TED talk. Is it healthy to say, good enough, let’s just reiterate? Is it healthy to continually press on regardless of where one is presuming perfection isn’t reached, thus one has to reach? But if it can’t be reached, can the desire be equally met by small circles as it could with outward expeditions thru words and styles? When is it transform for transformation’s sake instead of letting be?

Writing poetry is trying to tickle oneself, surprise oneself. As one becomes habituated, that gets harder to do. Of course some are easily amused or easily tangled. But to fall into that sweet groove of reading or writing, there has to be some sort of soothe or ping or both. If at the end you are where you began and only time has passed and not a blessed thought or change of perspective or chemistry, then why continue except to see if there is something to gain around the next bend or the next.

Serena Trowbridge said in her post dangerous words and how they can change the world,

“To read poetry properly – to take in what it says, to enjoy the language rolling through you, to consider seriously the words and the meaning(s) behind them, is dangerous stuff. If people read more poetry, the world would be a better place, but the order of things as we know it would be upset, and we would all become minor revolutionaries.”

She also points out how poetry is charged as being pointless and toothless and how that is partly a by-product of practice, partly perception, and partly selective definition.

If you count only as poetic as that which wells up, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, as Wordsworth said, that “relegates poetry to the personal and the immediate – not in itself a bad thing – but it strips it of skill, of political importance, of wide-reaching relevance, and instead equates all poetry as a necessary release of emotion”.

Not a complete picture of all it can be, just a subset of what some of it is. But what is is process, not end product, definitively It. Everything can’t be It. But that doesn’t mean life and literature must be put on hold and suppressed until the next lily pad of It grows. If you lop off all the not mature lily pads, you’ll never get a useful sized one to hop on.

Does one poem or work or book have the power to transform even a step by itself? There’s the occasional mind-blowing pivot. But that doesn’t relegate the rest as dreck. Part of the change is being present thru the thick of the data, through the longitudinal, seeing the small navigational shifts, the trends from all directions, the constants. Something that is the best of is largely meaningless outside the rest of. The transforming is not the product but the habit of trying to make the product, read the product.

This survey Charles Trumbull did is from 2001 but is new to me: Haikuworld Survey of Haiku Journals. It asked 91 haikuist for responses on 30 haiku journals. btw, I believe that the next Matrix is looking at haiku and family forms.

Sometimes humour is the taste of the day but a narrow band that is dark, ironic, superior, not too broad nor cerebral. Kept inside the tidy vinyl-extruded fences. What’s it doing there? It polices and reinforces boundaries and norms, is an act of control thru distance, vents frustration, anger or sadness. Is all humour that?

Humour isn’t an emotional state. Is it even a choice? It may come from a worldview of what is appropriate, but it is an outward behavior, a strategy to an end. Or is it pure response, the only reasonable response to laugh or make laughs?

Humour seems to be one of those life skill things. And poetry skill things. But too light of look and people can get nervous that its not real poetry. (Or at least nervous people do.) What’s that about? One generally takes the world seriously when one takes self seriously and taking self seriously comes from threat, fear, protectionism, ambition.

What’s the opposite end of the dynamic? Ampleness, belief in one’s own capacity to rebound, exploration, curiosity. If one feels threatened, can one reverse engineer to security that thru adopting behavior?

Poetry wants to hold course, not cop out too early or cop out by hanging onto the bandstand long after the last straggler of the band has gone home. Where’s the sweet spot?

Nah, think I’ve chased myself into a wet paper sack again. Definitions seem all wrong.

The whole humour grid depends on what range you’re used to. One person’s quip is another’s caustic. Some cheeky is too subtle to catch, a non-event, for a mismatched audience. Some outrageous is quaint, depending on what counts as normal. To vary too much too fast is like someone turning the lights on and off while someone else is watching stars out the window, or to alternately yell and whisper. It becomes more irritating because it is making it hard to match pace with. Humour needs a certain curve and time space for the eye and ear to keep up and perceive.

Humour works by contrasts to expectations, pulling aspects into isolation or exaggerations. The set up may be in the telling, or built into the audience and the observation providing the contrast, pushing taboos or absurdity.

Wait, I think I can make this dryer and pound the life out of the subject yet.

Let me go over here: At Neatorama on Steve Martin, As he studied philosophy and logic, he came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as logic, which led to the non-sequitur comedy routine he became known for later on.

“In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it.

What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song. These notions formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if I created tension and never released it? What would the audience do with all that tension?

Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. The audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.”

There’s no narrative arc and twist of an ending. It’s more like the pure play, like otters or chimps sliding down an embankment, or kids making up new rules for imaginary games as they go — not quite sure where they are going or where it will stop. It’s more the ride than the trajectory.

The non-sequitur links naturally to surrealism. Ottawa-born artist Gregg Simpson was part of the West Coast Surrealist Group in the 70s with David uu and others. They took up the 1930s torch of Dadaism again. Is the surrealist aim revolution and rebellious contemptuous shattering of all that is wrong? Surrealism Now, says it has moved on, not tied to old histories. It arrives from a “drive to engage the marvelous, the wonders of the mind, its relation to the universe”, to re-open eyes. It seems a turn, like clapper to redirect to see beauty and possibility not pathos and pathetic of old.

