spread it like a roll of nickels

best canadian poetry 2012 vancouver launch + more!

2012-01-31T09:00:00.009-08:00

I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I somehow managed to go from being longlisted for (but not included in) the Best Canadian Poetry 2011 anthology, to reading at the anthology launch with my name looming largest on the poster:

I believe it has something to do with my having the shortest name of anyone in the group.

Anyway, I'll be reading my almost-accepted ("not-totally-rejected"?) poem, "Ouchton Bay, Cape Scott, Kwakiutl Territory" (thanks, Prairie Fire, for originally publishing it), along with a poem or two from The Other Side of Ourselves, and one poem actually included in the anthology, Al Rempel's "We Love Bananas" (because, well, how can one resist a title like that?). It should be a great evening.

The details, in case you don't like looking at posters:

Best Canadian Poetry 2012 Vancouver Launch
Saturday, February 4th, 7 - 9 PM
W2 Media Cafe
111 W Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Marita Dachsel, Onjana Yawnghwe, Warren Dean Fulton, Daniela Elza, Timothy Shay and Rob Taylor
Free!

Also, if you're looking for something to do on Friday night, Event, Prism and Poetry is Dead are co-hosting a party at Project Space. Marita Dachsel will be there, again, along with Garry Thomas Morse. There will be a DJ and... are you ready for it?... cake! The details:

Prism is a Dead Event
Friday, February 3rd, 8:00 PM - 11:00 PM
Project Space
222 E Georgia Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Marita Dachsel and Garry Thomas Morse
$5 (suggested donation), $15 for a copy of all three magazines!

See you this weekend?

new writing group in deep cove - seeking members

2012-01-30T10:00:00.001-08:00

A message from a good friend on the North Shore, for those of you up there who might be looking to join a writing group:

Hi All,

My name is Alais Harris. I live on the North Shore in Deep Cove and am looking to start a monthly writing group in the Cove. Some of the things I am looking for in a writing group would be: a place to share work of any genre (though as the group evolves we can refine that to reflect the group's interests); a place to get honest, constructive feedback on work; and a creative atmosphere where new ideas and projects can be generated.

This writing group would take place at the Artemis Gallery, a warm, open space that gives us lots of room get comfortable and share ideas.

If you feeling a little lacking in creative inspiration, or long for a productive environment in which you can share your prose or poetry, or just want talk with people who love writing as much as you do, email me at alais_fairlight(at)hotmail.com.

I have arranged for the writing group to take place on the second Thursday of every month at 7:30 - 9:00 PM. We can begin as soon as next month if people are interested. There are amenities for simple food preparation at the gallery if we decide we want to bring snacks and drinks, or, across the street is a pizza place with great-tasting pizza.

The cost to rent the space for the evening is 50$ so I will be asking people to contribute a donation of 5-7 dollars.

Cheers,

Alais Harris
alais_fairlight(at)hotmail.com

literature is not a consumer good

2012-01-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

The best way to move [poetry books and chapbooks] is to put readers in direct contact with the work or with the author, through readings, or through radio, or samplers. Trade publishers have adopted this mistaken notion that there is something to learn about marketing literary books from the world of potato chips and soap flakes—from the marketing of consumable items. Literature is not a consumer good, nor is it strictly speaking entertainment (though the hype around prizes in the fiction scene might suggest otherwise). To talk about literature in terms of consumer goods and entertainment is to talk about rivers and forests in terms of raw materials and natural resources—little good comes from it. Literature and culture are about human relationships, and so it follows that finding ways to foster direct and authentic encounters between a writer and an audience is the best way to promote a book.

- Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press, in response to rob mclennan's 12 or 20 (small press) questions. You can read the whole thing here.

small, unnecessary devotions

2012-01-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

So what are we left with? Perhaps nothing more than the realization that much of life is devoted to things that in the end don’t matter very much, except to us. Time passes whether we like it or not, and its too-quick progress is measured out in private longings and solitary trivialities as much as in choices we might defend to a skeptical audience. This isn't to say there aren't reasons for us to love the things we love - Robert Frost was wrong, or at least not entirely right, to say that we "love the things we love for what they are." But those reasons can be difficult to describe in the way that it's hard to describe what red looks like, or how one's relationship with a child or parent feels. The same is true of poetry. I can’t tell you why you should bother to read poems, or to write them; I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all the other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful. There’s little grandeur in this, maybe, but out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident.

- David Orr, in the chapter entitled "Why Bother?" in his book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

#whitepoetproblems

2012-01-21T10:00:00.007-08:00

[Robert Duncan's] biological mother died in childbirth. He was adopted into a family of Theosophists. His adoptive parents were part of a hermetic brotherhood in Oakland, California... [They] adopted Duncan based on his astrological chart, and they told him that they had adopted him because of his “bad karma”...

Duncan had a troubled relationship with [his mother]. There are a couple things here: he was homosexual... she didn’t seem to have trouble with that so much. And it may actually have been part of the prediction, based on his astrological chart, that he would be “deviant” in this way. The chart also, according to his parents, showed that he had had his last incarnation in Atlantis, and that he had been part of a generation that had destroyed their own world, and that he had been brought back for the end times, now, which would be some fiery ending, probably atomic... That was in his head, growing up. But I don’t think that bothered him as much as the fact that she wanted him to be an architect.

- Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan's biographer, in interview with Curtis Fox for Poetry Off the Shelf, proving that even the crazies wish their kids would stop writing poetry and get real jobs. You can listen to the whole thing here.

welcomes and confounds

2012-01-20T10:00:00.005-08:00

When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him. For such readers, then, it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium.

- David Orr, in the introduction to his book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

"the other side of ourselves" interview

2012-01-17T10:00:00.021-08:00

In early December I got a note from Lena Garabedian, a student at the University of Toronto, who was writing a review of The Other Side of Ourselves for a course, and had a few questions for me.

Her questions were thoughtful, and worked their way a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of the book, and some of its specific poems, than other Q+As I've done for the book to date. So, with Lena's permission, I've posted her questions and my replies below. If you've read TOSOO, I hope you find this interesting.

Thanks, Lena, for taking the time with my book!

Lena Garabedian: The Other Side of Ourselves is the first book which has been your full debut to the poetry world. In doing so, was there any specific reasons why you placed “The Wailing Machines,” as your opening poem for your first book? Do you think that this was a good representation of what the rest of the book had to offer?

Rob Taylor: I'm glad you picked up on this poem in terms of sequencing. My manuscript existed for a year and a half before I sent it to a publisher. Over that time, I rearranged the sequence of the poems many, many times, but "The Wailing Machines" was always the first poem. In fact, for a long while, it was the title of the manuscript (it was the title listed for the manuscript when it won the Alfred G. Bailey prize, for instance) - I only changed it after the book was accepted by Cormorant. Once it was accepted, my editor, the wonderful Montreal poet Robyn Sarah, overhauled the sequencing once more, altering it almost completely (on this note, if you ever want to gain insight into one approach to organizing the poems in a poetry collection, I recommend you pick up Robyn's book Little Eurekas, which feature an excellent essay on book sequencing). One of the few elements that stayed the same was that "The Wailing Machines" was up front. In other words, the poem wasn't chosen to open the book haphazardly (unlike, say, David McFadden's recent books, which were sequenced randomly).

As for "why", there are a few answers:
1. It is one of the better poems in the book, in my opinion, and I like the idea of starting strong.

2. It is, as you say, representative of a number of the poems in the book in a few ways: its length, its more-or-less plainspokenness, its very slight nod to more formal poetry without being "formal" (it is 14 lines, like a sonnet, and has a turn in it, at the 11th line - a nod to the sonnet's volta), and its search for a natural spoken rhythm (something I'm always chasing but rarely catch).

3. Most importantly, it is a poem about meeting, about coming together (granted, rather violently in this case). It's a poem about the start of something - the start of everything, in a sense. As a writer I very much want readers to know that I am interested in them, in their presence and participation in the book. I want too be generous and welcoming, so it only seemed right to have a "welcoming" poem up front.

LG: In reading “You Can’t Lead a Horse” the second time around, I noticed the line, “The woman is drunk. She asks the water for waiter”. Was this a publication error or was it done purposely to be read in this way?

RT: That was on purpose. The error was the woman's, not mine or my publisher's! It's tricky to write a poem in which every couplet ends with the same word (a quasi-ghazal, keeping with my "almost formal" style I mentioned above) and not have it be hopelessly monotonous. While not the main reason that couplet was included in the poem, it did serve as a way to break up the monotony of the couplet endings while still, in a sense, maintaining the form.

LG: In your book, I saw a fluid concept of nature throughout many of your poems: “You Can’t Lead a Horse”, “Early Rain”, and “Errant”. These poems had many examples of elements of nature. Is this the result of your natural surroundings in beautiful British Columbia? Does geography have any impact on your writing?

RT: Yes, it is (and yes, geography does). Much has been made about Canadian poets being obsessed with writing about nature, as though it is somehow our national duty. One of the main reasons I address the Canadian landscape as much as I do (and a reason that rarely gets mentioned in the discussions I read on this subject) is because I do much of my writing while in quiet settings away from home. My wife and I go away on at least one, and often two or three, hiking trips each summer - usually along the BC coast, on Vancouver Island, or in the Rockies (for instance, "You Can't Lead a Horse" and "Early Rain" were written on the same day during a hike at Berg Lake in the Rockies). We also go to friends' cabins two or three times a year (I'm actually writing this response to you from one right now, just south of Whistler, surrounded by 100 ft pines and year's first snowfall).

We would travel to these places whether I wrote on the trips or not, but we go as frequently as we do in part because I get so much work done. I find it very difficult to write in the city, with its noise and people and constant buzzing - in many ways "Errant" is an attempt on my part to address those stresses. That many of the poems I write on these trips are about nature is largely a product of the type of poet I am - I look out the window, I listen, I consider the day I'm leading (where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going), and I do my best to make a poem from what I find.

LG: What kind of work are you most drawn to reading? Do you find yourself reading work similar to your own, or completely different?

RT: Both, though I often swing back and forth in bunches. I'll go for a while reading whatever I am most drawn to, not thinking about my choices too much, until I've built up a backlog of books that I am less intrinsically drawn to, for whatever reason. At some point, I'll switch over and dig into the pile that I had some early resistance to. I usually push myself to do this by telling myself that it's important for rounding myself out as a reader, and that even if I dislike the books, I can still learn a lot from them that will help inform my own writing. Often enough, once I get reading I find I like these books as much, or more, than the books I came to easily. A couple examples of "happy surprises" this year would be Matthew Zapruder's "Come On All You Ghosts" and Garry Thomas Morse's "Discovery Passages".

LG: What was your motivation in writing “On Realizing Everyone Has Written Some Bad Poems”, a play on Al Purdy’s poem, “On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems”? Why did you choose that specific poem and/or poet and not another one?

RT: A couple years ago, Jean Baird started a fundraising drive to save Al and Eurithe Purdy's old A-frame house in Amelisaburgh, Ontario. I was a fan of Purdy's writing, and volunteered to help raise funds, giving readings of Al Purdy's poems here and there around Vancouver to drum up interest. At some point around then, possibly in reading Paul Vermeersch's "The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology", I learned about Purdy's hatred of his first book, The Enchanted Echo (which, according to Steven Heighton, he once called "a piece of goddamn shit"). As a struggling young poet myself, loaded with insecurity and about the same age as Purdy was when he published The Enchanted Echo, I felt a connection with this time in Purdy's life. The poem came out of that, with the title following naturally enough after the subject matter.

raoul fernandes @ spoken ink

2012-01-15T09:00:00.001-08:00

The next instalment of the Burnaby Writers' Society's "Spoken Ink" series is this Tuesday, and will feature friend-of-silaron and black belt poetry ninja Raoul Fernandes.

The details:

Spoken Ink
Tuesday, January 17th, 8:00 PM (7:30 Open Mic Signup)
La Fontana Cafe
101-3701 East Hastings (at Boundary), Burnaby
Featuring: Raoul Fernandes
Free!

So long as my never-ending flu calms down a bit, I'll be there. I hope to see you there (and I promise not to cough in your direction)!

last chance to hibernate

2012-01-14T09:00:00.003-08:00

Because January 15th is a Sunday, the deadline for Pandora's Colletive's "Hibernating with Words" contest has been extended to January 16th. All you need to do is to get your submission to the post office and stamped by the end of day Monday.

(click on the image to expand)

The full contest details are available here. Good luck!

dead poets report

2012-01-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

Our second Dead Poets Reading Series event happened last Sunday. Project Space was packed to the point that I had to stand in a neigbouring room and lean my head in to see anything (hence the lack of close-up pictures - you can see all the pictures I did manage here).

We were caught a bit by surprise by the attendance, which was up from November. It seems the formidable power of the CBC was at work, as an interview with Christopher Levenson and myself about the series had aired on North by Northwest that morning (at some point between 6 and 9 AM - needless to say, I didn't hear it myself), and a number of people mentioned having come out because they heard about it on NXNW. I haven't been able to track down the audio of the interview yet, but if I find it anywhere I'll link it here. Thanks so much to Sheryl MacKay for taking the time (and airtime) to chat with us a bit.

The readings were all quite wonderful, each in its own particular, quirky way. Heidi Greco has a great recap of them here.

Our next event will be on March 11th, and will be the Vancouver leg of the cross-country Irving Layton Centenary celebrations. We are still looking for a few readers for that. You can read more information on how to get involved on the DPRS website.

Thanks to everyone who came out, especially our readers!

From L to R: Garry Thomas Morse (Jack Spicer), Miranda Pearson (Stevie Smith), Diane Tucker (Christina Rossetti), David Zieroth (Thomas Hardy), John Donlan (Edward Thomas)

shocks me out of the minutia

2012-01-11T09:00:00.001-08:00

Chad Pelley: Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Jacob McArthur Mooney: Sure, but why bother? I mean, there’s too few good book stores, too many shitty ones, and the wrong books get read by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But my problem with complaining is this: my dad is a butcher. My grandfather worked odd jobs for forty years. They both would have been much happier doing something else with their lives. There are many injustices afoot in the book world, and people have often said brilliant things about those injustices’ root causes, but I can’t stay invested in that conversation. I always find myself drifting back to the historical unlikelihood of my being able to spend this much time with something as beautiful and useless as a poem. It shocks me out of the minutia. Not to be a brute about serious and complex things, but I’m just too fucking lucky to care.

- Jacob McArthur Mooney, in interview with Chad Pelley for Salty Ink. The interview also includes the line, "Blogs eat subtlety and poop out earnestness." So read it here already, ok?

leaving itself absolutely nowhere to hide

2012-01-10T10:00:00.008-08:00

Frost treats the mechanism of poetic composition as a tool of philosophical concision, and that as long as we are using speech, and not algebra and mathematics, its beauty and clarity of expression are not strictly separate from its truth-value. Style also carries information. Here he conflates two conceits, a lyric one and a Pre-Socratic one. The first is the article of faith that beauty is truth, and that whatever aspires to the condition of song is also pursuing a parallel vector of truthful statement. And the second is that if something can be cleanly and concisely expressed, simplified to the aphoristic, to the demotic, to the plain-speaking, it has a better chance of being true than something which can’t, simply by its insistence on omitting the extraneous, emphasising the communicative foundation of language, and, maybe most importantly, leaving itself absolutely nowhere to hide.

Frost goes on challenging us not to deal with his poetry, but with what it proposes. A poem is not primarily written to provide an excuse to have a conversation about poetry, but as an emotional and intellectual provocation to which we are challenged to respond in kind.

- Don Paterson, closing his lecture on Robert Frost's poetry entitled "Frost as a Thinker" at the 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. You can listen to the whole thing here.

the barrier between myself and the world

2012-01-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

People never pray just once. They pray often, sometimes multiple times a day, for it is prayer which creates a connection to something larger than themselves, restoring a sense of calm and inner equilibrium, and thus helps them to live their lives.

Writing poetry and reading poetry does something similar for me. Each helps me to live by breaking down the barriers that exist between myself and the world at large, and in the process, real or imagined, my life is made whole.

- Chris Banks, in his one answer to Alex Boyd's One Question Interview on his BoydBlog. You can read the whole thing here.

save $2.50. check them out online.

