Taking a digital page from Brenda‘s notebook, a picture of what I’m reading next:

I’m not chasing any particular theme of thought, just changing pace from what the same-same memoirs of literal today that have such prevalence and sway. What was brought to my path by friends, family or random chance.

It’s tricky this admired trait of being contemporary, being in step with current. It’s like being present. I seem to need to be present and past back and forth I try not to drag too much of history with me at once.

I wonder about my relationship to history, literary or general. I look back at my growing up in the perennial urgent harvest or urgent to rest up and there was no past spoken of except by senility which wasn’t lucid and there was no future because it was either uppity to presume what god (or husband or random acts of neighbour dropping by) had in store. Plans were kind of taboo except in the broadest strokes and immovables, like wash day or grocery day for a given house. I’d guess that’s what drove me to history, anyone’s history. I was shut out of my own, so fine, anyone’s will do. I’ll glean something to make sense of now. Because now needs before to make any sense.

What is communication except an extension of trust or extension of mistrust? It plays in somehow.

I wonder why Candy Hemphill’s* song was so resonant. “You gotta trust somebody. You gotta let somebody in. You gotta trust somebody and call somebody friend. When you’re afraid and been betrayed, go to the Lord Almighty. He’ll show you with his tender care that you can trust somebody.”

A funny claim, that a god who doesn’t interact can prove trust. Funny that in the absence of reliable real people, trust is still needed and you can take an abstract concept and construct a “personal friend in Jesus” to fill the gap that needs filling.

[*She was born Carmel Hemphill but is now is Candy Christmas having married Rev. Christmas near Nashville. In her photo she is a middle aged woman but she was just a teen when I saw her sing, but then, I was a teen and I am middle-aged. Still somehow this all doesn't add up right.]

We need the past and community to stabilize present and allow motion to grow to momentum in the future and are resilient and creative enough to find solutions wherever.

But the books and whatever I’m looking for for reinforcement or countering…

Top to bottom: Paul Mackan’s O My God of Apes and Apples (Publish America, 2011). My Father Who Art is one of my favorites in here.

“To be my father’s son, a tragedy/ inherited with a ‘by your leave’. / His bones speak for him now/ he’s hit me with them if he could /[...] He was liberal so I am,/He sang, I sing,/ he played piano, / I the organ — a bigger to-do”

I must admit I’ve a weak spot for poetry with music that is sacrilegious or struggling with. “Resurrection Day will rise without me.” It’s a pleasure to see some of these poem’s I’ve heard at open mic come to the page and to discover new ones I haven’t seen.

The current issue of unarmed.

Pieces from Buck Downs thinking on ex mas when “suitability killed the tree”, Sheila E Murphy’s “I have been practicing/for life/to be lived” and Elisabeth Guthrie. Who is this, then? Her full X Portraits, from Crater Press is already out of print. (Their pricing scheme baffles. You can buy by a ROW? ROW? And for some issues, there’s a note “paperknife required”. It seems an odd enticement? warning?)

No End in Strangeness by Bruce Taylor (Cormorant Books, 2011)

It’s a chatty sort of book. Everyday language, from a playful person, not trying to put on the mask of lower class marxist layman. He’s alert, as in Fortune’s Algorithm which starts

If only you could strip
off the falseness,
tear away its fabulous
headgear and expose
its good bald head

It’s not a lineated prose (not that I expect it from him, just seems to be a common trend). His line breaks chosen to hook, turn, please and play. Conceptually he plays with the idea of mask yet more than theatre half masks, the suggestion of it covering the whole head, like a gorilla mask. As if even the back of our heads and our ears are trained to portray the target social grace in fabulous faux culture. He doesn’t sound bite excerpt.

Rather like Barry Dempster’s poems, they evolve and turn on themselves so the reveal is if you’ve been there for the whole poem.

In Taylor’s case, he really reels it out. Little Animals is a 10-page long poem. More commonly they’re 2-3 pages. Different things can be said in more time when you don’t cut to the punch.

In Taylor‘s 1998 collection, Facts (Signal), the title poem, The Facts runs on for 7 pages. Under the school of thought that each poem should have one subject and one metaphor set, clearly explored, it veers around like a webcam on a hummingbird.

He starts it sitting in a back of a moving pickup with a stray dog. By p. 25 and 26

[...]hammered sheet metal to a school wall;
then I drove a blue van, and later I worked for the city
painting white lines on roads,
and in the course of that spring
I did every job for a day,
so now I can tell you I’ve been every person in that town
I’ve done every work that was offered
and lived every life. When I went
I saw myself coming, the trolleys filled up with me
coming and going, the newspaper kept me informed
about all that I did, I looked up
to th rainstreaked windows downtown and saw me
looking down over streets full of me.
A red bird flapped up to its nest, it was me,
she laid me in branches and twine, when I hatched
I asked to be fed, so she brought me
a frantic six-legger and in a snap of the beak
I was gone, mislaid somewhere in a forest of me,
my slim branches clicking and groaning.[...]
in a world that’s always been there,
[...] with the power to pulverize
theories beliefs and conjectures
under the flat rough stones of the facts.

