Dear Peter

A'right, so I haven't been using this space for non-literary content much of late, but I wanted to put this up somewhere other than Facebook. I really can't express how much contempt I have for Defence Minister Peter MacKay, but I gave it a shot this evening, when I sent him this email:

Dear Mr. MacKay: 

You helicopter-hopping turncoat hypocrite. Shall I add nitwit to the list, sir? I just now heard you say on CBC radio that you are concerned about service reductions to Via Rail's operations in the Maritimes. You went on to say that service might be restored if people were willing to use the train more. Perhaps you are aware that the service cuts are a direct response to decreased funding for Via legislated by the government. Perhaps you are aware that the government is formed by the party you belong to. Perhaps you are aware that party only exists because of your willingness to sell out the values of the party to which you used to belong. Perhaps you are aware that your party's majority in parliament is not reflective of majority support, but a byproduct of a broken electoral system, Machiavellian strategising and apathy?

You are probably not aware that Via has not touched service on much less frequented routes, such as the trains to Churchill and Senneterre. You are probably also not aware that declines in ridership--which have been much exaggerated, given that ridership actually rose last year on The Ocean--are THE DIRECT CONSEQUENCE of large and small service reductions that have been ongoing for years--including recent refusals by Via to increase the size of The Ocean's consist, despite being consistently sold out. Ridership declines are also the indirect consequence of Canada's strong dollar, which has led to a drastic decrease in visits by American tourists--which is the direct consequence of your Party's love affair with the Alberta tar sands and the "Dutch disease" that love affair has caused. So don't blame Maritimers or "local policies" for this, you ass. Do something about it.

Sincerely,

Zachariah Wells
Halifax

Some love for the Snowman

Very pleased and proud to learn that the Canadian Authors' Association has given Goran Simic their poetry prize for Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, a book I had the honour to edit. I think this is the first official  award Goran has received in Canada, though of course it was around five years ago that I had the pleasure of presenting Goran a somewhat more ... ad hoc prize when From Sarajevo, With Sorrow was disqualified for the Governor General's Award--so this is a particularly sweet turn of events, from my perspective.

There's a trick with a hose I'm learning to do

I received a visit a couple weeks ago from photographer Patrik Jandak. One of Patrik's favourite subjects is poets (gawd luv 'im), so when he planned a trip to the east coast, he contacted me about doing a shoot. I was expecting him to drop by, but he hadn't said when he'd be coming. Around nine a.m., the morning after a railroad trip, I clomped blearily down the stairs in my housecoat. Looking out the living room window, I saw a very tall man standing on the sidewalk, about to dial a cell phone. Recognizing Patrik from his picture on Facebook, I opened the front door and invited him in. We had a coffee and chatted on my back deck. When I suggested I get dressed so we could go out and find a good place to shoot, he asked if I'd mind him taking a few shots of me as I was. Then he asked if I had a hose...

NEST

We arrived at the bend of solstice week
and pitched our tent below the red-roofed kirk
afloat like an ark on a blue-lupin

lea. In the lee of the cliff, we blew up
our bed to lie down beneath the midnight
sun, hard by the black-sand beaches of Vík.


Afloat on the youngest land Earth's bred, we slept
and woke to the surging sea, to the screak

of the terns who'd returned to breed, to rise,

plummet and nest. In wind and rain, we struck

our tent and girded ourselves for return
by a route discrete from the way we came.

Home from Iceland, Review in Print

We arrived home from Iceland last night, where we spent a week driving around various parts of the country and camping at night. Trip of a lifetime. Iceland might just be the greatest place on earth. Most of our trip was spent in "the nature," as they say there, but we snuck in a bit of culture, too, including a reading hosted by Angela Rawlings, who is living in Reykjavik these days. It was a great literary exchange between people from all over the world (Iceland, Canada, Columbia, Germany, Palestine and Hungary). As visitors to Iceland, Rachel and I were featured readers, along with German fiction and children's writer Finn-Ole Heinrich. Here are some pictures from our trip. Just a few that I snapped on my tablet. We'll be uploading more soon. When we got in last night, I found issue 68 of Arc waiting for me. In it, you will find a long review by yours truly of Bruce Taylor's knockout book No End in Strangeness. One of the best poetry books of the 2000's, folks. As always, much else of interest within the covers of Arc, so I'm looking forward to digging in. Once I get caught up...

Attack of the Strawman Zombies

I was amused to see this truly awful essay reanimated. Since the zombie apocalypse is clearly upon us, I thought I'd share my response to it, from around 8 years ago in Books in Canada.

BAFFLE

When every little scent's intense, intensity

itself grows tedious. Not every sensation

can be sensational if we wish to remain

whole and sane. Holy thoughts and sacred

sentiments should be consigned to holidays

where they belong, so that the mundane

and unremarkable might also grow.

I know a woman who can hear an ant

gnawing on a seed deep within a fissure

on a beam. This doesn't lead to rapture—

it causes pain. I take a walk around

the garden walls I've built as baffle

to the fascinating marvels of my life.

