Pesbo

The poet reflects "truant fancies wander" to an old sweetheart while he's sitting in the yard listening to the sounds of his wife and kids.

"I feel no twinge of conscience
To deny me any theme
When Care has cast her anchor
In the harbour of a dream –
In fact, to speak in earnest,
I believe it adds a charm
To spice the good a trifle
With a little dust of harm –
For I find an extra flavor in
Memory's mellow wine,...

An excerpt of an unpublished poem "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" by James Whitcomb Riley recorded by Victor Talking Machine Company 1912 and put online by the Indianapolis Public Library.

How marvelous to hear his voice and accent and intonation live. I read his poems for years growing up, first buying a collected at an estate sale. Many summer days were spent reading his poems aloud.

Vogon Poetry Generator results in,

See, see the wordy sky
Marvel at its big army fatigue depths.
Tell me, Scott do you
Wonder why the turkey ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel sweaty.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your tresede facial growth
That looks like
A condiment.
What's more, it knows
Your hobnob potting shed
Smells of frog.
Everything under the big wordy sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm moulds.

This is via Matthew Salomon who will be performing in Maryland at Artomatic next week. And lest I mislead you about his typical offering (hint not Vogon), regular poems, classic or typographical play, 12 easy steps towards a stronger better clerihew and he also posted this mini-movie of a Shakespeare sonnet spun into a new context:



from sounDeva.

And to point out also this from his archives: Zbigniew Herbert's poem: “Mr. Cogito Meditates on Suffering”. (That led to my browsing The Collected Poems: 1956-1998)

A lot of the poems Salomon points out with a parallel text in original language with links to poets and translating poets. It's always a pleasure to access the feel of the poems like that even if I don't read the language.

He also has occasional theory posts, such as on enjambment which he describes as a sonic effect, not only page. It's semantic not disruptive visual syntax when done well.

64 free ebooks of poetry for download today only (until May 2, midnight) at Rick Lupert's Poetry Super Highway. Click on "The Great E-book Free-For-All" from the main menu.

Notice the wide assortment.

What caught my eye? Terry McCarty's The Use Your Delusion Sampler where a caped crusader, poet in black stands and denounces the wrong-headedness of slam and proclaims the only true faith as triolet and is escourted back to his high horse, it given a slap on the rump as he rides back out of town.

I paraphrase but a poem with healthy sense of lampoonery is lovely. An excerpt from his Poet Inc.

Poetry Inc.
Each day, I consult the corporate handbook
and churn out intricate, metaphor-laden and
purposely inaccessible poems loved by an Important few.

Lunches are spent with colleagues
denouncing “journal entry” poetry
and hailing rhyme-and-meter “new traditionalism”.

In the break room, we are treated to tape loops
of Robert Frost intoning “free verse is like playing
tennis without a net” hundreds of times.

Easy to read these. Paul Koenig has a completely other feel and pleasure in Poems for Pixels. It is hard to excerpt but a different kind of play, dipping into surreal of "Today is unavoidably Tuesday. / all robots are secret Monkeys / Flecks of gold say her eyes." It feels like screen shots of a flash animation poem, additions accumulating.

Jonathan Shaw's sheets are densely laid out and compressed packets of real life, for example, a woman pressing a man's hand at 3 stages of life to different results and effects.

Charles P Ries' in I'd rather be Mexican is more of a travelogue of prose poems.

The competition closed last month but Poetry Slam Inc has the videos of 2 of the 7 of the slam poems of Women of the World Poetry Slam, 7 finalists, Suzi Q (she sings towards the end), Gypsee Yo, Tiffani Smith, Chauncey Beaty, Soul Poet, Crytal Senter Brown and andrea gibson, also of I Do.

The winner of this year's Robert Kroetsch Award is Geoffery Hlibchuk's Varations on Holderlin.

One Single Impression has the prompt of color. In consideration of this spring almost tanka:

dad's brown garden
still, the only green is
the plastic tomato stakes –
dad, my world's row marker
sleeps days indoors.

btw, it's Billy the Blogging poet's Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere election time. would you vote for rob mclennan? (listed as Rob McLennan, halfway down). Who does more for engaging and connecting the communities of poets thru his blog, and even posts occasional poems of his own...

I mentioned Kevin Connolly's Revolver here briefly weeks ago. Like Marcus I was anticipating hearing him in person.

