1/26/2011

an attempt at an online "works cited" for michael lista's bloom

A book club I'm in recently read Michael Lista's Bloom. We had a wide-ranging discussion about the book, much of which focused on Lista's decision to write "approximations" of other poets' poems. I haven't seen much discussion online about this, though in his Globe and Mail review, Nigel Beale describes Bloom as a book that "“misreads,” translates, covers, eclipses, parodies or fucks with a choir of contemporary poetic voices." Lista himself states in an interview with The Torontoist: "I wrote Bloom the way I did because it needed to be written like that." In the same interview he also notes that "creative plagiarism is one of the finest untapped sources of aesthetic possibility available to us today, and it has obvious extra-poetic relevance". In other words, Lista's choice to "approximate" or "translate" or "fuck with" looms large over the text as you read it.

This makes it all the more peculiar that the book includes no citations. The authors being "approximated" are referred to at the end of each poem with an "after So-and-So" tag, but that's it - no listing at the back of the original poems' titles, or the collections in which they appeared. This seems an odd choice for a few reasons: it could appear to be discourteous to the original authors, or suggest that Lista is trying to "get away with something", or alienate those who already feel they are "outside" the world of poetry. Mainly, though, I puzzle over it because of how greatly a reading of Bloom can be enriched by "connecting the dots".

I did a little pre-book club research, and circulated to the group the links to some "originals". Regardless of where group members fell in their final verdict on the book (I, for one, liked it), everyone agreed that reading the originals added significantly to their experience.

Below is my best attempt, using poems already available online, to connect Lista's "approximations" with the original poems. I'm still missing about half of the poems (as the gaps between page numbers indicate), in some cases because the source poems aren't online and in others because I'm not familiar enough with the authors to track the poems down (no titles are given, so you have to remember an idea or line that sticks out, or adeptly choose your Google search words).

If you happen to know of online sources for connections that I've missed, do let me know in the comment field, or by email (roblucastaylor(at)gmail.com), and I'll happily add them. Also, a couple of my guesses may very well be wrong. So lit-nerds, I encourage you to double check!

If you don't have a copy of Bloom on hand, but want to play along, I've linked the titles of all of the Lista poems to audio recordings of him reading them - thanks go to Seen Reading for making those recordings, all of which can be found in one place here.

Hopefully this will help new readers of the book engage more deeply with the text, and perhaps provoke a return to the book for those who've already read it through:



Metempsychosis [1] (p. 6) = John Crowe Ransom's "Janet Walking"


Louis Slotin in Hades (p. 16) = Anne Sexton's "To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph"


Louis Slotin as The Wanderer (p. 21) = W.H. Auden's "The Wanderer" (With a cameo from W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming")


Louis Slotin's Sex Appeal (p. 23) = Irving Layton's "Sex Appeal" (Scroll to the bottom of page 5 of the PDF)


Louis Slotin in Hiroshima (p. 24) = Fitzpatrick Madrigali's "?". (My guess was that Fitzpatrick Madrigali was Lista's own pen name, in order to keep up the appearance that all the poems are "approximated" - and to not diminish the significance of "The Eclipse" being "after Nobody". It turns out I was close, as a student who had Lista visit his class reports that FM is a character in an unpublished novel of Lista's)


Laestrygonians (p. 28) = D.H. Lawrence's "There Are Too Many People"


Louis Slotin and The White Lie (p. 32) = Don Paterson's "The White Lie" (I had previously thought it was connected to Paterson's "The Lie", but Aidan Gowland pointed me in the right direction. Thanks Aidan! And Don, what's up with all the "Lie" poems?)