Poems in print

Three of my poems (Anatta, Mersey, and Waypoints) can be found in the latest issue of The Fiddlehead, which is on newsstands right about now, if you're interested.

Stay still and feel something

Listen to this. Then read this. And savour the difference between ideology and wisdom, talking points and thought.

PROSCENIUM

I know nothing of the role I play.
Rolling over, I raise a middle finger to the day
whose light pours through the slats
of my venetian blinds and pounds me with its brickbats
and reproofs. This is proof that I exist
despite the fact the timepiece on my wrist
no longer ticks and the calendar page
has read September since I can't remember when. Rage
against the coming of the light gets you
nowhere fast, but the blood it sets in motion lets you
feel a little something. From the parlour comes
the rhubarb-rhubarb buzz of conversation, drums
rumble in the pit, I rise and shuffle into the day,
knowing nothing of the role I play.


first line from Wislawa Szymborska's "Life While-You-Wait" (translation Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh)

Interview and poems in print

FreeFall Magazine editor Micheline Maylor has been exceptionally good to me over the years, publishing glowing reviews of both Jailbreaks and Track & Trace. And now, she's published an interview she did with me, alongside two of my poems, "Magic Man" and "Twelve Poppies." You can read all this and much else besides in the Spring/Summer (22:2) issue of FreeFall, which I assume can be found on newsstands now. 

I'm especially keen to read the contest-winning story by Andre Narbonne. Andre and I were in several classes together as undergrads in the Dalhousie English Dept. He has since gone on to get his PhD and has been teaching university English. A whipsmart guy and a fine writer.

FIRST LESSON IN SHIT DISTURBING

On a ramble

down the creekbed

I kicked a log

that spanned

the stream.

From an unseen

orifice in its

underside streamed

a host of irate

white jacket

wasps. I froze

and watched

them buzz about

my knees

and rubber-booted

feet for what

might have been

an hour. One by

one they retreated

to their hidden

hive, my heartbeat

slowing one

by one, until

the last wasp

disappeared inside

and I paused

one beat

longer—then

kicked the log

and ran.

Review online

A few months back, Garrick Davis, the editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, a site I've long read and admired for its erudite and incisive criticism, approached me about contributing to CPR. Having a very full dayjob and freelance dance card these days, I'm not writing much by way of reviews, so I asked him if he'd be open to co-publishing a piece I had written for Canadian Notes & Queries, on the recent anthology Modern Canadian Poets. Happily, Garrick agreed to this and the other day my review went up on the CPR site.

One of the anthology's editors, living up to his name, if falling considerably shy of his namesake in wit, has already responded. (He has an unfortunate history of leaving no wound unwhined.) The only thing I have to say about this hilarious epistle is that, while I may well be an autodidact, I also have an MA in English. Which isn't nearly as impressive as having a PhD, natch. What was that about obsessive appeals to authority? Right.

Some deliquescent, quasi-mystical vacuity

...There will always be something in any poem, some reverberation of the numinous, which is not patient of explication, otherwise it would not be a poem.

     But I must insist that I am not endorsing a lapse into some deliquescent, quasi-mystical vacuity. That would be an insupportable cop-out. The poet may ask of his reader the willing suspension of disbelief; he does not, ever, ask for any diminution of the critical faculties. On the contrary, he would have the reader's critical faculties raised to the highest possible degree. No one can be more aware of the fact that, if everything means everything, then nothing means anything. Purgatory would be for me a perpetual mooning about in some gormless Dream-Analysis Workshop. The poet attempts to work within the most stringent of strictures; he abhors above all else the slovenly, the imprecise, in thought or in language.

--Richard Outram, "An Exercise in Exegesis," from Richard Outram: Essays on His Works

William Logan on the virtues of getting it wrong

Once the genius of Shakespeare, or Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Whitman, or Eliot is generally agreed, the critics who backed the wrong horse are generally written out of literary history, or held up to ridicule. Yet those critics of whom time makes fools—John Wilson Croker on Endymion(“We almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody”), Francis Jeffrey on The Excursion (“This will never do”), and many another—are often more worth reading than the critics of the day who got it right. We know what the latter critics will say—their taste is what our ears have been filled with; but, unless we read the other critics with attention, we can forget what an uncertain thing a poet’s reputation was at the start, forget what withering glances the poems themselves had to overcome, forget that, if the naysayers had had their way, literary history might have been different. 

Audio: Wells at U. Ste. Anne

Finally got around to uploading my second reading for students at Université Ste. Anne. You can listen to it here, should you wish. (I thought I had edited out a bit of dead air at the beginning, but it still seems to be there.)

The Chapbook Has Landed

One of the best things about unemployment/freelance is that you're home when exciting mail arrives. Today, I answered the door to my friendly postie, who had in hand this lovely package:

So now I have my weekend project all lined up: packaging these beauties so I can mail them out with minimal delay to all you wonderful folks who helped me travel to Linares. And for all those who've been meaning to order a copy, you can still do so at the Indiegogo page I set up, as the campaign doesn't officially close for another twelve days.

