Anything But Hank review

There's a nice little review, by someone named Robyn McNeil, of Anything But Hank! in the new issue of Tidings, the University of King's College alumni mag:

Choosing a baby’s name can be difficult. When my child was born, months of research and consideration had been whittled down to a short list of over 200 possibilities. Finding a suitable moniker that doesn’t lend itself to teasing or playground fodder, let alone one you like, can be a struggle at best.

Herein lies the crux of the problem in Anything But Hank!, the first children’s book by Rachel Lebowitz and King’s alumnus Zachariah Wells (BAH ’99), a whimsical narrative illustrated by Eric Orchard. Eight weeks after the birth of a little boy, his parents still haven’t agreed on a name and, according to the family cat, the child’s relentless tears won’t cease until he has a title all his own. So one night, while the boy’s parents sleep, a wise old pig puts the crabby tot on his back and they set off to find the wizard whose Mexican beaded lizard has a talent for knowing the name meant for every child.

Broken into five chapters, Lebowitz’s and Wells’s tale combines fanciful humour reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s literary nonsense with the adventure-narrative style of Robert Service’s ballads. The result is an entertaining read for all ages, though my kindergarten-aged son was especially delighted by the whimsy in the story’s rhymes.

The lushly gorgeous paintings of the Halifax-based illustrator that accompany the story add to the book’s allure. Paired with the writers’ quirky prose, Orchard’s darkly haunting illustrations elevate the Biblioasis publication from common tale to treasured keepsake, perfect for sharing at story time.

Children and parents alike will love the unusual adventure that unfolds in this oddly enjoyable tale, as they uncover the answer to whether the unnamed child “needs a word, a quiet space that he could call his own, needs a name to match his face, a name he can call home.”

United Breaks Guitars

This is hilarious. Well done, Mr. Carroll.

One of my tasks as an airline cargo agent was processing claims for damage or loss. One of my great frustrations was following up on those claims with First Air's Claims Department, which might as well have been called the Claims Rejection Department. Granted a lot of damage is the fault of the passenger for poorly packaging their stuff or for using already damaged luggage. But the claims departments of airlines treat all claimants as scammers, which seems like bad business practice to me.

In my experience, baggage handlers rarely go out of their way to intentionally damage luggage or cargo, but when you handle thousands of pieces each day, it's unrealistic to expect special treatment for one piece or another. We used to joke about things covered in "Fragile" stickers. Fra-jee-lay, what is that, some kind of salad dressing? But in order to actually break a guitar in a proper case--I have to wonder if this was a foam-padded travelling case; if not, the airline might have a point--you'd practically have to drive over it to damage the contents.

Here's a poem from Unsettled, from the baggage handler's perspective:

LITANY OF ARCTIC SAMSONITE

Lord liftin’, the godawful

junk folk hauls in

‘n’ outta this spot. Frozen

half rottened walrus. Boxed-up

scrap from the dump. Laundry

soap. Kibble. Rubbermaids

tie-wrapped shut, empty

southbound, stogged full o’

canned stuff comin north—

bust yer back just to

deadlift ‘em. ‘n’ the liquor,

of course—you’d think

the stunned cunts’d know

to not put bottles in soft-

sided baggage—get buzzed

off the whisky whiff

in the pits. Duffles loaded

with stone—small wonder

the handles tear off

in your grip—but sure’s shit

the cocksuckers’ll curse ya

fer each little rip

in their threadbare kit.

Steady go with them

white plastic sacks

from the Northern—2000

buck ticket, sure, but can’t

spare a red cent for a stitch

o’ halfway sensible luggage.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer reads from Perfecting

I've finally got around to uploading the audio from Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's reading last week. Christy Ann Conlin, author of Heave, read briefly before Kathryn, but I forgot to turn on my recorder until Kathryn started, so there's an anecdote she tells before reading that's a bit out of context. Following the reading, there's a Q&A session with Kathryn, Conlin and Nova Scotia novelist Stephanie Domet, author of Homing. Enjoy.

Sui Seidel

An excellent piece of criticism by Ange Mlinko on Frederick Seidel, the improbable anti-darling of the poetry world.

I had a discussion with someone recently about the validity of comparing and contrasting one poet's work with another in a review. It's something that's often done badly (which is to say arbitrarily or inappropriately, with the reviewer essentially saying something as critically vacuous as "look, this isn't real poetry, this is poetry"), but when chosen well, as Mlinko does here, a comparison can be damningly effective.

I recently read Ooga-Booga and found it quite striking. One doesn't see many poets--hardly any--intentionally embracing objectively bad writing for aesthetic effect. I wonder if anyone has ever drawn a link between Seidel and John Skelton? Another poet he reminds me of is the Roman dialect writer Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, a selection of whose vulgarly gossipy sonnets I've been reading lately, as translated--quite brilliantly--by Mike Stocks. All three poets are entertaining, but not terrifically profound.

I like that Mlinko brought up the problem of Seidel's range; how his signature style palls over the course of a collected volume. Ooga-Booga is occasionally brilliant and disturbing, but even over the span of that relatively short collection, Seidel's trademark techniques come to feel like one trick repeated over and over. And a pretty cheap, gaudy trick at that. Range--and its corollary, development--is to me one of the defining characteristics--if not the defining characteristic--of really great poetry: how a poet adapts his or her voice to a variety of modes, moods, situations and subjects; how a poet moves from one thing to another, both in the short term of a single collection and over the long haul of a lifetime's work; how open a poet is to experimentation--not for its own sake, but for the sake of getting the poem right. (Of course, openness to experimentation at one point in a poet's life can easily--especially when that experimentation leads to the serendipitous discovery of a signature style--calcify into rigid sameness later on.) Lack of range is the Achilles heel of an enormous number of talented poets and what leads so many in later work into self-parodic repetitions of earlier more successful efforts. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of credibility. If a poet repeatedly hits the same note, I have a hard time believing that there's a complete, authentic engagement with the world and with the poem. The poem starts to seem like a slapped-on lamination or a shake-n-bake recipe, more an issue of the poet's ego expressing itself than integrating itself with its environment.

A Lesson in Botany

Thanks to a poem of Robert Bringhurst's, I now know of a 24 lb. parasitic flower that stinks of rotting flesh. Damn him for getting to it first. I wonder if creationists ever use Rafflesia arnoldi as evidence for God's existence...

Perfecting

I'm off to hear Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer read from her new novel at Frog Hollow Books tonight. I'll see if I can make a tape.

Tim Horton's Nation

A feature on The Current this morning about the "Canadian distaste for being above average." Well worth a listen if you haven't caught it already.