What does that rely on as its reply foil? Surreal or satire wouldn’t work if someone didn’t take it seriously and/or find it offensive. Some satire is indistinguishable from the absurdity of actual events, thus The Onion getting taken as real news every now and again.

Non-sequitur wouldn’t work if we didn’t automatically prime these scenarios of what should properly come next. It makes a complex position if we take in too much of non-sequitur because then it has nothing to work against. For irony to work, or moral outrage, or innocence or whatever, there has to be a contrast. Too much comedy in ratio to dreadful events or boring repetition and there’s no contrast. You get diminishing returns.

While I suppose surrealism could be motivated by just wanting to be difficult, or knock from thought habits, it could become a one-trick pony too. Thus Steve Martin moving back out of comedy to music where the arrangement and relationship of expected and variation is also the dynamic played with.

In music, comedy, visual surrealism and non-linear poetry you’re trying to set up some mild pleasurable startle. A disconnect from exact repetition into a different direction.

How can humour pair with poetry? To vary the mix, the distance, the tone, to keep it interesting. For the brain not to go into test pattern, the pattern needs to be mixed up. To taste the palate refreshed.

I could do a page of comparison and it might accumulate to something funny. Otherwise it would be a wash, like poems that repeat too much to be fresh but not enough to become absurd, nor long enough to have a different sort of weight of simple things accumulating like a well-done pantoum, or nathalie stephens’ somewhere running. One thing becomes another effect when there is enough of it to become large enough to become a point of reference within itself. A novel that creates it own universe. A running gag can run to absurd lengths. When has it run far enough? How long does it have to sit before the audience recuperates and requests another run? What is the optimal stretch of sensible, sombre, sad, sassy and so on before we can get back to silly or surreal?

*

One must be permeable, flexible. It seems to be one of my cardinal rules that informs what I write. Why am I after this target of making more variation, more self-aware comedy, in an already varied range?

Why do I insist on what people tell me is so much variation?

Rewind to childhood for clues? Getting the same stories told the same way at me while others had no patience and rebuffed any repetition, both a defensive mechanisms by those around me. I didn’t want to be shut down nor boring so mix it up mandate. It’s a theory.

Or it’s a product of my attention span, inherent, incidental or trained, that needs to continually refresh my palate in order to taste anything. That’s encouraged bodily by my spine that complains should I maintain one position too long. I feel impelled to keep shifting in one sense or another. The lesson could have summed to persist past obstacles just as easily. The dime just didn’t happen to fall head side up?

At the same time I leap at a headspinning pace. Parcelling out ideas and training myself to following one thru many facets helps me track linearly more. I enjoy how my brain is cross-wired to bounce from any node to another like a jack rabbit but it can be tiring than amusing for some to follow me. It lends itself to humour tho.

People adapt to a certain speed and angle, want the same vein to be consistent: clever, or gentle, profound or amusing. To always be shifting away is a habit as much as droning on. If one responds the same way no matter the stimulus that doesn’t seem optimal. There’s no actual response, only a responding. Laugh no matter what, find the down side in anything, or how it demonstrates the constant bottom line whether that is: god is good or nothing matters or whatever This Only Goes to Show…

Perhaps an antidote to myself is to stretch and sustain some rut of subtle variations. But then, I do inside haiku and senryu. Still in there I push to language play. Don’t just do something, sit there. Repeat. Continue. Bore yourself but not silly? Hm. Not satisfied with that upshot either.

*

The mipoesias 2010 chapbook series has 5 chapbooks by William Stobb, Peggy Eldridge-Love, Adam Fieled, Michelle McEwen and Sam Rasnake which you can read and download from Scribd. It’s 22.5 meg or seems to run flash to read from the site.

rob mclennan will run more poetry workshops in Ottawa starting in just over a month. I’ve taken a few rounds of it and gained some orientation into what’s happening in poetry past the middle liberal lyrical center. It’s also a chance to encounter some like-minded fellow poets as some resources, and access some sharp editing eyes.

Next ones: Collected Works Bookstore (Wellington & Holland) on Wednesday nights 7 – 9 pm: September 22, 29; October 6, 13 & 27; November 3, 24 & December 1. ($200 for 8 sessions.)

More info.

Sept 16-19th, Blink Gallery (that little stone building in the north side of Major Hill’s Park across from the National Art Gallery) will be having a group show this September entitled Barely Their. The artists are Jean Jewer and Lynda Cronin. I’m collaborating with them to make a poem-sculpture.

The idea is to be a female contemporary response to the heavy geometric male columns of Tony Smith with a lightness of forms and put words back to the sculpture.

On the show’s opening night, Thurs., Sept 16th, 7 p.m. at the base of the column, I will do a short reading and the artists will give an introduction to the exhibit. (The show will be a column on which there is a 3-D poem.)

Saturday, Sept 18th, 2-3 p.m., there’ll be a reading at the base of the art group’s obelisk which is concrete plexiglass poetry of a poem. Join in.

For Barely Their the theme of the poems would circulate around the notions of
-unreliability of memory,
-shifts in self-identification,
-stages of life.

It could be a response to the site of the gallery itself where canal intersects river.

By August 28th, we’d need to have names of people who wish to read for the invitations/posters. Invites to attend out should go out in a couple weeks.