Reviews online and in print

My brief review of Julie Bruck's new collection, Monkey Ranch, is now online at the Quill & Quire site.

And my lengthy review of the Carcanet-published anthology Modern Canadian Poets is now in print, in Canadian Notes and Queries 84 (another beautiful issue, which I look forward to reading; please do subscribe). The review isn't online yet, but will be co-published soon by the American web-journal Contemporary Poetry Review. I've been reading CPR with admiration for years, so was chuffed to receive an invitation to publish criticism there, from editor Garrick Davis.

Audio: ZW live at Church Point

I recorded my session with the students at U. Ste. Anne yesterday. Archive.org has a new audio player widget, which doesn't seem to allow me to embed the player directly to the blog, but you can go to their site to hear it, if you're so inclined.

As I said, I'll be having a second session with the students on Friday morning, 8:30 a.m. at the school's Halifax campus, on Walnut Street (same building as the St. Thomas Lemarchant School). You're welcome to come, if you can stand the thought of an hour of my voice at that time of day.

Another exotic reading

Next, my travels take me to Pointe de l'Eglise (Church Point, eh: the interior of said church is pictured, left), NS, for a reading at Université Ste. Anne on Tuesday morning. The reading's at 8:30 in the Gustave Blanche building, SV3. The public's welcome, but given the hour and locale, I'm guessing that's not relevant to many (any?) people reading this. The students in prof. Darryl Whetter's class have been assigned my book, so it should be an interesting exchange. I expect to learn a thing or two about my poems, as I invariably do at such events.

I'll be doing another reading/talk for the school at their Halifax campus on Walnut St. on the 30th, but that one is also, alas, at 8:30 a.m.

It's Alive!

The translation chapbook is in print. I'll be mailing it out to campaign contributors within a week or so, once I get them from publisher Jim Johnstone in Toronto, who is numbering this ltd. edition beauty as we speak.

There are still copies left unclaimed, if you wants one.

DEAD LINKS

What you are looking for

could not be found

and this torrent

is unfit to be forded.

You will have to

return to where you

set out and follow

the long way around.

Reviews in print

Just got my contributor's copy of Arc 67, in which you can find my brief review of D.G. Jones' retrospective volume The Stream Exposed with all its Stones. And much other stimulating content besides.

And I believe, tho I've yet to see it, the new issue of Quill & Quire has my brief review of Julie Bruck's fine new collection Monkey Ranch.


In future publication news, I got the proofs and contract today for my interview and two poems, forthcoming in the next issue of the Alberta litmag FreeFall. The interview is with Micheline Maylor, who has published glowing reviews of Jailbreaks and Track & Trace in past numbers of FreeFall, so the magazine has a special place in my cold, dark heart.

Questionless (and damn near answerless) Interview

This went up just before I went to Mexico and I neglected to post it here. A bit o' fun.

Last night in Linares

Hard to believe it's coming to an end already. A slew of people left today, returning to their various homes or carrying on with further Mexican journeys. Only four festival participants left, myself included. I'm glad I had today for decompression. The schedule's been so full that this has been the first real opportunity to just wander around the streets of Linares a bit. It really is a charming little city, utterly bereft of kitschy tourist trap shops. This is simply a place where people work and live. There are occasional signs of the troubles that plague Mexico-- state troopers armed to the teeth, rumours of vans cruising the streets, driven by men in bulletproof vests--but I've seen no actual violence or crime.

Wednesday finished with an epic evening of literature and music. Maybe a few too many acts on the bill, but still some remarkable performances, especially from Estonian poet Katlin Kaldmaa. I also really enjoyed a couple of older gents playing traditional Mexican tunes. Muy simpatico.

Thursday, I and others were back at the Colegio Linares, where I talked to a grade 7 class and a grade 11 class. The classroom visits have all been terrific, even if the older kids didn't swarm us for autographs...

In the evening, I attended a talk on the place of Mexico in Pablo Neruda's Canto General. The lecture was delivered by Irish poet Kieran Furey in Spanish, so I didn't catch a whole lot of it, but it was very well received by those who understood it better than I did.

It's really been a fantastically stimulating week. I feel privileged to have been invited and humbled to have received so much help getting here. In post-mortem conversation last night, my campaign was cited as a potential model for future fundraising for the Linares festival. I hope that Colin Carberry and the other folks around here who make this event happen are able to keep it going and growing.

I blast off quite early tomorrow, catching a 7 am shuttle to Monterrey. From there, I fly to Atlanta, where I lay over for a few hours before carrying on to Montreal, from whence I'll be training it home, arriving Monday evening. Hasta luego.

Linares Day 2.5

Very busy day yesterday and was too damn tired to post anything last night.

Read to a class at the Technical University in the morning, which went well, then had lunch (best prime rib fajitas ever) with other festival participants and people from the university.