Connolly's newest book Revolver is set up so that each poem has to be a challenge to be different from any other in the book. In form, voice, tone and style, each poem is. It's quite remarkable. It's got a sweet and sharp balance. Serious and funny, seriously funny and moving without the sense of trying to push and shove the reader down a chute.

They are 45 "contraptions made of words" which "morph you into heartfelt syntax". He set out to challenge and entertain himself. He said in a writers fest panel that he enjoys the writing process but after publication, things are awkward.

He feels like the Johnnie Jackass of Canadian literature for trying so many things in one work but it works from the get-go, or in other words, it works from the title piece and doesn't stop working yet doesn't feel laboured. It fills the brain but it's a good fill.

The title piece that opens with surrealism of A tiny acrobat walks a rope of milk/whitewash in microform, history pelted,. Other poems are as distinct like a Powder Keg where

Let's decide now, it's all euphemism:
"I hang my hammer by the claw
in your dewy branches...." Which
could mean anything, granted,

but you'll have to agree
it's pretty suggestive.
Like that the grass that grows
under your feet and over mine.

To pick any sample of poem is to mislead of what to expect on any other page, which I personally love.

One poem reads like those ubiquitous puzzle book logic paragraphs to figure out whose name did what where. On p. 72 Really Need Ted Lilly to Throw the Hook, it's all dense sports jargon which on a literal level, I haven't a clue about but it's a sort of read me the phone book and I'll listen to the way you can trip sounds along.

On page 30 and the next few there's Litany where someone is cross examined for a cull of birds which plays against cliché of histrionic poems and badgering witnesses. Each question and matter of fact reply intensifying the other.

Did the moon weep and fret at their growing peril?

Yes.

Did you weep?

No, not initially.

But when it came, did your weeping fill a thousand barrels?

Yes, and ten times as many.

When your tears came, did they fill a thousand thimbles?

No, not so much as that.

Did the beach ache with your misplaced sympathy?

No.

Can you think of a more apt metaphor for your distress?

Perhaps, but not at the moment.

In questions Kevin Connolly, having written a couple collections of poetry, was asked to describe why he chose to make a table of contents in Revolver which doesn't list the poems. He explained that a table of contents seems a vestige of the 19th century. What good does it serve in a book of 45 poems? It's 70 pages at the most. He took an idea of Bill Knott. Knott's book Autonecrophilia – people clapped at that title, yeah, isn't that best poetry book title ever? said Connolly before going on – used a list of B Monster movies instead of the table of contents.

Connolly was inspired to do something similar. Each title is associated with the song on the page number and are tracks he was listening to when writing the book.

The book makes for interesting reading that leaps associatively and logically but with no sense of frenetic, and no sense of unconsidered, the next placement of verbal foot sure.

Saturday's Writing Life #3 was Sean Wilson hosting Mary Swan, Elyse Friedman (Long Short Story) and Diane Schoemperlen. Friedman's stories were entertaining to my brain. The offbeat twists on expectations were light and there's underlying compassion for her characters that was warming.

I found myself rather distracted by non-verbal in the panel.

They were all explicitly in agreement and conscensus seeking and agreeableness was at extraordinary levels. How aligned body language was in the combination of these 4! The mirroring body language would go round and round. One would lift a hand to tuck hair and 2 would immediately echo. One would go from palms together to clasped hands and the Simon says would zoom around. The hands of each were as if on a track sliding lap to knees with one remote.

I missed a lot of what was said verbally.

They responded as one person to questions from the audience with synchronized head bobs that started and ended together. Even their gestures were largely using the same box of space of mid-chest, hands open, facing upwards with very little finger movement, except when Mary Swan made gestures backwards and to left behind her.

Tidbit: The high concept: a spine you can hang the meat of the story on, the 8 words that explains your story.

The next Writers Life panel will be May 1st, 7:30 p.m. at the National Library and Archives featuring Steven Galloway, Anthony De Sa and André Alexis.

Lynne Alsford and L.M. Rochefort were among those shortlisted for the CAA, poetry category. On May 13, the top place finalist will be announced.

Not including the library books, I have a weighty tower of new titles that I got in April. Looking at all the ducks like that that, I'm thinking this couple dozen could take a while.