Sirens (p. 35) = Victor Hugo's "Tomorrow, At Dawn"


Louis Slotin's Flaw (p. 40) = Robert Lowell's "The Flaw"


The Return of Odysseus (p. 45) = Edwin Muir's "The Return"


Do. But Do. (p.47) = Robyn Sarah's "The World Is Its Own Museum"


Louis Slotin and The Green Knight (p.55) = "The Pearl Poet"'s "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight" (Scroll to the bottom of page 9 for the juicy decapitation scene - or read the summary on the Wikipedia page)


Louis Slotin Exits The Office (p. 59) = Fitzpatrick Madrigali's "?" (See "Louis Slotin in Hiroshima (p.24)")


Head of a Dandelion (p. 63) = Alice Oswald's "Head of a Dandelion" (Very quiet audio here)


Louis Slotin's Got The Main Blues (p. 66) = George Johnston's "Home Free"


Metempsychosis [2] (p. 67) = Karen Solie's "Determinism"


Johanna Finds a Reason (p. 69) = The Velvet Underground's "I Found A Reason"


The Coming of Wisdom with Time (p. 70) = W.B. Yeats' "The Coming of Wisdom with Time"


Louis Slotin Circles Kilimanjaro (p. 72) = Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (Scroll down to p. 57 of the text, though the "approximated" part doesn't come until the end of the short story)


Penelope (p.73) = Herman Kahn's "On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios" (Thanks to Ariana Ellis for finding this one. I'd originally guessed it was Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War")

If you don't feel like reading a whole Herman Kahn book (or two), this works pretty well as a summary:

1/25/2011

two anthology launches and a reading

And in traditional Vancouver fashion, they're all scheduled for the same night and time! Gotta love it. Anyway, they're posted below, and added to the big list for February:

Walk Myself Home: 50 Voices Join Together to End Violence Against Women
Wednesday, February 9th, 7:00 PM
Carnegie Community Centre Theatre
401 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Kate Braid, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Yvonne Blomer, and more!
Free!


Incite Reading Series
Wednesday, February 9th, 7:30 PM
Alice MacKay room, Central Library
350 West Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: Contributors to "Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature", including Trevor Carolan, Russell Thornton, and more!
Free!


Play Chthonics
Wednesday, February 9th, 7:30 PM
Graham House at Green College, UBC
6201 Cecil Green Park Road, Vancouver
Featuring: Jay MillAr and Chris Hutchinson
Free!

1/23/2011

a blood sport to be indulged by the young

Terry Gross: Now, you are both a novelist and critic. So you have lived and worked in two different, often conflicting worlds. You write that as an author, receiving a bad review is like being spit on by a complete stranger in Times Square. Has that feeling ever held you back from writing a bad review?

Wilfrid Sheed: It finally held me back from writing any reviews at all. I do very, very few these days, at least of living people, because, well, just to be crass about it, I don't need any more enemies. As a novelist, you really don't need any more than the course of life is going to send you.

But also, yes, on humane grounds, I think that you lose the killer instinct as you go along. I think that criticism can be a blood sport, really to be indulged by the young. As you get old, you imagine that perhaps the person is ill, or, you know, you imagine all the situations that have happened to yourself at one time or another, and you really can't go on giving it: You know how much it hurts.

TG: You don't think that criticism plays a higher function than just panning a new book or dishing the writer?

WS: Yes, I suppose when I talk about panning, and I really never did enjoy it, people seem to assume that this is the part of the work that critics really enjoy the most, and I suppose, you know, one can indulge oneself, and there are probably more rich hostile words in the language than nice ones.

But I have really enjoyed writing favorable reviews, and actually, I think criticism itself goes ways beyond praise and blame. Criticism, as opposed to reviewing, is that you assume that the reader is familiar with the work of art or will make himself so, and then you can talk.

This is the talk of people who have gone beyond the question of whether it's good or bad and now just want to talk about the thing itself, and that kind of criticism I would still like to do.

- Wilfrid Sheed, who died last week at age 80, in a recently rebroadcast 1988 interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air. You can listen to the interview here, and read the transcript here.