Late-Breaking News in Retrograde Praxis

A sect of carpenters who refuse to use nailguns has just been uncovered in Canada. People are calling them the Neo-Hammerists.

There Is No Such Thing As "New Formalism" in Canada

I don't mean to keep picking on Paul Vermeersch, but if he keeps making erroneous statements, I have little choice. In a recent blog post, he opines:

[James] Langer is a poet clearly energized by the present-day Canadian renaissance

of New Formalism in lyric poetry (which is the hot topic in CanPo according to its champions ...and only 25 years behind the Americans who have long since moved on to more interesting discussions).

Where to start? First of all, saying that there is a "present-day ... renaissance of New Formalism" implies that the movement had some kind of prior life in Canada. It didn't. New Formalism as such is an exclusively American phenomenon. As the entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics opens: "A reaction, in late 20th-c. Am. poetry, against free verse and a return to metrical and fixed stanza forms." There were magazines, particularly The Formalist, and anthologies associated with the movement and there were poets who identified --and who continue to identify--with it explicitly. As the Encyclopedia entry makes clear: "This is not to say that poetry in traditional forms was not being written in America in the 1940s, '50s, '60s, and '70s." Of course it was, mostly by people little concerned with being part of a school or movement (the Encyclopedia cites Lowell, Hecht, Merrill and Berryman as prominent examples). The movement was, as movements tend to be, more an attempt to consolidate a share of lit-political power, than a reflection of the practice of poets.

In Canada, there has been a similar continuity in the writing of metrical poems, even while free verse has been, and continues to be, the predominant mode--and while anthologists have systematically ignored most of the strongest metrical verse being written here. Unlike the US, there has been nothing resembling a movement here to enshrine the practice. Small clusters perhaps, but no magazines, no manifestoes, no CW programs dedicated to it or biased towards it. There was an anthology, In Fine Form, a few years ago, but its editors, while clearly interested in the possibilities of traditional verse structures, can't seriously be considered as "formalists." Also, the anthology is historical and not contemporary, unlike Jarman and Mason's provocatively titled Rebel Angels.

So, if there's no movement, there are also no champions. Presumably alluded to by Paul is Carmine Starnino, since the former recently asserted that the latter is a promulgator of "formalist orthodoxy." So, if Langer is a product of the "New Formalism" "championed" by Carmine, he should be overjoyed about Langer's book, right? Oh, but wait. In the Globe and Mail review of Gun Dogs I linked to and discussed a little while ago, Carmine said that the arrival Langer's very good book is ill-timed because it slots too neatly in with a constellation of other books published in the years preceding it. So much for "fashionable" being favoured by the fashion's "champions."

Getting back to Langer's book, which I don't think should be seen as an avatar of the retarded New Formalism of Canada--whether or not you think that's a good thing: if you engage with the actual poems of the book, you'll have a hard time seeing much influence from Langer's contemporaries, who are supposedly "energizing" him. Frost is a touchstone of the book, but Langer's translation of the opening lines of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer" shows that he has sent his taproot deep into a line of poetry beginning in the Middle Ages and moving into the present thru Wyatt, Coleridge, Clare, Hopkins, Hardy, Frost (of course), Hughes and Heaney. That's where the prosody is coming from, not from some ephemeral--which is not to say imaginary--present-day movement.

What we're seeing in Canada right now is more an exhaustion of the possibilities of loosely structured vers libre than a concentrated and deliberate reaction against it. Rhyme and metre have always been a part of poetry written in English and, as resources, they are no less relevant to the present moment than they ever were. The way these resources are employed differs considerably from their use in past ages; if it didn't, it truly would be retrograde. Very few of the poets who use metre and rhyme do so exclusively, making the designation of "formalist" even more dubious. I've appended an incomplete list of living Canadian poets who use metrical and stanzaic devices below. Very few of them do so near-exclusively. Daryl Hine and Wayne Clifford are exceptions. Hine, who sensibly rejects the label of "formalist," has been doing it, quite against the grain of fashion, since the '50s. Wayne Clifford's turn to "form" (one really has to put it in quotation marks because the notion that form pertains only to metrical poetry is ridiculous) came in the middle of his publishing silence, in the 1980s, when it really wasn't fashionable to be writing extended sonnet sequences.

As for the supposed fashionability of metre and rhyme, these days, I don't really see it, for all the interesting work being produced. As "Murray Citron" points out, as a response to Arc's ads for the Poem of the Year contest, in a recent letter to the editor:

There have now been 12 Poem of the Year contests, with three prizes each year. No rhyming poem has won first or second prize. In 2001, a partly rhymed poem took third prize. The rhymes were subdued, and may have escaped notice. Twenty-two poems have been printed with Honourable Mention. One, in 2005, rhymed violion, skin, and within. In 2001 there was a sestina [CLM: almost never a rhyming form]. There have been 78 Editor's Choices. Two, in 2004 and 2009, had rhymes. The rhymes were unconventional. As with the 2001 third prize winner, they may have slipped under the radar. That is 136 poems, four with rhymes, and a sestina. Who says rhyme doesn't pay?

If there's any impression of fashionability, it's because several editors not hostile to metre and rhyme are ensuring that the books get published, despite their continued unfashionability. Most notably, these editors are Starnino, Babstock, Clifford and Ormsby.

***

An incomplete list of living Canadian poets who use or have used metre and/or patterned rhyme with some regularity (please let me know who I've forgotten). I think the list shows that the common denominator of "formalism" is trivial at best.

George Amabile
Ken Babstock
Elizabeth Bachinsky
Mike Barnes
Brian Bartlett
Walid Bitar
J.D. Black
Christian Bok
Tim Bowling
Stephen Brockwell
Suzanne Buffam
Mark Callanan
Jason Camlot
Colin Carberry
George Elliott Clarke
Wayne Clifford
Don Coles
Pino Coluccio
Geoffrey Cook
Mary Dalton
Jeffery Donaldson
George Ellenbogen
Adam Getty
Catherine Graham
Richard Greene
Jason Guriel
Jen Hadfield
Steven Heighton
David Helwig
David Hickey
Daryl Hine
Michael Holmes
Nancy Holmes
Troy Jollimore
Sonnet L'Abbe
Anita Lahey
James Langer
Ross Leckie
Ian Letourneau
Michael Lista
David McFadden
David McGimpsey
Don McGrath
George McWhirter
Robert Moore
AF Moritz
George Murray
Shane Neilson
Barbara Nickel
Peter Norman
David O'Meara
Eric Ormsby
Catherine Owen
PK Page
Brian Palmu
Elise Partridge
Christopher Patton
Molly Peacock
Craig Poile
James Pollock
Alessandro Porco
Steven Price
Matt Rader
John Reibetanz
Peter Sanger
Richard Sanger
Robyn Sarah
Sandy Shreve
Goran Simic
Anne Simpson
Adam Sol
Karen Solie
David Solway
Carmine Starnino
Ricardo Sternberg
Shannon Stewart
Todd Swift
Brenda Tate
Bruce Taylor
Harry Thurston
Joshua Trotter
Peter Trower
Peter Van Toorn
Patrick Warner
[myself]
George Whipple
Alan R. Wilson
Carleton Wilson
Christopher Wiseman
David Zieroth

Dinah won't you blow

The railroad gods continue to smile on me, as once again I've been called to work a trip to Montreal. And I'll be training a student "Learning Coordinator"--junior to me in service, but senior where it counts, due to my transfers--to take trips away from me. O cruel irony! Oh well, it'll be a pretty sweet, easy ride letting him do all my work.

