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 Seems that locals in the private sector are stepping up to replace much of the support withdrawn by the Linares government.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.