Christine McNair‘s chapbook making workshop taught 3 styles this time. A Magic Book, a japanese binding and how to sew two signatures together while hiding the stitches from being seen on the closed book. (And I only poked myself with a needle twice. Look, ma, no blood!)

There are loads of books on making books –Japanese bookbinding, Book craft, [holp! I've fallen into Amazon and can't get out!] folding, wrapping, pop books and found materials.

Reading is something. Illustrations help. DIY by yourself can be fun. But learning in a group, hands on, taking the time in person with someone who has experience, a sense of spatial of how to hold, and who can show and explain tools, like a Japanese punch tool, a bone Folder, or spools of linen threads makes it all more interesting and easy. Not to mention the laughter as we all learn together.

Afterwards, there were readers including Steve Artelle.

He has a series thinking around what would be the gods of the modern urban world? China has household gods to govern, like Zào Jūn, the stove master and the door gods. The Catholic church tries to update the Saints and what they would govern to make one in charge of computers, or patron saint of the unemployed. It’s a fertile sort of ground.

And David O’Meara read two poems. The video’s not up yet. He read a poem on the White Rose Movement at a previous reading. He announced that you can catch his play, Vicious, at the Extremely Short Play Festival May 3-12 at the Arts Court.

I couldn’t fit in a whole night, but the nice thing about events is catch what you can when you can. More poetry events come constantly. For example, on Friday there’s a workshop with Ian Keteku on spoken word as part of writers fest. Ian has done a workshop for Tree too although having him again would be good too.

If anyone has anyone they’d like to learn from or a skill you want a specialist brought in for as a 1-hour session with the Tree workshop, I’m scouting for people to facilitate learning aspects of poetry for this summer and this fall.

The next Tree Workshop will be on May 8th with Robin Macdonald on Hidden Language: Explore the tools of yoga as they connect to writing, cultivate the ability to listen with intuition, and refresh your creative process. Wear comfortable clothing and bring a journal.

sure as urge becomes purged

i.
what adze to the morning
ices the sun. cloud. he lights
the fuse in refused. foiled.

sure as a jigger’s sleeves slip
a bone will knit

with the usual waul.
this no cat song
no sex call.

once enough drugs have
thawed these elm limbs
they’ll helm wind for an
extended reach

a heavy weight crane
the hoistest with the
moistest in the rain

ii.
sure, happy to lend an eye
so long as I get my glance back

iii
crow-bard dawn
a revel without a caw
lax in the ax grip’s rip
of tender as quilt stitch, cloud
over cloud over moon.

iv.
sawn snore. the long claw of the awwww.
yawns. where can I say they flew?

calf-napped mo oo (hiccupping
into two). the updo is broken apart.

puff, fff, f overstocked. enough.
pat on a cast (honed to level,

topically) of how-sands. in grains
are mortar are structure are

safe and shone at a matte grit
over gore that felt as that

which the vet knew gnawed in
with an exotic moiling son-of-a.

v
who hikes over an acre of
hymen, imbibes equine
pee gin, and evicts fate?

a raj’s djin, lint on a glint
on a facet of love. a zig
and a cig and a zag and a
nah and they’re off,

vi
trailing out with a pout, they
who spat a spout of clowns.
careful with that carful of them
who give of zein selves

vii
the hot of the shower pops
(but not off) a crop of goosebumps

we are each other’s body language
smudged together sopping
comic pages.

viii
last wisdom, my son? never,
in prison call anyone a
goof. tantamount to
choke bait. now scoot.

Dan Weber in the after chats at the AB Series last night.

His extensive book and ephemera table.

Some posters being looked at.

And other ephemera including “ephemera for a better world” and “odes to common things for people with short attention spans” from ChapbookPublisher.com, lovely boxes of lines, one from the Lost Lines Project and Geof Huth‘s chapbook. I describe the night and his sestinas in more detail at Humanyms.

“Ottawa poets, editors and bloggers Pearl Pirie and rob mclennan will do an informal talk, and answer questions on writing and publishing contemporary poetry.”

I should mention this, shouldn’t I?

So, on the evening of Thursday, April 26, rob mclennan and I are giving a panel talk to the Ottawa Independant Writers. The doors open at 6:30 at the Library and Archives Canada, Wellington St, room 156. It’s free to members of OIW. Guests are welcome but have a $10 admission.

Poetry, the rivet and pivots: What holds it together and makes it spin? What makes it poetry? What does poetry do differently from prose? What’s out there? How to find the poetry you will like and where. They will also examine styles and ideas in the literary dialogue.

I expect to have a handout of go-to places for people to orient themselves or discover new things.