1/19/2011

like dropping into a cavern in the raiders of the lost ark

The question that my readers ask me most often is... probably [about] the fact of poetry itself as an art form, and that somebody would do that, and why it’s possible, and how it might work, and how it exists in our culture. Because there’re a lot of people who know a lot about poetry and they would have a specific set of issues, almost like political in a sense, or theological. People outside of it sort of don’t know about it, and sort of discover it – it’s like dropping into a cavern in The Raiders of the Lost Ark, you see all this stuff you didn’t know existed. You’re sort of startled that there is such a developed and elaborate world in American poetry. So I think people from outside poetry are really surprised and interested in the whole fact of its density and its contentiousness and its richness. People inside are more interested in technical and partisan and political and aesthetic agonism, struggle, conflict.


- Charles Bernstein, in an interview with those lit-crazy folks in Iowa City which quickly takes a turn away from the "City of Literature" and towards "Silly Town, USA". Whether it has already taken that turn in this quote is yours to determine (for instance: "surprised" I could see, but "interested"?). You can watch the whole thing on YouTube here.

1/18/2011

some february readings, mega-readings, book launches, info sessions, $175 live auctions, etc.

Thanks to Vaughan Chapman for pointing to this blog as a good place to keep up with Vancouver lit readings. Now that I have a reputation to maintain, here's an eclectic batch of events for early February, two of which will include me:

Banff Centre Info Session
Wednesday, February 2nd, 3:30 - 4:30 PM
Arts Club Upstairs Lounge
1585 Johnston Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Information on Banff Centre programs. Go get learned, Vancouver writers.
Free!


Vancouver Lit-Mag Extravaganza (aka "A Communal Reading") [aaka "A Literary Clusterf*ck"]
Thursday, February 3rd, 7:00 PM
The Beaumont Studios
316 West 5th Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Readers representing PRISM international, Joyland, Poetry is Dead, Geist, EVENT, subTerrain, OCW Magazine and Ricepaper, including Rachel Knudsen, Dina Del Bucchia, Gillian Jerome, Shannon Rayne, Charles Demers and George Bowering. Yes, this event will be seven hundred hours long.
$10 (includes some free magazines)


Writers' Trust Presents Margaret Atwood
Thursday, February 3rd, 7:00 PM
Fairmont Hotel
900 West Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: A theatrical performance of Atwood's "The Year of the Flood", and an auction full of things you'll never be able to afford - at least not after having shelled out for a ticket. There's also an online auction, which seems more affordable, here.
$175 (funds go to The Writers' Trust)


Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, February 3rd, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Jamie Reid and Pam Bentley
$5 (suggested donation)


Word Whips: Inspired by "Kumra, my Child"
Sunday, February 6th, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery
Jewish Community Centre of British Columbia
950 W 41st Ave, Vancouver
Featuring: Daniela Elza, Fran Bourassa, myself and more!
$5 suggested donation (all proceeds to school projects in Ghana)


Walk Myself Home: 50 Voices Join Together to End Violence Against Women
Wednesday, February 9th, 7:00 PM
Carnegie Community Centre Theatre
401 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Kate Braid, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Yvonne Blomer, and more!
Free!


Incite Reading Series
Wednesday, February 9th, 7:30 PM
Alice MacKay room, Central Library
350 West Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: Contributors to "Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature", including Trevor Carolan, Russell Thornton, and more!
Free!


Play Chthonics
Wednesday, February 9th, 7:30 PM
Graham House at Green College, UBC
6201 Cecil Green Park Road, Vancouver
Featuring: Jay MillAr and Chris Hutchinson
Free!


Poetry is Dead - This is Not a Love Poem
Thursday, February 10th, 7:00 PM
The Waldorf Hotel
1489 East Hastings St., Vancouver
Featuring: Fiona Lam, Nikki Reimer, Catherine Own, myself and more!
$5 (includes a free issue of Poetry is Dead)


Robson Reading Series
Thursday, February 10th, 7:00 PM
UBC Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St, Vancouver
Featuring: Andre Alexis and Harry Karlinsky
Free!


TWS Reading Series
Friday, February 11th, 7:00 - 9:30 PM
Take 5 Café
429 Granville Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Bernice Lever, Dennis E Bolen, Sheenak and more!
Free!