After a bit of a siesta, I was up again and out for supper, then off to the university for a big reading in an auditorium, which was also quite good and was followed by a lively Q&A.

Today so far has been great. This morning I visited a class of 9 & 10 year olds at Colegio Linares, a local private school. I read them Anything But Hank! and they were really into it. Once more, I was swarmed by kids with questions and autograph requests. Left a copy of the book with the school library. A number of them spoke quite good English.

This afternoon, several of us were driven out to one of the state university's campuses, where we read to a crowd of 60 or so in a stunning, cool old chapel.

And this evening, I'll be reading at the Noche Bohemien, which will also feature musical acts. Apparently, over 100 tickets have been sold.

So, altho this festival was deemed too small to qualify for travel grants, I've read to many, many more people here than I have at bigger festivals in Ottawa and Toronto. Go figure.

In other news, I have received and corrected the proofs for the translation chapbook, so it should exist in three dimensions before too long. There are still 30-odd copies not spoken for, if you want to claim one. If there are any left once the campaign closes, I'll sell them by other means.

Linares Festival, Day 1

It's been such a full day that I had to stop and think about whether this was the first or second day of the festival. It's too late to write at length, but in precis form:

8:45: Opening ceremony at a local school. Dignitaries on hand, speeches, music, a dance performance by local artists informed by native traditions. Afterwards, inundated by young kids with notebooks and scraps of paper seeking autographs. I don't know what I was expecting, but whatever it was, this blew it out of the water. Incredible red carpet reception.

10:30: Did a reading with Jasmine D'Costa (from India, now living in Toronto) and Katlin Kaldmaa (from Estonia), at a technical college. About 100 students on hand. Wonderful response from them. I've recorded it and will post it when I have a bit of time.

4:00: After late lunch, went to a reading at the very impressive casino building. All of the writers who did not read in the morning read at this event, including Al Moritz. Some wonderful things. The most poignant moment   occurred when Veronica Garza Flores, reading the translation of an excerpt of Irish writer Jack Harte's novel, was so moved she started to cry. She pulled herself together and finished the reading. Unheralded overflows like this one are among my favourite things about live readings.

6:00: Hustled off after the reading to the radio station where each of us had a few moments' worth of interview. In my time, I told the interviewer how much Linares reminds me of Charlottetown, which in an odd way it really does.

8:00: Went out of town a few clicks to a friend of Colin Carberry's where we enjoyed a delicious barbecue and much lively conversation.

Present moment: exhausted and off to bed.

Tomorrow a.m.: Going to the university at 10:30, where I'll be doing a solo session with a class.

Buenos noches.

A sample from the translations

I thought I'd provide a little taste of the translations. Here is Lidia Valencia-Fourcans' and Hernan Sicilio's take on my poem "What He Found Growing in the Woods":

LO QUE ÉL ENCONTRÓ BROTANDO 

EN LOS BOSQUES

Aire verde y un susurro mohoso.

Tiernos puños apretados en retoño

brotando en helechos de hoja amarga.

Salamandras, desnudas bajo piedras

volcadas; y babosas, reptantes gotas

de moco fresco. Espuma de pompas

cubriendo un dique de árboles caídos.

Cigarras chirriando estridentes credos

y logros. Flores donde antaño ardió la brasa.

Borrosos faisanes marrones agitando

un aire verdoso. Su última rica cabellera

y los primeros bosquejos de barba.

And here is the original:

WHAT HE FOUND GROWING IN THE WOODS

Green air and a rusty babble.

Tender tight fists of fiddleheads

fronding into bitter-leafed ferns.

Salamanders, nude under turned-

over stones, and slugs, creeping beads

of cool snot. Foam of bubbles

coating a dam of fallen tree rubble.

Cicadas scraping shrill creeds

and credentials. Flowers where a fire once burned.

Brown blurred pheasants churning

green air. His last full head

of hair and the first faint traces of stubble.

Look out, druglords, here I come!

After much back and forth with my long-suffering translators, we now have what seem to me to be excellent Spanish versions of ten of my poems. I have printed those poems and stuffed them in my carry-on. I have emailed them to Jim Johnstone at Cactus Press HQ. And tomorrow, shortly after noon, I will be enroute to Mexico. By train. Which will take me to Montreal, where I'll spend a bit less than 24 hours before boarding a very early flight to JFK, then on to Mexico City, then Monterrey, where I will be met and conveyed to Linares. What a journey! In many ways. I can't wait to get there.

The campaign, as anyone can see by glancing to the right, has been an incredible success. Yet another thing that has made this whole business so wonderfully affirmative. It's nice to get a grant, but you always know, if you're honest, that all it means is a couple of people happened to like your work well enough on a given day--and that those people had nothing much to gain or lose in the process. Something like this has so much more reciprocity to it. I feel humble and grateful for all of the support I've received for this most marginal of endeavours.

There are still translation chapbooks unspoken for if you want to read me in Spanish (with English en face). Hasta luego. Updates to follow.