2012-01-07T10:00:00.003-08:00

PDFs of the 2011 "Poetry in Transit" series have gone up on the ABPBC website. You can view them all here. Here's mine (click to expand):

Thanks to everyone who's hunted it down on busses. Keep sending me those pictures!

one authentic subject

2012-01-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Deracinados - bred in suburbia, atopia, the generic North American milieu - might as well have been born in cyberspace and raised in the food court of an international airport. Or an Old Navy outlet. If they're writers, they have one authentic subject: rootlessness. They'll never have the Deep South of Flannery O'Connor, the working class New Jersey of Bruce Springsteen, the midcentury Souwesto of Alice Munro, the seething Victorian London of Dickens. Pretending to have a true place they know in a radical, intimate way can result only in frantic mimicry. Their life is a postmodern patchwork and they have no native soil. They can write only of their exile, create books that will be their one home.

- from the series of memos "New Frames of Feeling: Eclectic Dispatches" in Workbook: Memos and Dispatches on Writing by Steven Heighton. It's a thoughtful, fun book. Writers, treat yo selves.

frankness can let you down

2012-01-05T09:00:00.006-08:00

I feel about Groundwork that, for all that these poems are mytho-poetic, it's also a very personal book, which I think is clear in various ways. I think that would make it fresh for any writer who had an honest bead on their own situation, or tried to - to talk about that through these stories. It's a funny thing sometimes: frankness can let you down as a means of expression. You can try to talk about your experience in the plainest way and end up feeling like you've only betrayed it. And sometimes the masks of myth can actually allow you to speak more plainly and more accurately about your experience.

- Amanda Jernigan, in interview with Bernadette Rule for Art Waves, about her new book, Groundwork, which explores the myths of Adam and Eve, and Odysseus (and, from what I've read so far, is pretty darn great). You can listen to the whole thing here.

existentially open pores

2012-01-04T09:00:00.007-08:00

8. The writing life's cruellest irony: while failure can make you miserable, success won't make you happy.

9. The writing life's cruellest irony: the creation of good fiction and poetry requires a life lived with existentially open pores, while handling the public side of a career requires thick skin, a closed carapace.

10. The writing life's cruellest irony: publishing authors are mostly recovering wallflowers who now seek to earn, through their writing, respect, praise, prizes, admiration, love - things they believe, consciously or un-, will retroactively salve the formative rejections of their early years. In so seeking, they bring on their adult selves more rejection and vicious personal attacks than they could ever have imagined in grade nine gym.

- from the series of memos "On Criticism" in Workbook: Memos and Dispatches on Writing by Steven Heighton. Writers, if you didn't get this book over the holidays, treat yo selves.

the year is newborn, the poets are dead

2012-01-02T14:22:00.000-08:00

Remember that New Years resolution you made yesterday about taking in more cultural events in 2012? Well here's a chance to start the year off on the right foot:

The second instalment of the resurrected Dead Poets Reading Series is happening this Sunday (January 8th), from 3-5 PM at Project Space. It will feature:

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), read by David Zieroth
Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894), read by Diane Tucker
Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971), read by Miranda Pearson
Jack Spicer (1925 - 1965), read by Garry Thomas Morse
Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917), read by John Donlan

Entry is by donation, to cover the rental costs for the space.

We were standing-room only last time, so come early if you want to be sure of a seat. Oh, and Facebookers, you can do your Facebook things here. Remember the New Years resolution you made yesterday about inviting all your Facebook friends to more cultural events in 2012?

You may have noticed that David Zieroth was on the bill for the last reading, too. He couldn't make that one, as he fell ill. When I tried to organize an event with David back in 2010, he wasn't able to make that, either. Will he slip through my grasp a third time? You'll have to show up to find out!

p.s. Another great reading, featuring Vancouver's "Poetry Dogs" (Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, and Elise Partridge) is happening tomorrow night at the VPL. More info here.

a (sort of) silaron year in review

2011-12-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

2011 was a busy year for me, highlighted by the launch of my book in May, and the revival of the Dead Poets Reading Series in November.

It was also a busy year here on the blog, as it turns out that actual content makes a blog more interesting: silaron readership jumped by 56% from 2010 to 2011. Thanks, trusty readers/people Googling images of june bugs!

Earlier this year, I installed a new stat-tracking program that let me follow how many hits each individual post receives. It turned out the five most popular posts of 2011 were spaced out evenly across the year, and reviewing them seemed, for me, like a nice end-of-year recap. Maybe you'll think so, too?

Here then, in chronological order, are my five most well-trafficked posts of 2011:

January 26th, 2011: "an attempt at an online "works cited" for michael lista's bloom"

This post, originally concocted as an elaborate excuse to post a Dr. Strangelove clip on my poetry blog, attempted to trace the lineages of some of the poems in Michael Lista's Bloom.

April 1st, 2011: "James Moore comes clean (for a split-second)"

A second appearance by Michael Lista. Also, A.F. Moritz, the Fiddlehead, Chatelaine, Spanx, Ugg Boots and LMFAO (no, not that LMFAO). Oh April 1st, never stop being you.

July 12th, 2011: "urgency and simplicity - An Interview with Kae Sun"

My interview with Ghanaian musician and poet Kae Sun, before his show in Vancouver as part of his summer tour. Try to spot the cardboard cutout of a janitor!

October 17th, 2011: "hope too is an old and unusual growth - "The Bright Well" Book Launch"

This post featured a poem by Glenn Downie and an interview with "The Bright Well" editor Fiona Lam. The book has gone on to be a big success (apparently it's already in its third printing). This post isn't solely responsible for that, of course, but it certainly deserves at least half the credit.

December 8th, 2011: "five christmas ideas #3"

What list is complete without listing another list within it? This post on five of my favourite Canadian poetry books of 2011 featured Doug Ford, Peruvian haircuts, 88% meat Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supremes, and the debut of the Unimpressed Zach Wells (UZW) rating system. To top it off, the post itself received the UZW seal of approval in the comment section (though the exact number of UZW heads awarded was not specified).

Happy holidays, everyone. See you in 2012!

come for a visit, maybe?

2011-12-23T07:00:00.001-08:00

Green College at UBC is looking for a Writer-in-Residence for Fall 2012. Locals aren't eligible, but you out-of-town poets are. See, you knew I'd eventually reward you for wading through all my Vancouver event postings! The details:

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Green College at the University of British Columbia invites applications from Canadian writers normally resident outside the Lower Mainland of BC, for the position of Canada Council Writer-in-Residence at the College. The term of the residency will be three months within the period between September 1 and December 15, 2012, subject to funding approval.

The Writer-in-Residence will work with the Green College community through consultations and workshops, and will create and coordinate a public series of literary events, as part of the College’s academic programming for the UBC and local community. She or he will be expected to live at the College for the term of the residency, and will be provided with reimbursement for economy-fare travel (within Canada) to and from Vancouver, room and partial board during the stay, and a stipend of $18,000. Additional funding will be available to support the public series of events.

For its 2012 residency the College seeks a writer of established reputation in any genre/s (at least two books in print or equivalent public recognition) and with significant previous experience of arranging and hosting literary events.

Only complete applications received by postal mail by the deadline are accepted. Please send applications to:
Writer-in-Residence Selection Committee
Green College, The University of British Columbia
6201 Cecil Green Park Road
Vancouver, BC
V6T 1Z1
Applications must include:
* A covering letter that includes a sketch of possible events for the residency
* A curriculum vitae
* 20-30 page writing sample
* Two letters of reference, signed by the referees and provided in sealed envelopes, which may be mailed separately
Please Note: Applications must be received by Green College on or before the February 1, 2012 deadline to be eligible.

Questions may be directed to Tatiana Tomljanovic, Communications Manager, at gc.communications(at)ubc.ca or 604-822-0676.

as if the ear is learning to feel

2011-12-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

Curtis Fox: Do you find it easier to memorize poems [written] in metre and rhyme?

Dan Beachy-Quick: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I think that it’s memorizing poems in metre and rhyme that has, in certain kinds of ways, guided me towards experiments in metre and rhyme and more traditional form.

Fox: Really? Explain that. How does that work?

Beachy-Quick: Well, I think when you go through the work of memorizing a poem, the metre of it or the rhyme of it or the formal pattern that it’s in ceases to just be a kind of technology of the poem, and you begin to see the real necessity that might be underlying the choice of writing in the sonnet, or the genuine power of what it is to write a poem that takes as a genuine concern the need to find a perfect rhyme, or a slant rhyme. And because those things, too, metre and rhyme, are so absolutely bodily in part of their meaning. One feels a rhythm; rhyme is as much felt as it is heard. It’s almost as if the ear is learning to feel when it hears a great rhyme. Also, I think in a way, memorizing such poems helps one learn to read and take seriously very traditional values in a poem that in a post-modernist framework might be easily dismissed.

- Dan Beachy-Quick, in interview with Curtis Fox for the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast. You can listen to the whole thing here.

more details on tonight's subTerrain reading

2011-12-20T09:00:00.012-08:00

It looks like tonight's subTerrain Marathon Poetry Reading/Magazine Launch will start at 6:00 PM, not 5:00 PM as previously posted.

George McWhirter will kick things off at 6:00, followed by subTerrain head-honcho Brian Kaufman at 6:05, and yours truly at 6:10. A steady stream of readers will follow, including Lionel Kearns, Heidi Greco, Kate Braid, Renee Saklikar, Nikki Reimer, Miranda Pearson, Daniela Elza, Jamie Reid, Joanne Arnott, Heather Haley, Peter Trower, Catherine Owen and, to cap off the night, everyone's favourite Member of Parliament for Vancouver East, Libby Davies.

The main information, again:

SubTerrain 125 Marathon Poetry Reading Event
Tuesday, December 20th, 6:00 PM – ? PM
Army, Navy and Air Force Veteran’s Club
3917 Main St. (at 23rd Ave.)

And if you don't feel like you've adequately trained your mind and body for the rigours of a poetry marathon, remember that I'm also reading at a more manageably sized reading (and for more than five minutes) in Burnaby, starting at 8:00 PM. The poster for that:

I hope to see you tonight!

TOSOO good news/bad news

2011-12-19T16:11:00.001-08:00

Good news: the first print run for The Other Side of Ourselves has all-but sold out!

Bad news: it's done so on the week before Christmas...

A second run will come, but not until the new year.

If you are looking to pick up a copy, I know there are still a few on the shelves at Chapters locations in Greater Vancouver, and one copy left on Amazon.ca.

If you're in Vancouver, and want a copy before Christmas, the best way to get one is from me personally (perhaps at my readings tomorrow? Hint, hint!). Likewise, you can always shoot me an email at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com and we can work something out.

Thank you to everyone who has bought the book since it came out in May. Though this is a bit of a headache at the moment, knowing that so many people have taken interest in my book is as good a Christmas present as I could have hoped for.

master the middle ground

2011-12-18T09:00:00.004-08:00

rob mclennan: How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

George Stanley: In third year high school (grade 11) my English teacher required all his students to write poems. At the end of the term he took three of us aside — me, my friend Manuel, and a boy named John. He told the three of us that we had talent as poets. (Actually only two of us had talent; Manuel was writing John’s poems for money.)

More than once I have tried fiction but could not master the middle ground, middle distance. For me everything was either cosmic or closeup.

- George Stanley, in interview with rob mclennan, as part of rob's 12 or 20 (or 21 or 19 or 45 or...) questions series, this time hosted at Dooney's Cafe. You can read the whole interview here.

keeping your eyes open

2011-12-15T10:00:00.002-08:00

I’m very wary of this idea that poetry shouldn’t be political. I think that’s also a kind of reflexive opinion that a lot of people have, is that poems can’t be political or shouldn’t be political or should restrict themselves to the aesthetic sphere. I don’t believe that. I like that this poem that I just wrote attempts to engage with the issues that are happening right now. Most of my poems, in one way or another, do, but the way that they engage has more to do with trying to pay attention to language, and the way the language is used in these situations, and what’s happening. Being aware. Keeping your eyes open. And I think that’s very political, to pay attention.

- Matthew Zapruder, in an interview with Ryan Van Winkle for the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast. You can listen to the whole thing here.

two reading tuesday

2011-12-13T10:00:00.008-08:00

I'm taking part in two readings next Tuesday (December 20th). First, I'm reading my poem from the Vancouver 125 issue of subTerrain as part of their Marathon Poetry Reading/Launch. The details:

SubTerrain 125 Marathon Poetry Reading Event
Tuesday, December 20th, 6:00 PM – ? PM
Army, Navy and Air Force Veteran’s Club
3917 Main St. (at 23rd Ave.)
Featuring: Oh man, many people. See the list of contributors for an idea.
Free!

I'll be reading at 6:10 and a bit later I'll head across town to participate in the December instalment of Spoken Ink. The details there:

Spoken Ink Reading Series
Tuesday, December 20th, 8:00 PM
La Fontana Caffe
101-3701 East Hastings Street (@ Boundary Road)
Featuring: Rob Taylor
Free!
Poster:

I hope to see you at either event. Or you can make my day and go to both!

p.s. Anvil's 20th Anniversary Party is tonight at the Railway Club!

five christmas ideas #3

2011-12-08T14:29:00.011-08:00

Here we are at year three of my little CanPo promotion project (you can read the last two years' entries here and here)! As always, I'm looking to make this year's list bigger and better than the last. And what's hotter among the industry's best at moving product (GGs, Griffin, I'm looking at you) than a whiff of "conflict of interest"? As you'll see below, I've done my best to pack in some scandal (really I just picked my five favourite books I read in 2011, but let's pretend, ok?). I even developed a numerical system to make clear my biases and underhanded allegiances, because I am nothing if not generous to my detractors!

Enough preamble. Here are my suggestions of five new-ish Canadian poetry books for poetry fans and maybe-possibly-soon-to-become poetry fans alike:

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno by Matt Rader, House of Anansi, 2011

Matt Rader? Never heard of him. He's a Canadian poet, currently living in Salmon Arm (thanks for the update, Facebook nitpicker!). That said, he usually lives on Vancouver Island (thanks for the subsequent update, second Facebook nitpicker!). This is his third book of poetry. Here's more!

Does Doug Ford know this guy? Man, I'd look so dumb if he did and I didn't... No, I think you're safe.

What's so great about this book? Rader writes well-crafted, beautiful poems. As Ian Letourneau says, "Rader is a confident poet. There is no ponderousness here. The poems are direct, sure of themselves." The book really shines in its two sections that were previously published as chapbooks, Reservations and (especially) Customs, which explores the lynching of Louie Sam.

Ok, so the quality is there. But what about quantity? Am I getting good bang for my buck? It features 35 poems and costs $22.95, or a mere $0.66 per poem. Ok, to be honest, that's $0.16 cents more per poem than any book I've highlighted over the last two years. Anansi raised the price of their books by four dollars this year! But still, what would you rather buy for $0.66: a top-of-the-line Matt Rader poem or a Peruvian haircut? Ah, but before you answer, remember that the haircut cost excludes airfare. That's where the Peruvian barbers get you every time!

If I only have a minute in the bookstore, what one poem should I read? "Weeds", p. 47.

Should I buy this on Amazon? Please no. Here's a good reason.

What's in this for you? You promised me some juicy conflict of interest. We're from the same province? That's all I can think of. Oh, and Anansi is the only publisher that's had a poem on each of the three lists I've made. How I wish they were paying me under the table and/or I was owned by Scott Griffin, but it's just not true.

I'm not sure how outraged I should be by that answer. Can you compare that to another scandal, and rate it on a ten-point scale? The Griffin Prize's "Toronto/Anansi Bias" Thing, 2 out of 10 UZWs (Unimpressed Zach Wells').

Discovery Passages by Garry Thomas Morse, Talonbooks, 2011

Garry Thomas Morse? Never heard of him. He's a Canadian poet, living in Vancouver. This is his second book of poetry. Here's more!

Does Doug Ford know this guy? Man, I'd look so dumb if he did and I didn't... No, I think you're safe.