Geist [which I couldn't find in Chapters and asked 3 clerks to get blank looks and assurances that they are sure they don't carry that magazine. Then I found it myself under some non-literature section.], The Puritan Magazine, Unquiet Desperation (vol 1, issue 20, vol 2, issue 1 from when Warren Dean Fulton was reading in town.), Rampike [which Amanda reminded me was out there, delicious poems in this issue], The Malahat Review, Me Sexy (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008) by Drew Haydon Taylor, Hay West: A Story of Canadians Helping Canadians (Red Deer Press, 2004), The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that inspires them (source books, 2008), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon press, 1983) by Monty Reid, Bird Tracks on Hard Snow (ECW, 1994) by Nelson Ball, Shoot & Weep (Nomados 2008) by Rachel Zolf, Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame by robin robertson, The Dream World (M&S, 2008) by Alison Pick, Floors of Enduring Beauty by Steve Venright (Mansfield Press, 2007), These Lawns (Red Deer Press, 1990) by Monty Reid, Les Scribbliste (Produce Press) by gustave morin, From the Monestery, (gesture press, 2006) by Nicholas Power, Spiral Agitator (Coach House, 2000) by Steve Venright, The Story of the Cannibal Woman by Maryse Condé (Washingston Square Press, 2005), Carnegie Pocket Companion, 1923, Engineers, Architects and Builders Tables, Steel, and the ones I already mentioned that also arrived in April: Out of Light (Kitchen Press, 2008), by Joseph Massey, Mornings Like This: Found Poems (Harper Collins, 1995) by Annie Dillard, and Subject (University of California Press 2005) by Laura Mullen.

I think that's them all but they may have started to drift around the house.

Oh, appetite, get ready...

And I still want to reparse all the rest of my notes from the festival. And keep up the 3 poems a day. And start to edit the (somewhat meaningless number since it includes in pageage various copies of drafts of poems too) 60 pages of 75 new poems drafted in April so far. Dear me. Looks like May is well-spoken for already.

Some people found the talks of Don Domanski enlightening. As with any writers festival talk, you never know what will happen next. Perhaps one writer will tell another "You don't like animals?! I love animals. You're going to Hell." Or it all might go along rather more sociably.

Domanski spoke with Rob Winger on April 15 about the poet's role in society and then in a second discussion on panel with Stephen Brockwell, Alison Pick and Anne Simpson later that evening. (I'm amalgamating the two here.)

In short, on the question of the role of poet, Domanski felt the role was to point away from individual lives and minutiae of any given time, place, society into the big picture which is nature, the universe, to attend to biology.

By biology he made clear he didn't mean the biology of our own genitals but to our small place in the universe as humans. We must attend to the natural world in order to extend our own consciousness beyond ourselves and grow in spirit thru poetry which reaches for universal truth.

He said, if one extends ones arms to the sides (as he made Rob Winger do), the whole of human history on the grand timeline would be erased if one took a single stroke of an emory board to one finger.

His presentation style was as grand as his polished cane and jewelry. At one point he totally lost his place in the lecture he was giving. His aside of "where the hell am I now?" was a marked register change, the first laugh he got, breaking out of his incantation-style of lecture.

Quite an interesting thing, his polish and his cracks. He said his dad had always wanted him to follow him into science but he became a poet, to his dad's disappointment; there's an advantage in disappointments.

He talked a lot about sitting on stones and watching birds, a far more rewarding activity he said than the nonsense we can fill our lives with, watching Oprah, shopping for purses or being concerned about the state of our stomachs or genitals. He seemed, and I don't think I was alone in picking up on this underlying belief of his, contemptuous of anything but the long view of the universe.

There were some chuckles as he made quips, such as, in the context of separating personal experience, self, the contemporary politics and notions, to get to divine connection of nature thru mindfulness, he was asked about the place of ego and self in poems about distance from self. "Do I still have an ego?" (dramatic pause, checks his own pulse) "yep, still got it."

He said poetry has to be more than pollyanna. Poetry needn't make us feel good, needn't be the "the ecstasy of dogs running". When we study anything we reach into the separation and loneliness that is part of existence. He didn't invoke ying yang per se but suggested the dual nature of nature. We are trying to balance ego, (which can become dogma, cherished self and our own being centered in our tangible lives) with the plentitude of the universe and its time, space, form and mystery.

By writing with this part of the brain that he said is uniquely human, that can create comparisons and metaphors, we can bridge the dark chasm between meanings, open up, through comparisons and metaphor and make a light. Citing Emerson's ideas he said, as each word was once a unique understanding of the world, a poem, through poems, we can try to create new understandings.

