CLM Has Landed!

Hey, look what knocked on my door Friday afternoon. The official publication date was last November, but like so many of the pieces it contains, my book of critical writings came in a bit past deadline. But now, patient readers, Career Limiting Moves the book can be purchased from better booksellers everywhere, be they brick and mortar or virtual.

If you're going to order online, why not go straight to the publisher?

I have to say, it's strange to have published a book with such a thick spine after putting out a bunch of skinny poetry books. Despite its girth, however, the book is right handsome, thanks to the top-notch design work of Kate Hargreaves.

Launch events TBA.

Recital review

A French critic named Olivier Brunel has written a review of the Paris recital. He is unfortunately--and I don't think very fairly, but I am neither impartial in this case nor well-educated in such matters generally--harsh on Phillip Addis' vocal stylings, but impressed by Emily Hamper's work on piano. Pleasantly for yours truly, however, Brunel reserves his highest praise for the "Waypoints" cycle:

Il est rare aussi de bénéficier au cours d’un récital d’une création comme ce fut le cas avec celle de Waypoints(«Points de repère») commande des deux protagonistes pour leur tournée de récitals au compositeur canadien Erik Ross (né en 1972) sur des textes de l’écrivain et poète canadien Zachariah Wells (présent dans la salle pour cette création française). Ce superbe cycle de trois chansons de facture assez classique et tonale a été le moment le plus fort de ce concert.

Something missing from the review is an acknowledgment of how well the audience received the performance, a fact that doesn't necessarily negate Brunel's criticisms, but would help significantly to contextualize them. He does not, for example, mention that the Ralph Vaughn Williams song that closed the evening was performed in response to quite palpable popular demand. Hélas.

Review online

My review of David O'Meara's stellar collection, A Pretty Sight, has been posted on Arc Poetry Magazine's website.

Opera Report Post Scriptum

As I just said on the Indiegogo page for my fundraising campaign, I am enormously grateful to everyone who has helped to make this happen for me. I really am a fortunate man.

Opera Report

As I said on Facebook last night, I have enjoyed a handful of truly great nights in my life. First among them were my marriage night and the birth of my son. What I experienced last night at the amphitheatre of the Opéra Bastille is not far behind.

After tramping around all day--from our flat in the 2e Arrondissement through the courtyard of the Louvre and the Tuileries, through part of the Champs Elysées, then across the Seine to the spectacular Musée d'Orsay (where we lunched and took in a couple of the permanent exhibits, including Van Gogh and Gauguin)--my mother and I hit Ile de la Cité and strolled along the river to Ile St. Louis, where we strolled some more before having an early supper at one of the few restaurants that serves such a meal (most of the other patrons had small children with them).

After supper, we made our way to the Opéra Bastille, the somewhat controversial modern opera house built in the late '80s. After I picked up our comp tickets, we headed downstairs to the Amphithéâtre, the intimate open-seating venue for Phillip Addis' and Emily Hamper's performance. We were among the first people there, so we managed to snag front row seats, just right of centre stage.

Shortly after settling in, we were warmly greeted by Christophe Ghristi and Mireille Campioni, the Opera staff members in charge of the Amphithéâtre. While we waited, spectators arrived steadily, eventually filling the three central seating sections. A handful of people sat in the outer two sections. I would estimate that somewhere between 200 and 225 people attended, all told.

I'd be surprised if a single one of them was disappointed. Phillip and Emily started off with Hugo Wolf's "Abendbilder," a short song cycle, with German text by Nikolaus Lenau. I'm a complete ingénue when it comes to music, but I thought it was very fine. Phillip and Emily headed offstage to warm applause and returned to deliver Benjamin Britten's settings of "Songs and Proverbs of William Blake." An ambitious selection of fourteen of Blake's most famous short poems, this was where both pianist and singer soared. And when they finished, the crowd showed their appreciation, going into a rhythmic clap that cues a curtain call. (After the show, Emily said that a curtain call at the intermission is very rare, since people are generally keener to hit the bar or the WC than to stay in their seats any longer.)

Following the intermission came another change of pace with Francis Poulenc's sublime song cycle "La fraîcheur et le feu," with French texts by Paul Eluard. I will confess that the deeper into the Poulenc they got, the harder it was for me to relax and listen, knowing that "Waypoints" (the song cycle that Erik Ross built out of my poems "I," "Anattā" and "Waypoints") was coming up. Appropriately, the last stanza of Eluard's chimes nicely with an image from "Waypoints":

Je sais le sort de la lumière
J'en ai assez pour jouer son éclat
Pour me parfaire au dos de mes paupières
Pour que rien ne vive sans moi.

Its final word made for a perfect segue into "I."