Next book down? Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and Jonson, edited by Hugh Kenner (Reinhart Editions, 1964) p. 85, Lame pickup lines that probably didn’t work then either, such as Song to Celia, where the narrator sends flowers which she rejects but because she breathes on them, they’ll never wither only taken an upgrade and give off her scent instead of their own.

p. 205, George Herbert who calls for a little more plainness, less painterlyness. Down to earth in Jordan 1 he questions, “false hair/ becomes a verse? Is there in truth no beautie? [...] is it no verse except in enchanted groves[...] while he that reades, divines/ catching the sense at two removes”.

The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta Press, 2008) won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Almost no capitalization, the sense of single poems with the title at the top, except each page has the same title, and the only punctuation is space on the page. Almost every line of the 64 long-lined pages ends with the word stop, please or advise. A dizzying sort of structure. The funny thing is, so far, the lines can be read skipping those words, or including them making multiple texts overlaid. It is right-justified, which I don’t think I can reproduce here. p. 5

my pleasures inventoried like cutlery stop
no histrionics just two brass lamps a stack of old newsprint from Paris tied in twine stop
the glamour in asking first Are you happy? stop

I’m elongating the upward curve of my handwritten “f” please
years of growth sanded away to make this beautifully varnished myth please
the stories so often describe the homecoming as some kind of relief stop

Letters on Birchbark by Uta Regoli, translated by Henry Beissel (Penumbra, 2000) I’ve owned for a long time but somehow slipped sideways without being read. p. 53, City in Winter, “In the city glass separates/ice from light” and p. 84, Winter Litany,

It was so cold that we needed two fires:
each one to keep the other warm.
The animals emigrated south
and took the trees along.
We were left behind [...]
and talked to ice ferns”

What better time for gardening? Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening by Louise Riotte (Story, 1975, 1998) Wild carrot’s deep taproot indicates a soil worth improving for crops. p. 73

Stinging nettle [...] strengthens growth of mint and tomatoes and gives greater aromatic quality to herbs such as valerian, angelica, marjoram, sage and peppermint.[...] Fruit packed in nettle hay ripens more quickly. Stinging nettle is helpful to stimulate fermentation in compost or manure piles.

Custom by Rae Armantrout (above/ground, 2012) got slipped back out of the shot but it’s fitting because in “At least” there’s a natural slip to it

“The train of thought
is not a train,

but a tendril,
                   blind”

In West Coast Line (24/Three, 1990) Ray Kiyooka has some memoir essays, including on the Sino-phobia that swept Canada, poems, and something on arts funding from 1979,

as well all know: visual thirst in the last quarter
of the 20th century was satisfied by a weekyl sitcom on television.

I’d say let’s pull the gold-plated plug out of the kultural-grain
dump a can of draino into it and let the wind pass thru.[...] a simple

proposition, viz: does the thing on he wall turn you on. it takes
love or a reasonable facsilimile thereof to make a painting and

be able to see if for what it’s worth, clearly.

Curiously Kevin Connolly is also in the issue using the same date and year at the bottom of the poem as Paul Mackan used. p. 94 Connolly has a poem “Junk Male”

I wonder if we’d calm down
a little if sex were a seasonal thing,
like fruit ripening. If all you
had to do was sit there in the wet dirt
and wait for the carrot to scream.

He goes on to play pool in stanza 4

“Research,” I call it. Bob call
it “Thursday,” and he’s right.

The issue is curiously full of familiar names: Angela Bowering, George Bowering, Maxine Gadd, Barry McKinnon, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Creeley, Stuart Ross, Lillian Necakov, Lisa Downe, Gary Barwin, Michael Redhill, Margaret Christakos. And 17 others that don’t ring a bell. Over 20 years, some poets could have written the same today, and others have shifted. Some value different scales of change differently, I speculate but don’t understand. And I wonder what did Janset Shami do next? Amazon lists only one title for her from and it from that year, and 5 years later she was making marionette shows, but then, women change their names and become untraceable.

The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, edited by Susanne Woods (Oxford). Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer. Her book of poems is dedicated entirely to women patrons. I’m still in the introduction.

Maybe I should dig out The Cloud Corporation which I got at Dodge Poetry Fest…I started but didn’t finish it and it just won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize.

I’ve also just discovered Asymptote, a literary journal of translation and reviews. I often feel hemmed in by the small circles of reference. This widens it out.

If, what I’m seeking, is surrogate stories of family or tribe, I may be taking a circuitous, scenic route in the wrong direction to that end. I should be heading towards bloodlines, except the rate of dying is high and there’s no reason to bring me into the fold of stories among those who remain.

