My interview this morning on Global Morning News

Paris fundraising drive update

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

Further Adventures in Crowdsourced Funding

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

Baffle launched

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

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

 

Critic's Desk Sombrero

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

Poems in print

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

Upcoming Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

                  --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

 

More Boyd

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

Brian Boyd again

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

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

   --Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories

Poems online

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

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

Get Baffled

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

Jeweller's "I"

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

NOTES ON BUILDING A DRY STONE RETAINING WALL

Stagger your seams. Vary sizes so that

large stones appear bolder. Resort to

the cold chisel only once all other

options exhausted. Stagger. Don't squander

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

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

backfill. Stagger your. What's buried behind

matters as much as the face. Cultivate

a rustic, rough-finished ideal. Creeping

thyme will hide your mistakes. Stagger your

seams. The wall should lean back, ever so

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

surge a spell and come to stand for itself.

Review online

My review of The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry is now online at Arc's site. Check it out.

Tingling with anticipation

Karen Schindler of Baseline Press tells me she's put a couple copies of my soon-to-be-officially-released chapbook, Baffle, in the mail. This is how it looks, with a letterpressed cover by London's All Sorts Press:

A super-cool thing that is happening

I often, only half-jokingly, say that I started writing poems because I'm tone-deaf and can't sing. Well, it looks like I might have unintentionally become a song-writer.

Back in December, I got an email out of the blue from a baritone singer named Phillip Addis. He had come across my poetry and wanted to have some poems set to music so that he could sing them. I was, of course, enormously flattered. Addis said that it would be several months until anything happened, as funding would have to be sorted out, etc. Since then, I wondered occasionally where things were, but I figured that the most likely outcome would be that nothing would come of it.

Shows what I know. A few weeks ago, I got an email from composer Erik Ross, saying that he'd been reading my work and was zeroing in on a shortlist of poems to score. And then he followed up a few days ago, saying that he has selected my poems "I" and "Waypoints," both of which will also be published in my forthcoming chapbook, Baffle. The score is supposed to be finished by September 1. Not sure yet what's happening with Addis' performance.

Essay online

My essay on David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is now online for your reading pleasure at The Critical Flame.

ESSAY IN PRINT

My essay in appreciation of the poetry of Patrick Warner, "Mr. In-Between," is yours for the reading in the latest issue (# 71) of Arc Poetry Magazine. I've long admired Warner's poetry and think he should be every bit as feted as Babstock, Solie and others of his generation.