Before that would happen, however, Phillip and Emily, having taken their post-Poulenc bows, disappeared backstage to refresh themselves and my heart started beating hard. When they came back out, Phillip produced a slip of paper from his pocket and read some prepared remarks in French about the genesis of the "Waypoints" cycle. He finished by saying that Erik Ross was unfortunately unable to attend, but that I was here from Halifax. He gestured to me and I walked to the edge of the stage (which was level with the front row) and bowed to the applauding audience.

My heartbeat cranked up another notch or two as I returned to my seat. What followed I can't adequately describe, both because my knowledge of music is rudimentary and because the performance hit me on such an emotional, pre-verbal level. I write with the spoken voice in mind. I write my poems not just to be read, but to be heard. I have a pretty good idea when I've made a poem sound right (or as right as I can), but never have I imagined them sounding so transcendently gorgeous. The range of tone was staggering; on a couple of occasions, as my mother pointed out, Phillip turned red in the face while singing, which didn't happen during any of the other cycles. I was enraptured for the duration of the performance, chills running up and down my spine. The score, the performance, the setting--the whole thing blew me away.

The audience response was enormous. Phillip bowed, then gestured to Emily (as he did following each cycle), who bowed, then he looked over at me and pointed at the floor beside him. In a daze, I walked onto the stage, embraced Phillip and Emily (both of whom I was meeting in person for the first time), turned to face the audience, and bowed. The crowd kept clapping and Phillip nodded at me to bow again; then the three of us joined hands and bowed together. I half-staggered back to my seat while Phillip and Emily strode off-stage. My mother said afterwards that she wished someone had been taking photographs--house rules prohibited pictures--so I could see the expression on my face when I was taking my bows. Phlegmatic fellow that I am, it's rare that I radiate joy, but I'm sure I did last night.

Phillip and Emily returned to perform two songs by Eric Wolfgang Korngold, with lyrics by Elisabeth Honold and Josef von Eichendorff, respectively. Appropriately, the second song ends "Singe, sing nur mimer zu!" (Sing, sing without stopping!) The audience was clearly in sympathy with that thought. Phillip and Emily's bows were followed by more rhythmic clapping, along with shouts of Bravo! and Encore! They came out for a curtain call, went backstage, then came out again, to play a song by Ralph Von Williams, with a text taken from Henry V.

Thus ended the magic, but the night wasn't over. My mother and I went backstage, along with Opera staff and friends of Phillip and Emily's. We had champagne (the real McCoy, natch) and chatted for a while before a group of us headed to a restaurant next door for drinks and food and a lot of great conversation. I can't express how incredibly lucky I am, not only to have had my work given such royal  treatment, but to have it done by collaborators who are also charming, lovely people. The only things that would have made this evening more memorable yet would have been the presence of Erik Ross (whom I got to meet and hang out with in Toronto a couple of months back, at least) and Rachel, who has been with me for most of my writing life and without whom it's hard to say where I'd be in life and literature today.

My interview this morning on Global Morning News

Paris fundraising drive update

Since launching my funding campaign a week ago today, I've already raised $1549--over 70% of my funding target. As with the last time I undertook such a campaign, I am feeling the love. There are few public endeavours I've undertaken as a writer that have felt more affirmative. Unlike a grant, I'm not just getting money to produce work or to go somewhere, but I'm participating in an exchange, creating new works that wouldn't have existed without the funding drive and getting old works in front of some eyeballs. The postal receipts alone tell a tale of how many books and broadsides have gone out over the past week. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed so far and to everyone who will in the days to come.

Further Adventures in Crowdsourced Funding

As anyone still following this sleepy blog knows, my poems are being performed operatically at the Opéra National in Paris next month. I applied to the Canada Council for a travel grant, but learned today that my application, along with composer Erik Ross's, did not meet with success. So, as I did last time something like this happened, I've decided to use Indiegogo to raise funds to cover my expenses. Lots of quid pro quo on the table. Check it out.

Baffle launched

Back from a couple of very well-attended and otherwise successful Baseline Press launches in Toronto and London. I was especially impressed by the turnout at the London event; a quite large venue space was packed to capacity. It's a city smaller than Halifax, but I couldn't imagine a similar-sized crowd turning up for an event here. So kudos to Karen Schindler and the other folks at Poetry London, who have clearly done much to cultivate a public for poetry in their city.

Pino Coluccio was on-hand at the Toronto event with his video camera and tripod. He kindly filmed and edited this little vid of my reading:

 

Critic's Desk Sombrero

In many ways, book reviewing is the most thankless of literary endeavours, but Arc Poetry Magazine has long been exceptionally good to practitioners of this unpopular dark art. I learned the other day, and it has just been officially announced, that I have won Arc's Critic's Desk Prize for my long review of Bruce Taylor's No End in Strangeness. This is the fourth time I've won the CDP, but the first time I've won it for a long review. Awfully glad to win it for this piece, if only because it gives a wee bit more press for Taylor's truly stupendous book. The review, slightly expanded, is also forthcoming in Career Limiting Moves, the book, which I just finished proofreading about an hour ago. Huzza!