In Which I Am Posed 20 Questions...

...and manage, in the course of answering them, to pull my tongue out of my cheek once or twice.

Academicised

I just found out that my poem "Operation Surname" from Unsettled is being taught in a pretty cool-looking history course at Western. Neat. "Operation Surname" is a pretty atypical poem in Unsettled, more gnomic and based on historical events than the lyrical/narrative firsthand experience poems that predominate.

Have you seen...

...the new CNQ site yet?

Chugga-chugga

Well, despite being laid off with no immediate prospect of recall, I've got another railroad assignment tomorrow. If I keep getting one a week, and the government actually reforms EI, I might just make it thru to next year without having to take grossly underpaid temp work. O, my ambition is endless!

Craft Fatigue?

Carmine Starnino on James Langer's Gun Dogs in The Globe:

Poetic form has become a hot-button issue thanks to a group of tyros who have made it impossible to talk about anything else. The upside is that it's an exciting time for serious readers of Canadian poetry, here and abroad. The downside is that an admirable book like Gun Dogs – which might have emerged as a triumph when fewer such books existed – trails the herd. In fact, it's worse than a herd: a sub-genre. Gun Dogs is a prize example of what Newfoundland poet Patrick Warner calls “the School of Stacked Vowels and Clustered Consonants.”

Warner coined that phrase in a review of Steven Price's Anatomy of Keys. Members of that school he identified were myself, Carmine, Ken Babstock and Joe Denham. What struck me at the time was that each of us arrived at the style we were writing in pretty much independently. The only one who might have had a modicum of influence on me was Babstock, since Carmine's earlier works were quite a bit more muted in their effects than his With English Subtitles. I can't speak for anyone else, but I picked up a great deal of my prosody from Clare, Hopkins, Hardy, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. I know UK and Irish poets were important to Babstock, Carmine and Steven, too.

What Carmine identifies in the Langer review is something that's been bugging me of late (by which I mean, for a few years now): how to decompress my style and still write poems that feel like my poems and that don't fall into the too-looseness of the still-typical and utterly exhausted free-verse anecdote/lyric mode or the even looser structures of the "long poem" (I often have ideas for extended sequences, but never get very far with them; something there is in me that doesn't love a sprawl). I guess I've been subliminally aware that there's a growing vogue for the kind of verse I've written and have no interest in being part of a school or movement. Nor, I think, have I ever consistently written in one style or mode. Most of the poems in my new book bear scant resemblance to anything in Unsettled, even tho much of the two books' content was written during the same span of years (1998-2004). And even in Unsettled, Jeramy Dodds noted in a review that in many of the poems there was "no sign of [my] typical cadence, alliteration, or poignant compounds and kennings." This was a complaint from someone whom Mark Callanan recently identified as a new member of Warner's SSV&CC; indeed, Jeramy is probably the most thoroughgoing stacker and clusterer out there at the moment. His response to the increasing prevalence of such techniques may have been to ratchet it up. I think there's only so far one can go with this; as spectacular a book as Crabwise to the Hounds is, I think it's a formal cul-de-sac: if he keeps writing that way, courting too-muchness at every turn, I don't see how he can avoid a descent into self-imitation or even self-parody. I'm certainly interested in seeing what kind of direction Jeramy takes after the runaway success of Crabwise.

I'm likewise very keen to see what Joe Denham's been up to. Looks like his second book--following his highly acclaimed, but wildly uneven debut, Flux--is coming out this fall. It's been six years since Flux was published and I know Denham has said in an interview in CV2 that he probably published it too early (a statement that sparked a letter of protest to CV2 from his publisher, who probably didn't appreciate Denham undermining his own book), so I think we can look forward to a pretty thoughtful re-purposing.

Carmine's response, as I suggested the other day, seems to have been to get more plain and direct, as in the closing sequence of This Way Out. I don't know if those poems were written later than the others in the book, but it certainly feels that way.

But one should be wary of making too-confident statements about poetic development. When I saw Carmine a few weeks ago in Montreal, he mentioned my poem "What He Found Growing in the Woods" as a signpost of a marked departure, a leap forward, from the poems in Unsettled. Which is funny because, as I pointed out to Carmine, that poem was first published in my chapbook Fool's Errand, nearly six months before Unsettled went to press, and was written a couple of years prior to that. Narratives of progress in poetry are almost always suspect, it seems to me, since the whole game is, as Randall Jarrell said and as I like to tell students when I visit classrooms, rather like playing pin the tail on the donkey, only there's no tail and no donkey.

Guest Poem

CAMELUS SALTAT
George Meredith

What say you, critic, now you have become
An author and maternal?--in this trap
(To quote you) of poor hollow folk who rap
On instruments as like as drum to drum.
You snarled tut-tut for welcome to tum-tum,
So like the nose fly-teased in its noon's nap.
You scratched an insect-slaughtering thunder-clap
With that between the fingers and the thumb.
It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch,
Which bade our public gobble or reject.
O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked,
Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch!
What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere,
You dealt?--the voice austere, the jeer, the sneer.

Sucker Punned

1. The roundest knight at King A rthur's round table was -- -- Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.



2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island -- -- but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.



3. She was only a whisky maker -- -- but he loved her still.



4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class -- -- because it was a weapon of math disruption. ;



5. The butcher backed into the meat grinder -- -- and got a little behind in his work.



6. No matter how much you push the envelope, -- -- it'll still be stationery.



7. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road -- -- and was cited for littering.



8. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France -- -- would result in Linoleum Blownapart.



9. Two silk worms had a race -- -- they ended up in a tie.



10. Time flies like an arrow -- -- fruit flies like a banana.



11. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall -- -- the police are looking into it.



