2/24/2010

The Quatchi Rap - The Video

By popular demand, via Microsoft Paint...



All you motherfuckers better sit ‘er down and watch, see,
‘Cause DAMN! here comes a rap about Olympic mascot Quatchi!
His powder-blue ear muffs pimp him out like Liberace;
he blazes down the rink like that shit is a hibachi!

Forget the barbecue, let’s get back to the Sasquatch, he
bangs so many chicks that you need a Fibonacci
Sequence to keep track: 2, 3, 5, 8 – this shit’s debauch’ry!
He’s had his way with women from Vancouver to Karachi!

But after the Olympics there’ll be no more love for Quatchi,
he’ll hang out in the park with some old dudes playing bocce,
he’ll fall back into drugs, and his earmuffs will grow splotchy,
he’ll reminisce about the days before his fur turned blotchy.

But at least he’s! Not VANOC, eh! Those dudes are Nazis!


Oh man, I'm so white...

2/23/2010

readings. two of them.

UPDATE: Now three of them!

Real Vancouver Writers Reading #4
Wednesday, February 24th, 7 PM
W2 Culture + Media House
112 West Hastings, Vancouver
Featuring: Steven Galloway, Timothy Taylor, Rhonda Waterfall, Brad Cran, and more!
$5


The Poetics of Space: Feminist Writers in Dialogue
Thursday, February 25th, 7 PM
Rhizome Café
317 East Broadway, Vancouver
Featuring: Sina Queyras, Lydia Kwa and Emily Fedoruk
Free!


White Rock Literary Series
Thursday, February 25th, 7:30 PM
Pelican Rouge Coffee House
16th Ave. and 152nd St., White Rock
Featuring: Ray Hsu
Free!


Oh, and the deadline for the Pandora's Collective special achievement awards has been pushed back to this Friday. The info is here.

2/22/2010

poems do not come from what you know

Curtis Fox: When did you write that poem about your hips?

Lucille Clifton: Oh, that was early seventies.

CF: Was that in response to the feminist movement at the time?

LC: No, it was in response to my big hips! There’s not always, you know, I mean... I’m not always responding to various movements and things, I’m responding to life. Somebody asked me where do I get my ideas, for instance, as if poetry comes from ideas all the time. Poems do not come from what you know, they come from what you are trying to wonder about.

- from an interview featured in the lovely Poetry off the Shelf podcast "Done with this Dust". Lucille Clifton died on February 13th.

2/20/2010

Brad Cran is at it again

Will anyone escape the Vancouver Poet Laureate's wrath? And here I thought Cadence Weapon would be the badass poet laureate:

2010 Handbook for Entering Canada

quatchi rocks

Quatchi Watch, the blog for all things Quatchi, has posted my Quatchi Rap. Yes, that was three "Quatchi"s in one sentence.

You can read that post here.

2/18/2010

The Quatchi Rap


All you motherfuckers better sit ‘er down and watch, see,
‘Cause DAMN! here comes a rap about Olympic mascot Quatchi!
His powder-blue ear muffs pimp him out like Liberace;
he blazes down the rink like that shit is a hibachi!

Forget the barbecue, let’s get back to the Sasquatch, he
bangs so many chicks that you need a Fibonacci
Sequence to keep track: 2, 3, 5, 8 – this shit’s debauch’ry!
He’s had his way with women from Vancouver to Karachi!

But after the Olympics there’ll be no more love for Quatchi,
he’ll hang out in the park with some old dudes playing bocce,
he’ll fall back into drugs, and his earmuffs will grow splotchy,
he’ll reminisce about the days before his fur turned blotchy.

But at least he’s! Not VANOC, eh! Those dudes are Nazis!




p.s. Watch "The Quatchi Rap - The Video!" here.

2/17/2010

poetry is for bad boys

This just in: Red Fez now has swag!

vancouver lit leaders? think quick!

A note from Pandora's Collective (note that the deadline is today, not sure why the short notice...):

Pandora’s would like to recognize certain individuals who have had an impact on the literary community over the years. We will be giving out four special achievement awards [at the Summer Dreams Literary Festival in August] and would like you to tell us who you think deserves them. We have a committee in place to go over your input and sort through who you think should receive one of these awards. Finally as I am Executive Director I will be picking one individual that I think should be recognized in the community for their commitment and work.

But now it is your turn. Really think about whom it is you think needs to be recognized. It can be for the quality of their work, the support they have given emerging writers, their tireless endeavors to keep a reading or spoken word event going or their continued workshops that have made a difference in your life. We want to know who you think these people are.

Send us their name and three sentences about why you think it is they should receive special recognition. If you have a contact for this person that would help.

But don’t take to long to think about it. All submissions for consideration should be sent to blnish_pandoras@yahoo.ca by Wednesday February 17th [UPDATE: DEADLINE NOW FEB. 26th].