Poems in print

Very pleased to have two poems, "Swarm" and "Squalid," in the new issue of This magazine. Both poems have starlings in them, as it happens, but are otherwise quite different. The poems aren't up yet on the mag's website, but I am assured they are in the physical magazine, which I have yet to behold.

Upcoming Events

I have launches/readings coming up in Toronto, London and Charlottetown. Here be the details.

Toronto, Thursday November 7, 7:30 pm: Baseline Press and Frog Hollow Press launch, Black Swan Tavern, 154 Danforth Ave.

London, ON, Friday November 8, 7:00 pm: Baseline Press launch, Organic Works Bakery, 222 Wellington St.

Charlottetown, Sunday November 17, 7:00 pm: Joint launch of Baffle and Rachel Lebowitz's Cottonopolis, The Big Orange Lunchbox, 77 University Ave.

If you're handy to any of these events, I'd love to see you there.

“At least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire security, as not to keep watch and ward, even on our best feelings. I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian antipathy most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of an undistinguishing comprehension of sects: and acts of cruelty, (I had almost said,) of treachery, committed in furtherance of an object vitally important to the cause of humanity; and all this by men too of naturally kind dispositions and exemplary conduct.”

                  --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

 

More Boyd

The individuality of authors is no more a product of the West, the Enlightenment, or the bourgeoisie than is the individuality of apes, and has no more reason to be hushed up. As readers of others and readers of authors, we have always had an intuitive grasp of individuality that we enjoy and rely on and need to articulate more clearly as part of literary theory, and that we can now trace to the capacity ofr discriminating individuals and intentions evident in many animal species.

Brian Boyd again

Much of Theory, since Roland Barthes's 1968 announcement of the "death of the author," has sought--or professed--to downplay the individual, using the rhetorical strategy of referring not to authors but to texts, as if they were self-created or the product only of "systems of cultural production." In fact even if they have nominally challenged the idea of the "single historically defined author," most critics have continued to discuss single historically definable authors in articles and books that they would be indignant not to have attributed to their own single historically defined selves.

Explanations in terms of cultural difference tend to lack many links in their proposed causal chains. "Refletionist" explanations of art, which assume that art immediately reflects its time or place, pre-suppose either that ages have a unitary spirit or that different pursuits within a period are inevitably contesting representations of the age. Film critic David Bordwell notes that top-down explanations in terms of an era repeatedly begin from preconceived notions and are very selective in their presentation of supporting evidence, first in the historical data and then in the artistic works they choose and the details they choose from them. He also observes that scholars who commit themselves "to a search for a single overarching pattern tend not to treat historical actions as shaped by a multitude of factors." Such sweeping explanations turn people into passive conduits of the impulse of the age or participants in an unavoidable common debate, rather than treating individuals as different in susceptibility to influence, according to their capacities, positions, roles, aims, and interests.

   --Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories

Poems online

It's always a nice surprise to receive an acceptance for poems you forgot you sent out. Which happened to me the other day, as I got an email from the poetry editor of The Island Review, a newish and very sharp-looking online magazine, telling me that they wanted to publish two of the poems I sent them last December. (Nowhere near my personal record for elapsed time between submission and acceptance, which belongs to Elysian Fields Quarterly, who wrote me an acceptance message some three years after I sent them a clutch of baseball sonnets.) 

TIR is based in Shetland and focuses on island-based and/or -themed writing. The poems they took are from Track & Trace, so nothing new to readers of my work, but I'm guessing that readers of TIR and readers of ZW are cohorts that don't much overlap, so it's nifty that these old poems have found a new home so far from my own shores. I'm also tickled about the publication because TIR's poetry editor is the redoubtable Jen Hadfield, whose work I admire a great deal.

Get Baffled

It isn't officially out till next month, but you can pre-order a copy of my new chapbook, Baffle, from Baseline Press now. They're only making 60 copies, so if you want one, I wouldn't dilly-dally.

Jeweller's "I"

Jeffery Donaldson has done a brilliant reading of my poem "I" over at his new video blog, The Jeweller's Eye. Really worth checking out all his entries. The blog is already a master class in close reading.

NOTES ON BUILDING A DRY STONE RETAINING WALL

Stagger your seams. Vary sizes so that

large stones appear bolder. Resort to

the cold chisel only once all other

options exhausted. Stagger. Don't squander

your shims. You'll need them. So. Good drainage

is key. Stagger your seams. No such thing as too much

backfill. Stagger your. What's buried behind

matters as much as the face. Cultivate

a rustic, rough-finished ideal. Creeping

thyme will hide your mistakes. Stagger your

seams. The wall should lean back, ever so

subtly. If so, it will hold the hill's slow

surge a spell and come to stand for itself.