Speaking of new things, tonight, visual poet Dan Waber is giving a slideshow talk at AB Series. As I understand it he also has gigs in town with schools to speak the good non-word poetry and conceptual pieces he does.

What is is to edit a poem so it is not just tighter or different but what its own form is, so a poem has found itself?

It can vary infinitely, a novel boiled down until its ideal form is a haiku, or a freeform utterance finding its face in a sestina or sonnet or spoken word story or erasure text or boiled down to a overlaid layers of visual text.

Any communication can be made more densely packed or easygoing conversation or messed with to highlight out some aspect, sound or omissions or collecting repetitions, or making an emotive oratory arguments.

Poems don’t have to make sense but making ideas is sweet. One life to live so calling it in with an utterance that could be something special but ends up bland is kind of a waste of life. Because you can do anything, that doesn’t mean everything is equal.

No point has a prescribed destiny. If any direction is possible, how do you choose?

Communicating in an open loop is more interesting than a closed loops among internalized self. Writing is a dialogue. Reading a great deal helps so you know what other people typically gravitate to. A reader or group of readers or editor all can help tease out what is more standard and what is more unique or well-wrought.

As Erin Moure said in the video in the previous posts, by “collaborating you get rid of each other’s excesses”.

Interview with Stuart Ross at OpenBook has this snippet:

C.B. Forrest: What is the editor’s job and where are the boundaries between “editing” and “creating”?

Stuart Ross: This is a huge one, and I won’t do it justice at this moment. The editor’s job varies depending on the writer. Most important: the editor helps the writer to achieve most effectively what he or she set out to achieve. But you also have to call the writer out when you feel something is inherently flawed or lazy. Some writers you have to challenge.

Coming at this on a more straightforward level: the editor’s job is to correct spelling, punctuation, grammar; to weed out useless words and unintentional repetitions, and to smooth out lines and sentences, paragraphs and pages. Help the writing be as good as it can be.

And, as any good editor will tell you, the editor’s job is to keep hands off anything that doesn’t need changing.

A close read and a tight but sensitive edit to intentions.

Susan Glickman has a short piece on poetry on her site where she talks about poetry as something that is developing towards something rather than something composed from inspiration, reading, experience, reaction, etc.

“As with most beginning poets, he is so intoxicated with the lines that are given to him he can’t recognize that they must be lines to, not just lines from (the Muse, the Unconscious, whatever). Like the punch-drunk freshmen outside, he’s playing at beginnings.”
~ Susan Glickman, On Teaching Poetry

She describes a poem as formed enough to workshop once it has achieved, regardless of style or form, a balance of lyric motive and narrative motive to give it poetic weight.

I’d translate her words to mean a conscious editing until there’s a balance of what and how, to tell a story and to make a word music of sounds and rhythms. It sounds similar to what Barry Dempster was saying in his workshop last year — that poemness is achieved once you have an even weight of the poem among head, heart and language. Those are the 3 dimensions you need for the structure. If it is too clever, or too sentimental or too much in the head, or all the linguistic techniques but no content, it fails.

In her essay On the Line, she says, “Poetry is less concerned with the clear statement of thought than with the evocation of experience. As Auden wrote, poetry is “a way of happening.”

Editing a poem to get to one of its optimal shapes so it makes an experience, as close to primary experience as possible, not tertiary meta-report.

Readings by Robert Majzels and Erín Mouré – Play Chthonics: New Canadian Readings, a 1-hour Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College in March 2012.

What is the provisional avant garde? Here are a few things: the provisional avant-garde melts in your hand not in your mouth. It writes on rather than about the city. It will not dig deeper. Is neither clever, nor ironic nor warm-hearted. The small black squirrel. Not the small black squirrel but the leaping. Or my presence and implication on the leaping. Is environmentally friendly.

Here’s the Provag call for a poetry strike to protest war in Afghanistan.

Here’s another article on provag: Anne Boyer.

The first 11 minutes is on the provisional avant garde, then they share translations they’re working on of Nicole Brossard to be published by Coach House next spring.

…A ledger was an enemy, a tongue, an accent, a place an enemy, in the Ukrainian, Austrian, Polish histories…

Lots of interesting stuff. For example, she says in oral cultures, a spoken promise is more viable than one written down, which is fixed. The world changes around paper, but living people adjust their agreement and understanding in principles.

What is writing? Writing is not the peak. Oral precedes and gesture precedes that.

At best it may bump and knock loose something else in someone else that dislodges a hidden brick of meaning. Then their chimney falls in and there’s a house fire. Then you get on like a house on fire. No, that’s not it.

A poem is a synthesis of all that’s come before. Copy, combine, transform. It’s remixing and perpetuation of some part of something. It’s the outcome of perceptions.