2/15/2010

the toxic residue of puritanism

The answer [to why page poetry has been in decline since the 1970s] is that the work of poets entangled in academia and its publish-or-perish credo has become so insular and cryptic, so divorced from broader society, that they have alienated a generation from their brand of poetry.

Thank goodness for the poetry slam! Poetry slams let writers know that droning a series of oblique literary allusions in a monotone voice does not make you a refined poet - it makes you an insufferable bore. Art does not have to be painful and difficult. That impulse is just the toxic residue of puritanism at work again. Poetry should be enjoyable. Once poets embrace this, they will earn back the privileged placement in the bookstores and in the wider public sphere.

- Chris Gilpin, from "The Living Language of Spoken Word" in the first issue of Poetry is Dead.

And speaking of slam poetry in the wider public sphere, it's quite something to see hundreds of people debate and interpret a poem, as they are currently doing over at CBC.ca.

2/14/2010

some love from ghana

A love poem from Ghanaian poet Adjei Agyei-Baah is up at One Ghana, One Voice just in time for Valentine's Day. Check it out here.

2/13/2010

hey, look! olympics!

They're everywhere! Mad props to Shane Koyczan and Leonard Cohen/k.d. Lang for slipping some literary content into those Viagra-sponsored opening ceremonies (seven healthy phalluses and one with E.D., if you were counting along at home).

Lang's cover of "Hallelujah" was one of my highlights of the ceremonies, and Koyczan did a great job as well. It must be a tricky task to write and read a poem that has to be "safe" and powerful all at once, and it's unfair to expect a literary masterpiece to result from such a situation. Compared to the other OMG, a poem? moment of late, Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem for Barak Obama, Koyczan's was easily the better performance. If you didn't see it yesterday, there's a spliced together version of Koyczan performing the poem here. [UPDATE: A clip from the ceremonies themselves here - thanks to The Drive is Alive for the link!]

It was especially nice to see some literary content considering the dearth of it during the "Cultural Olympiad" - one of Brad Cran's concerns in his recent, and much-ballyhooed, blog post.

And with Koyczan promoting Vancouver slam poetry to the world, I can only imagine how popular the next few slams at Cafe Deux Soleils will be. Commercial Drive will be crazy! Oh wait, it already is...


Others may force the rerouting of the torch relay, too, but no one does it with the style (and barbed wire) of the Drive!

P.S. GOOOOOO SNOW LEOPARD!!!!

2/12/2010

stuck on you

... if you are a wall. It was harder to come up with a title for this than I thought it would be.

Anyway, High Altitude Poetry has been sticking love poems (including one of my own) on the walls around SFU's Burnaby Campus all day - if you are up there working late, take a look around and see if you can find one (they'll probably only linger a day or so, knowing the militant janitors...). The details, via Facebook.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, YO!!!

2/10/2010

"The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC..."

Brad Cran, Vancouver Poet Laureate, says "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Olympics. In poetry, too.

oh man am i out of titles for these "readings" posts

The readings march on despite the Olympian-sized lineups at transit stations (and the Games haven't even started yet!). If anyone can make it to anything, here are some readings:


Real Vancouver Writers Reading #2
Wednesday, February 10th, 7 PM
W2 Culture + Media House
112 West Hastings, Vancouver
Featuring: Charles Demers, Jen Sookfong Lee, Larissa Lai, and more!
$5


A Wake for Duthie Books
Monday, February 15th, 7 PM
The Shebeen (Behind the Irish Heather Pub)
212 Carrall Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Not a reading, a wake! Dress and drink appropriately.
$20 (includes dinner, proceeds to charity)


Burnaby Writers' Society Reading Series
Tuesday, February 16th, 8 PM
The James Street Cafe
3819 Canada Way, Burnaby
Featuring: Bonnie Nish and Sita Carboni
Free!


Real Vancouver Writers Reading #3
Wednesday, February 17th, 7 PM
W2 Culture + Media House
112 West Hastings, Vancouver
Featuring: Elizabeth Bachinsky, Heather Haley, Sonnet L'Abbé and more!
$5

2/09/2010

happy boy

After a long publishing dry spell, the last few days have been a whirlwind. Riddle Fence and Other Voices each picked up two poems, and then, when I thought I was already just about as excited as I could be, I got word from One Cool Word that I was the co-winner (with Catherine McNeil) of the poetry prize in their 1st Writing Contest. In conclusion...


It sort of feels like my own personal National Poetry Month has started early, in that so many awesome things are happening in so short a period of time that it's making me a bit dizzy.

Incredible amounts of thanks to the editors and publishers of the three magazines, especially to Patrick Friesen and Rita Wong for judging the One Cool Word contest - the honour is that much greater when it comes from writers you admire.

2/06/2010

the stubborn, essentially worthless, production of one person

Romantic notions of the self were formed in resistance to the new industrialism. If people could be put in front of looms for 14 hours a day, their only use as producers of goods to be sold... Doesn’t it make sense that it would be necessary to proclaim the brilliant depths the soul could plumb? Wasn’t there something in us to be affirmed besides our use as an economic unit? But Wordsworth and Keats and company could not have foreseen the scale upon which an assault on individuality would be mounted by an increasingly global capitalism. Beauty, soul, art itself: those luxury goods become one more item on the economic scale...