12. Atheism --- is a non-prophet organisation.



13. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway -- -- One hat said to the other, 'You stay here, I'll go on a head.'



14. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger -- -- then, it hit me



15. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab centre said -- -- ‘Keep off the Grass.'



16. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital -- -- his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, 'No change yet.'



17. A chicken crossing the road -- -- is poultry in motion.



18. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison -- -- was a small medium at large.



19. The man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray -- -- is now a seasoned veteran.



20. A backward poet -- -- writes inverse.



21. In democracy, it's your vote that counts. -- -- in feudalism, it's your count that votes..



22. When cannibals ate a missionary -- -- they got a taste of religion..



23. Don't join dangerous cults -- -- practice safe sects!

This Way Out

Unencumbered by bothersome word counts and two-dimensional prejudices, Brian Palmu reviews Carmine Starnino's new book, poem by poem.

Tramping thru the Trilliums

Big congrats to Pasha Malla and Jeramy Dodds on winning Trillium prizes. Always nice to see good people and good writers, moreover, doing well in these lotteries. Pasha says that the pot, to a poor fellah like him, feels like a fortune, but I'm always struck by how little money is involved, compared with, say, CC grants. A writer with a couple of books under the belt can take home two $20K grants in four years--and stands a much better chance of winning the grants than a prize. Even the Griffin seems not so ritzy--one wonders just how much gets spent on all the hoopla surrounding that one-- when put in this perspective.

Speaking of Jeramy Dodds, after some Canada Post misadventures I've finally got my copy of Riddle Fence #3, which features a snappy Norse translation by Mr. Dodds. Mark Callanan and co. have done a very nice job with RF. I can't think of many mags with as much interesting content as this little east coast upstart. Besides Jeramy's translation and two poems by yours truly, #3 features a couple of poems each by Starnino, Guriel (if you haven't read his new book, Pure Product, you really should; it's delightful) and Babstock, an excellent trio by James Langer and very good reviews by Patrick Warner and James Pollock. There's some fiction and non-fiction, too, which I've not yet got to.

I'll be working...

...on the railroad!

Yes, that's right. Just as I was getting ready to blow the dust off my sad-ass c.v. to look for 10 buck an hour temp work, I got a call to work a trip to Montreal. I'm still not recalled from layoff, but if this happens with some regularity, I won't have to look for something else. Here's hoping. Choo. Choo.

The Ugly Big Toe of Essentialism

Thanks to Simon at the Vehicule blog for pointing out this review, by Paul Vermeersch, of Carmine Starnino's latest book, This Way Out.

Paul and Carmine are both friends of mine. Paul published and edited my first collection of poems and Carmine's editing my new one, so I read this with particular interest. In the review, Paul tries to square the "the starchy and strait-laced critic" with the free-wheeling flights of Carmine's poems. One reason he fails to see a connection between the criticism and the verse is that he clearly hasn't been reading Carmine's prose as closely as he did the poems in TWO; there's a great deal more to it than "formalist orthodoxy"--examples of which aren't to be found in Paul's review, so we'll just have to take his word for it. All we get in this review is a caricature of Carmine the Critic. I'll ask the same question Paul poses in the first paragraph of his review: Is this as it should be? If you're going to bring the criticism into a review of the poems, you should do better than accepting the received wisdom and regurgitating the usual stereotype.

It's too bad that Paul didn't mention the closing sequence of TWO, "The Strangest Things." The plain speech and confessional directness of these poems represent the real departure from Carmine's critical positions, as I see it, and as such represent the riskiest gambit in the book. And the risk pays bigtime dividends; it's a beautifully moving suite, probably the best part of the collection. And it shows what Paul either doesn't recognize or acknowledge: that Carmine (the critic and the poet who aren't different guys after all) isn't a flat-footed writer, but is always ready to change directions, evolve, and surprise. Which is probably why the arrows on the cover of his book point four different ways.

I think the last poem of the book, "Hairline Wall Crack, Study, Parc Ex Flat," goes a long way towards resolving Paul's puzzlement (and maybe explains why I haven't got any edits from Carmine yet, nudge-nudge):

It takes me so long
to get up to speed,
I'm sometimes left asking
whether the job was worth starting. Afraid a foot set down
will be a foot put wrong,
I hem and haw,
think twice, weigh one direction
against another, ignore the can't-put-my-finger-on-it feeling
something's
come undone. Momentum, a work-in-progress.
I eye my options.
Eye them again. It takes time.
It can take all day.

Event

For all you addicts out there jonesing for your next fix of Wellsian verse, you can get hooked up in the new issue of Event, in which appears my anaphoric litany in falling rhyme, "Ego Sum." That should help keep my creditors at bay.

Speaking of which, my unemployment benefits seem to have expired, so Monday I'll be sending out resumes to temp agencies, oh joy. I'm not averse to doing a bit of freelance editing, if anyone feels like hiring me.

Why Do People Hate James Wood?

Steven Beattie weighs in with a post about a post about people loving and hating poetry.

For the record, I agree with Wood that poetry doesn't need to justify itself in the terms of another discourse, be it evolutionary psychology's or neuro-aesthetics'. I'm just saying that the leading figures speaking those discourses aren't saying what Wood says they're saying. I'm saying that everything's connected and poetry isn't some special thing that floats above the world on a magenta cloud.

More Love for Sonneto Canadensis

Reviews for Jailbreaks have been coming in fast 'n' furious. I got an email the other day from a hotel manager in Kingston telling me that Jailbreaks had inspired him to write his own sonnets. And this morning, this enthusiastic piece penned by Micheline Maylor for Freefall Magazine came across my desk. Please, do as she says, if you haven't already! Last I talked to Dan at Biblioasis, sales were somewhat lower than hoped; because of all the contributor fees that had to be paid, it's harder to break even on this sort of book than on an individual poet's collection. Obviously no one's in this racket for the money, but I hate to see my publisher in the red for a book of such obvious appeal!

More Ritz

Big congrats to Al Moritz on winning the poetry jackpot (aka, the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry). I'm reading with Al in Toronto in November. Maybe he'll buy me a beer...

A POLISH MAN

A Polish man wanders the airport.
He has no English.
His mother's been sent home.

A Polish man wanders the airport.
He has no polish.
He is iron, not chrome.

A Polish man wanders the airport.
He has anguish.
He wants to go home.

A Polish man wanders the airport.
He is finished.
His ductile bones chant Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.