World Poetry Anniversary Gala
Monday, February 14th, 2011, 6:30 PM
Alice MacKay Room, VPL, Central Branch
350 W. Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: Tenth anniversary celebrations with hosts Ariadne Sawyer and Alejandro Mujica-Olea
Free!


Spoken Ink Reading Series
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011, 8:00 PM
La Fontana Caffe
101-3701 East Hastings Street, Burnaby
Featuring: Julie H. Ferguson and Daryl Stennett
Free!


Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, February 17th, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Catherine Owen and CJ Leon
$5 (suggested donation)


Ray Hsu and Evelyn Lau Reading
Thursday, February 24th, 1:00 - 2:00 PM
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
Victoria Learning Theatre (Rm 183)
1961 East Mall, UBC Main Campus, Vancouver
Featuring: see title!
Free!


Locution Reading Series
Thursday, February 24th, 7:00 PM
Pulpfiction Books
2422 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Katia Grubisic and Alexander McLeod
Free!


Robson Reading Series
Thursday, February 24th, 7:00 PM
UBC Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St, Vancouver
Featuring: Eve Joseph, Lydia Kwa and Kenneth Radu
Free!

As you'll note if you looked closely, there's a new reading series in town. The Vancouver International Writers Festival has started up a year-round reading series of their own, called Incite. Get all the info here.

1/14/2011

twinglish as an instrument of linguistic reciprocity

[Darko Antwi's] use of Twinglish (a linguistic mix of Twi and English) in the phrase, "Saint Domeabra," is one of the many powers that this poem uses to convey its themes. It is about time for us, writers of African descent, to be creative on multiple levels when it comes to language. Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were unapologetic with the use of native words in their prose. Poetry in Ghana, as a microcosm of African poetry, has been reluctant to give the rest of the world a taste of our beautiful languages. It is about time African poets and writers put their words where their hearts are. The use of a local word or phrase as the pivot of a poem urges the English speaker/reader to understand a word that is not native to his/her tongue. African writers can inject this instrument of linguistic reciprocity to achieve seven main objectives:

1. To forge new words made out of their own languages
2. To maintain the use of their native language in a world where other languages are dying or acquiescing themselves to English
3. To give their work authenticity and identity
4. To broaden the lexicon of the English language, which still lacks words that properly describe certain actions, activities and people
5. To keep the contextual integrity of their works
6. To open their world to the rest of the world, and
7. To make their poetry more accessible to the less-educated in their societies.


- Prince Mensah, in his "How Poems Work" essay on Darko Antwi's "The Burial of Saint Domeabra" over at One Ghana, One Voice. You can read the whole essay here.

1/12/2011

seven statements about writing poetry

1. Every poet is an experimentalist.

6. You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.

8. Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

9. The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.

22. What they say "there are no words for"--that's what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.

26. A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.

27. A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.


- Some of my favourite of Marvin Bell's "Thirty-two Statements About Writing Poetry", published in the Commemorative 2002 issue of The Writer's Chronicle. Read all thirty-two here.

1/09/2011

a poem should not just be a ransacking of words

Reading a wide swath of poets and poetry is essential to becoming a better poet, as is a knowledge of formal technique, but I won’t say it is everything. A poem should not just be a ransacking of words. A good poem, if it is a good poem, may use assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme in considerable ways, yet these are only the joists propping up a poem’s deeper emotional or ideological centre. Where exactly this centre lies is often unknown, or at least shifting...

As a poet, I am constantly trying to articulate what lies just outside on the periphery of vision; to put into words the world I see and the one I hear—that place where "the other voice" resides. And perhaps it is this seeking, as much as any amount of reading, or study of craft, that has taught me the most of what I know of poetry today.


- Chris Banks, from his essay "Falling in Love with Poetry: A Bird's-eye View" in the Summer/Fall 2004 Edition of The New Quarterly. You can read the whole essay, which Chris has recently posted on his blog, here.

1/08/2011

a story that's much bigger than yourself

Both pieces are about a moment where something you thought was deeply personal, that you thought was only you, only your problem, is actually the result of, say, legislation that was passed, or systemic economic or social inequality. The first realization is that you've been internalizing the burden of something that is really a systemic issue, and the second part is that there is a group of people who benefit from you continuing to think that it's just you, who benefit from you internalizing this burden. It's a huge slap in the face, but it's also transformative, because you realize that there are more of you and you're part of a story that's much bigger than yourself.