What's so great about this book? In Discovery Passages Morse blends his personal history, Kwakwaka’wakw history and legend, and the lives and acts of such controversial figures as Duncan Campbell Scott and Franz Boas into a powerful, sweeping, fierce (and often funny), suite of poems. Lorraine Weir thinks Discovery Passages should soon "find itself among the canonic texts of contemporary Indigenous and Canadian writing." I'm not big into sainthood, but I think it's a really good book.

Ok, so the quality is there. But what about quantity? Am I getting good bang for my buck? Discovery Passages delivers 30 poems for the low, low price of $17.95. That's $0.59 a poem, which is still more expensive than anything from the last two years, but looks pretty good next to Matt "Peruvian Haircut" Rader.

If I only have a minute in the bookstore, what one poem should I read? "BCP #95", p. 93.

Should I buy this on Amazon? Please no. Here's another good reason.

What's in this for you? You promised me some juicy conflict of interest. I know Garry personally. He let me read at his reading series last month. He's reading at mine next month. We tweet. I hope sales of his editions will reap largesse.

I'm not sure how outraged I should be by that answer. Can you compare that to another scandal, and rate it on a ten-point scale? The 2008 Governor General's Award Controversy in content, and The 2011 Governor General's Award Brouhaha in intensity, 6 out of 10 UZWs.

Where We Might Have Been by Don Coles, Signal Editions (Vehicule Press), 2010

Don Coles? Never heard of him. He's a Canadian poet, living in Toronto. This is his eleventh book of poetry. Here's more!

Does Doug Ford know this guy? Man, I'd look so dumb if he did and I didn't... No, I think you're safe.

What's so great about this book? It's Don Coles, in all his wandering loveliness. He's the king of the killer ending. Just when you think he's ambled way too far off track to be able to bring it all together, he pulls it off with one brilliant line. As Kenneth Sherman puts it, "It is difficult to think of another poet whose style is so unmannered, whose tone is so engagingly true." This may not be Coles' best work (he has a lot to compete with), but it's definitely his very-good work, which is still far better than just about anything else being written in this country.

Ok, so the quality is there. But what about quantity? Am I getting good bang for my buck? It's 16 (mostly long) poems for $18.00 or... wow... $0.88 a poem. Records are falling this year, it seems. Poetic inflation? Gone are the heady days of $0.16 John Newlove poems, that's for sure. Really though, $0.88 still isn't that bad. At that price your options are a long, "unmannered" Don Coles poem or an 88% meat Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme. I rest my case.

If I only have a minute in the bookstore, what one poem should I read? "A Walk in the Woods", p. 13.

Should I buy this on Amazon? Still no. Here's yet another good reason.

What's in this for you? You promised me some juicy conflict of interest. Absolutely nothing on this one. I guess you could say that the book should be disqualified because one of Coles' books was on last year's list. But I make the rules here and that's not one of them.

I'm not sure how outraged I should be by that answer. Can you compare that to another scandal, and rate it on a ten-point scale? The QWFLA "Actually, You've Already Got One" Incident, 0.5 out of 10 UZWs.

Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry edited by Robyn Sarah, Cormorant Books, 2011

Robyn Sarah? Never heard of her. She's a Canadian poet, living in Montreal. Here's more. But the writing in the book is by eleven unpublished (in book form) poets, including Amanda Jernigan, Daniel Karasik and Sarah Feldman.

I have a feeling Doug Ford doesn't know any of them. Right? Right.

What's so great about this book? As I hinted at above for the Rader book, I'm a big fan of chapbooks. And this book is, in essence (and by design, according to Sarah's introduction), eleven chapbooks of poems by poets you might not have heard of yet, but will be hearing from soon. I'm used to anthologies of new poets being mixed bags, but there really aren't any duds here. Jernigan, Karasik, Feldman, George Pakozdi and Margo Wheaton stand out particularly, but on a different day I could probably list the work of the other six contributors as equally, or more, enjoyable.

Ok, so the quality is there. But what about quantity? Am I getting good bang for my buck? Undercurrents comes in at 90 poems for $24.00, or $0.27 per poem. It's the value pick of 2011!

If I only have a minute in the bookstore, what one poem should I read? "October" by Sarah Feldman, p. 22.

Oh c'mon, please say I can buy this on Amazon? Look, you can do what you want. But maybe read this first.

What's in this for you? You promised me some juicy conflict of interest. I promised it, and now I'm delivering! Robyn Sarah was the editor for my book (yes, I weaseled a link in somewhere - I knew I could do it!) and Cormorant is my publisher. What can I say? My tastes overlap with theirs a bit...

I'm pretty sure I should be enraged by that answer. Still, just to be safe, can you compare that to another scandal, and rate it on a ten-point scale? The 2011 Governor General's Award Squabble in content, and The 2008 Governor General's Award Embroilment in intensity, 9 out of 10 UZWs.

Winter Cranes by Chris Banks, ECW Press, 2011

Chris Banks? Never heard of him. He's a Canadian poet, living in Waterloo. This is his third book of poetry. Here's more!

Doug Ford doesn't know anyone, it seems. I've been wasting your time with this question, haven't I? Yup.

What's so great about this book? Banks writes long, clean, satisfying sentences (the first one in the book, for instance, rolls over seven lines and moves from friends in a car, to a blizzard, to a description of the local farmland, to the sound a radio playing "Stand by Me" over all of it). In some ways this is much like Don Coles, but Banks usually stays more fixed in an individual moment or object. As Nick Thran says, Banks is "a maestro with the poetry of physical objects, able to stack just the right amount of cordwood, or to jimmy open the basement window just enough to achieve the desired tonal effect." Because the lines run so smoothly and the subject matter is usually clear, tangible stuff, it's easy to breeze through this book. It's also very easy to return to it over and over again, pulling out new moments of pleasure and insight each time.

Ok, so the quality is there. But what about quantity? Am I getting good bang for my buck? Banks gives us 33 poems for $18.95, or $0.57 a poem. Undercurrents is a tough act to follow, but he's still got the best value of any of this year's single-author books.

If I only have a minute in the bookstore, what one poem should I read? "Darkening", p. 11.

But Amazon is soooo cheap.... Look, there's a Wikipedia page dedicated just to their controversies. And it has fourteen sections. And subsections. You're killing me here.

I'm still looking for more conflicts of interest! Spill it. I'm a big fan of Chris' blog (which he doesn't update nearly enough), though we've never met. We've exchanged a couple emails.

I'm not sure how outraged I should be by that answer. Can you compare that to another scandal, and rate it on a ten-point scale? The "Was This Supposed to be a Controversy? I Can't Even Tell Anymore" 2010 Governor General's Award, 3 out of 10 UZWs.

That's it for another year - thanks for reading!

p.s. If you can't get enough CanLit book recommendations, be sure to check out the Advent Book Blog.

first drafts aren't writing

2011-12-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

Audience Member: What do you do when you have writer’s block? Do you have any tips for that?

Michael V. Smith: You just suck it up. Somebody told me that they didn’t believe in writer’s block, and I really like to say I don’t believe in writer’s block. “Writer’s block” just means you don’t want to write something shitty... You can always write crap. Writer’s block is, I think, simply not giving yourself permission to write crap. My mother always said “It doesn’t have to be perfect, just done”... and I am very fond of that advice. You have to have permission to play. And playing means you get your hands dirty. And if you get your hands dirty, it’s because you’re mucking around in shit. So you have to give yourself permission to muck around in shit...

First drafts [aren’t] writing. That’s not writing. Writing is not creating a first draft. Writing a first draft is being an amateur. Revising the first draft is being a professional...

Really, it’s all about permission... I get to write crap. I can just make up crap right here. “Look here’s some crap. Look, I made it up.” Ok, what are we going to do with it? How are we going to make it better? So it’s not so precious, that’s the thing. It only gets precious with time and effort. But it doesn’t come out as precious. You know, a diamond isn’t made in a day. It takes eons. The earth has spent a long time investing in that carbon.

- Michael V. Smith, in the Q+A after a reading as part of the Robson Reading Series. You can watch the whole reading and Q+A here.

Dead Poets January Reading

2011-12-05T16:14:00.000-08:00

The poets and readers for the January 8th, 2012 Dead Poets reading (3-5 PM at Project Space) have been announced:

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), read by David Zieroth
Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894), read by Diane Tucker
Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971), read by Miranda Pearson
Jack Spicer (1925 - 1965), read by Garry Thomas Morse
Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917), read by John Donlan

Also, we have a call out for contributors to a special reading in March for Irving Layton's 100th Birthday. More info on both can be found over at the DPRS site.

I was (very) late to the last one in November, but I'll be there this time. I swear! I hope to see you there.

sex, science and sweet sincerity - "Everything Water" Chapbook Launch

2011-12-02T09:00:00.005-08:00

from Everything Water - Adrienne Gruber

Launching upright, I slip into the water.
Black lake tonguing the edges of doubt. Imagine

a held breath, a swirl of milky clarity. The remainder
of days are lonely as a motel ship painting.

Sky stretches; the toffee-flux of time.
Heart jeers; queer as a French Horn.

Moon billows and purges light, a shroud. The roundness
of full-figured flesh against gloomy trunks. I write myself

out onto a late night limb, scrambling
for some truth. I pull myself out.

Plunk these dumb feet into the lake,
wet back smacking against rough boards;

thighs fissured. The words will come
spit-shined and polished.

from Everything Water (Cactus Press, 2011).
Reprinted with permission.

Adrienne Gruber is chapbook-crazy in 2011 (some might say crazy as a cat lady?), publishing two different chapbooks with two top-notch Canadian chapbook publishers: Mimic (Leaf Press, 2011) and Everything Water (Cactus Press, 2011). She's launching the latter here in Vancouver next Thursday, with help from special out-of-townie guests Jim Johnstone (Cactus Press kingpin, from Toronto) and Zach Wells (from Halifax). The details:

(Click to Expand)

Everything Water Chapbook Launch and Reading

Thursday, December 8th, 2011
7:00 PM
Spartacus Books
684 East Hastings Street
Featuring: Adrienne Gruber, Jim Johnstone and Zach Wells
Free!

Earlier this week I got a chance to chat with Adrienne about the chapbook and the launch. It was early in the morning, so Adrienne was pounding back the coffees, but that didn't stop her from busting out her interview finest:

You thought I was joking about the cat lady thing...

Ok, the truth is we just corresponded by email. But I had to find a way to get that picture in there! Here's what she had to say:

Rob: Everything Water explores the glosa form, without ever including a "proper" glosa, but often coming close: sometimes two lines are quoted instead of one, sometimes the quote creeps up a few lines and finds a home in the middle of the stanza, sometimes the stanzas are broken up into more-or-less individual poems. I wonder here what inspired you to work with and around the glosa in this way? Was the project driven by the source material, or did your interest in the glosa drive you to seek out a source to play with?

Adrienne: The funny thing is that I never directly intended to write a proper glosa, I just knew I wanted to work with this particular chosen text. I realized once I had the first draft that I was playing with form, but I think I was too caught up with where the text was taking me to get what I was doing. Once I figured it out I tried to stuff some of the poems into proper glosa form, but they were terrible! I guess when you set out without a particular expectation you can’t really force it later on.

The project was definitely driven by the material I was working with. As much as I wished at times that my poems would adhere to official form, I eventually had to let go of that. I’m not usually the kind of writer who thinks of poems as personified and having their own specific form or voice or style that shouldn’t be changed or messed with. This particular collection did not seem to want to conform and I had to recognize that and be okay with letting them be slightly experimental.

Rob: The "glossed" lines in Everything Water are unattributed in the text (though they are sourced in the acknowledgements), leaving the reader to wonder, at first, if they are quotes from another writer, overheard speech, or the voice of one of the characters in the poem. Do you expect the reader to instantly flip to the back to locate the source, or do you want a bit of mystery to loom over the first reading?

Adrienne: It's interesting that you would mention this, as I did find myself hesitating to reveal the source of the "glossed" lines. This was partly because I wanted the lines to intertwine with my work and transform into something substantially different from their original context, but also because I chose the lines from such an odd source; an interview between Lidia Yuknavitch (author of the recently published memoir The Chronology of Water) and "Sugar", the advice columnist who responds to letters for the online newspaper The Rumpus. The interview is really more of a conversation between these two writers about bodies, sexuality, sexual identity and sexual expression. It’s beautiful and inspiring and I fell in love with their dialogue. I had also wanted to move into my own poetic dialogue around sexuality and sexual identity and this text seemed like the perfect jumping off point.

Rob: Considering the date of the source interview, Everything Water must have been gone from composition to publication in around six months. Is that a record for you? And is that expediency one of the things that drew you to publishing chapbooks? Do you think there are any drawbacks to moving at that pace (which seems lightning-quick in the publishing world, but probably glacial to outsiders)?

Adrienne: Ha ha, yeah. Quickest turnaround of all time. Ironically my first chapbook, Mimic, was accepted with Leaf Press in March of 2010 and was only just published in late September of this year, so I think chapbook publishers usually don’t have the time and energy to work at lightening speed, especially since everything they do is done voluntarily.

My experience with Cactus Press was, I think, fairly unique. I had a chapbook that I wanted to submit to Cactus, but ended up abandoning it because it wasn’t really excited about it. I ended up holing myself up at a cottage with writers Matthew J. Trafford and Linda Besner for two weeks and wrote pretty furiously. A rough draft of Everything Water came out of those two weeks. Since then it’s just been editing and revising.

This is definitely a record in terms of speed, but I’m also one of those writers who works in fits and starts. It’s certainly exciting to see the fruits of a more recent labour in published form. I’m still very engaged with the work, whereas by the time my first poetry collection came out in 2008, I was pretty tired of it. I still felt connected to some of the poems, but mostly I wanted to focus on what was new and compelling – with what I was writing at the time, not with work I had written five years earlier. I also have a ridiculously short attention span, so anything I’m working on today is much more interesting than what I was doing yesterday. Or even an hour ago. I think this might be why chapbooks are so engaging to me. I can sit down and read a chapbook in one sitting, but a full-length collection might take me days or weeks to really sink my teeth into.

Rob: You mentioned Mimic, which came out earlier this year from Leaf Press. As you now have recent working knowledge on two of Canada's best chapbook publishers, what have you found to be the major similarities between the two? Any notable differences (beyond, in your case, the publishing timetable)?

Adrienne: I think the similarities would be the quality of the books and the appreciation and encouragement of work that pushes boundaries. Both Leaf Press and Cactus Press produce gorgeous books and I was really excited to have work come out with both presses. Another similarity is how much time and effort both Ursula and Jim put into the final product.

I think the differences might be the chapbook ‘vision’. Cactus Press does not include any text on the cover in the hopes that the cover art will be displayed as its own piece and not simply used as a background for the title and author’s name. I asked my friend Zachari Logan (an incredible visual artist based in Saskatoon), if he would be willing to lend me a detail from one of his drawings for the cover. It’s a gorgeous piece and I’m glad it gets to stand on its own.

Rob: It's rare that three poets will come together from different parts of the country to launch a chapbook. How did the reading at Spartacus Books come together? What can people expect to see and hear if they come out to the reading?

Adrienne: Well, honestly, the whole thing is a bit of a fluke. I was living in Toronto for the past couple of years and got to know Jim fairly well. I moved to Vancouver in July with the intent of coming back to Toronto in the fall for the Cactus Press book launch. By the time the launch came around I was flat broke and there was no way I was making it to Toronto! Jim was invited to read at UBC [December 7th, 5 PM] and he suggested having a Vancouver launch. Jim found out that Zach was going to be in Vancouver at the same time and was looking for an opportunity to read while he was here. And, well... that’s how it happened. This has all been arranged over the past week, so it’s been a lot of emailing back and forth. I think people can expect a pretty eclectic range of content and poetic form. I really respect both Jim and Zach’s work and I think the reading will be well rounded. That sounded super wholesome. People can expect some poems about sex, science and sweet sincerity. Oh, and delicious cheeses.

Everything Water can be ordered by emailing Jim Johnstone at jim.johnstone(at)utoronto.ca, or, if you're in Vancouver, bought in person at the launch on December 8th. I hear there will be cheeses, people. Yes, plural. See you there?

facebook...