More bright ideas from the neo-liberal goons calling themselves Conservatives

Sounds like, surprise-surprise, Harper would like to privatize the CBC and Via Rail. If it happens, I'll be permanently out of a job, as there's no way a for-profit private company would continue running year-round trans-continental rail service. Which would be a Bad Thing for the country, never mind me and my colleagues. I hope this isn't something they can do ex-Parliament.

Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene

I don't know that this is quite what Nietzsche had in mind, but it's about time!

Rock(as)sa(u)lt

There's an incisively critical review of the Rocksalt anthology up at The Danforth Review (which, sadly, will be closing shop indefinitely). The review's by Catherine Owen and is written from the perspective of someone arbitrarily excluded from the book because she'd moved to Alberta from her home province of BC a couple of years previously. She mentions me as a contributor who benefitted from the eligibility criteria, since I'd moved to BC shortly after she'd moved away. The argument is, and I think it's totally legitimate, that she has more business being in the book than I do. She does go on to say that my poem is one of the strongest in the anthology, and I'm one of the 33 contributors--by her count--whose poem is squarely located in a specific BC locale. Catherine thinks this is how the book should be oriented, but I'm not so sure. Tilting an anthology towards site-specific poems usually results in a) a lot of second-rate poems being included because they're thematically appropriate (tho, as she points out, insisting on new, unpublished poems is at least as likely to dilute the brew) and b) an overall picture of the culture of a place that is misleadingly provincial because it excludes poets who don't give a hoot about birds, bears, mountains or forests.

Speaking from the anthologist's side of the fence, I sympathise with the editors because some kind of arbitrary criteria simply have to imposed if you're going to make your job a manageable one. Figuring out what those criteria are--and how flexible you're going to be about them--is a crucial task, on which the aesthetic success or failure of the anthology depends. My anthology had one very obvious pre-set limit: each poem had to be a sonnet. This is trickier than it might seem at a glance, since the sonnet in the 21st century is not necessarily a 14-line poem in a set rhyme scheme (nor has it been in past centuries, but the exceptions to the rule are far more normal now than when Milton was caudating or Hopkins was curtailing). A second limit I set myself was that all the poems had to have been published in book form--essentially the opposite of the Rocksalt rule. Rhenisch and Fertig didn't want to deal with permissions, I didn't want to deal with an open call; in retrospect, sifting thru a pile of submissions would have been much easier than the countless hours I spent spelunking in the Special Collections at the Killam Library, but I highly doubt I'd have received many, if any, poems to supercede those I'd found in my digs. So the work would have been easier, but the yield much lower; I think Catherine's right to criticize the Rocksalt editors on that score.

I did exercise my judgment in making a few exceptions to the book-published rule, pace the criticism of Sarah Neville that I ignored literary journals; for example, I included Catherine Owen's collaboration with Joe Rosenblatt, which I first encountered in an issue of Prairie Fire, before they had secured a deal for the book in which it now appears. As far as nationality goes, a number of the poets in the book are ambiguously--or perhaps amphibiously--Canadian. My rule on this was to err on the side of inclusiveness, which Owen is--correctly, I think--arguing Rhenisch and Fertig should have. As readers of Jailbreaks are aware, I was frustrated by the close-minded refusal of Elizabeth Bishop's publisher to let me consider her as a Canadian poet.

It's hard to imagine editors of a PEI anthology excluding me or, say, Steve McOrmond or David Hickey on the basis of present-day non-residence; this would be no more reasonable than excluding Richard Lemm for being born in the US or John Smith, PEI's former laureate, because he's from Ontario. I think maybe British Columbians take it more for granted that if someone has defected from their most sublime of provinces, it's because they don't want to be there--instead of because it's a prohibitively expensive place to live, especially if you prefer the sort of lifestyle most writers do.

Goin' Fishing

It's so funny when publishers pull "praise" from less than praiseful reviews. For example this, which says nothing about the book in question, and which you'd never know came from this. It's one thing to quote disingenuously, but couldn't they at least do it right? "... one of the most gifted poets in the country" perhaps?

F&D review of Jailbreaks

Jailbreaks has been reviewed by Karl Jirgens for Canadian Literature. Apparently, it contains "sonnets." Who knew?

"I mean I'd like to butter his canoli all night long."

When Oscar Wilde said the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, I don't think he had something like this in mind. Or maybe he did.

The most negative review of all

Thanks to Carmine at the Vehicule blog for pointing out this very thoughtful post on reviewing by Alfred Corn. Someone I reviewed a while back told me recently to "stay the [expletive deleted] out of my way." Corn suggests that wouldn't be in her best interest; I tend to agree, but am happy to oblige.

Derek Walcott on Robert Frost

Pound's poetry does not absolve Pound, any more than a single phrase from a letter by Frost damns Frost forever. One groans or shudders, but one pushes on. Poetry is its own realm and does not pardon. There is nothing to forgive Frost's poetry for. There are, instead, many poems to be grateful for, so many poems, indeed, that the man, the biography, the symbol of Yankee resilience are all negligible, since poetry pronounces benediction not on the poet but on the reader. A great poem is a state of raceless, sexless, timeless grace, and this book, which contains more than just a life, is too full of such benedictions for this reader not to pick it up and continue. -- "The Road Taken"

Formal Fallacies

Been reading the new issue of Arc. It's another strong, interesting issue of what has become one of the top literary rags in the country. One of the great things in this issue is a feature called "White Salt Mountain," devoted to various poets talking about John Thompson's work.

One of those poets is Allan Cooper. In an interview with Janna Graham, who organized the White Salt Mountain festival in Sackville, Cooper says something that kinda sticks in my craw:

JG: What is your experience of writing in forms (as opposed to free verse)? What are your thoughts on the resurgence of form in Canadian poetry today?

AC: I employ the ghazal form in my poems, or at least my version of the ghazal, but I stopped writing sonnets and villanelles when I was in my teens. I found that formal verse couldn't contain the extreme states I was seeing in the world. When I first started writing serious poetry, the Vietnam War was coming to an end, and an American cargo plane full of Vietnamese children crash-landed. I think all of the children were lost. So how could I write about that experience in a formal poem? I needed colloquial speech--free verse--to get that experience across.

There are so many things wrong with this statement I hardly know where to start, but here goes:

1) Cooper is basically saying that formal verse is okay for kids, but grownups facing real issues need free verse, thereby tacitly dismissing anyone who writes the former.

2) He is guilty of the logical fallacy of generalising from a particular. Instead of saying that he didn't feel that he could write about certain subjects in rhyme and metre, he says that those structures are somehow incapable of containing those subjects, no matter who tried. Never mind Wilfred Owen, Cooper knows better, 'cause, you know, he heard about some kids dying on the news. Classy. What Allan probably should have said is that he stopped writing rhyming verse because a) he was crappy at it or b) none of the cool kids were writing it (Cooper's mentor Alden Nowlan famously abandoned rhyming poems for free verse) and he just really wanted to fit in and write achingly naive liberal-minded poems about how awful war is.