I like the idea of poem as by-product, like paper scraps cut off after the real product of text is printed. It isn’t useful as by-product, if not used. Unless it existing is a use. Which it is. Is it sufficient leveraging of the gift of living? Poetry is a thankfulness, a paying back, the gift of being alive.

Once used for this other purpose, it becomes something else, not the earlier processing, not the initial by-product. That puts different constraints on how it looks. It brings in place, time, person, impact.

To be writing is to make ideas which is the mental food, to use the sun and soil and other food sources make something for to feed at least self. It is nourishment. Poems may have vitamins, like well-formed thoughts, or calorie-rich junk which people may enjoy and survive on but may not be optimal for health. Poems are fodder for maintenance of life. Do they need to improve self and others or be part of the process of disintegration?

Must a poem map what is, only the transformation to be a useful process or an ideally useful product? The latter assumes change the only thing of value, not collecting constant meaningless pieces? Is poetry then, just meaning?

It’s effective for form and content to reinforce each other, for a poem about disorder to be not in cutesy couplet rhymes, unless to the nth degree of satire. A poem about waves could get the undulating sound in meter or line length or consonance shifts. The challenge in a poem wastes reader energy when it makes the getting to the point complicated. It’s like a really convoluted shaggy dog story for one little pun. A let down. Not enough payoff for effort.

What should a poem be doing?

John Barton has said that one should risk in content not form.

What would constitute a reveal for myself? I’ve only ever written a couple poems that scared me, that I felt driven to destroy the computer and any evidence that they were ever coming into being. They were terrible poems, probably entirely indistinguishable from any other of my terrible poems in the end, but the needing to be admitted into words, words being what governs perception and gatekeeper to real. Once you give a word to something, it acknowledges in that naming its presence. To risk saying any subject in poetry, despite what it may do to the writer or the reader or the family who seem to commonly say to a writer write whatever you like once we’re all dead.

A risk in form or content is a wobble instead of an affirming reinforcement of status quo. Except I suppose, if one were a confirmed anarchist in which case a radical act might be orderly.

To take a risk follows the notion that poetry should transform the poet that Dempster was so insistent on and I that I reject(ed?) out of hand. Part of that is because an eye to the end is like having sex for the orgasm instead of for the whatever comes connections or journey, if you will. If you want the first end, you miss stuff and skip stuff that would make the end better. It makes unnecessary strains.

An aha at each composition seems to cultivate the external look of satori as a cliché, much as the razor cut ending to profound. It can feel like reading the last page of a book and skipping the rest. The journey without realization can make for boring reading.

The living a life in order to fast forward to emotional impacts instead of faking ones on the page also seems wrong-headed, an extensively circuitous route way to get to a good poem. What comic strip had someone skydiving and declaring this will make an excellent blog post? You can’t think of the product while doing the process of living or else you won’t be fully in the process, distorting with observer effect and skew the perceiving. It might have the effect of someone who networks to meet important people he can use instead of networking to meet interesting people to keep life interesting.

Perhaps this is what people mean when they say a poetry feels “genuine”. It isn’t smarmy towards getting something back. It is poetry that is comfortable in its own skin of letter shapes. And it happens to line up with another to cause a reaction from someone else who can feel or think something in response.

That’s not the sole domain of poetry, or art, or communication, but it is a sweet spot when poetry hits it.

Is the only joy in poetry the pleasure you bring to it in the composition or completion? Or is there room within the lines and content itself? Is uncomplicated happiness the final frontier of taboo of poetry?

rob mclennan speaking on Heather Christle’s third trade collection, What is amazing (Middletown CT: Wesleyan, 2012) says,

As much as poets complain that humour in poetry isn’t taken seriously [...], an outright, articulate joy and optimism appears to have even less consideration, and even fewer examples.

I was thinking that myself lately.

Happy is hard to do well, perhaps even harder than grief because it comes around so much less in shorter glimpses. How to i.d. it in a lineup let alone replicate it?

Joy in verbal is hard not to have ring hollow. It is as colored and nuanced as melancholy but while sadness feels tangled, it helps the realness to bring in complexity, an optimism needs a cleaner palate to convey itself.

Christle has that sort of brisk, chipperness that insists on being silly.

As captain of the flowers I tell the flowers Look alive
and they listen They have evolved like an ear I have evolved
like a piano

and so it enjambs itself forward, hooking ahead in a breathless way. She’s got a weight and depth to having an ear compared to development over centuries, that paradox of each being from birth needing to get up to speed on what the combinations of various species on earth have worked out over the millennia.