2011-12-01T00:17:00.006-08:00

Photo Source

I know, I know. I didn't think this day would ever come, either. But my wife, who has been doggedly promoting my book and readings on her own Facebook profile, has decided it's time for me to branch out on my own, and has set up a page for me:

http://facebook.com/roblucastaylor

Marta will be coordinating all the updates, which (I believe) will mostly be reading announcements and links to blog posts from this site (i.e. regular silaron readers won't be missing anything), but if you enjoy "liking" things on Facebook, I am now one of those things. Go at it!

Similarly, Diane Tucker has just set up a permanent Dead Poets Reading Series Facebook Page. Sign up there for all the no-longer-living poet news that you can handle - including a sneak peak at our January lineup!

all its little gadgetry

2011-11-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

Chad Pelley: What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

Mark Callanan: I’ve always appreciated that Dorothy Parker quote: “I hate writing; I love having written.” Let that be my mantra. I find writing extremely difficult to do; I’m too concerned with doing it well to actually enjoy myself. That being said, there’s a moment that comes, countless drafts in, when the elements that constitute a poem start snapping into place, when all its little gadgetry suddenly works and those disparate pieces unite to a single purpose, when the trajectory of the poem seems inevitable — that’s the good bit: when the poem works, when it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, it would seem like a lot of pointless toil and frustration.

- Mark Callanan, in interview over at Salty Ink. You can read the whole thing here.

oh hey, vancouver

2011-11-28T10:00:00.004-08:00

SubTerrain's Vancouver 125 issue is about to come out, featuring poems by:

Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Brad Cran, Roy Miki, Peter Mitham, Sachiko Murakami, Nedjo Rogers, Carleton Wilson, Alan Twigg, Brian Kaufman, Tom Osborne, Lakshmi Gill, Roy Kiyooka, Larissa Lai, Joanne Arnott, Renee Rodin, Daniel Zomparelli, Phillip Quinn, Ray Hsu, Patricia Smekal, George McWhirter, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Phinder Dulai, Clint Burnham, Christine Leclerc, Daniela Elza, Renee Sarojini Saklikar, Tammy Armstrong, Diane Tucker, George Bowering, D.N. Simmers, Michael Turner, Rita Wong, Lyle Neff, Chris Hutchinson, Cynara Geissler, Jennica Harper, Trevor Carolan, Ryan Knighton, Jeff Steudel, Libby Davies, Calvin Wharton, Kate Braid, Oana Avasilichioaei, Gary Geddes, Jay MillAr, Marguerite Pigeon, Jen Currin, Russell Thornton, Adam Cramb, Catherine Owen, Wayde Compton, Daphne Marlatt, Rob Taylor, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jim Wong-Chu, Alexis Kienlen, Karen Green, Heidi Greco, Malcolm Lowry, Bud Osborn, Jordan Turner, Lionel Kearns, Evelyn Lau, Mari-Lou Rowley, Gillian Jerome, Stephen Collis, Miranda Pearson, Heather Haley, Judith Copithorne, Jamie Reid, Elizabeth Ross, Howard White, Dennis E. Bolen, Suzanne Buffam, Patrick Lane, Onjana Yawnghwe, George Fetherling, Bliss Carman, E. Pauline Johnson, Mona Fertig, bill bissett, Patrick Friesen, Colin Browne, George Stanley, Billeh Nickerson, Peter Trower, Susan Cormier, Paul Pitre, Nikki Reimer, Christine Lowther, Reg Johanson, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Garry Thomas Morse, Cecily Nicholson.

The crazy part, for me, is the number of local poets I know who aren't on that list, and the thought of how big an issue it would have been had it included us all. It's nice to be reminded just how many of us there are out there writing in, and on, our city. Thanks, SubTerrain!

lions win! lions win!

2011-11-27T22:49:00.000-08:00

Back to poetry tomorrow...

to wa / and back

2011-11-25T17:15:00.006-08:00

Photo by Marta Taylor

As I've mentioned here before, in September 2010 we started up an Arc Poetry inspired "How Poems Work" series over at One Ghana, One Voice . The series gave OGOV poets an opportunity to write short essays on some of their favourite poems (either published on OGOV or elsewhere). Fourteen months and three essays later, I'm finally chipping in with an essay on Nana Agyemang Ofosu's "18 Miles to Yeero". It is rather unimaginatively entitled:

How Poems Work #4 - Rob Taylor on Nana Agyemang Ofosu's "18 Miles to Yeero"

I decided to write on this poem not because it is my most loved on the site, but because it's a poem that slowly won me over after I was initially disinterested - a phenomenon that I find much more interesting to think and write on. I hope readers are at least somewhat as interested as I was...

If you read the essay and find yourself inspired, I encourage you to read through the OGOV archives (and all our past "How Poems Work"), find a poem you love, and send me a proposal for "How Poems Work" #5!

a piece of the jaw

2011-11-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

I’m a magpie. I’m online. I’m attention deficit. I have selective memory. I don’t think in a linear way. I work hard anyway. Attention is multivalent. It isn’t just memory-recall, or knowing how the thing got moved from point A to point B. Other people write about this more eloquently: Jan Zwicky, John Berger… I have to trust that other people, readers, can relate. I used to be hard on myself for not remembering the plots of novels, the names of characters. Now I read accepting the fact that those things will leave me, sometimes the very next day. So when I’m digging up subjects for poems, when I’m entering a relationship with another artist’s work, whatever the genre, I’m never really digging up the whole whale: just an eyeball, or a piece of the jaw. Sometimes I don’t even get down to the carcass. I mistakenly hook into a boot, or a photo by Cartier-Bresson I remember seeing. Bingo. Reverb. Off we go.

- Nick Thran, on his writing style, in interview with Sheryda Warrener over at the Event Magazine blog. You can read the whole interview here.

reminder: dead poets tomorrow!

2011-11-19T10:00:00.002-08:00

(click to enlarge)

More info at: http://deadpoetslive.ca

See you there?

hey toronto

2011-11-15T02:05:00.000-08:00

This should be good. The book sure is.

(click to enlarge)

the greatest of our miseries

2011-11-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversions amuse us and lead us unconsciously to death.

- Blaise Pascal's Pensée #171, entitled "Misery"

dead poets live!

2011-11-10T02:09:00.004-08:00

As I'm sure many of you know by now, Christopher Levenson, Diane Tucker and I have been busy over the last couple months preparing the "resurrection" of the Dead Poets reading series that David Zieroth used to run on the North Shore (here's my summary of the event Chris and I read at back in early 2010).

We've moved the series to Vancouver - to Project Space, to be specific - and have set up a new website, but have kept the structure more-or-less the same: five living poets reading work from their favourite non-living poets.

Our first reading will be on Sunday, November 20th, from 3-5 PM, and will feature:

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), read by David Zieroth
Ronald Johnson (1935 - 1998), read by Sonnet L'Abbé
Muriel Rukeyser (1913 - 1980), read by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Frank Stanford (1948 - 1978), read by Raoul Fernandes
César Vallejo (1892-1938), read by Russell Thornton

Entry is by donation. You can RSVP via Facebook, if that's your thang, and can subscribe to our mailing list simply by entering your email here:
Nifty, eh? And we have a poster and everything! We're not messing around:

Please help spread the word, and I hope to see you there!

hibernating with words

2011-11-08T13:57:00.003-08:00

I'm a judge (along with Fiona Lam) of Pandora's Collective's upcoming poetry contest, "Hibernating with Words":

(click on the image to expand)

The judging is blind, so you can't bribe me directly. But you can always paperclip a personal check to your poem. Just sayin'

Funds raised by the contest goes to Pandora's, who do a crazy number of useful things for the Vancouver writing community, so please spread the word, and consider sending something in! Full entry guidelines can be read here.

some november readings

2011-11-03T02:24:00.008-07:00

Here are ~~thirteen~~ fourteen readings for November:

The Kranky Reading Series 
Thursday, November 3rd, 7:00 PM
Kranky Cafe
#216-228 East 4th Avenue , Vancouver
Featuring: Rob Taylor (that's me!), Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Wanda John
Free!

Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, November 3rd, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Sandy Shreve and Renee Saklikar
$5 (suggested donation)

Visible Verse Festival
Friday, November 4th and Saturday, November 5th, Various Times (main show is Friday at 7 PM)
Pacific Cinémathèque
1131 Howe Street, Vancouver
Featuring: 36 video poems!
$11.50 for Friday show, Saturday events by donation

Writing for Social Change Reading Series
Sunday, November 6th, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Historic Joy Kogawa House
1450 West 64th Avenue
Featuring: Betsy Warland
Admission by donation

Incite Reading Series
Wednesday, November 9th, 7:30 PM
Alice MacKay room, Central Library
350 West Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: Ami McKay
Free!

TWS Reading Series
Friday, November 11th, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Take 5 Cafe
429 Granville Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Cathy Stonehouse, Don Simpson, Rua Mercier and more!
Free!

Kootenay School Reunion and Book Launch
Saturday, November 12th, 7 PM
W2 Community Lounge, 2nd Floor
111 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Featuring: Colin Browne, Jeff Derksen, Kathryn MacLoed, Tom Wayman, and Calvin Wharton
Free!

Spoken Ink Reading Series
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011, 8:00 PM
La Fontana Caffe
101-3701 East Hastings Street, Burnaby
Featuring: Peter Tupper
Free!

Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, November 17th, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Michael Turner and Heidi Greco
$5 (suggested donation)

Robson Reading Series
Thursday, November 17th, 7:00 PM
UBC Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St, Vancouver
Featuring: Carmen Aguirre and Rishma Dunlop
Free!

Dead Poets Reading Series
Sunday, November 20th, 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Project Space
222 East Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: Fiona Tinwei Lam (Marianne Bulger), David Zieroth (Thomas Hardy), Sonnet L'Abbé (Ron Johnson), Russell Thornton (César Vallejo) and Raoul Fernandes (Frank Stanford)
By donation

Writing for Social Change Reading Series
Sunday, November 20th, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Historic Joy Kogawa House
1450 West 64th Avenue
Featuring: Sheena Wilson
Admission by donation

Incite Reading Series
Wednesday, November 23rd, 7:30 PM
Alice MacKay room, Central Library
350 West Georgia St., Vancouver
Featuring: Ray Robertson, Cathy Stonehouse and Rebecca Rosenblum
Free!

Writing for Social Change Reading Series
Sunday, November 27th, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Historic Joy Kogawa House
1450 West 64th Avenue
Featuring: Wayde Compton
Admission by donation

music has rests

2011-11-02T17:42:00.000-07:00

Terry Gross: You said that when you stopped drinking, you wondered: Am I genuinely eccentric, or am I just wearing a funny hat? What am I made of? What's left when you drain the pool?... What did you learn about yourself when the alcohol wasn't there anymore?

...

Tom Waits: Well, I wanted - I've always wanted to be curious and provocative, I guess, and interesting, and interested in this sparkling sapphire we all call home. I always wanted to be mystified by it all - and rather fascinated with life itself. And... I think maybe when you drink, you're probably robbing yourself of that genuine experience, even though it appears what you're doing is getting more of it. You're getting less of it. And it takes a while, when you've had a rock on the hose like that for so long. It takes a while for the hose to be a hose again and for things to start flowing.

Like with songs, if you don't play for a while - if you stop playing for even like a year - sometimes it all builds up in a really great way. But there's no such thing as not playing. There's just - you know, music has rests in it, so you are on a rest right now. And the music will begin shortly.

- Tom Waits, in interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. You can listen to the interview here, and read the full transcript here.

look what i found...

2011-10-30T01:48:00.002-07:00

... on the way to the Cross-Border Pollination reading!

The reading itself was very enjoyable - they're producing some lovely writers up there in Alaska (and Toronto and Vancouver, for that matter, in Maureen and Rhea).

All that, and I finally found my poem!

Thank you so much to Rachel Rose and her band of collaborators for putting the reading together, and for running the Cross-Border series all these years (I was surprised, and saddened, to learn at the reading that it will be the last for the series). As Rachel said in her "closing remarks", let's hope that the energy generated around the Cross-Border series finds new, equally enriching homes elsewhere in the city.

mic check

2011-10-27T02:21:00.009-07:00

It looks like there'll be an open-mic poetry slam at Occupy Vancouver this Sunday, running from 2:30 to 5:30 (sign up at 2:30).

That is, unless Gregor decides to get all Jean Quan on us. Or if Suzanne Anton hulks up and tears down all the tents with her bare hands. Barring any of that, there should be poetry on Sunday.

For all you Facebook lovers out there, a Facebook group has been established for the event.

two readings with me in common

2011-10-25T14:59:00.002-07:00

I've got two readings coming up soon, both of which I have thus far inadequately HYPED here on the blog. That ends now.

The first is the October installment of the Cross-Border Pollination Reading Series, which seeks to unite Canadian and American writers. I'll be reading with fellow Canadians Maureen Hynes and Rhea Tregebov, and we'll be joined by three Alaskan poets: Peggy Shumaker, Joan Kane and Sherry Simpson. I will attempt to read my more masculine poems to address the gender imbalance. Sorry, 90% of my book...

It should be a fantastic early-evening of poetry. Here are the details:

Cross-Border Pollination Series
Saturday, October 29th, 5:00 PM - 7:30 PM
SFU Harbour Center, Room 1415
515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Rob Taylor, Maureen Hynes, Rhea Tregebov, Peggy Shumaker, Joan Kane, and Sherry Simpson
Free!
Poster:

Five days later I'll be reading at the Kranky Reading Series, along with Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Wanda John, and a (loud?) preamble by Garry Thomas Morse. The details:

Kranky Reading Series
Thursday, November 3rd, 7:00 PM
Kranky Cafe
#216 - 228 E. 4th Avenue , Vancouver
Featuring: Rob Taylor, Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Wanda John
Free!
No Poster!

And while I'm HYPING events, remember that People's Co-op Bookstore will host the launch of the anthology The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer this Wednesday. My post on that launch, including all the event details, can be read here.

I hope to see you at any (or, dare I say, all?) of these events!

some days all i startle

2011-10-24T14:04:00.002-07:00

It's been a while since I mentioned anything about One Ghana, One Voice here on the blog. This is in part because I took a hiatus over the summer, my first in five years. Well, we're back at it, and I'm very pleased to be able to present two poems by one of my favourite Ghanaian poets, L.S. Mensah, over the next two weeks. Both poems look at Nigerian literary characters from the perspective of their mothers (whose stories were overlooked in the original texts). The first, Mother of Ikemefuna, is already up on the site, along with a Q+A with L.S., which is, as always with L.S., both thoughtful and informative. My favourite answer of hers this time was in response to a question about her opening line (the title of this post):

Looking back, I believe that phrase started life in one of my Congo poems but it always impeded my efforts to do anything with it. It became the starting point for this poem, but even then I wouldn't say the outcome was guaranteed. Seamus Heaney makes a point about how the right opening line can lead one to generate a whole poem, but one does need some luck too. A lot of the time I feel like an Accra cobbler, making shoes out of those worn car tyres, hammering them into place with oversized Kantamanto nails!

Photo Source

The second poem in the series, along with another Q+A, will be published next Saturday.

To see more of what OGOV has been up to of late, check out the archives. And if you, or someone you know, is somehow connected to Ghana + poetry, get those submissions coming!

ekphrastacy

2011-10-21T00:06:00.002-07:00

Hey Vancouver poets, here's a chance to ekphrasise your pants off. The show closes at the end of the month, so act quick! The press release:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | CUTTY CONTEMPORARY ART | OCTOBER 30th

Call for Submissions:

As visual artists we recognize the importance of writing in relationship to the art as a document of the discussion. Artwork is never self-contained once it has been exhibited; it is open for interpretation, inspection, reaction and reprocessing. Our goal with art has always been the inciting of conversation and discussion.

We’re looking for writers to collaborate with us on the catalogue for our most recent exhibition at the gallery, Randy Grskovic’s Reoccurring Themes. We are going to be printing a newsprint periodical with documentation from the exhibition and are accepting writing to accompany the images. What we’re searching for is a response to the artwork itself. Each piece has it’s own story/context. It could be in the way of a review of the physical piece, an idea sparked by the work. A previously written work that relates to a certain theme… a poem… a drawing… a post it note… whatever… It could be positive; it could be negative. It could be real; it could be fiction. It could be short; it can be long.