3) Pace Allan Cooper, there is no equation between "colloquial speech" and free verse. Lots of free verse is highly formal in terms of diction and syntax (KJ Bible anyone?) and lots of rhyming, metred verse is colloquial (see Carmine Starnino's review of David O'Meara's latest book in the same issue of Arc).

4) Allan doesn't even try to answer the second part of the question, presumably because he doesn't know anything about it, since he's still living in the 1970s, apparently. Groovy.

Cooper would do well to heed Peter Sanger's answer to the same question:

Poetry is form. Without form it is non-poetry. Anyone who turns to free verse to avoid scansion, rhyme, regular stanza pattern and other similar disciplines will write bad poetry. Good free verse cannot be written without some substantial grounding [ed.: i.e. beyond having a few juvenile pokes at it] in formal verse, although it can, of course, be faked by a parasitic extension of the style of another poet who is or was so grounded.

Jen Hadfield

While we were in Scotland, I picked up a few books by Scottish poets. I haven't managed to read anywhere near all of them yet, but a highlight so far has been Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield. The book caused a bit of a sensation across the pond, as Hadfield, at the tender age of 30, became the youngest author ever to win the TS Eliot Prize. The book was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize. And justly so. I love the colloquial vigour, formal inventiveness and restless venturing of this book; I don't get that snap of connection with very many contemporary collections, but I do with this one.

Hadfield, it turns out, has Canadian roots (and citizenship), as her mother's from this side, and much of the book was written during, or about, extensive travels through Canada, going from Halifax to Vancouver by train--I wonder...--and up the Dempster Highway into the Western Arctic. Such latitudes are not unfamiliar to her--even if the landscapes would have been--as she lives in Shetland, north of the Scottish mainland (and nominally Scottish, but don't dare suggest as much to the locals). Most of the best poems in the book are rooted in the Shetlands and are peppered with Shetlandic vocabulary.

Hear me Read Jen Hadfield's "Self-portrait as a Fortune-telling Miracle Fish" (with thanks to Bloodaxe Books for permission)




Some links:

Profile at Poetry International

Interview at Abe Books

Another interview

A poem

4 poems

Hear Jen Hadfield read "Paternoster"

Review of Nigh-No-Place

Another Review

Article in The Independent

Article in The Times, including 3 poems

Trillium Award Shortlists Announced

Gawd, if such good shortlists keep getting released, soon there'll be nothing left for me to grumble about. Just learned that both Jeramy Dodds' Crabwise to the Hounds and Adam Sol's Jeremiah, Ohio have made the shortlist for this year's Trillium Poetry Prize. For Jeramy, this represents a trifecta, since he's also up for the Gerald Lampert Award and the Griffin Prize, no less. And this after already scooping the Bronwen Wallace and CBC Literary awards. Crabwise appears to be a juggernaut of unstoppable force! I thought Adam Sol's book would be nominated for more than it has--it deserves to be--so I'm glad to see it hasn't been shut out altogether. This is his second Trillium nomination, if I'm not mistaken.

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

Twice have I killed

a rat in my wife's

presence—

The first time was outdoors:

She said she would

divorce me.

Second time was in our kitchen:

She fell sobbing

on my breast.

The impact of these events

on the rats has yet

to be reckoned.

Frog Hollow Press: Book Sale

Hi everyone,

We're having a sale of some older titles to make room on our shelves for forthcoming books.
Please see our website for further details: www.froghollowpress.com

---

TRACERY & INTERPLAY by matt robinson
letterpressed, hand-sewn chapbook - regular price $25 on sale for $20

ALDEN NOWLAN & ILLNESS edited by Shane Neilson
letterpressed, case-bound hard cover - regular price $90 on sale for $75

A SET OF DEADLY NEGOTIATIONS by George Murray
letterpressed, hand-sewn chapbook - regular price $35 on sale for $20

NOW THAT YOU REVIVE by A.F. Moritz
Smyth-sewn paperback - regular price $35 on sale for $25

EDITING MORITZ Shane Neilson & A.F. Moritz
Smyth-sewn paperback - regular price $35 on sale for $25

Why?

Thanks to Peter Darbyshire for pointing out this piece. Like him, I have nothing to say.

Oh poo!

Normally, I don't enter poetry contests, but when I caught wind--pardon the pun, you'll see--of a rather, erm, special one in Florida, I couldn't resist squeezing out an entry. The contest was hosted by a colonoscopy clinic, with a top prize of $500 USD. The catch: the poem had to be about colonoscopy. The exchange rate being favourable and the contest being free to enter, I figured, shit, why not, I'm a professional, I'll give it a toot.

Well, the winners have been announced, along with a good many runners up and yours truly did not cut the cheese. It turns out I should have written a limerick. And I should have gone the cautionary tale/didactic route instead of agonized introspection (mixed with cheeky allusions to the Great Las Vegas Colonoscopy Scandal. Oh well, I could second guess till the gastroenterologists come home. Here's what I did do, for your amusement or disgust:

Colonoscopy Prayer

O Lord, let this procedure not presage my end.

Let this be painless.

Let the nurse be not too young or attractive.

Let the doctor have mercy.

Let the scope be smooth and warm as it enters.

Let my bowels be inactive.

Let the clinic be cleanly.

Let its staff be attentive.

Lord, let me not go to Las Vegas.

Let this be painless.

Let the drugs be effective.

Let the lens find no lesions or polyps.

Should it find polyps, let them be mite-sized.

Should it find lesions, don't let them be cancers.

Let them be easily excised.

Let this be painless.

Let me have answers.

Let me lead my kids into adulthood.

Let me be my wife's final companion.

Let us see the Grand Canyon.

Don't let it be because I went to Las Vegas.

Let me have patience.

Let this be over.

Let it be painless.

I may not have a job...

...but I've got rhythm! Four poems from my forthcoming collection are now online for your reading pleasure or pain at Rhythm Poetry Magazine. Editor Mary Kathryn Arnold would like me to let you know that if you're writing metrical verse, she welcomes your submissions of same.

Dim Prospects

I went into work the other day for the first time since early November. It wasn't for a trip, just an information "refresher" session. The information I received was none too refreshing. Looks like the recession has hit tourism pretty damn hard, and since most of Via's increased summer ridership is directly tied to tourism, the numbers are way down. What this means for me and many of my colleagues is more weeks without work. Looks like I might not be recalled till mid-June, whereas last year it was early May. I normally wouldn't mind this, but the last couple of months have been rather expensive for this normally frugal household. So: if you're thinking of travelling somewhere within Canada, and can spare a little extra time in transit, please take the train!