Goal Reached!

As you can tell by glancing to the right, I have not only achieved my fundraising goal, but have now exceeded it. I had no expectation of the campaign being this incredibly successful; thank you so much to everyone who has contributed. As I said, I will be redirecting funds raised in excess of my goal to Colin Carberry, to help cover any costs he's incurred as a result of funding lost when the Linares government pulled its support.

Around forty copies of the translation chapbook have been claimed to-date; Jim Johnstone and I have decided to publish it in a limited edition numbered print run of 100. The translations are almost finished; I should be receiving final draughts from Lidia Valencia Fourcans in a few days. So I'll start mailing them out, along with other books claimed, when I get home from Mexico in three weeks or so. I'll be keeping the campaign open for another six weeks, or until all the chapbooks are claimed, whichever comes first.

Onwards and upwards!

Putting the micro in microfunding

Contributions to my campaign have slowed in recent days, but I'm still edging ever closer to my goal. In the hopes of stimulating things somewhat and because I know all about how lean things are for a lot of people these days, I've added a  couple of econo-perks. Donating less than $10 has always been an option, but now it's more explicitly so. If you've been meaning to contribute, I hope you stop by campaign HQ. Thanks again to everyone who has contributed.

Talk re-posted

For anyone who's interested and missed it when I first posted it here, the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary blog has reposted my talk on descriptive poetry and poetics.

Patching the Potholes

Great news tonight from Mexico. Seems that locals in the private sector are stepping up to replace much of the support withdrawn by the Linares government. The festival was going ahead regardless, but this is welcome news.

As of the present moment, I have received almost one third of my campaign goal, with 54 days left till the deadline. This is wonderful; like the festival, I'm going ahead with or without funding, but the support makes it so much easier. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

Potholes on the Road to Linares

So, there have been some developments in Mexico that are less than ideal (I've provided details on my campaign website, which you can click to on the right), but the festival is going ahead and I have now raised 24% of my campaign goal, which is wonderful. Gracias a todos!

I have also received an offer to publish the translation chapbook, from Jim Johnstone of Cactus Press. This will save me production costs and time, so it is a major contribution to my campaign.

Campaign Update

I won't be posting daily about the campaign, but today's a significant day because I've received the rough draft translations of my poems from Lidia Valencia Fourcans. Very exciting. We need to get our heads together to work out some knotty problems of diction and syntax, but it's great to see the poems taking shape in Spanish.

Also great to receive all the generous donations yesterday. I certainly didn't expect to have almost 15% of my goal within 24 hours. Muchas gracias to all who have pledged support.

Crowd Sourcing

Regular readers of this blog may recall me saying a while back that I'd been invited to read at the Linares International Literary Festival in Mexico next month. I applied to the Canada Council for a travel grant to cover my airfare (the Festival can only pay for my hotel and meals, which is pretty standard), but the CC deemed the Linares Festival to be insufficiently "large" for my participation to merit funding.

So, as an experiment, I've decided to try out this micro-funding thing that's all the rage. On the right, you'll see a link to my funding campaign at Indiegogo.com. Contributing to the campaign isn't a simple matter of donating money to me (tho it can be, if you'd prefer): you get stuff in return. So please do check it out and make a contribution if you're so inclined. And by all means, spread the word.

Muchas gracias, amigos y amigas!

Publications galore!

So, I've got four poems up at the Maple Tree Literary Supplement site, for your reading pleasure.

Aaaaaaand, today in the mail I received my copies of UNB's Journal of Student Writing, wherein is printed my essay on Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. Probably pretty hard to find unless you're on campus, I'm guessing, but if you're stone-cold jonesing for a bit of left-field scholarship, you can read it here.

Kingston! Tomorrow!

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

Bennett, Eckerlin, Hartman et moi

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:

Upcoming Dates

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.

Essay in print: "A Bite out of 'The Bight': Elizabeth Bishop's Diction as Depth"

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 at 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."

A bit of love for the Lyrebird

Rhonda Douglas has a very thoughtful review of The Best Canadian Poetry 2010 on the Arc site. She has nice things to say about my contribution to the anthology, which pleases me of course, but reserves her highest commendation for Ross Leckie's mesmerizingly beautiful poem, "The Critique of Pure Reason." Hear, hear.

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.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

POETRY

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.

Johnstone, Gruber et moi

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.

Reading: Vancouver, Dec. 8, 7pm

I hope you can join me, Jim Johnstone and Adrienne Gruber 

for a reading at Spartacus Books, 684 E. Hastings.

