I've been having a most enjoyable little tour. After Montreal, I read and talked to a first year writing class at the University of Western Ontario in London, which was a lot of fun, as such things almost always are. And tomorrow, I'm reading here in Kingston. Hope you can make it if you're in the area.
Monday, January 23rd, 7:30 PM: Kingston, The Grad Club, with Matt Rader and Anne-Marie Turza. DETAILS
A fantastic night in Montreal. Up late and out early, en route to London. Here's the audio from last night's event at Argo Bookshop:
Hey there, sports fans! I have a couple of readings coming up, and if you live in Montreal or Kingston (or within hailing distance), I'd love it if you could make it out.
Monday, January 16th, 8 PM: Montreal, Argo Bookshop, with Kaspar Hartman and John Eric Bennett. DETAILS
Monday, January 23rd, 7:30 PM: Kingston, The Grad Club, with Matt Rader and Anne-Marie Turza. DETAILS
I was supposed to be reading in Perth, ON, on January 20, but that event was cancelled, unfortunately. On the 18th, I'm visiting a class at the University of Western Ontario in London, but I don't believe that one's open to the public.
Just got my copies of The Worcester Review (XXXII: 1&2), a special issue devoted to Elizabeth Bishop, including an essay of mine, which is an excerpt of the (very long) essay I wrote about Bishop's "The Bight" while I was UNB last year. Lots of other nifty-looking content in the magazine, including an essay by PEI expat poet and scholar Thomas O'Grady on "Elizabeth Bishop as a Maritime Poet."
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
is not a shapely
blot upon a page, not
a metric cascade
of sweet and scented
syllables tumbling
through the air, nor
is it the tap and click
of keys encoding
Important Thoughts
and Feelings Deep
across a backlit
screen. Poetry is
none of these
because it is
the quid of things,
which is why
we find it
so infrequently
in words, and so
rarely in the minds
of those accounted
wisest. Poetry
is the cooling
ash that holds
the form of what was
burned and has not
fallen through
the grate. It is
the pause
in the slide of slightly
oily fingertips
along a tingling
thigh. It is
the quick slip
caught in the middle
of an old and
well-told lie.
It didn't bleed, but would seep a bit of lymph
on Sundays. It could be kept covered
by clothes, but liked to be exposed as much
as possible—though fresh air did little
to close it. It was a portal, a wormhole
between the time of its infliction
and infinite points in the future. It breathed,
and if, in perfect stillness, you inclined
your ear toward its puckered lips, you'd swear
it muttered in a foreign tongue. Somehow,
it staved off infection, was odourless
but for a faint floral whiff. Once, I saw
a hummingbird moth hover above it,
then sink her proboscis deep in the folds.
Herewith, audio from my reading the other night. An enjoyable, albeit occasionally odd, evening. The unexplained phone call that happened in the middle of my reading was from, I later learned, a friend who had wanted to come to the reading, but had a plumbing emergency. She'd called to find out if the reading was still going on, which the somewhat socially awkward store clerk didn't bother to explain. Same guy had come into the store during Jim Johnstone's reading, cut through the audience and made a beeline for the cheese plate, where he noisily helped himself to cheese and crackers while Jim read. Classic.