Kill a Critic

As long as it's not me. Well, if it's only imaginary, that's okay.

Pretty cool contest being held at Biblioasis. Details:

Everybody Hates a Critic,

Some people hate them more than others.

Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead kicks, err, off with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head, and literary revenge plays an increasingly important role as the novel unfolds. The literary world, and especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful – and occasionally murderous – place. Character assassinations abound, books are regularly murdered in the (shrinking) book pages across our fair land, while others are smothered with damningly faint praise. More than a few knives, even if thankfully metaphorical, have been buried hilt deep in authorial backs.

Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage and only have a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your evident talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.

To celebrate the launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead, Biblioasis and Seen Reading are teaming up to help you unleash the murder we know is in your heart with our Revenge-Lit contest. Pen a flash fiction of 250 words or so (though, in truth, no one is likely to count them) on the (fictional) literary critic whose body once filled the chalk outline and what he did to get there and send it by June 12th to revengelit@gmail.com. The best of the entries will be published as they are received at http://www.facebook.com/l/;RevengeLit.blogspot.com. The winning entry will:

1) Receive a one hundred dollar cash prize

2) Be published in a forthcoming issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries

3) A Biblioasis press catalogue of in-print trade titles (approx. 40 books, retail value approx. $1000.00)

Entries to be judged by Dan Wells, Julie Wilson and Terry Griggs.

Speaking of beautiful books, I got my contributor's copy of A Verse Map of Vancouver today and what a stunning production it is. I thought the Halifax antho I was in a few years ago was nice--it is--but this beats it hands down. A full-sized, full colour hardback coffee table book, Derek Von Essen's photos not only gorgeous but carefully chosen to accompany the selected poems. Wowzas. Kudos to George McWhirter for conceiving of the project and executing it so finely, to Von Essen for his hard work and beautiful results, and to the city and Anvil Press for not stinting in the production values. You can tell a lot of labour went into this--time well spent. And money well spent if you get yourself a copy.

Another reason to pre-order Track & Trace

As if you needed one! I'm told that the book will be designed by my fellow Prince Edward Island expat and graphic novelist extraordinaire, Seth. (Okay, so he's not technically an Islander, but his dad is.) Not that I had any doubt it would be a beautiful book, but it should be extra lovely in his hands. It's quite appropriate that someone with ties to the Island should be designing the book, since several of the poems are rooted there and others, broadly, are about not being there.

CNQ 2.0

Dan Wells has posted a sneak peak of the newlook CNQ website over at Thirsty. Looking sharp. Many thanks to my good friends at Sobule Design.

A lovely little note

...from a reader in Ontario, with an unauthorized, but not unwelcome, reproduction of a poem from Unsettled. Thanks!

Pre-order Track & Trace NOW!

Looks like my new book is available for pre-order on Amazon. Not all at once, now.

Jailbreaks Review

Just came across this review of Jailbreaks in Maple Tree Literary Supplement. While the review is mostly praiseful, Michèle Rackham poses the most pointed questions of any reviewer about specific exclusions. I'm glad she asked. I left Carman out because Carman was a terrible poet; had he been anything but a popular versifier who had the historical good fortune to be one of the earliest poets in the country, he'd be completely forgotten by now. His work is kept alive by academic life support. Dudek I left out because he was a dully pedantic poet; again, I don't know that anyone outside of academic specialists reads Dudek anymore. Livesay and Kroetsch very nearly made the cut, but I ultimately couldn't generate enough enthusiasm about the poems to include them. And the book, as her observations about the notes suggests, was intended to present poems I'm enthusiastic about, not to present a picture of the canon-as-is. Poems, not reputations.

Oh, and as for why Neff is next to Bailey:

Neff: "Consider an owl tracking thru the vulnerable / Night of a billion sleeping mice: you can be like that and kill!"

Bailey: "Look well upon the elm whose wittol root / roams like a hungry rat"

'Nuf said?

Reviews online

Still getting our house in order (a task made difficult by the fact that we have approximately half the furniture we need), so not much time for idle pursuits like blogging, but thought I'd alert you to the online presence of my brief reviews of Karen Solie's new collection, Pigeon, and Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, by, wait for it, Lisa Robertson. The latter should be required reading for those who think I review with some kind of hidden agenda or that I'm incapable of appreciating work radically unlike my own.

Still no call-back to work, which is a mixed blessing. I'm not especially looking forward to my return to wage slavery, but I've been spending way too much of the old savings lately. So, back to writing my next review...

Back at 'er

Contrary to what my last post might seem to suggest, I'm no longer in Scotland. I'm now back in New Scotland, staying with my flu-plagued family at a hotel prior to moving back into our old house in the North End of Halifax. Once I have time and energy to compose some thoughts and words, I'll do a big post--with photos!--on our trip, which was splendid.

ORKNEY REPORT

Everything here's impossibly old

and once you've seen one ruinous cottage

or roofless church, you're better off

breaking the spine of a book at the noust

than carrying on with the tour. It should

be said, though, that a crumbling broch

is far finer than abandoned brick-

n-mortar batteries, Brodgar boggles

the brain, and it must be something

else to see the solstice sun flicker

and ripple on the rear wall of Maeshowe—

but sure as this landmass drifted

from Orcadie, it'll all wind up

in the sea. Five millenia back,

the waves that buss the buttressed seawall

at Skara Brae were half a mile of dunes

away. The Old Man of Hoy's a peedie boy

compared with what’s crumpled about him.

Across Scapa Flow, the Flotta flare

burns all roofless day without blinking.

Dodds Does it Again!

I've spent all day getting ready for our trip to Scotland, so I'm late with this, but as you probably already know is that the Griffin Prize shortlist was announced today. I don't know if the world is changing or I'm just getting soft, but this is one of the best Canadian shortlists I've seen. Which doesn't necessarily mean that it has THE BEST books of the last year, not necessarily the same three books I'd've picked, but that it contains three strong books and no head-scratchingly weird choices (unlike the most recent GG award, about which readers of this blog have already heard far too much, sans doute). Kudos to Michael Redhill, this year's Canadian judge.

It should be noted that Redhill has been published by both Coach House and Anansi and was on the Coach House editorial board for several years in the 90s. So I wouldn't go so far as to say this was an unbiased judgment on his part, given that the list is comprised of two Anansi books and one Coach House publication. Given that the prize is funded by Anansi's owner, it would have looked a lot better if Redhill had managed to shortlist but one of their books. But as conflicts go, it's fairly tenuous. Not to say that there aren't conflicts, but none that I know of.