A lot of surreal poetry sidesteps the lyrical habit of deadly taking-self-seriously in utter at length importance of being earnest. Some humour breaks the 4th wall with self-deprecation. Both tend to have a more depressive wit. You laugh, perhaps, but it accumulates a kind of weight.

There’s a despair under a nihilist edge rather than a zest for life. Likewise some humour has pathos but is leavened by clever. “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein and she does run thru a range, this Christle not keeping to crystal palaces of poetics where there’s only happy harmony of bee hum and lover’s eyes. If she didn’t it would be in the brittle confines of a sitcom.

Some poetry stays in other brittle confines, never cracking a smile because that would be “out of register” or “distracting” from the tone or net effect. People want to stay as readers in a tidy little arc, or avoid tidy arcs. There’s an unspoken mandate to be poignant or profound or to not do that and avoid meaning. Either solemn suits of well-polished poems scratch at the collars. It is a good ceremony but doesn’t allow much allow for the silliness that life is by times.

How to navigate that expression of joy without falling into slightness?

The only subjects for a poem are mortality or sex, right? Or was there a third?

Does a balloon need a string to grave to tether it or will a hand do? What’s worth being heard without it becoming diverting amusement or tribute has a wide range.

Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst wrote Apologetic for Joy and there is a delicacy that isn’t fobbed off, an attending to excruciating beauties, but it is around a pathos, amid funerals and helplessness against mental illness. It is a joy despite not a joy for its own sake.

[...] that a bee finds a flower
because it is the only urgency it knows, that a soldier finds a pocket
for a photo: a roof for memory to land, atop the boarded up room
of longing. The heart is where we store honey and purpose.

There’s something about grief that makes it want to crown itself king and lowest-common denominator that trumps all.

People feel it is respect to be emphatic and enter the lower slower tone of another. Are people as able to enter another’s cheer?

People feel unheard should they share a grief to be told of the bright side. Is it not also disrespectful to refuse to move into another’s joy?

Two states meet like water finding equilibrium. The grudge begrudges having to raise. Does the rain resent leaving the clouds and rainbows? A movement among the cycle is natural.

People are happy in poetry to capture and hold fixed the moment of lash or crumple or fear or panging of melancholy. How many can pause from the living it long enough to record the light heart’s beat?

James Henry Leigh Hunt did an exclamation simply in Jenny Kissed Mebut even then had to give a head duck to illness and mortality. Does Ogden Nash stay above the splashing fray of dour down, leaving that to what is already internalized within the reader to act as a countering agent?

Kristen Lindquist sustains that heady happiness in Transportation. Part of it works by the audience filling in their own experiences and expectations that counter what she describes,

Even before I descend into the trippy light show
of the walkway between terminals,
I am ecstatic. I can’t stop smiling.
On my flight we saw Niagara Falls
and Middle America green and gold below.
Passengers thanked the pilot for his smooth landing
with such gratitude that I too

The experience takes the writer by surprise and so can the reader by surprise too. The point of view sits against the usual responses to being herded about in mass transit, the jet lag and fatigue. Perkiness then, in the poem, don’t have to be countered by the poet who has already accomodated the reader in the order of reveal.

Whimsy is the feather some poets rode when personification wasn’t so overdone. Audrey Alexandre Brown converses with the Phoenix.

From a perspective across time it’s hard to not read her words as satire, even tho she eventually declares that willingness “to dare to die” “is evidence enough of Immortality” for the god-crew faithful.

Still, there’s a brightness to tone thru the poem, an optimism that just as man cannot live by bread alone, one can’t live by beauty alone either. Audrey then colors the joie de vivre with suitable death-drapes to make it properly poetic subject.

Stand-up comedy poetry, eliciting a chuckle and demonstrating word play, or genuinely playing in words, or self-deprecating quick wit, or gently humorous poetry of sweetness are all something that has a distance from deflecting the necessity of depressed self to be in every conversation but it’s not all joy. Exhilarated and compassion are states under-represented in poetry. Playfulness and whimsy are on the continuum and can, I’d speculate be done as well as woe.

If one can live a poem with grief alone as the internal consistency of the built-world, why not a poem that has joy alone?

.

Taking a boo at the newest renovations at Collected Works, their piano is back and so it round table seating and all new shelving in the new half, and blue paint. I forgot to look down to see if the flooring is in. It must be with all that done. I also saw this in the poetry section, the haiku anthology: The Touch of a Moth, put out by Scrivner Press.

That means there are 7 books on their shelves with my hand on them in some way. 3 books written by me, 1 edited by me, 1 I am mentioned in, and 2 books with poems in them, including this. Curious and odd.

Mansfield Press and Anvil Press.