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.