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