Anyway, enough of such speculations. I'm very glad for all three shortlistees, especially my pal Jeramy Dodds, who is having a damn good April to-date and is about to hit the road on a cross-country train tour. (Wonder where he got that idea?) This might just be the closest that yours truly ever gets to Griffin gold, as my name appears in Crabwise to the Hounds. Also, it should be noted that Kevin Connolly, also shortlisted, edited Jeramy's book. Gotta be a good day for him.

We're off to Edinburgh tomorrow evening, which seems scarcely possible. The flight with a 9 month old should be... interesting. How he manages jet lag even more so. I'll be popping in from time to time, but mostly enjoying my holiday before getting back to the grindstone in Halifax, working on the train and getting my house and grounds up to snuff. Ciao for now.

Heard Reading

I'm poet o' the day at Seen Reading today. You can also hear me reading Edwin Muir's post-apocalyptic masterpiece "The Horses" in the archive.

Mansfield Revue

Mansfield Press has started up a new feature on their website, "The Mansfield Revue." It includes my recent review essay of Pino Coluccio and Suzanne Buffam's books from CNQ 76.

ZW in the Post

My "NaPoMo" questionnaire is now up at The National Post's blog, The Afterword. Check it out.

Elise Partridge

Carmine Starnino, at the Vehicule blog, has pointed out this very good interview with Elise Partridge, conducted by Dani Couture for Northern Poetry Review. It doesn't seem to have been announced publicly yet, but I'm told that Elise has also been named inaugural poet-in-virtual-residence at Arc magazine. Her second book is also up for the Dorothy Livesay Award at the BC Book Prizes. Good to see so many good things happening for such a deserving writer. She's one of the folks I'll miss when we leave this coast.

More efficient and less time-consuming distribution of the communion elements

In case there was any doubt about the link between Christianity and the culture of conspicuous consumption capitalism...

You have a choice in life

Tho, admittedly, the distinction is often hard to make. Perhaps this is more differential diagnosis than ultimatum...

Gerald Lampert

The League of Canadian Poets, with its usual fanfare on such occasions, recently released the shortlist for this year's Gerald Lampert Award for best first poetry collection. It's an uncommonly good list this year--due in part, no doubt, to the presence of Barbara Nickel on the jury--with two of last year's best books, never mind debut collections, making the cut, and no egregious exclusions that I can think of. The two books of which I speak are Jeramy Dodds' Crabwise to the Hounds and Sachiko Murakami's The Invisibility Exhibit. Two very different books; I'd have a hard time choosing between 'em, were I a judge. Sachiko writes with skill and sangfroid about horrific subject matter. Jeramy assaults the page with a baroque barrage of sonorous imagery and metaphor. Neither one could conceivably write anything resembling the other's poems.

In another year, Katia Grubisic's What if Red Ran Out might be a serious contender, but tough comp in '09. A few months back I flipped through Johanna Skibsrud's book and took a pass; haven't looked at it closely enough to make a judgment, but what I saw didn't grab me. Chiles and Eichorn I know very little of. I hadn't even heard of Chiles' publisher, Cinnamon Press. Anyway, I've very curious to find out who wins this one.

"I'm working on a collection of poems that will be defined by the poems that end up being in it."

One of the only honest "project descriptions" I've ever heard. Likelihood of it getting Stu a Canada Council grant? Almost nil.

Julie Wilson interviewed...

...by Mark Medley at The Afterword, on the subject of 30 in 30.

The Cruellest Month

Hello, April. Blogger tells me this is the 801st post on CLM. Not including, of course, those that have been deleted. Pace the bean-counter, numbers lie as much as anyone else.

April is, of course, for better or for wourse, National Poetry Month. 30 days hath NaPoMo and as we know, Julie Wilson will be presenting 30 poets (or so) over at Seen Reading. She's already posted the archive, which is bound to grow. There you can hear all kinds of great stuff--I've only made a small dent myself--including yours truly reading a poem of his own and a poem of Edwin Muir's.

A bunch of other folks have undertaken similar serializations. The National Post's blog, The Afterword, will be publishing 30 poet profiles/Q&A's over the course of the month, including one of yours truly, on a date TBA. Angel House Press promises to also expose us to one verser a day. As does the League of Canadian Poets--members only, natch.

What am I doing for NaPoMo? Running. I handed the keys to my erstwhile apartment over to the landlord yesterday, our goods--what's left of them--were loaded on a truck on the 28th. We're now at no fixed address for 30 days. Right now, we're crashing at my sister-in-law's while she and her family are in Mexico. Tomorrow, my family and I head to Sechelt for a getaway weekend given to us by said sister-in-law as a marriage present last April and untaken advantage of till now due to Kaleb's birth and general busyness. On our return, we'll be spending a few days at my mother-in-law's in False Creek before leaving on April 8 (which happens to be my pa's 73rd birthday; so many of my relatives, including my darling wife, were born in April) for Scotland (another wedding gift, this one from Rachel's dad). We fly into Edinburgh, via Amsterdam, spend a night, then we rent a car and drive up to Stromness in the Orkneys (Rachel's mother's maiden name, coincidentally, is Strom), where we'll be spending what promises to be a glorious week in a stone cottage on a pier, hard by the erstwhile home of the wonderful Orcadian poet George MacKay Brown. I'm reading Brown's novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, in preparation for the trip. I've also recently finished reading the autobiography of Edwin Muir, former teacher of Brown and outstanding poet, translator (most notably of Kafka, along with his wife, Willa) and critic. The two make for an interesting contrast: Muir the cosmopolitan nomad and Brown the stay-at-home islander. A contrast familiar to anyone who grew up on an island. Or in any remote/rural community, for that matter. There are an awful lot of landlocked islands in the world today. From Orkney, we make our way back to Edinburgh, stopping in Glencoe before finishing the trip with 5 days in the capital city, where we've rented a flat.

We'll be back in Canada late April, flying into Montreal, then taking the train to Halifax, where we'll hole up in a hotel a couple of days before retaking possession of our North End house, resuming some version of the life we led between 2004-06. We're making this epic move--again--for a number of reasons, personal and financial. What it boils down to is that we're far better equipped to lead the sort of life we want to lead in Halifax than we are in Vancouver, a city far too expensive for anyone not wealthy or overfond of working hard.

So, CLM will be unwontedly quiet over April as we go, as Chaucer said, on pilgrimage. But I'll try to post the odd photo from our travels.