Joseph Conrad, on the improbable start of his literary career

In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense that
literary ambition had never entered the world of his imagination, the
coming into existence of the first book is quite an inexplicable event.
In my own case I cannot trace it back to any mental or psychological
cause which one could point out and hold to. The greatest of my gifts
being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to
boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen, at any
rate, was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps
a pen (the cold steel of our days) in his rooms, in this enlightened age
of penny stamps and halfpenny post-cards. In fact, this was the epoch
when by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made the reputation
of a novel or two. And I, too, had a pen rolling about somewhere--the
seldom-used, the reluctantly taken-up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen
rugged with the dried ink of abandoned attempts, of answers delayed
longer than decency permitted, of letters begun with infinite
reluctance, and put off suddenly till next day--till next week, as like
as not! The neglected, uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest
provocation, and under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without
enthusiasm, in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil _is_
the beastly thing gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where, indeed! It might
have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so. My landlady's anemic
daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed it), though commendably
neat, had a lordly, careless manner of approaching her domestic duties.
Or it might even be resting delicately poised on its point by the side
of the table-leg, and when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak
which would have discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me!
"Never mind. This will do."

Tom Riesterer Memorial Prize

I checked my UNB email account today for the first time in two months and discovered that last month I was awarded the Tom Riesterer Memorial Prize by the UNB English Department for my essay on Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus. Nice bit of icing on the cake for me, now that I've finished my MA. The essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of the department's Journal of Student Writing.

Some Love for Kenneth Leslie

Tim Inkster at The Porcupine's Quill has pointed out this nice little review of my Kenneth Leslie selection. So glad to see this book--to see Leslie's poems--getting some thoughtful attention.

Review in print

My review of Peter Norman's At the Gates of the Theme Park and Michael Harris's Circus has just been published in Fiddlehead 249. Both books are marvels.

POEM IN NOVEMBER

The tamaracks are golden.

The snow is on the ground.

IFOA post mortem

Thought I'd share a few impressions of my week at IFOA as I roll towards Montreal on the train.

The number one impression is the incredible hospitality I enjoyed while I was at the festival. Geoffrey Taylor and his staff, as well as the many volunteers, do a top-notch job of making writers feel like royals, while also managing their slew of events with military efficiency. Kudos! I'll never forget this incredible week.

While I encountered a lot of stimulating writing at IFOA, I was just as impressed with the people who produced it. I met so many warm, witty, whipsmart people in Toronto, people from all over the world, some of whom I have the feeling will be friends for a long time. Rachel and I had a particularly fine time in the company of some Scots writers our own age, Alan Bissett, Kirstin Innes and Rodge Glass. Also the German novelist and journalist Thomas Pletzinger, English novelist Linda Grant and Danish poet Niels Frank. And this is only naming the people we talked to the most. Too many smart and gracious folk to name.

Highlight readings for me were Daniel Woodrell and Zsuzsi Gartner, who had the crowd at the Giller shortlist reading in stitches with her spirited reading from an absolutely explosive short story. I'm very sure that I missed a number of equally good things because they were on at the same time as events I was attending or participating in.

My own readings went well. The highlight for me was being approached by an audience member for a signature and being told, "This is the first book of poems I've ever bought." This kind of reader is inordinately important to me. Usually, I just have to imagine that he or she exists, so I was humbled to actually meet one face to face.

I can't wait to see my son after more than a week away, and I'm looking forward to getting more landscaping done before the weather turns cold, but I have to say, real life has a tough act to follow.

Last reading at IFOA!

READING: Marx, McWatt, Wells, Wilson

Sunday, October 30, 12:00pm, 2011

 | Studio Theatre

Purchase Ticket

Patricia Marx, Tessa McWatt, Zachariah Wells, and D.W. Wilson read from their latest works. Mark Medley hosts.

Related Content

Patricia Marx

Patricia Marx is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a former writer for Saturday Night Live. She is the author of several books, including the novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humour. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, the world's longest continually published humour magazine. Marx presents Starting from Happy, the story of a reluctant girl who finds her perfect, yet absurd, romantic match.

Tessa McWatt

Tessa McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of five novels, including a Governor General’s Literary Award and Toronto Book Award-nominated Dragons Cry. She developed and leads the MA Writing: Imaginative Practice Programme at the University of East London, and is currently working with the British novelist, art historian and painter John Berger to develop a film based on his novel To the Wedding. McWatt’s latest novel, Vital Signs, takes readers deep inside a marriage at the edge of an emotional abyss.

Mark Medley

Mark Medley is the National Post's Books Editor and co-edits the paper's books blog, The Afterword. His work has appeared in publications across North America, including the Globe and Mail, Walrus andThis Magazine. He currently sits on PEN Canada's Board of Directors.

Zachariah Wells

Zachariah Wells is the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes & Queries and the author of Unsettled, a collection of poetry about the Arctic. He is also the author, alongside Rachel Lebowitz, of the children’s book Anything But Hank!, and editor of the anthologyJailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. Wells presentsTrack & Trace, a collection of poetry that uses an eclectic array of techniques and forms to represent a post-industrial nomadic restlessness in a rootless age.

D.W. Wilson

D.W. Wilson is the recipient of the University of East Anglia’s inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship – the most prestigious award available to students in the MA programme. His stories have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, Ireland, and the UK, including the Malahat Review, Grain and Southword. Wilson’s debut collection of stories, Once You Break a Knuckle, tells tales of good people doing bad things: two bullied adolescents sabotage a rope swing, resulting in another boy’s death; a heartbroken young man refuses to warn his best friend about an approaching car; and sons challenge fathers and break taboos.