We, in writing, he said, try to unclog of preconceptions, precepts of what a poem is, away from censor of reason and culture. As an aside he assured that this is not easy. It is exceedingly difficult. What's more it is a seditious act to observe, open mind and hearts in these political times. It is subversive to reach for mindfulness, the sacred umbilical poem. It is a difficult process to enter a room and observe it, rather than begin to make opinions on the room and read implications from it.

In his view, poetry is about practicing mindfulness, is an exercise of meditation, impartial observation, not to draw attention to yourself, but point beyond yourself. He related how in Buddhism they remind: do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. It is easy to fall to fingerism. Poetry should be, not politics, sides, stylistics and prizes, but something broader for change, and elevating.

He talked at length about nature and universal and learning to let poems come in the form they will take, and get out of their way, something new poets don't understand. Young poets decide what they will talk about, a mountain, say, and if I river comes, they don't follow it.

Winger asked him, can you find mindfulness and wonder outside of nature, say in Oprah or pop tarts? (which Domanski had earlier disparaged as being flaky and not worthy of a life's attention). Domanski answered "My wonder would be in filling Oprah with pop tarts...(pause)... but I'm getting therapy for that."




Much better pictures of him from the fest here.

The century of sound poetry (with one from circa 560-600) presented at the OIW festival was spatial, interaction, and some of it improv. Which is not to say unpracticed. For jwcurry to curate and for the troupe to synchronize their timing and reading of each other that well takes a load of practice and intensity.

It is people playing off each other and off of reactions to text, or in some cases visual remnants of what once was text, or off of visual or concrete poetry. (As an aside, most of Alexander's Dark band, Nicholas Powers, Rob Read, jwcurry all have books and chapbooks at the Writers Fest book tables, including Book Thug's O Spam Poams and hand made chappies of various designs and flavors.)

Even with camera in hand I had a sinking feeling that visual is the wrong medium, at least for me, for this. I couldn't have the skill to capture the pure impish joy and flow of Maria Erskine even if lighting and camera could capture that, or what abstracted text they were interpreting, although JohnW could.

The group was 1-4 people, or 6 depending on the piece. (6 when the Auxiliary of John Lavery and Carmel Purkis joined in.) Each person worked like a letter, that in isolation had a different meaning than with the troupe.

One was sombre semantic fragment, one was linguistic, base beat of a word or a number acting as a metronome, one non-linguistic sound jazzing into it. Each person performed part of the sound that converged and passed back and forth; it was as if each were a different tv channel and one watches all at the same time.

The asymmetry is part of the meaning in a way a recording doesn't pick up. It's dinner theatre in the sense of action happening of people walking around, coming into the scene.

I was overly hasty with the camera, deciding that the pictures I took wouldn't do, and erased a few. If I erase words, I can reconstruct easier than images. But as is, I'll have to use words to reconstruct what my ears and eyes caught. Hard to say which would represent sound poetry better. One vantage point doesn't capture and yet one image that is a multiple that I didn't erase seems appropriate in being not exactly literal. When the word is fragmented into constituent phonemes, why not also the image?



It is a mysterious thing, sound as having simultaneously no explicit literal narrative meaning and at the same time causing visceral reactions, senses of play or dismay. In the piece, She was a Visitor (by Robert Ashley, 1967) the choral voices rising together and apart and converging emulated a sort of mourning wail that crested and subsided and the emotional tone and negotiation changing. It is like listening to music in a foreign language and catching some universality.

Other pieces were similar in effect, where if you spoke German or French, you could catch more of the meaning but it wasn't necessary to have the language in common. It is play of sound, volume, tone, where the sound in made in the mouth, how far the sound projects. In some pieces there was a meditation on a word, meditating on each portion of it the way one savors each bite of a really good meal. In some there was monk-like chant interspersed with clapper-like shouts.

Some pieces were by Claude Gauvreau, some Frank Zappa, some Steve McCaffrey, some Kurt Schwitters and bpNichol. One was by Jaap Blonk, who everyone local knows by rote is a sound poetry superstar coming to Ottawa, June 6 to Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities.

Nearly 4 hours of performance makes for a distinct disjuncture from normal head space.