If I’m seeking a more benevolent, more critically engaged narrative of how the world works, and more diversity than the implausible conformity that didn’t comfort, perhaps I’m going the right way.

Mon Feb 6th – Humour in Poetry, led by Bardia Sinaee
Thur. Feb 9th – Editing and Publishing Fiction, led by Dave Currie
Mon Deb 13th – The Spoken Word, led by Brandon Wint

Feb 25th, writing lives with Charlotte Gray is offered by Canadian Author’s Assoc
Coming March 3rd, Versefest workshops for families and youth and March 4th with registration now open, a slam workshop with Ursula Rucker

At Adanna Literary Journal Kathleen Kirk puts her finger on what I’ve been trying to reach regarding sentimental: “I think our worry as poets would be in asking for more emotion than a situation warrants, or manipulating readers’ feelings in some way—asking or expecting them to feel more than they do or telling them what or how or how much to feel. “

Issue 8 of Ottawater is now online. There must be something good in the ‘water. Sure is. 60 pages of art, and lots of poems

Poems by nearly 2 dozen including Marilyn Irwin, Phil Hall (“Come back Silence we’ll try to listen”), John Barton (a Masterclass weekend with him in April is now taking registration), Stephanie Bolster, K.I. Press, and ones by some of my other favorite writers whose work too rarely lets work to light of day, like Anne Le Dressay (in a list poem of pros of a city: “The absence of a silence so profound it wakes me out of sleep like/a sudden sharp noise.” or “it’s the back of his bent neck that makes you/ notice, so that you see the vulnerability/elsewhere in him.”) and Robin Macdonald, (“A year of too many desires /planted. In fertile soil, everything /grows.”)

There are interviews (with Michael Dennis and Christine McNair) and exceptional layout by Tanya Sprawl.

The launch is tonight at the Carleton Tavern.

Psst, the next weekly issue of Linebreak is also up. A poem of matches.

On January 28th, 2012, VERSe Ottawa (versefest.ca) is organizing Ottawa’s first ever Women’s Slam Championship, as a fundraiser for the annual poetry festival VERSeFest and as a way of celebrating the incredible women of Ottawa slam. Twelve of the top names chosen from throughout the history of slam in Ottawa will come together at Arts Court to find out who will take the title of the first ever Ottawa Women’s Slam Champion!

From new, up-and-coming poets such as CauseMo (member of the National Champion Youth Slam Team) to scene-starters like Capital Slam co-founder Elissa Molino and established slammers like two-time Canadian Festival of Spoken Word veteran Festrell, the field will take in a wide range of styles and feature some of the movers and shakers of the spoken word scene both in Ottawa and across the country. Competing: CauseMo, Danielle K.L. Gregoire, D’Lightfull, Elissa Molino, Elle P, Festrell, Jenna Tenn-Yuk, Rage, Sarah Musa, Scotch, Sepideh, and Stargazer.

The top four poets will also be given a feature spot at the 2012 edition of VERSeFest, Ottawa’s Poetry Festival, which runs from February 28th to March 4th, 2012.

Arts Court Doors at 6:30, slam at 7:00! Admission is $8. Show up early, this event is going to be packed! For more information visit versefest.ca.

On iTunes or other rental places you can find: Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. He said, “I don’t trust styles and I especially did not want to be encapsulated in one.” He also said in that documentary, “works that are too preconceived go dead[...] the peculiarities of the moment are more energized”. It’s a tricky spot to figure out what makes a practice work, and what is a knock off of the outward seeming practice but missing the point, or key elements or implementing it poorly and eroding the concept. What comes to mind is the filter down effect of clothes that come from runways to discount stores, modifying at each step to the constraints of price point and usual materials accessed and you end up with a cut of clothing that worked with a stiff fabric but with a rayon-clingy drape and the innovations to make the changes with the color of the year and clientele length and decoupage, end up with a rag. Regardless of what style poetry starts as, it can descend to cardboard verse. As Glaser said, “Crystallization of belief – “oh I’ve got it now – becomes a limitation” in the not good sense of limitation.

As the creation habit continues, the pendulum swings: Neo-classicisist, The Romantics, Symbolists, Imagistes, Dadaists makers of concrete poetry, OULIPO and Language poets.

Each were at the start only a handful of acquaintances over a short period of time that sort of agreed and if you squint held common threats, the way stars hold a constellation and story that help us orient ourselves but the myth isn’t really in the sky or history.

With each phase of poetry, one tries to correct for the weaknesses of the last phase, to be more structured, less structured, driven by sonorous, by paring away extraneous, by suggesting, by mathematics, by directing thru deletion, by accumulation, by curating the unimportant, by lifting up the mythical, by pointing past little things to the cosmic, by seeing the universal in the pore, by stripping false myths away, by insisting the universe is not kind but cruel, or not random but kind, ruled by kings, not by the common man, by including the unbeautiful and non-sequitur and disorder. All the methods try to not stand in the way of a reality that gets obscured by our habituating.