And at the same time, it is no exaggeration to say that poetry is thriving... I’ve never known young people to be as keenly interested, as open to poetry. I think this is because art is never made by committees; resists the focus group; cannot be market tested; cannot, if the truth be told, be sold. Sure, you can buy a book of poems, but no one is going to get rich from this undertaking. And no one is going to invest in poetry futures or trade poetic commodities. It is the stubborn, essentially worthless, production of one person, one sensibility, giving form to how it feels to be one’s self. That is paradoxically precious, and absolutely worthless. A poem has no value, cannot be possessed. You can memorize it, give it away, sing it, e-mail it to everybody you know. It isn’t yours, or anyone’s. It could only have been made by the one who made it, but you make it your own as you take it in. You could imitate the poems of others, but that isn’t really the point: the goal is to make the poems that no one could have made but you, whatever those turn out to be. That is why poetry is, at this moment necessary, irreplaceable of inherent value. It is not threatened, not in the sense that people are about to stop writing it or reading it or thinking about it, it is threatened in a larger sense in that its root which is the particular idiosyncratic stuff of selfhood may itself whither... To what extent can the forces that run the world homogenise us? We don’t know the answer to that yet.


- Mark Doty, from his keynote address "Tide of Voices" at the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar. Listen to the whole thing here.

2/05/2010

dissolve the barrier of skin and bone and separateness

Here are some lines from a terrific first book from Craig Morgan Teicher... “To speak is an incomparable act / of faith. What proof do we have that / when I say mouse, you do not think / of a stop sign?” The project of poetry, in a way, is to raise language to such a level that it can convey the precise nature of subjective experience, that the listener would envision not just a mouse, but this particular one in all its exact specifics, its perfect details. Such enchanted language could magically dissolve the barrier of skin and bone and separateness between us and render perception so evocatively that we don’t just know what it means, we feel what it means.

- Mark Doty, from his keynote address "Tide of Voices" at the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar. Listen to the whole thing here.

2/03/2010

it goes round and round like an eddy, gathering up odds and ends

I just finished reading The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, and very much enjoyed it. It's an odd little collection of poetry, prose, and photos on all things Al and A-Frame, with the proceeds going to the Al Purdy A-Frame Trust. It features a dozen or so of Purdy's A-Frame-related poems, mostly lesser-known, including this excerpt from "The Woman on the Shore":

the lake is trying to decide about itself
whether it is better to be ice or water
and can't make up its mind
it yearns toward both of them
And little two-inch tubular crystals form
phantoms in the water
- when the merest hint of wind comes
they sing
they sing like nothing here on earth
nothing here on earth resembles this
this inhuman yearning for something other
sighing between the planets


Alongside his poems are pieces of Purdy's prose, such as this description of stepping out naked into the snow:

It was like being caressed by little white sparks, the touch no more than a ghostly awareness of touching. The feeling of having once had wings, or an additional sense beyond the ordinary five which enabled the possessor to be part of things instead of separate from them... Retreating into the house, I felt as if I had glimpsed a human faculty we had lost when life was "nasty, brutish and short," but you could speak to snowflakes in their own language...


While Purdy's contributions are, not surprisingly (his being dead and all), excerpts from previously collected works, the other two-thirds of the book are devoted to mostly new writing: anecdotes and reminiscences (and a good deal of myth-making) on Al and the A-Frame from friends and fellow writers. Some great notes on Purdy's writing (and writing style) slip in from time to time as well, most notably this observation by D.G. Jones:

Generally, a Purdy poem focuses on a particular moment, a particular set of relationships, and then it goes round and round like an eddy, gathering up odds and ends, whatever can be caught up and borne along in the current of feeling. It imitates the action of daily life in which one spontaneously digest all kinds of unrelated matters as one moves from situation to situation, moment to moment. It is an action which integrates, not always logically, but sensibly and psychologically, inner and outer space, the local and the cosmic, past and present.


It's a wonderful read, and if you are a Purdy fan I hope you'll check it out.

woodward's writers

I don't know how I missed this until today, but the W2 Culture + Media House at the new Woodward's building is hosting four readings, one on every Wednesday in February - the "Real Vancouver Writers' and Culture Series" - which just might have something to do with the Olympics being in town...

The first is tonight at 7 and features, among others, Peter Van Camp, Jennica Harper and Brendan McLeod. It's $5.

More info on the series can be found here, and the lineups for all four readings are here.

2/01/2010

red fez on your iThings

In case you need more internets, Leopold McGinnis, the wizard behind Red Fez, has made it possible to read Red Fez on your mobile phones/pods/pads: m.redfez.net

I don't understand any of it, but Leopold explains/hypes it a bit here.