You know the sensation when staring at a black dot then moving your eyes to a white wall and seeing the after image? Or seeing a list of words made of real words and rhymes of non-words? You read it long enough and nothing looks spelled right or like English anymore...A similar sort of effect of hearing non-semantic vocalizing then regular English gets jostled unrecognizable.

Yesterday was mildly insane productive with 19 poems, most of which were utter shite underachievements but still could be pillaged for words or phrases.

Because I am insane like a challenge, and since there are multiple lists of prompts for poetry month, I'm going to do them all, aiming for at least 3 poems per day.

Amy King pointed to Daisy Frieds prompts and I'm doing the Brewer prompts and the Book of Kells prompts, which I already mentioned here, plus whatever poems naturally erupt out of normal course. That tend to be 1 every day or two and the 40 word year daily words which I think of as blog posts not prose poems and will extend out on either side of poetry month.

So am I writing? You betcha. Hopefully I can empty this brain. So far, nearly halfway thru, it's been interesting.

The latest, possible non-dreck?

small town generalist

we don't have enough bodies
for people to be narrow.
he loves all skirts, no fickle
stick-to-generation, size,
class, religion, coloring
and matched sense of
humor. that's for the luxury
of choosy metropolises.
he's mentally undressing
every woman (defined at
over 6, and under...
dead). when he talks
what of him that isn't
hands is all eyeballs.
he winks. his innuendo
may be a stretch. his
references may be obscure
but he's rarely subtle.
and no one sings "saved
a wretch like me" louder
than he on Sunday.

And I'm editing of course, the current and the last 10 month long train project. And reading like a maniac life is running out of time. Which is it continually.

Currently reading Kevin Connolly's Revolver (Anansi, 2008) and Nelson Ball's Bird Tracks on Hard Snow (ECW, 1994). Apparently getting high enough frequency of waves of tingles can actually cool one down. I think they are happening enough for my arm skin fan the air without the bones moving. Who knew that was possible?

Transformations by John Reibetanz (Goose Lane, 2006) (First impression: ***)

Out of Light by Joseph Massey (Kitchen Press, 2008) (First impression: *****)

Mornings Like This: Found Poems by Annie Dillard (Harper Collins, 1995) (First impression: ***)

Architecture for the Poor by Hassan Fathy (various publishers and new editions with different titles, this one, University of Chicago Press, 1973) (First impression: ****)

Comstock Review, annual contest winners issue. (First impression: *****)

Harvest: a book of signifiers rob mclennan (Talon, 2001) (First impression: ****)

Subject by Laura Mullen (University of California Press, 2005) (First impression: ****)

Selected Poems by Stéphane Mallarmé, Bilingual edition, translated by CF MacIntyre (University of California Press, 1957) (First impression: *)

The Glass Air, PK Page (Oxford, 1991) (First impression: ***)

Signs of the Former Tenant by Bronwen Wallace (Oberon, 1983) (First impression: **)

btw Brewer's Poetic Asides has a new poetry prompt every day for April.

   
   

      pickle pickle pickle pickle
pickle pickle pickle pickle pickle pickle pickle
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pickle picklepickle pickle picklepickle pickle pickle pickle pickle
pickle pickle picklepickle pickle picklepicklepicklepicklepickle pickle
picklepicklepicklepicklepicklepicklepicklepicklepicklepicklepickle
pickle pickle picklepickle pickle picklepickle pickle pickle
    pickle pickle pickle pickle pickle pickle
pickle pickle pickle pickle


What is more absurd than pickles? [laughter prompt]

A response to the One Single Impression prompt of spring, which is still a good month away here.

The ice pellets pick away at the glass again, the small sun of a cat on my lap, moaning should I shift, then when I accept her there, she trots off. Finally the sidewalks are shiny from the rain earlier this morning, not from ice, but the temperature is yo-yoing around freezing.

more snow coming,
post equinox sun –
spray of orange peel

The second panel discussion of the Doing it in Public event on Feb 29, 2008, was moderated by Michael Morse talking to Christian Bök, derek beaulieu, Adeena Karasick, Alexis O'Hara and angela rawlings.

There was audio recording of the sessions but the files are still not online at Trent. This is from my notes and not direct quotes. Some things I missed writing and there are gaps in flow.

This second panel on From Word to Sound was considerably more lively than the first on From Text to Performance with more debate and audience wanting to jump in to disagree with, well, with Bok's statements, mostly.