Our main goal is to collaborate with writers on this project. If you would like to have a conversation with us please let us know and we can start the process.

The work can be viewed on weekends from 12pm – 6pm or by appointment. Please feel free to email us and make an appointment:

cuttycag(at)gmail.com

The show closes on October 30th and the deadline for submissions will be no later than November 6th.

More information about the exhibition can be found here:

www.cuttycag.com

hope too is an old and unusual growth - "The Bright Well" Book Launch

2011-10-17T10:00:00.011-07:00

Medicine - Glen Downie

I have travelled in cities of the East & held out
my paper token    The black-suited subway man bites
a neat piece of it with his metal punch & in between
passengers his tic tic tic continues    The tiny jaws continue
tic tic tic    In Seoul's medicine shops are glass bottles
where herbalists display unusual growths
of ginseng shaped like people    All this beneath the city –
trains worm their way through cold tunnels
& the ginseng sellers advise on the endless complaints
of middle-age while at produce stalls I hear
the nervous tic tic tic of the vendor's trimming shears

And I have travelled in cities of the West where radioactive cobalt
must be replaced in the machines before reaching its half-life
A patient gingerly fingers the bulge of his cancer & calculates
whether he's too young to die or too old to be tortured
on the slim chance of cure    No one is sure    Even the doctor
speaks as if ticking down
a list of well-practised evasions    Experience tells him
that truth is too potent & must be replaced
with half-truth   as a dose of radiation is dispensed
in fractions   although hope too is an old & unusual growth
often strong as the roots of stones & human-shaped

from Wishbone Dance: New and Selected Medical Poems

(Wolsak & Wynn, 1999). Reprinted with permission.

Glen Downie's "Medicine" is one of the many standout poems included in Leaf Press' new anthology The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer. Featuring contributions from twenty Canadian poets, including Lorna Crozier, Michael Harris, Maureen Hynes and Anne Simpson, the anthology launches in Vancouver on October 26th. The details:

Launch of The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer
Wednesday, October 26th, 7:30 PM
People's Co-op Books
1391 Commercial Drive
Featuring: Elise Partridge, Miranda Pearson, Rachel Rose, and Betsy Warland
Free!

The anthology is a very good one, and rarely if ever depressing, despite the subject matter. It's even (dare I say it?) inspirational at times. I hesitate in saying that only because "inspirational" has gotten a bad wrap in our current popular culture (made-for-TV movies on the Lifetime Network, anyone?). This isn't that kind of inspirational. This is the real deal, the kind that's earned through attention and honesty and persistence.

I had the opportunity to correspond via email with anthology editor Fiona Tinwei Lam.

Fiona, eagerly anticipating our email correspondance

Here's our exchance, in which we discuss the origin of The Bright Well and walking that fine line between the two types of "inspirational":

Rob: You've mentioned in a past interview how much losing your father to cancer at a young age shaped your life. Was that the primary inspiration for your taking on this anthology? Can you tell me a bit more about how the project came together?

Fiona: There were a variety of factors that led me to initiate this project. I'd had my first experience editing an anthology with Cathy Stonehouse and Shannon Cowan putting together Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen's University, 2008), an anthology of creative non-fiction, Cathy convinced me that such a book could become a valuable resource to the many writers who were struggling to juggle parenthood with writing. As we gathered the material, I was moved by the way the contributors wrote so compellingly about their frustrations and their triumphs, and wanted to do what I could to ensure their voices and stories would be heard. This same impetus lay behind The Bright Well.

Canada has such a wealth of extraordinary poetic talent, a wealth I feel is taken for granted and undervalued. Poetry, like other art forms, has the potential to communicate ideas, feelings, experiences, and insights very powerfully, deeply and concisely. People often turn to poetry during the most important transitional periods in their lives (graduations, births, deaths, weddings, funerals), but they can be intimidated by poetry outside of those occasions. I believe that poetry can lead to a deeper understanding and connection within ourselves as well as on a broader scale between individuals across the borders and boundaries that can divide us.

But because Double Lives ended up being a huge amount of work over three years trying to solicit, select and edit the essays, as well as pitch publishers and then market the book, I hesitated to jump into another anthology project again. However, after publishing my second book of poems, I decided that I was ready for a defined, small-scale project collecting work by other authors.

I wanted to reach readers by delving into a significant life challenge and by offering poems that they would find moving, meaningful, and accessible. A collection of poems about cancer was the first thing that came to mind. My father died of cancer when he was almost forty-two years old and when I was eleven years old. He died very quickly after his diagnosis, about three months later. As an adult, I felt some of that same helplessness, turmoil and shock when a poet friend was diagnosed with cancer, and later, a family member. When I had to undergo ultrasound testing and a needle biopsy myself, I finally very concretely, if briefly, experienced a small portion of the terror that so many others have gone through.

I consulted Elise Partridge (who had published some superb poems about her experience of breast cancer in her book, Chameleon Hours) about the possibility of putting together a chapbook of poems by Canadian poets on the subject. Elise’s encouragement and feedback were invaluable to me as I gradually gathered poems. I already knew about poems written on the subject by a few other poets, such as Mari-Lou Rowley, Maureen Hynes, Rachel Rose, and Anne Simpson. In a few cases I contacted poets directly whom I had heard or known had had cancer. But in most cases, by word of mouth and by email enquiries, I gathered names, requested more books from the library, read through them carefully. When I found the kind of poems I wanted — beautifully crafted poems that had a first person perspective of cancer that offered kernels of hard-won insight, wisdom, beauty, self-awareness, or truth - I contacted the poets in question to tell them about the project and ask them if they would be interested in having their work included in a chapbook, the proceeds of which would be put toward cancer research and/or treatment.

I also ran a short writing workshop at InspireHealth for cancer patients, and got a sense of the kinds of poems that moved them, and read through a number of chapbooks produced by the non-profit Callanish Society that holds retreats for cancer patients and their families. It was pretty clear what kind of poems appealed and what kind were upsetting. Cancer patients and their families understand suffering, discomfort, pain and the fear of death intimately — they might be experiencing these things daily. So poems of witness by outsiders observing family members’ or friends’ suffering or pain, let alone poems of mourning and loss, didn’t seem appropriate. For this reason, I decided to choose poems with a first person perspective.

I had to winnow out many very fine elegies, even ones written by established or well-known poets, which reduced my file by half. I also left out several poems that focused on describing pain without providing other layers of feeling or context. I narrowed the poems down to those which cancer patients and their caregivers would most identify with and not turn away from, that were about their own experience from their own perspective, and ultimately about trying to stay alive and survive in the face of death. I wanted to put together a book that would honestly reflect the experiences of those who have faced cancer so that readers who are facing or who have faced cancer would feel understood, and less isolated. My aim was also to help family members, friends and medical professionals understand those experiences that are often challenging to convey.

Ursula Vaira of Leaf Press, a press that has produced wonderful high quality poetry chapbooks over the years, expressed interest in my project early on. My file of poems eventually turned out to be a slim volume rather than a chapbook, but I chose to stay with Leaf Press because of Ursula’s commitment to poetry and to this project.

Rob: In the introduction to The Bright Well, you note that the book is "a way to name the unnameable, stripping away platitudes, clichés, and new age pseudo-spiritualism." This reminded me of an essay by Joshua Mehigan in which he noted that "Two-thirds [of readers] think I’m repugnant for suggesting that poetry isn’t soul magic." But isn't it the spiritual, or pseudo-spiritual, or "magical" that some (many?) people who are facing cancer turn to, and that some would expect (or even hope for) in picking up your book?

Did you find it a tricky line to walk as an editor: to gather together poems that were both honest and unflinching, and yet still hopeful? That contained the soul-lifting without being "soul magic"? How do you think the best poems in the book accomplished this?

Fiona: In my introduction I was trying to distinguish between a true spiritual, soulful quality and the pseudo-spiritualism of some new age writing that relies on clichés and abstract sentiment (.e.g poor modern imitations of Rumi). Contemporary poetry can be very spiritual and soulful, yet remain quite concrete and specific. Many of the poems in The Bright Well are about the experience of facing death, and these poems not only depict or name an experience, but transform or transcend it through original, startling imagery or other poetic means. For example, Sue Downe’s poem, “Little Horse”, which in a few short phrases transforms a tumour by way of a metaphor into the symbol of a complex and unexpected journey. Sue Wheeler’s “The Sound of No Shore” is but one example of a poem that shows the kind of gut-wrenching life/death questioning that goes on during treatment. There are also other poems where the imagery plays an alchemical or a connective role - transforming painful experiences or imbedding them in a meaningful context. I think of Sandra Dunn’s pantoum, with its rounds of repeated lines about her grandmother’s words and protective presence during a childhood swimming lesson alleviating the terror of going under anaesthetic. Or the use of wool and thread images in Lois Lorimer’s poem, “Knitting”, to depict that basic need for connection and comfort from family while recovering from surgery. I chose the poems in the collection because they were deeply heartfelt and very much from the soul, as well as well-written. And yes it was a difficult process — that’s why the process took so long and why the book is as slim as it is.

Rob: When I heard about your book, I immediately thought of Elise Partridge's Chameleon Hours, specifically her two standout "Chemo Side Effects" poems (one of which, "Memory", is in The Bright Well). In first considering the anthology, did you have certain "must include" poems that immediately stuck out in your mind? Were there any poems you very much wanted to include but, for whatever reason, could not?

Fiona: A number of contributors had written entire books or long sequences of poems about the experience of cancer (e.g. Michael Harris, Susan Wheeler, Susan Downe, Richard Sommer, Luciano Iacobelli, Betsy Warland, Elise Partridge, Marianne Bluger). By selecting individual poems or excerpts, an editor is bound to lose the overall impact or effect of a series of poems by one author on one subject. The way the poems will play off each other or accumulate cannot be captured. Instead, an editor has to choose individual works by individual authors that will work as a cohesive whole, playing off each other and accumulating in a different way. In the end I chose a representative excerpt or sampling from those sequences or books that would cover various stages and aspects of the cancer experience.

One of my key objectives was that this book would whet readers’ appetite for more, hence the list of titles at the back of the book and the contributors’ comments and statements to readers that accompany their bios. I wanted to ensure that the important work of the contributors on this subject would not be forgotten. The Bright Well does not pretend to be a comprehensive compendium of cancer poems: rather it is a selection of fine poems by twenty accomplished Canadian poets about aspects of facing cancer. It might very well lead to more such collections — I hope so!

The Bright Well can be ordered from the Leaf Press website, or, if you're in Vancouver, in person at the launch on October 26th. See you there?

some more efficient form of rescue

2011-10-14T10:00:00.002-07:00

I will do anything to avoid writing. I hate every second of it. The only part of the process I like is having written, which I don’t think counts. If you’re now wondering why I write - I realise you’re not - the best answer I can give is that it’s the closest I’ve been able to come to song, to singing. I mean by this that my intent is always to reach some unbearable moment where time slows down and the sensual and psychological details compress and the language rises into what someone smarter than me once called the “lyric register”. The rest is just chewing gum and string. Honestly, if you can find some more efficient form of rescue, I recommend you do so.

- Steve Almond, in his lecture to the Tin House Writer's Workshop, entitled "Everything They Told You In MFA School is Wrong, Except The Part About The Debt" (podcast here). I quoted this a couple days ago, and I'm back because it's so damn quotable. Here's another quote from this talk posted somewhere else.

two (ok, four) more october events

2011-10-13T10:00:00.002-07:00

First up is a cool little project, spearheaded by Catherine Owen, entitled "Hot Sonnets". It's a 14 month calendar featuring photos of 14 Vancouver poets by Patrik Jandak with a 14 line poem by each. Poets in the calendar are Maxine Gadd, Fred Wah, Steve Collis, Miranda Pearson, Warren Dean Fulton, Diane Tucker, Catherine Owen, Judith Copithorne, Sonnet L'Abbe, Heidi Greco, C.R. Avery, George Bowering, Sandy Shreve and Kate Braid. Here are the details:

Hot Sonnets: 14 Vancouver Poets
Saturday, October 15th, 2011, 6:00 - 9:00 PM
W2 Media Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Music, and readings by the poets
$20 (includes a calendar)

Second up, as if in response to my poverty-stricken-poet routine in my original post on the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, the V125PC has added three free readings on Friday, October 21st. To make things simple for you, they will all take place at the exact same place as the "Hot Sonnets" launch. The details:

V125PC Free Reading - Steven Heighton
Friday, October 21st, 11:00 AM
W2 Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Steven Heighton
Free!

V125PC Free Reading - David Seymour
Friday, October 21st, 1:00 PM
W2 Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: David Seymour
Free!

V125PC Free Reading - Stephanie Bolster
Friday, October 21st, 3:30 PM
W2 Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Stephanie Bolster
Free!

I've added them all to the big list for October.

throwing beautiful words at the page and hoping to produce truth

2011-10-12T21:48:00.003-07:00

When an inexperienced writer presents me with a story in which he or she exhibits style, what I tend to see is a writer pushing too hard, stepping between the reader and the fictional world. Style is doomed to the exact extent it implies a conscious effort to shape the language - maybe I should say “a self-conscious effort to shape the language.” When I really admire an author, somebody like Saul Bellow or Jane Austen or Toni Morrison, I don’t think of them as having a style. They’re not writing to impress the reader, but to implicate them. They’re not throwing beautiful words at the page and hoping to produce truth. They’re trying to capture complex and painful truths, which is what lifts the language into beauty. Style, in other words, is the residue produced by the dogged pursuit of truth.

- Steve Almond, in a lecture to the Tin House Writer's Workshop, entitled "Everything They Told You In MFA School is Wrong, Except The Part About The Debt." You can listen to a podcast of the lecture here, and I recommend you do. It's very, very good. Thanks to Mike Hingston for pointing it out.

vigilant instead of receptive

2011-10-11T01:40:00.000-07:00

When I begin work on a script I go from the beginning and distill each scene down to its essence. And then I try to name each scene with a word or two or more. It’s almost as if I’m trying to write a poem for each scene; articulating the inchoate, indescribable, unknowable. So, I go through the script and I go through and through it, with my mind and without it. Much the same way as when I’m reading a poem. And then I put the script down when the play or movie begins. Good acting, like a good poem, remains mysterious to me. I couldn’t tell you what it means, but I know it.

I used to try so hard to understand a poem. I was being vigilant instead of receptive. If the poem is saying the unsayable, I don’t need to articulate it back to myself with words. The poet has done that for me. If poems are about emotions, then that is the language I need to use when I’m reading them. Poetry has helped me become more versed, so to speak, in the language of emotion.

- Actress Lili Taylor, as part of Poetry Magazine's consistently enjoyable "The View From Here" series, in the October 2011 issue. You can read her whole essay here.

the bloodsuckers are better organized

2011-10-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

Poet Charles Bernstein at his rambling best, dark energy and all, at an Occupy Wall Street march. The Occupy Movement comes to Vancouver on Saturday, October 15th. You can get more information on the Occupy Vancouver website.

Poetry readings have begun at Occupy Wall Street. Hint, hint, Vancouver...

i'm not writing books for people whose lives are perfectly great

2011-10-06T10:00:00.005-07:00

Terry Gross: Why did you want to write about depression in your novel?

Jonathan Franzen: People who have a depressive cast of mind are usually the funniest people you meet, and there's nothing like putting a couple of Eeyores into the text to make it at least a little bit funny. What else? Why did I want depressives in here? It's, you know, most interesting people become somewhat depressed at some point in their life, and I'm not writing books for people whose lives are perfectly great. People whose lives are perfectly great probably don't need to read books like the kind I write. Only if you have some regular connection with some kind of darkness or difficulty or conflict does serious fiction begin to matter. And so it's simply realistic to let people, as the stories of their lives build toward dramatic peaks, to enter these dark woods from time to time.

- Jonathan Franzen, in interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. You can listen to the whole interview here and read the transcript here.

some october readings

2011-10-05T10:00:00.009-07:00

Vancouver is hosting three big-dog events this month, namely the Vancouver International Writers Festival, Surrey International Writers' Conference and Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, which - in classic Vancouver style - are all happening at exactly the same time (well, October 18th - 23rd for VIWF, 21st - 23rd for SIWC, and 19th - 22nd for V125PC). Sometimes I want to line up all of Vancouver's lit event organizers and then run down the line slapping them.