Tomorrow! Please come.

READING: Coady, van der Pol, Wells, Wolitzer

Saturday, October 29, 4:00pm, 2011

 | Studio Theatre

Purchase Ticket

Lynn Coady, Marieke van der Pol, Zachariah Wells, and Meg Wolitzer read from their latest works. Michael Lista hosts.

Related Content

Lynn Coady

Lynn Coady is an award-winning author, editor and journalist. Her previous novels include Saints of Big Harbour, which was a national bestseller and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and Mean Boy, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Her popular advice column, "Group Therapy," runs weekly in the Globe and Mail. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Coady’s new novel, The Antagonist, follows a man who, formerly cast as an enforcer and goon by all who knew him, discovers that, almost 20 years later, a once trusted friend has published a novel mirroring his life.

Michael Lista

Michael Lista is the author of Bloom, the acclaimed collection of poems. He is the poetry editor of The Walrus and he writes a popular monthly column on poetry for the National Post.

Marieke Van Der Pol

Marieke van der Pol is the author of the prize-winning screenplay for the international hit film The Twin Girls. Her debut novel, Bride Flight, has also been made into a film in the Netherlands. Bride Flightfollows three women who took the last great transcontinental flight from London to New Zealand in 1953 and their eventual realization, years later, at a fellow passenger’s funeral of how tightly their lives have been bound together.

Zachariah Wells

Zachariah Wells is the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes & Queries and the author of Unsettled, a collection of poetry about the Arctic. He is also the author, alongside Rachel Lebowitz, of the children’s book Anything But Hank!, and editor of the anthologyJailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. Wells presentsTrack & Trace, a collection of poetry that uses an eclectic array of techniques and forms to represent a post-industrial nomadic restlessness in a rootless age.

Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer is the author of eight previous novels, including The Ten-Year Nap, The Position and The Wife. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She lives in New York City. Wolitzer’s latest novel, The Uncoupling, is a Greek drama-inspired novel about a tight-knit group of men and women in a high school community who are forced to look at their shared history and at their sexual selves in a new light.

IFOA-bound

I'm off to Toronto tomorrow for a couple of readings at the International Festival of Authors. Been looking forward to this for some time, but just at the moment, with frighteningly unseasonable Indian summer conditions making a massive landscaping project immensely enjoyable, I'm almost wishing I was staying home to finish it. I'll get over it. If you're in Toronto at month's end, I'd love it if you came out to my readings. Looks like some pretty damn good company I'm on stage with. TTFN.

The CC says everything's cool

So the Canada Council has responded to the comments I made about the most recent GG poetry shortlist. Here's what they have to say:

The Council does not see a conflict of interest in authors assessing books by other authors that are produced by their publishing house. Peer assessors are professionals and dedicated to making the best decision possible. If authors were not able to sit on a peer assessment committee to discuss books produced by their publisher, it would be impossible for the Council to have qualified representation on these committees. As noted by Mr. Wells, Mr. McCaffery has a stellar reputation in the poetry community. The Council benefited from the expertise of all three members of the jury in this selection process.

A number of things to address here. First off, I agree in principle with the first sentence. Obviously, peer jurying would be inconceivable otherwise. I have my issues with peer jurying, but I've never said that no poets should ever be on the jury. However. Agreeing with this a priori does not mean that one need agree with it a posteriori. When three titles by a single press make it onto the shortlist, one immediately looks for an explanation. The altruistic explanation is that it was just an exceptionally good year for BookThug. Bravo, BookThug! This could also be the cynical explanation, depending on your angle. The altruistic explanation only holds water if you can't otherwise account for such a high number of shortlistees. (Keep in mind that BookThug submissions accounted for 6% of books under consideration for the award, but 60% of shortlisted titles. Just having one title on the list defies the odds; having three is akin to the mathematical improbability that saw the Tampa Bay Rays make the MLB playoffs this year.) We could speculate endlessly about how this extremely improbable scenario took shape--and we must speculate, as the CC insists on acting like some kind of goddamn Star Chamber--but Occam's Razor insists that we pin responsibility on an interested party.