Unlike the consensus-seeking casual conversational tone of the last panel. Bok started in with oratory tools, prepared remarks and gambits for making people react, saying, in part, there is something episcopalian about poetry readings. We sit thru the services silently then go away hating poetry.

Bok explicitly rebutted and chastised the underlying self-deprecating apology that others put forward in the first panel of how they got into performance poetry. In other words, he reparsed, if you can't sing, and if you can't dance and if you can't do stand up, well, (head hung) at least you can be a poet.

Is it the lowest choice as a career? The expertise of being a poet is demeaned as a discipline when the audience is too tolerant or if we tolerate and reward as poets low quality.

There's something wrong with the term performance poetry. Do we have performance music? "It begs the question, do we have that that is poetry that is not performance?" No poem has inspired a riot or set a car on fire and he has a problem with that. If music concerts can provoke, why not poetry.

Alexis O'Hara retorted that he's going to the wrong poetry events. At Burning Man there are things set on fire to poetry. There were riots and visceral outbursts like he is talking about. People react and engage and love the poetry she's seeing.

Alexis O'Hara said her entry to poetry was thru punk rock, a populist audience which is not polite. You have to fight to be relevant, to be heard.

You have to take risks and "embrace the transformative power of failure". When an audience is uncomfortable, they are in their bodies. Pleasure is a salve. Discomfort situates us in ourselves. In risk there are chemicals that load that situation.

Risk is an illusion for her now. She knows too well how to get out of the risk she creates. She has to push to new places. She remarked how military has figured out the exact resonant frequency that will make people auto-defecate without even being able to register hearing a sound. She assured us she wouldn't do that to us in her performance that night. (The laughter seemed a mix of unease and relief.)

Complacency and perfect is easier. For a while she rejected virtuosity as symbolic of masculine.

She said that in performing poetry there can be some freestyling. In a performance she hung out in the washroom before the show and overheard a conversation and dropped the whole chunk into her performance. The entire audience were those two girls who knew that was for them and it meant nothing to anyone else there. That part is a direct private discourse with those two people. It's a connection.

Adeena Karasick: In sound poetry and experimental poetry, one is "throwing a wrench into normal discourse and see what happens". (Which seemed to be more or less the undercurrent gist of debate.)

In context I lost, Karasick turned this phrase: Everyone has the right to speak, but not the right to speak to me.

a.rawlings brought the subject back to the question of Word and Sound talking about automatists and her first exposure to sound poetry – Steve McCaffrey and the mindblow of seeing what was a familiar poem completely deconstructed, uncommon syntax and broken down into the base material of language, the kinetic, the aural and visual.

She said poetry is "the identity inside the blur". (Or else my handwriting is pure crap there.)

a.rawlings said poetry isn't the drafting but the getting into with research, thinking, rethinking and 40% of the end end product poem as editing.

derek beaulieu remarked on visual poems as being for the page not a score for audio performance. He doesn't read his visual poems and convert them to sound. Anyone else can if they like but the performance of poetry is the eye to image, the reading of it. Flatland came as a performance of the act of reading. He went letter by letter over a novel on a light table. The recurrent combinations of letters seemed to form their own rhythms of characters, actions, plot, oceanic vowels [or the occurrence of vowels? my short handwriting could go either way.]

Can you customize a poem to an audience and see how each interprets? Each poem is made by the writer and his job ends there. The audience picks up the task.

When one makes a dichotomy of us vs them, page vs. sound, it doesn't do either side on the argument any good.

The risk in poetry happens on the page as much as it would in oral performance.

When it comes to a matter of making big bucks from blockbuster poetry, access to people who want to access is what matters. The internet in particular can get work into the hands of a reader who wouldn't otherwise see it unless they were in the room with the writer. It expands the potential audience. He quipped the internet has expanded his base audience by at least 10.

A man in the audience wondered why is poetry not more mainstream in Canada. In Iran anyone on the street can recite to you Hafiz. Poetry is integrated into lives and the poet is highly esteemed. Why not here?

Bok: Poetry is a high art form but it has become crafter, artisinal like glass blowing or crotcheted doilies. We tolerate a high degree of incompetence in poetry like we would not tolerate in film or music. We give financial reward to music and film like we do not give to poetry as a society. Why should we have the bar so low that selling only 1000 units of poetry is considered a best seller when to have a successful movie the bar and the rewards are much higher.