Two of the three (VIWF and V125PC) are collaborating a bit, with two "shared" readings between the two festivals on the evenings of the 20th and 21st. In response, I have decided to temper the intensity of my slaps. But the slaps are still a-coming, people.

If you want to save some money and still take in great writers (often the same writers as at the big events), here are fifteen other (free or cheap) readings happening this month:

Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, October 6th, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Susan McCaslin and Duncan Shields
$5 (suggested donation)

The Kranky Reading Series 
Thursday, October 6th, 7:00 PM
Kranky Cafe
#216-228 East 4th Avenue , Vancouver
Featuring: Rebecca Keillor, Kevin Spenst, and Jenn Farrell
Free!

Robson Reading Series
Thursday, October 13th, 7:00 PM
UBC Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St, Vancouver
Featuring: Martha Schabas and Johanna Skibsrud
Free!

TWS Reading Series
Friday, October 14th, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Take 5 Cafe
429 Granville Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Jude Neale, Anthony Dalton, Adrienne Gruber and more!
Free!

Hot Sonnets: 14 Vancouver Poets
Saturday, October 15th, 2011, 6:00 - 9:00 PM
W2 Media Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Music, and readings by the poets
$20 (includes a calendar)

Writing for Social Change Reading Series
Sunday, October 16th, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Historic Joy Kogawa House
1450 West 64th Avenue
Featuring: Eric Enno Tamm
Admission by donation

V125PC Free Reading - Steven Heighton
Friday, October 21st, 11:00 AM
W2 Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Steven Heighton
Free!

V125PC Free Reading - David Seymour
Friday, October 21st, 1:00 PM
W2 Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: David Seymour
Free!

V125PC Free Reading - Stephanie Bolster
Friday, October 21st, 3:30 PM
W2 Café
#250-111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Stephanie Bolster
Free!

Third Friday Reading Series
Friday, October 21st, 8:00 PM
People's Co-op Bookstore
1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver
Featuring: George Stanley and Mystery Guest (Oooooo...)
Free!

Emerge Anthology Launch
Saturday, October 22nd, 8:00 PM
Room 2555, World Art Centre, SFU Woodwards
149 West Hastings, Vancouver
Featuring: Readings by students of the SFU Writers Studio program
$10 (suggested donation)

Book Launch for The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems About Facing Cancer
Wednesday, October 26th, 7:30 PM
People's Co-op Books
1391 Commercial Drive
Featuring: Elise Partridge, Miranda Pearson, Rachel Rose, and Betsy Warland
Free!

Robson Reading Series
Thursday, October 27th, 7:00 PM
UBC Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St, Vancouver
Featuring: Susan McCaslin and Christopher Patton
Free!

Cross-Border Pollination Series
Saturday, October 29th, 5:00 PM - 7:30 PM
SFU Harbour Center, Room 1415
515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Rob Taylor (that's me!), Maureen Hynes, Rhea Tregebov, and from Alaska: Peggy Shumaker, Joan Kane, and Sherry Simpson
Free!

Writing for Social Change Reading Series
Sunday, October 30th, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Historic Joy Kogawa House
1450 West 64th Avenue
Featuring: Tara Beagan
Admission by donation

nine? that seems a bit high

2011-10-04T17:01:00.004-07:00

Quincy Lehr gives you the run down on promoting your poetry book:

And you might even get a review in a prestigious journal. The journal has a subscription base of 1,800 people, of whom 200 subscribed because they’d heard the thing was highbrow but give it a desultory look-over. Five subscribed online while high. Another 250 are shipped out to university libraries. Some 600 are subscriptions from former and would-be contributors largely looking to see what work of theirs might be appropriate to send in, given what’s been running lately. Thirty subscribers graduated from the same creative writing program as the editor, while another ten are undergraduate chums. Then there are the thirty or so contributors of poems, fiction, and critical articles. The reviewer of your book won’t buy a copy; she has the review copy. The editor might, except that the magazine reviews sixteen or so books of poetry a year, and he knows five of those under review, who take priority. Most of the poets look at the issue to check for typos and to make sure that the poems next to theirs don’t suck. Ditto the fiction writers. Of the seven contributors who read the review, one buys the book reviewed immediately after yours; two decide that your book doesn’t sound like their thing at all, four think they may well buy the book some day, and one actually buys it when you’re booked for a double-feature together nine months later. The subscribers, of the 400 who make it to the review in the back of the magazine, skim the review as a rule, noting the kind of poetry it is. Of these, 146 decide they might be interested, and nine actually buy it (out of the twenty-one who decided they should), one of whom because he lives in the same town as your publisher’s second cousin (who owns a bookstore and actually has your book on the shelf).

- from Lehr's article "Quincy Lehr on Selling Your Poetry Book" on the Contemporary Poetry Review website.

someone who wears a lot of scarves or something

2011-10-03T17:38:00.003-07:00

I took part in a couple noteworthy activities last week, starting with Word on the Street last Sunday.

As happens at what seems like every second Vancouver WOTS, we were rained out. This time, though, the wind got in on the action as well, blowing over half of the outdoor tents, including the poetry tent. So we all piled into the Poetry in Transit bus (which, to add to the occasion, had died and needed to be jump-started) for the reading, which was a real pleasure. The events of the day, including my reading, have been summarized elsewhere by Raoul Fernandes and Todd Wong (who snapped this photo of me post-reading. Thanks Todd!).

As Raoul notes in his post, Garry Thomas Morse really impressed with his reading - check out his new book, Discovery Passages, if you get the chance. In the darkness/excitement of the powerless bus reading, I forgot to snap any pictures of my Poetry in Transit placards. I have proof that they exist and are out there on buses, though, in the form of this tweet by a stranger - it was a fantastic way to find out that the placards have started going up! Thanks to WOTS and the ABPBC for making Sunday's events possible.

A couple days later I was off to Heritage Woods Secondary in Port Moody for my first attempt at reading my book (and some other poems) in a high school. I read all day, to classes of students ranging from grades 9 - 12. It was challenging at times, and deeply rewarding at others. A couple highlights included having fun with Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer" and chatting about living in Ghana (one of the student's in one of the classes was from the Volta region, and was able to provide all the context needed for my reading of the two "Ghana poems" in The Other Side of Ourselves). One of the best parts of the visit didn't come until the following day, when the teacher sent me a ream of comments the students had written after the visit. Some of the funniest:

“I think it was pretty cool that an actual poet talked to us. I liked his poems.”

“I think it was very interesting to see a poet come to our school. It made me realize that writers aren’t that special. They’re just ordinary people with extraordinary talents... which means that they’re extraordinary... confusing. It was interesting.”

"Yesterday was different than I expected because my idea of a poet is someone a bit older and more either artsy or depressedish, someone who wears a lot of scarves or something.”

“I finally learned what 'Pumped Up Kicks' was about.”

Yes, I talked with a class of high school students about a song about school shootings. I wonder if that will hurt my chances of getting invited back? But hey, I got confirmation that I was an actual poet, and I didn't have to wear a lot of scarves or anything. So that's cool.

Thanks to Ms. Van Gaalen and her students for giving me the opportunity!

omg v125pc ebd deja vu

2011-09-30T12:43:00.004-07:00

At the end of August I posted about the end-of-the-month early-bird deadline for the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference. Well, they've extended that deadline by a month (the new deadline is tomorrow, October 1st), so I'm back doing the same again (if you want all the details, click here to read last month's post).

It looks like they've also dropped the rate for partial tickets from $20-25 for one session, to $35-$50 for a whole day. The one-day registration seems like a pretty decent value, especially on the Friday, with readings by Matthew Zapruder, Nick Thran, Katia Grubisic, Matt Rader, George Murray and Ken Babstock throughout the day (among many others), and an evening keynote reading featuring Don McKay, Fanny Howe and Martin Espada. I think I'm going to take that day in. If you're interested as well, you can register here.

hogan's alley poetry festival - this weekend

2011-09-23T02:44:00.004-07:00

Sorry for the late notice on this event - I only found out about it today!

The Hogan's Alley Poetry Festival is running all this weekend. Unfortunately that means it's competing against Word on the Street. It looks like the main event is tonight, though, which is the least "eventful" part of WOTS' schedule. That event is happening at the Vancouver International Film Centre, and will feature poetry, spoken word, music, a historical slideshow, and a screening of a documentary on Hogan's Alley. Poets involved include Wayde Compton, Scruffmouth, Julianne Bitek, and more.

You can get the schedule for tonight's event here, and the whole festival here. Check it out!

two fall titles

2011-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Poetry may only be relevant for one month per year, but it seems that no one told some of our best publishers that. A number of strong titles are coming out this fall, including Amanda Jernigan's first collection, Groundwork (Biblioasis). There are two titles which I'm particularly excited about, though, and wanted to take a minute to highlight:

Winter Cranes by Chris Banks (ECW Press)

Winter Cranes is Chris Banks' third book of poetry. Chris runs one of my favourite poetry blogs, Table Music. I've only read the first of his books, Bonfires, but I quite enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading both Winter Cranes and his second book, The Cold Panes of Surfaces.

Chris is launching Winter Cranes in Montreal this Sunday and in Toronto on October 5th. Sadly, he will be just about the only poet in Canada not coming to Vancouver in October.

To get more information on those launches, and to read the excellent title poem from the book, click here.

Gift Horse by Mark Callanan (Véhicule Press)

Mark Callanan is the author of one previous book, Scarecrow. He also published a chapbook with Frog Hollow Press entitled Sea Legend, which you can apparently read in its entirety here. I haven't read either yet, but I have read a number of poems of Callanan's that have appeared here and there in magazines and on the internet, and I've been consistently impressed.

Beyond his own writing, Callanan is the (co-?)founder of Newfoundland's Riddle Fence, which currently stands as my favourite non-subTerrain Canadian lit mag. He was also the judge for the 2010 Alfred Bailey Prize, which means his taste is impeccable!

He's launching his book on the other coast on October 11th (details here), and like Chris Banks doesn't seem to be making the long march out here, poetry conference or not. You can read a poem from Gift Horse here, and start picking up his book in stores at the beginning of October.

word on the street 2011, destroyer of bucket lists

2011-09-20T03:13:00.001-07:00

Word on the Street is less than a week away! I'm all the more excited about this year's iteration for a number of reasons. One is that WOTS has been expanded to a three-day festival, with events at Joy Kogawa House and Banyen Books and Sound on Friday and a full slate of readings and workshops at the Carnegie Centre on Saturday, all before the traditional Sunday festival kicks off at 11 AM at Library Square. The full schedule for all three days can be found by clicking around on the WOTS "What's On" page.

If you click that link and check out the lineup at the poetry tent, you'll understand the other reasons why I'm excited this year. I'll be reading twice on Sunday, back-to-back, at 1:30 PM and 2:30 PM. The 2:30 PM reading will be for The Other Side of Ourselves. Getting a reading spot at WOTS has always been a dream of mine, and I'm thrilled and appreciative that it's going to happen for my first book.

The only thing that might top that is the 1:30 reading, where I will be participating in the launch of the 2011 "Poetry in Transit" series (along with Gillian Jerome, Christine Lowther, Kate Braid, Laisha Rosnau and David Zieroth). Yes, oh list of my crazy dreams, you just lost another member: my poem "Summer", from The Other Side of Ourselves, will be included in Poetry in Transit this year! I'm not sure when it will start appearing on buses and Skytrains, but if you want to be sure to see it you can come by on Sunday, as they'll have a bus on site displaying all of the poems.

Last on my list of dreams accomplished, if you look really closely at the schedule for my reading you'll see that I've achieved the dream of all dreams - my own corporate sponsor! It's the library's own community-run, tchotchke-dispensing, fundraising storefront, book'mark:

Oh poetry, even your corporate sponsors are non-profit... Thanks, book'mark!

There will be many non-Rob-dream-related reasons to swing by WOTS on Sunday, as well, including readings from their new books by Sachiko Murikami (Rebuild) and Garry Thomas Morse (Discovery Passages). Also, there will be music, and sales tables (usually with good sales), and info on community groups and magazines, and those crazy kids at The Word Under The Street, and gaggles of readings from authors who shun line breaks.

So I'll see you there, right?

a place that you can go to and a phrase to remember

2011-09-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

Brad Frenette, National Post: A lot of your lyrics deal with the [theological] side of things. Your book has an angel in it. What do you believe in?

Josh Ritter: In terms of belief, I would have to say that the things that I believe in the most are songs. I believe that its important to have a place that you can go to and a phrase to remember. Like a pill, almost, that you can take when you need it. Leonard Cohen, he's better than most doctors. That's one thing. I also find that, as Bill Hicks says - the comedian - 'it's better to deal with the light in everybody and forget about the middle man.' And I find that to be very true, and more and more I find that a lot of times to be a writer, to be an artist, to do anything creative in our lives, whether we consider it art or not, we have to ask serious questions. And I find that the more entrenched religion becomes the more difficult it is to ask those questions.

- Musician and novelist Josh Ritter, in interview with the National Post for their sadly now-defunct Arts podcast (you can still download old episodes from iTunes, including one with silaron favourite Kae Sun).

aquafit

2011-09-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've received a number of thoughtful and generous emails and letters from readers of my book, and I've treasured them all. One of my favourites so far came from Vancouver-via-Ottawa-via-Netherlands-via-Germany-via-England poet Christopher Levenson, which included a poem Chris had written in response to my poem "Old Men at the Community Pool", which in turn was written in response to the epigraph to Wallace Stevens' "Evening Without Angels" by Mario Rossi: the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

Chris has agreed to let me share the poem here - hopefully it can inspire another poem by someone and keep the chain going:

Aquafit

Some antique ritual:
for an hour in the enormous sunlit pool
I am an anonymous token male
among a score of large elderly ladies
swaying like lily pads
to the pounding disco beat.
Our eyes are fixed on the instructor,
whose arms and legs lithe as a Hindu goddess
are showing us what to do.
Like trainee astronauts
we follow her in slow motion,
shedding our pounds, toning our muscles,
relishing weightlessness.

- Christopher Levenson

Photo Source

unforgettable

2011-09-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

I saw a friend reading Still Alice by Lisa Genova recently. This was the blurb on the cover. Amazing.

ride them like a horse

2011-09-13T11:20:00.001-07:00

Student: How do you go about writing a poem?

Robert Frost: Well, first something has to happen to you. Then you put some words on a piece of paper and ride them like a horse until you have a poem.

Student: I think I should set myself a program and write two, four, even six hours a day, whether I feel like it or not. Do you think that’s a good program?

Frost: It sounds like a good program. I’m sure it’ll improve your handwriting.

Student (angered): I’m serious.

Frost: I’m serious, too. You want me to give you the truth wrapped in a bundle so that you can put it under your arm and take it home and open it when you need it. Well, I can’t do that. The truth wouldn’t be there anymore.

- Robert Frost, whipping up some bust-posing banter at the Harry Ransom Center. You can read the article the quote comes from here. Thanks to Don Share for pointing this out.

the solid or rickety stage you stand on

2011-09-12T15:55:00.000-07:00

I am grateful to have come to poetry as a woman and as a mother, joyfully connected to the reproductive rhythms of the living earth, fearfully awakened to the possibilities of the future, the environmental dangers we now face on a global scale. The heroic maternal practice of intimate, daily caring of growing children, with very little social support, while at the same time competing with less-encumbered colleagues in the professional arena, taught me strength and courage to wrestle with the pervasive despair of our time, to reach beyond the fashionable postmodern stances of irony and exposé and shared narcissisms toward more intersubjective, recreative, reparative strategies to confront the daunting challenges of our age.

There is mystery at the heart of poetry: people want to know the recipe, but there is none. There is what Don McKay calls "poetic attention," to the beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, of everything around you, there is the heightened attentiveness to sound, rhythm, image, breath, spacing. The grand struggle with form, the impossible leap between the blood, the wild heart, rooted in primitive, fantastic memories and sensations and dreams and desires, and the page in front of you, the here and now, the material world in front of you, the solid or rickety stage you stand on.