Enter Steve McCaffery, BookThug author and Champion of All Things Avant Garde. The spokesperson from the CC said that I made reference to Dr. McCaffery's "stellar reputation in the poetry community." I said nothing of the sort. For one thing, I've never held Dr. McCaffery's work or opinions in high regard. For another, I'm far from alone in this. I said that McCaffery is an eminence grise. Which he is. He is a polarising figure who has dedicated his life and work to the promotion of one stream of poetry and the diminishment of all others. If he is to be placed on a jury, this needs to be taken into account. Dr. McCaffery is not simply a variable to be inserted into a jury equation. He is a theorist and poetic ideologue dedicated to the promotion of postmodern values in poetry, who would have a number of preformulated arguments at his fingertips, which he would no doubt bring to bear in any discussions with fellow jurors to determine a shortlist. If your average possible juror is x, then McCaffery is 5x. For a jury including him to be balanced, the other jurors must be similarly formidable figures. Douglas Burnet Smith is a good writer and a smart man, but has nothing like McCaffery's stature or zeal. Joanne Arnott, to be frank, is little better than an amateur. In the absence of disclosures from the CC, it is only reasonable to assume that McCaffery had a disproportionate influence on the shortlist. The CC is to blame for this, for choosing an unbalanced jury in the first place and for failing to redress the unbalanced shortlist in the second.

Something that's gone unmentioned is the fact that the unbalance isn't restricted to the presence of 3 BookThug titles. Besides those, there is also a book by a writer, Garry Thomas Morse, associated with the Kootenay School of Writing, which is aesthetically aligned with BookThug and its pedagogical arm, the Toronto New School of Writing. So, four out of five titles have "avant garde" credentials. And we're to believe that McCaffery, a longtime avant-garde general, had no more say in this than the other two. Who have no avant-garde affiliations, by the way. Uh-huh. A likely story. Occam? Not bloody likely, you say? Oh. (And please note that the CC carefully avoids saying that all jurors had equal input.)

As usual, the CC is owning no responsibility for this cock-up. Same thing happened a couple of years ago with the Di Brandt/Jacob Scheier mess. They said everything was okay. But then they started cracking down hard, going so far as to remove juror Brian Bartlett from jury duty because a poet he barely knew happened to dedicate one poem to Bartlett (because the poem borrowed a line of Bartlett's). The CC doesn't seem to realize that conflict of interest is something that has to be watched more on the back-end than the front-end of a juried competition; a potential conflict of interest is immaterial if the compromised juror selects no books to which s/he has an affiliation. Had this year's jury only turned up one BookThug/avant-garde title, you shrug and go "okay, that's to be expected." Three?! Then, you need to go back to the jury and find out, pardon me, what the fuck is going on. Let me remind you: there were 170 titles submitted to this award. 11 of them were from BookThug. Let me also remind you that this is a press that fairly prides itself on its own counter-culture marginality, on being "experimental" and "innovative." For them to have three books on this most mainstream of lists means either that they've sold out hardcore or that they've been given an unfair boost by an ardent fan.

Finally, I think this situation proves conclusively that the three-person peer jury consensus model is too broken to be fixed. Scrap it, and stop pretending it's the only way this thing can be done. I've made many suggestions in the past how this might be effected. Mark Sampson has recently made more elaborate, but eminently reasonable, suggestions. Canada Council: start listening to your constituents. Don't be like Steven Harper. Because even if you are, he'll still cut your ass.

Richard Outram

I got my contributor's copy of Richard Outram: Essays on His Works in the mail today. It's been a long time in the works. I submitted my essay to editor Ingrid Ruthig back in '07, so very glad to see it in print. And in fine company, other contributors being Brian Bartlett, Michael Carbert, Robert Denham, Jeffery Donaldson, Steven Heighton, Amanda Jernigan, Eric Ormsby, Ingrid herself and Peter Sanger, who has written the book on Outram. I'm looking forward to reading everyone's contributions to this important book about one of the country's very best poets.

Peter Darbyshire on the GG shortlists

...with commentary from yrs truly. As I said on Facebook earlier today, what is really remarkable about this story is the CC's complete ineptitude when it comes to oversight.

 I know someone who was forced to withdraw from judging the GG last year because one poem in one book was dedicated to him. The author wasn't someone this ex-juror knew personally, but the poem borrowed a line from one of the ex-juror's poems. And yet this clusterfuck "slips through." Bureaucratic incompetence is ultimately to blame for all these SNAFUs

All That Needs to be Said About This Year's Poetry GG Shortlist

Let me end with a lament and a seduction.  There are poems that I’m sad cannot be included because of length.  “Teachable Texts” is a favourite of mine and a poem that  think stands the test of time, likewise “Poetry in the Pissoir.”  Both are available (theoretically in earlier formats).  I withheld poems from the Basho Variations and Every Way Oakly (my homolinguistic translations of poems in Stein’s Tender Buttons) as a  courtesy to my publisher, the brave Jay MillAr, in the hope that sales of his editions will reap largesse.

 --Steve McAffery, in the introduction to his selected poems in 2009

More Love for the Trotter

Abigail Deutsch reviews Joshua Trotter's All This Could Be Yours in Poetry.

Interview online

I recently did a Q&A with Kathryn Mockler for her literary webzine The Rusty Toque. Check it out.

Poems online

Six poems of mine are now up for your reading pleasure at The Winnipeg Review. Many thanks to Maurice Mierau for publishing them!

Interview online

An interview with me is now up at the new issue of The Puritan. Thanks to Jesse Eckerlin for his thoughtful questions and the good folks at the magazine for sharing them with y'all.