When we say "good for you for trying" to poor poetry, that's therapy and not art. In visual art we say, pah, my little daughter could do a better painting than that. Why do we not apply the same critical standards to poetry? We could look at poetry the way a carpenter looks at someone else's chair.

Bok said poetry should not bore the audience with cliches and should provide something new.
Poetry should be as science and you don't know what the answer is when you start. It should push epistemology. The exploration not the form is the point.

(That reminds me what Clifford Stoll said, do it once, it's science. Do it twice, it's engineering, do it three times and its technician work.)

A poem is akin to an Ikea chair without an alan key nor instructions and the only rule is that you are to make something from it, and hopefully not a chair. You defamiliarize language and exoticize language.

Adeena Karasick: The universe shifts when someone reads these letters. That's the hope. They reshape someone else subtly. Someone's perspective on any level may shift. Poetry to change others is a political act. Poetry if it is not semantically followable can still lead thru disjunctures thru a backdoor in imagination and cause an alternate way of understanding.

The following is paraphrased not quoted, and reconstructed from my notes of the first panel discussion of Doing it in Public symposium on performance poetry at Trent. [Some photos from]. It was moderated by prof High Hodges.

What role does performance poetry play?

Jill Battson: Performance gets works to the public between books

Lebogang Mothibatsela: Performance gets work out faster and breaks down the 4th wall. Sometimes you have to use different words to make that connection the words and the audience.

Ziysah: Poetry text is communication. In performance poetry words are adjusted to the who's there, based on knowing who the audience is and eye contact of what they're getting.

Motion Brathwaite: Can poetry on the page transfer the same meaning without the tone if sung? Bob Dylan is a songwriter but people give him the name poet as well. Not many people can bridge song and word.

Lebo: We have spoken word poetry now. Next we'll have acrobatic poetry. It's what communicates. I refused the term poet for what I did, just called them thoughts but eventually recognized that you don't have thinkers on stage, you have poets. So I accepted the convention.

Why is performance poetry back?

Motion: It was never gone. Dub poetry was born as the sibling to reggae music when people were hearing the notes and not hearing the message. So take the music away and people can hear the words again. The griot was the origin of hip hop, the building of a storytelling of a community. It's thousands of years old. Each generation makes a new label for poetry and calls it new. Now performance poetry has a cool factor that makes it the same level as drama or singing.

Ziysah: It's mainstream art worldwide. Political repression fuels art and resistance. The top 40 charts and the mainstream that can be spread by technology and MTV, are being resisted by the same mainstream technology using myspace and youtube to make a counterculture to keep diversity of voices.

Jill Battson: The new peak of performance poetry isn't a change in the poetry or in the poets. It's the same people. It's just a by-product of a fad of media attention.

Lebo: In this age of information overload, people have more to say, more to synthesize, more international news, people are physically living closer to each other but speaking less with less community. Poetry gives an open entry point to express all this. It's not just for the depressed and in-love anymore.

On Poet and Audience

Lebo: If the audience doesn't get you you may as well read it in the bathroom to yourself.

Ziysah: A mic technologizes the voice and can be a barrier between the audience and the poet.

Motion: Spoken word isn't any less literate. Literate or illiterate is contextual. To understand references that's in term of culture. Understanding depends on context.

What works on the page may not work with a performance. What works with an audience may not work to record. The tool of the microphone is used differently in the studio. You find out things in the studio, like you're popping your Ps or not saying a word clearly. It's a noisy place performing in a bar and if people are watching you they can figure out what you said. You can forget words and say wait a minute and its ok, but with a studio its different. The focus is on the words and the technical. In person you can scream or whisper. The mood is different.

Motion: Slam poetry is like a jazz jam session. It forces you to construct and play and try out things with each other. It pushes your skills and you teach each other. It pushes you to push yourself. If you're just composing alone it's like "I'm the best poet ever!" and then you go out and see what others are doing and you go "oh shit. I'm the best poet ever in my bedroom!"

bpNichol computer poems, 1984 now online. "First Screening is some of the earliest programmed, kinetic poetry." It's such fun. How did bpNichol think so multi-dimensionally and make things so simple to grasp at the same time. How wonderful that these guys (Jim Andrews, Marko Niemi, Geof Huth, Dan Waber, Jeff Rivett, Jason Pimble and a handful of other digital archeologists) recovered it to accessible.

[via Arc Portage]

And Happy World Poetry Day.