- Di Brandt, in her afterword to the book Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt.

omg v125pc ebd

2011-08-31T01:08:00.002-07:00

Tomorrow (September 1st) is the "early bird deadline" to register for the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference.

If you haven't heard about the conference yet, I commend you for keeping away from electronic media all summer. Otherwise, you are probably already well aware that "v125pc" is the honking-big term-ending project for outgoing Vancouver Poet Laureate Brad Cran. Running over four days in mid-October (full schedule here), mostly out of SFU Harbour Centre, it will feature a whole lotta poets and cost a whole lotta coin to attend (by poetry standards, that is). We're talking $129 for students and low-income, and $179 for you high-rolling normals out there. This makes taking advantage of the early bird deal, which cuts $30 off both rates, all the more important. So if you're keen, get registering people!

I'm not sure if I'll be attending the full conference. It's difficult for me to justify the cost considering that the majority of the poets either live in Vancouver or visit often enough (and give free readings when they do). That said, it will be hard to stay away from a few of the individual readings (it's $20-$25 to attend a single session). Some samples of the great readings that will be happening:

October 20th, 4:30 pm
Barbara Nickel
Chris Hutchinson
Carmine Starnino
Stephanie Bolster
Reading and in conversation with George Murray

October 21st, 2:45 pm
David Seymour
Matt Rader
George Murray
Ken Babstock
Reading and in conversation with Carmine Starnino

October 22nd, 10:30 am
Steven Heighton
Christopher Patton
Elise Partridge
Sue Sinclair
Reading and in conversation with Gillian Jerome

And on top of all that there is the Friday Keynote reading with Don McKay, Fanny Howe and Martin Espada!

So if you're interested in taking it all in, make sure you register ASAP. If you decide to pass on registering, maybe we can listen in by an open window together?

last chance to win my book

2011-08-30T12:00:00.003-07:00

The deadline for the Goodreads contest to win a free copy of The Other Side of Ourselves is midnight tonight. You can enter here.

I'll be giving away three books, and as of this writing 750 people have entered the contest. If you don't like those odds, as a special offer to silaron readers I have arranged a deal with your local bookstore to guarantee you victory in the contest. It will only cost you $18 + all applicable sales taxes. To enter simply go in to the store and say you'd like to "order in" a copy of The Other Side of Ourselves. That's the password for the secret deal. If you're lucky they might have some contest copies in stock and you'll be able to walk away with yours right then and there.

Don't say I never did anything for you, faithful readers. Whichever route you choose, I wish you luck!

end of the road

2011-08-26T02:00:00.002-07:00

We've arrived at the fifth and final entry in my East Coast trip literary report. This time we're going bronze. And busty.

We'll start in Quebec City, whose BPC (Busts Per Capita) rate must be the highest in the country. Did you serve as a politician in Quebec at any point over the last 400 years? You get a bust. Did you fight for freedom against colonialism/racism/sexism/the English/the Americans/complex carbohydrates? You get a bust. Have you ever voted for the Bloc, or once ironically worn a Bloc button at a house party? You get a bust. A poet? You might just get a bust, people.

Here are a couple examples. First, a monument bonding Quebec City and St. Petersburg using the poetry (and enlarged metal heads) of Émile Nelligan and Alexander Pushkin:

And second, me doing my best Dante impression next to Dante doing his best Mrs. Butterworth impression:

On to New York, for the obligatory Hotel Chelsea shot. Lucky Brendan Behan, you get to be the meat in a Schuyler/Cohen sandwich:

But Gertrude outdoes them all, relaxing in Bryant Park:

Last on the New York leg of the trip is the Harlem YMCA, which doesn't have a plaque or anything, but darn well should, considering how many leaders of the Harlem Renaissance stayed there (most notably Langston Hughes, who is honoured at the nearby Schomburg Center, as I blogged about here). C'mon New York, make it happen!

And to close things off, one statue from Toronto. This one is for you, National Post:

That's it! It only took me three months to summarize a three week trip. And I thought writing my first book in eight years was fast!

you put everything into it that's needed

2011-08-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Paris Review: We’ve heard that you don’t give readings from your own work. In America, this has become a business for poets. Do you enjoy attending the readings of others?

Philip Larkin: I don’t give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much—the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don’t like hearing things in public, even music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the “score” that doesn’t “come to life” until it’s “performed.” It’s false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that’s needed: the reader should “hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page.

- Philip Larkin, in interview with The Paris Review in 1982. You can read the whole thing here.

steer clear of english

2011-08-19T11:25:00.001-07:00

Paris Review: Would you like to give any advice to young writers?

Peter Levi: Yes. Steer clear of the writing departments of universities. Steer clear of English. Learn foreign, preferably dead languages, but learn them properly. Do not be a wastrel, don’t just hang about the world. Poetry is about life. The quality of your poetry will be the quality of your life. And you can’t regulate that by a knob. Read. Get or get near a very good library. Take more notice of Randall Jarrell than you do of any academic critic. Don’t spend time attacking other writers. Dig to the bottom of your mind, and don’t give two damns about publications.

Writing is like breathing or it ought to be. One’s got to write poems. Like one has to go to church. Not out of social duty, or because there’s any pressure on one to do so. Not even out of reaction to people who say one shouldn’t do so. But just because of some decent, natural good behavior. One might as well go on with it.

- Peter Levi, in interview with The Paris Review in 1976, just after Levi had left the Jesuit order to get married. You can read the whole thing here.

it goes without saying...

2011-08-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

but my wife is awesome. She whipped up this painting one day, featuring the text of my poem "Early Rain" (fulltext of the poem here, or you can click on the image below and read it straight off the painting):

It's already been sold to someone, so don't go thinking you can snatch it up. If you ask nicely, though, she might be up for custom orders...

astonished at what is chosen by others

2011-08-11T10:00:00.003-07:00

Welcome to part four of my hopelessly drawn out East Coast trip report. This time, it's my favourite book stores of the trip! These stores are, in large part, the sources of my airplane-weight-limit-busting suitcase of books.

I'm only commenting on bookstores I took pictures of - I went to far too many overall (thank goodness I didn't know of Nigel Beale's Literary Tourist site at the time, or it would have been much worse). I also missed most of the bookstores I wanted to visit in Toronto, due to time constraints. So, with those qualifications, here are my favourite bookstores that Marta and I visited in Ontario, Quebec and New York:

Nicholas Hoare, Ottawa

I didn't realize this was a "chain" bookstore until I started writing this post. Chapters, take note - spacious and beautiful with literature profiled up front, instead of board games and Celine Dion CDs.

Collected Works, Ottawa

We lucked out in Ottawa and stayed with a friend who lived almost across the street from this bookstore. Plenty of poetry, author visits, and open mics. And style points for the giant book dangling from the sign.

The Word, Montreal

I already blogged about how The Other Side of Ourselves made it onto the display shelf at The Word, so it's not too surprising that I enjoyed my visit. The picture above doesn't show much, I know, but then I don't think that there's a sign outside the store to photograph, even if I had remembered to. The Word could easily be missed, hidden away near the McGill campus on, appropriately, Milton Street. It shouldn't be, as the selection in this new-and-used bookstore was quite impressive (and is only a small sample of a collection that sprawls out into numerous nearby storage areas).

St. Matthew's Church, Quebec City

Ok, this isn't a bookstore, but it was a first for Marta and I, and seemed worth noting here: a church converted into a public library. Could be a good backup plan, Toronto...

The Strand, New York City

I think I was supposed to know about The Strand in advance, but I did not. Luckily, we stumbled upon it on our very first day in New York (and returned with a bigger backpack a few days later). It's a small town, we were bound to run into it eventually.

You see that man on a ladder - he is risking life in pursuit of poetry. While I was there a number of people did the same, and there were a couple near-falls and bump-overs as we jostled about in the narrow poetry corridors. As I've said before, poets are not exactly experts at moving through space. Sitting, we're good at. Really good. But when it comes to coordinate human movement... yikes...

But it was well worth the risk to see their selection, which included far more lesser-known Canadian poets than our bookstores feature lesser-known Americans. We win this round, NAFTA!

So those are my picks. Don't like them? Well, Nick has a message for you:

p.s. For all I saw, nothing came close to the wonder and insanity that is MacLeods. So don't feel too jealous, Vancouver!

p.p.s. CBC Books just announced its readers Top 10 Canadian Bookstores.

p.p.p.s. In sad news, everyone's favourite little Winnipeg bookstore, Aqua Books, has announced that they will be closing in the fall.

FIVE videos + fundraiser + Project Space

2011-08-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

FIVE was OCW Magazine's fifth birthday party, which took place back in April. It featured a gaggle of artists from various disciplines giving PechaKucha style talks on their work. I was honoured to be one of them (before the event, I blogged about it here).

The presentations from FIVE were recorded, and the videos have just been posted online. Highlights include Barbara Adler's love song to her accordion and Kevin Spenst's twisted world view. All of the videos from the evening can be viewed here.

I spoke about the first meeting between myself and my One Ghana, One Voice co-founder, Julian Adomako-Gyimah, which was entertaining in some typically Ghanaian ways, and one very atypically Ghanaian way:

It was quite fun to be able to tell a Ghana story to a Canadian audience, and an extra challenge to try to compress one into five minutes (and to dig up photos that even vaguely fit with the story I was telling). Thanks for the opportunity, OCW!

Speaking of OCW, they are hosting a fundraiser this Saturday at The Cobalt. The details:

OCW Summer Benefit Concert
Saturday, August 13th, 8:30 PM
The Cobalt
917 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: music by The Stone Pines, Sunny Pompeii and Ailsa Rose
$8

The crazy kids at OCW will be putting the fundraised money to good use, as they're about to take on their most ambitious project to date: Project Space, a "curated bookshop, programming space, and studio" on Georgia Street in Chinatown. It's scheduled to open in September. I'll be sure to post more details about the grand opening as they come in.

interested in language as pure material

2011-08-06T10:00:00.001-07:00

Dean Rader: Where do you think you find the language for your poems? What do you want that language to do and be?

Matthew Zapruder: I think a misconception some people can have about poets is that they are mainly interested in "language" as pure material, as something outside of its function as a communicative mechanism. Maybe this is because at least on the surface some poems seem uninterested in a reader. I am very interested in the reader, in fact there is probably nothing I am more interested in.

It is not exactly a breakthrough in cultural criticism to point out that nowadays our world is filling itself up more and more with distractions that take us out of the moment and into other spaces. I write poems to take myself out of that distracted, half aware, limited space, which I am just as susceptible to as anyone else. And when I find the "door" it comes in the form of some sentences that I, and also anyone else who picks up the poem, can read and understand and feel something deeper and stranger and more mysterious and more real.

- Matthew Zapruder in conversation with Dean Rader over at The Huffington Post. You can read the whole thing here.

two big events for august

2011-08-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

Early each month I usually post info on a number of smaller Vancouver lit readings taking place around the city, but there really isn't that much happening in August. Instead, I figured I'd use this space to profile two big literary events happening in the city this month: the Summer Dreams Literary Arts Festival and the Main Street Magazine Tour. If you're interested in other readings in town (which certainly do exist, if few in number), I encourage you to visit the Federation of BC Writers events listing page.

Summer Dreams Literary Arts Festival
Friday, August 12th (7 PM) and Saturday, August 13th (12 - 8 PM)
CBC Studio 700 (Friday) and Lumberman's Arch, Stanley Park (Saturday)

Friday night will be an evening of recognition, with awards being given out to members of Vancouver's literary community. George Bowering will be receiving the main award of the evening, and other awards will be given to Poetry is Dead, RC Weslowski, Sean Cranbury, Betsy Warland and Mother Tongue Publishing.

The full-day festival at Lumberman's Arch in Stanley Park kicks off at 12:30 PM with a reading by George Bowering, and closes at 7:30 PM with a performance by CR Avery. In between, dozens of poets and musicians will perform, run workshops, and participate in discussion panels. And I've heard rumour that there'll be a literary game show...

I'll be involved briefly, as well, participating in a discussion on collaboration from 5:00 - 5:30 on the "Granville Stage". The full schedule for the day is here.

Here's an interview about the festival with Summer Dreams founder Bonnie Nish and volunteer (and silaron regular) Daniela Elza:

I'm excited to actually be able to make it to Summer Dreams this year (I've been out of town the last couple years), as Summer Dreams was one of the first literary events I participated in way back in the early 2000s. As event founder Bonnie Nish notes in the video, the whole point of Summer Dreams was (and still largely is) to pull together the diverse writing groups in the city for one big collective event. Our SFU writing and publishing group, High Altitude Poetry, participated in the first few years of Summer Dreams, and through the festival I got a big boost of confidence and made a number of good friends.

I'm looking forward to seeing old and new faces alike this year. The same goes for the second event of this post...

Main Street Magazine Tour
Thursday, August 18th, 6 - 10 PM
Starting at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Gardens

The Main Street Magazine Tour is moving North this year, touring around Chinatown, giving the area a chance to show off its growing number of new artist-friendly spaces, such as 221A, Blim, and Hogan's Alley Cafe (which hosts one of the city's many new reading series, the aptly "Hogan's Alley Poetry Reading Series") - speaking of which, if you don't know anything about Hogan's Alley, you best get learning.

The tour is, as usual, split into two, which means options, people. Tour "A" lets you take in readings and panels organized by Room, Event, and Prism (featuring, among others, Gillian Jerome, Donato Mancini, and Jen Currin), while Tour "B" gives you discussions and workshops organized by Poetry is Dead and Lester's Army. The evening closes with a reading of "deliciously rotten writing". Will any of it be on the subject of cheese? One can only hope. For a full schedule, click here.

I was lucky enough to participate in last year's Main Street Magazine Tour and it was a blast, featuring a very warm and diverse crowd. You are both warm and diverse, no? Then you should join in.

Happy August, all!

poetry isn't soul magic

2011-08-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

A close friend, also a poet, once asked me why I write poetry, and I replied that, among other things, it gives me a chance to make my narcissism palatable to others. She laughed. Her husband laughed. It was no joke. It seems to me that narcissism is ineluctably at the heart of poetry, maybe of every human enterprise. One-third of people will think I’m an idiot for bothering to state this. Two-thirds will think I’m repugnant for suggesting that poetry isn’t soul magic. But, however magical your soul, doesn’t its unveiling imply a touch of egotism? In lyric poetry, especially, some degree of narcissism seems unavoidable. Even Dickinson and Hopkins sought readers at some point. Now let us observe a moment’s silence for the Unknown Poets, who have defeated narcissism and won oblivion. Then, since there’s nothing to build on there, let us quickly turn in gratitude to their egotistical fellow poets, who reached through self-regard to give the bitter world a little beauty and insight.

- Joshua Mehigan, from his essay "I Thought You Were A Poet: A Notebook" in the July/August 2011 issue of Poetry Magazine.

win my book

2011-08-01T12:00:00.025-07:00

Last I checked, no one buys poetry in August (or the 21st century, for that matter). So to keep things moving until September 2101, I'm giving away three copies of The Other Side of Ourselves over at Goodreads.com!

It's free to enter, just click below and follow the instructions (you have to be a Goodreads member to enter, it seems). The contest closes at the end of August - enter early and often!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Other Side of Ourselves

by Rob Taylor

Giveaway ends August 31, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Good luck!

urgency and simplicity - An Interview with Kae Sun

2011-07-12T02:18:00.010-07:00

One of One Ghana, One Voice's finest poets, Kwaku Darko-Mensah (aka. the soul/folk/rock/pop/reggae/just-about-everything-else musician Kae Sun), is performing in Vancouver this Friday:

Kae Sun in Concert
Friday, July 15th, 9:00 PM Doors, 10:00 PM Start
Calabash Bistro
428 Carrall Street, Vancouver

It's a rare treat when I get to promote an OGOV poet here in Vancouver, but Kae Sun is exceptional in many ways. For one, as my intro noted, he is a musician as well as a poet, though the dividing line between the two arts is often a blurry one (we profiled one of Kae Sun's songs, "Lion on a Leash", on OGOV, for instance).