Pratt, in The Imagist Poem relates what TE Hulme said in 1924 in Speculations about language decaying in its power to signify over time. That’s why we choose “fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not because they are new [...] because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract” by overuse.

Glaser’s drawing hand can think for him directly much. We record the world around us, but they are means, the world and the recording, not ends. “We don’t have an obligation to represent the tree, but the tree initiates”, Glaser said. The outward and inward are also a mobius strip.

Glaser’s an interesting fellow. Drawing, cooking and chopping, “I don’t see these as different kinds of experiences”. “What I’ve always hated is the parochialization of as an action, unrelated to other activities.” All activities are about interrelatedness, redesigning our world for the better in whatever sphere and capacity to create civilization, which is that which links people so we don’t all kill one another.

Books, performances of poetry and music this weekend, Saturday, Jan 21, Arts Court, 2 Daly Ave, Ottawa. 7pm doors. Cover $8

Come for one, come for some, come for all – you can watch or perform in the Theatre, or have a drink, socialize and buy books in the Studio. We’ll open the doors at 6:30 then at 7:00 a performance by folk/bluegrass trio Call Me Katie, and follow that with short open mike segments and featured readers.

We’ll crown the winner of our “Poetry For The End Of The World” contest – and then we’ll send the winning poem off to the end of the earth. Literally. We’ve got our hands on a weather balloon, and we’re going to laminate the winning poem, attach it to the balloon, and launch! Weather balloons can travel up to 100,000 feet in the air, and who knows how far it might go… before air pressure causes it to explode, going out, as they say, “not with a whimper, but a bang.”

The third main segment of the evening will feature four prominent local poets we never hear enough of. Brigette DePape, Kevin Matthews, Rhonda Douglas and David O’Meara will fill a half-hour with fine lines.

We’ll close the evening starting at about 10pm with Montreal indie band Puggy Hammer (featuring last year’s VERSeFest guest David McGimpsey, poet Jason Camlot, and Matt Rosenberg.)

And while you’re at it, check out VerseFest’s new website with this year’s amazing line-up.

Allison Armstrong is a queer femme poet, model, and pornographer living in Ottawa, Ontario, where she co-organizes the Voices of Venus women’s spoken word showcase. Her work has appeared in Vagina Dentata, Venus in Scorpio, Whorespeak, and at Bywords.ca. She is one half of the queer women’s literotica troupe Honeyed Tongues, and she blogs about feminism, bdsm, sex work, and gender at http://syrens.wordpress.com/.

Mike Montreuil lives in Gloucester and is waiting for the Habs to win the Stanley Cup again. He has a small haiku press: Éditions des Petits Nuages.

rob mclennan is Ottawa’s literary encyclopedia and creative superhero masquerading as a mild-mannered writer of more than 20 books of poetry, novels, essays and other non-fiction. robmclennan.blogspot.com

Luminita Suse is as a software developer that writes poems in her spare time when she doesn’t read, bike, do gardening or tend to her family. Her poetry appeared in Bywords Quarterly Journal, Ditch Poetry, New Stalgica Hymnal, Moonbathing, Gusts, Atlas Poetica, Magnapoets, Tanka Café/ Ribbons, Red Lights, Notes from the Gean, and others.

Amanda Earl’s poetry appears in the air and on paper. Amanda is the angel of AngelHouse Press & the curator of experiment-o.com, an annual pdf magazine that celebrates the art of risk. For more on her hijinx & shenanigans, please visit amandaearl.com

Fellow Sage Hillers Frances Boyle, Cynthia French and Heather Haley are in a love poem anthology that Leaf Press will put out next month: The Wild Weathers. Heather Cardin (who moved out of Ottawa back to Saskatchewan), Linda Crosfield and Susan Ioannou and Kim Yong-Hi, Winona Baker (haikuist) and Leonard Neufeldt are also among the 4 dozen or so in that upcoming.

Salty Ink asks Valerie Compton:

You’re an accomplished short story writer, but this is a debut novel. What was the hardest part of upping a story’s wordcount to novel length?

It’s not a matter of upping the word count so much as solving the dilemmas of a story that is too complex to be resolved in small span of words. A novel does, and should, require depth and breadth and time to complete.

Good to hear someone say that.

A novel is a different creature. Just like a haiku is a different creature not just a short free verse. You don’t compress the best phrases of a page long poem into Cole’s notes short poem and call it haiku any more than a cowboy in a story makes it a western. Because it’s a long utterance doesn’t make it an essay. Because a written piece talks about a book doesn’t make it a review. Carry on…