- An excerpt from a great Q+A with Krissy Darch over at One Ghana, One Voice. You can read the interview here, and the two poems she is referring to here and here.

1/05/2011

two rules for sonnet essays: #1 no cussing. #2 don't call me shirley.

The sonnet has become the poet's self-imposed glass ceiling. Surely we can appreciate the irony that the form whose best feature is that it encourages a poet to think through the challenges of form, rhetoric, and syntax has become the easy alternative to thinking through new ways to meet the challenges of form, rhetoric, and syntax. Surely we can see how a fervour for sonnets stunts an adaptable poetics that responds to those standard old sonnet traditions of love, time, and death, but also to the alienation of digital communication, the shallowness of social networking, dystopian echoes of G20s and G8s, or science's assault on the fundamentals of the way we understand the universe - in other words, the full challenge of investigating the immediate in an art almost as old as language itself. When our response to that challenge is to take the sonnet with all its many virtues, raise it on a pedestal, and stop thinking about how else the lessons of the sonnet - rather than the sonnet itself - might be applied, adapted, explored, and expanded, preferring instead to churn out more fucking sonnets? Well, that is a sad and tragic decision. Me, I say fuck that. And fuck the sonnet.

- Chris Jennings, breaking all the rules in his demurely titled essay "On the Sonnet" in the Winter 2011 issue of Arc.

It's a great issue in general, featuring long essays on Robyn Sarah and Don Coles (by Carmine Starnino and Amanda Jernigan, respectively), and new poetry by Steven Heighton and Elise Partridge, among many others. Check it out at an independent bookstore near you, yo!

1/04/2011

happy new readings!

Happy New Year, all! If you resolved to attend more poetry readings in 2011 (and really, who didn't?) - these listings ought to help make it happen:

Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, January 6th, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: George Bowering and Sasha Langford
$5 (suggested donation)


Poetic Justice
Sunday, January 9th, 4:00 - 6:00 PM
Renaissance Books
43 - 6th St., New Westminster (near Columbia Skytrain)
Featuring: Diane Tucker
Free!


Locution
Thursday, January 13th, 7:00 PM
Pulpfiction Books
2422 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Elizabeth Bachinsky
Free!


Robson Reading Series
Friday, January 14th, 7:00 PM
UBC Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St, Vancouver
Featuring: Sheila Heti and Bren Simmers
Free!


TWS Reading Series
Friday, January 14th, 7:00 - 9:30 PM
Take 5 Café
429 Granville Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Beth Kope, Harry Karlinsky, Ayelet Tsabari, and more!
Free!


Spoken Ink
Tuesday, January 18th, 8:00 PM
La Fontana Cafe
101-3701 East Hastings (at Boundary), Burnaby
Featuring: Shauna Paull
Free!


Play Cthonics
Wednesday, January 19th, 7:30 - 9:00 PM
UBC’s Green College
Piano Lounge, Graham House
6201 Cecil Green Park Road, Vancouver
Featuring: Jeramy Dodds and Philip Kevin Paul
Free!


Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, January 20th, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Dennis E. Bolen and Soressa Gardner
$5 (suggested donation)


On Edge Reading Series
Thursday, January 20th, 7:00 PM
Emily Carr University
South Building, Room 406
1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver
Featuring: Elizabeth Bachinsky in conversation with Jacqueline Turner
Free?


Mashed Poetics VI: Are You Experienced
Thursday, January 27th, 8:00 PM
Cottage Bistro
4468 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: "A night of spoken word and music mashup, featuring the music of the Jimi Hendrix Experience". Do you really need to know more? Ok, R.C. Weslowski, Daniel Zomparelli, Daniela Elza, and many more will be reading/performing/whatever-the-hell-you-do-while-mashing-with-Jimi.
$5 - $10 sliding scale