Here's a sample of his recent work, entitled "When the Pot":

From Toronto via Accra, Kae Sun is at the end of a West Coast tour (he'll be in Alberta and Ontario in August - dates here), and took a bit of time out of his busy schedule to e-chat about writing Ghanaian-infused poetry and music in Canada:

Rob: An interview with you that showed up recently on YouTube features a funny moment in which you are talking about the influence of Asante gospel music and the interviewer thinks you are referring to Ashanti, the pop singer. Likewise, one of the poems of yours that we’ve featured at One Ghana, One Voice, “Ananse’s Grave” is more likely to be interpreted in Canada as a poem about the demise of one of this country’s leading small presses than as a poem about Ghanaian folklore. These are only a couple specific examples of how the same words carry different meanings in Africa and in North America – when you move into more fraught terms like “poverty”, “development”, etc. the gulf between the meanings of words is potentially even greater, and certainly more complicated.

There’s a good deal of talk in the poetry world about whether writers should write for themselves or for an audience (and if so, a specific one or a general one). As a Ghanaian writing about Ghanaian/African subjects in Canada, is it possible for you to write without considering an external audience? Can you write about the Asante without worrying about people thinking you are talking about Ashanti (in the interview, for instance, you clarify what “Asante” means before the interviewer brings it up himself – you can sense his confusion before he even says anything), and if you can’t, does that in some way limit or compromise your work?

Kae Sun: One of my favorite artists, Mos Def, said something in an interview that really stuck with me. He said in order to be universal you have to be really specific. In other words you can only be genuine about your own experiences, views, etc. and if you go deep enough with it you're bound to strike a universal chord. We're essentially pretty similar as people, the difficulty is cutting through the external cultural differences. To write for an audience requires the almost impossible task of guessing what that audience wants to hear and that's not something I'm interested in doing at all. Plus it's easy enough to research new information or cultural references that one is unfamiliar with, in fact I think it's important. I mean I had to do it in order to live and go to school in Canada, so other people can do it too.

R: Does the same hold true for your music as for your poetry? It seems to me that your poetry is more closely tied to Ghanaian/African themes than your music. Would you consider that a correct assessment? If so, why do you think that is? Do you consider your poetry and music as having different audiences, or as being written for different purposes?

K: Not at all. I haven't really analyzed them separately. I mean my writing is evolving and I find that especially with this most recent EP, a lot of the themes within the songs have to do with Ghana, going home, etc. It has a lot to do with where I'm at in life when those poems or songs were written and right now I'm very connected to home, for the first time since I left.

R: That seems like a good segue to talking about your new EP. "Outside The Barcode" is an acoustic EP that you've made available for free download. What inspired you take this route (both "acoustic" and "free")?

K: Urgency and simplicity. I'm very much against the pure business approach to bringing music to an audience. There are few things I hate more than being all formal and businesslike especially with art. It's just not cool to me. Being professional is good to some extent but I find that some people take it too far. In my case my vocation is to write songs and share them, so I really didn't see the need in making the issue more complicated than that. These particular songs were ready to be shared so I just went with it. Thankfully I have a very supportive team so I can do things a bit more creatively.

R: Speaking of bringing your music to an audience, I recently came across a cover [posted above] of your song "Lion on a Leash" by a couple guys in France (and a cutout of some dude leaning on a broom?). Was that cover a YouTube first for you? How did you feel about the first time you saw your music covered? Did it feel like a milestone of sorts?

K: Yeah, it's a good feeling for sure. One way of knowing if a song resonates with an audience is watching at shows to see how people respond when they first hear a song without the hype. The other way is when people actually go out of their way to cover a song. It's a blessing.

R: Have you been to Vancouver before? To the West Coast in general? How have you been finding your time here? What can people expect from your show on Friday night?

K: Yes, I have. It's my third time here. It's beautiful out here, I love the pace of things. I'll be playing some of the new songs this time around. I'm still trying to decide if it'll be all acoustic or if I'll have a band with me. We'll see.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see Kae Sun play in an intimate setting this Friday - and if you aren't in Vancouver, be sure to download his new EP (for free!), and stay "on the lookout" (sorry, couldn't help myself) for when he comes through your town.

what a strange thing!

2011-07-09T02:48:00.000-07:00

Here's part three of my sporadic trip report: Poets House in New York City!

Poets House, on the bank of the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, is the kind of place that makes me jealous of cities-that-aren't-Vancouver. It features a 50,000 book poetry-only library, a number of special collections (the stacks in the second picture below, for instance, are just for chapbooks!), a special exhibition room, and a series of open and well-lit reading and writing spaces. In addition to all that, it hosts over 200 events and programs a year, though Marta and I weren't able to take anything in while we were in New York.

Founded by Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray in 1985, Poetry House moved into its current digs in 2009 after winning a lottery, open only to community non-profits, for free rent in the building (hint, hint, Vancouver).

More important than the building, though, are the free Poets House haiku pencils given out in the lobby. Be sure to take one if you visit, or better yet, grab three and you have a portable haiku-generator. Some (rather terrible) examples:

Erasure writing seems to be all the rage these days. How about Pencil + Eraser haiku writing? Maybe I should run a contest.

Speaking of clumsy segues, the deadline for Geist's Erasure Contest has been pushed back to July 15th. C'mon, you know you want to win a writing contest without writing anything - submit, already!

More trip updates to come (hopefully soon, before I forget everything we did)...

it certainly doesn't get any easier

2011-07-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

This should be the boilerplate that appears at the beginning of every interview with a poet, or at least every interview with me:

Nothing works for sure. Every poem feels like a first poem. Every poem enters my airspace by a different vector. What works one morning, likely won’t work the next. Maybe that’s the only certainty. It certainly doesn’t get any easier.

The same can be said about discussions like this. Every statement I make about poetry, my own poetry in particular, I find I can just as easily say the opposite.

- Joshua Trotter, in interview with Jacob McArthur Mooney over at The Walrus blog. You can read the whole thing here.

a few july readings

2011-07-05T18:17:00.000-07:00

Emphasis on a few. Oh, Summer. If I missed some, though, and I'm sure I did, send me a note and I'll add them.

Oh, and if you're in Vancouver and near a radio tomorrow, Daniela Elza and I will be on Co-op Radio's Wax Poetic show (Wednesday, July 6th, 2 PM, 102.7 FM) talkin' collaboration and reading a few poems.

The Kranky Reading Series 
Thursday, July 7th, 7:00 PM
Kranky Cafe
#216-228 East 4th Avenue , Vancouver
Featuring: Sandra Huber, Mariner Janes, and Nikki Reimer
Free!

Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, July 7th, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Trevor Carolan and Timothy Shay
$5 (suggested donation)

Cross-Border Pollination Series
Saturday, July 9th, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
SFU Harbour Center, Room 1530
515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Bren Simmers, Andrew Feld, and more!
Free!

Literary Arts Cafe
Monday, July 11th, 7:30 PM
Harrison Memorial Hall
98 Rockwell Drive, Harrison Hot Springs
Featuring: Trevor Carolan, Daniela Elza, Robert Martens and Franklyn Currie
$12

TWS Reading Series
Friday, July 15th, 7:00 - 9:30 PM
Take 5 Cafe
429 Granville Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Ashleigh Rajala, Fiona Scott, and more!
Free!

Twisted Poets Literary Salon
Thursday, July 21st, 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM
The Prophouse Cafe
1636 Venables Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Natasha Boskic and ???
$5 (suggested donation)

And look - the TWS series scored some coverage from local media. Fancy stuff!

my soul has grown deep like the rivers

2011-06-28T17:14:00.004-07:00

Instead of one big final report on Marta and my travels, I figured that over the next couple weeks I'd sporadically post some poetry-related highlights. Let's call this part two of that series (the first being the big stack o' books).

One of the highlights of our visit to New York was the "Rivers" installation at the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which is based on the Langston Hughes poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers":

It's a striking display - the poem is never written out in its entirety, but excerpts appear throughout the installation along with the names of the four rivers mentioned in the poem (the names of other great rivers of the world ring the edges of the room) and dates that correspond to the lives of Hughes and Schomburg. Needless to say, my pictures don't do it justice - here they are nonetheless, along with the poem's text and audio of Hughes reading it (complete with introduction):

The Negro Speaks of Rivers - Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

my "conflict of interest" q+a

2011-06-24T14:31:00.006-07:00

My good friend from back in University and actual real-life book reviewer (he gets paid and everything), Mike Hingston, runs a fantastic reviews blog called Too Many Books in the Kitchen.

Not generally one to review or discuss poetry on his site, Mike made an exception in my case, read The Other Side of Ourselves, and shot me a few questions. Those questions and my long-winded replies have been compiled into this:

Q&A: Rob Taylor, The Other Side of Ourselves

p.s. If you're curious about some of the references Mike makes in the intro, the poem he quotes is here, and the rather horrifying shots of me in spandex and ski goggles can be seen here.

robert kroetsch, 1927 - 2011

2011-06-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

News of the accident, if you hadn't read of it yet.

why our bags were over the air canada weight limit / what i'll be doing this summer... and fall... and winter...

2011-06-17T10:45:00.001-07:00

Books brought back from the trip, including city of acquisition, presented Brenda-Schmidt-bookshelf-style:

Methodist Hatchet, Ken Babstock (Ottawa)

the walnut-cracking machine, Julie Berry (Toronto)

Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop (New York)

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (Vancouver)

Love Figures, Sam Cheuk (Toronto)

some frames, Jack Hannan (Montreal)

Opened Ground: 1966 - 1996, Seamus Heaney (Toronto)

Patternicity, Jim Johnstone (Toronto)

The Red Fez, Leopold McGinnis (Toronto)

Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea, Leopold McGinnis (Vancouver)

Game Quest, Leopold McGinnis (Toronto)

Misunderstandings Magazine #16 (Toronto)

April 2011 Poetry Magazine (Vancouver)

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno, Matt Rader (Vancouver)

Undercurrents, ed. Robyn Sarah (Montreal)

More To Keep Us Warm, Jacob Scheier (Toronto)

The God of Loneliness, Philip Schultz (New York)

Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, Diane Seuss (New York)

No End in Strangeness, Bruce Taylor (Montreal)

All This Could Be Yours, Joshua Trotter (Montreal)

And Also Sharks, Jessica Westhead (Toronto)

Every Riven Thing, Christian Wiman (New York)

Home Schooling, Carol Windley (Toronto)

Come On All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (New York)

The Other Side of Ourselves, Rob Taylor X19 (Ottawa)

Oh and six guide books, three novels of Marta's, and two notebooks, not featured.

When I'm crippled by back problems later in life, I'll send my chiropractor the link to this page...

homecoming hodgepodge

2011-06-16T11:00:00.005-07:00

Hodgepodge the First:

A poem of mine, The Great Ceiling, is published in the new issue of subTerrain. The issue also contains poems by Dennis Lee, Catherine Owen, Jen Currin, Elizabeth Ross and more. Check it out in a bookstore if you get the chance.

Thanks, subTerrain!

Hodgepodge the Second:

I dropped the ball on posting readings for June. Generally speaking, you can usually look at the list from the month before and project the dates for the reading series' forward. I should be back on the ball for July. One event I want to point out, though, is the Art Sound Lab, which is happening this week (including tonight!).

Poets and musicians have been working together for months to produce collaborative works of art (view the participants here). The main concert will be on Sunday, June 19th at 8 PM at the SFU Woodward's building. You can view a full schedule here.

Hodepodge the Third:

Two local magazines have submission calls/contests out now that are worth noting.

First, subTerrain is looking to get together 125 poems on Vancouver for Vancouver's 125th birthday. Don't tell me that you don't have any inspiration right now. That said, maybe let's keep the share of the poems that are riot-related down to 75%, alright? The deadline is June 30th, and the details are here.

Second, Geist has an erasure contest on - it looks like a lot of fun. Take a gander here.

Hodgepodge the Fourth:

A Canadian Goodreads has just been released into the world. It's called Canadian Bookshelf. The Other Side of Ourselves hasn't made it into their system yet, so you'll just have to be patient with your 5-star ratings and gushing reviews...

A cute feature they've included is a "Cover Shuffle Challenge", which has you guess the names of books based on pictures of their covers. I got 16/24 without hints. I need to get out more. See if you need to get out more by taking the challenge here.

Hodgepodge the Fifth:

Worrying about next year's grant applications? Have no fear, the Arty Bollocks Generator is here.

Hodgepodge the Sixth:

How to deal with those noisy people at the back of the coffee shop who walked in during a poetry reading and for some reason didn't decide to leave, courtesy of Ray Hsu:

For next year's Cup run, I recommend we unleash an army of dancing Ray Hsu-bots to calm the rioters.

I hope everyone got home safe last night. If you want to help with the cleanup this morning, get info here.

tonight we're gonna party like it's 1994

2011-06-15T22:30:00.000-07:00

Good job, Vancouver. You just made losing the Stanley Cup the high point of the evening. We took a few pictures on our way out of there.

Crowd watching the early rioting:

Gearing up to flip the first car:

Gearing up in response to gearing up to flip the first car:

First car burning, while on our way the hell out of there:

Hopefully I'll be back babbling about poetry tomorrow, so long as our basement suite isn't looted. Fingers crossed!

incredibly delayed reading report

2011-06-15T11:43:00.005-07:00

I thought I might get one more post in during our travels, but then New York happened. That place is big, eh? And trying to see it all is both time-consuming and laughably impossible. I'm back in Vancouver now, and have a large backlog of stuff to share. First up, a report on a reading that happened two weeks ago!

The livewords/Misunderstandings Magazine launch/wake in Toronto on June 2nd went very well. There was a strong turnout, and I was able to put faces to many names I've blogged about here in the past (including A.F. Moritz, Sam Cheuk and Jeff Latosik). Al Moritz stole the show, as I suspect he does most nights he takes the stage, reading five poems from the last issue of MM. I read an odd set of internet-themed poems, partly inspired by the news that a few days earlier Raoul Fernandes had read one of them ("Errant") at an event in Victoria, and it had gone over well - thanks for that, Raoul!

Here's a blurry iPhone photo of my reading (what can't iPhones do half as well as a computer/camera/Xbox/organic human companion?):

Thanks to Edward Nixon and Jim Johstone for being generous hosts, and to Jim for all his work over the years with Misunderstandings. His new project is Cactus Press. Cactus produces chapbooks, and though I haven't seen any of them yet, the strongest section of Matt Rader's new book A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno, entitled "Customs", was previously published as a Cactus chapbook, so that's a darn good sign. A review of Cactus' latest set of chapbooks, written by Jacob Mooney, can be read here - keep an eye out for more titles as they come along.

Ok, that's all for now. More updates tomorrow. I have to go prepare both my party outfit and riot gear, as I'm sure I'll get to use at least one of them tonight. If I'm really lucky, both!

take care to lean / far in

2011-06-01T20:08:00.025-07:00

The Art Bar event last night was wonderful - a packed, generous crowd (including more friends than I expected!) and some very strong readings, highlighted by Julie Berry reading from her latest collection, the walnut-cracking machine. You can read the title poem here - it's well worth the time.

I'm reading again tomorrow night at the Misunderstandings Magazine final issue launch (details here). Apparently, there will be cake. I hope that's not the kind of thing people in Toronto joke about. No one should ever joke about cake.

In the midst of all the excitement (including Dionne Brand's Griffin win [congrats Dionne!], Vancouver's win [congrats Vancouver!], and my being in a town where I can walk between five different independent bookstores in ten minutes [congrats Toronto!]), I'd forgotten to promote this week's One Ghana, One Voice feature, Daniel Karasik - until now!

I got to know Daniel's writing through Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry, which I'm currently reading through and thoroughly enjoyable (which shouldn't come as a surprise, as it's selected and edited by my editor, Robyn Sarah). Daniel's contribution to the anthology is particularly strong - if you're in a book store, flip to his poems "Old Men Running", "Sanctity" and "Others Will Be Remembered" to see what I mean - so I was excited to read in his bio that he had spent some time in Ghana. I shot him an email in hopes that he had been writing poems back then, and sure enough he had. The first of the poems that he sent me, "A Wrapping Ceremony" is up on the site now, and another will follow down the road. You can read "A Wrapping Ceremony" here, and Daniel's bio and Q+A here.

And now, because at some point I need to post a picture from the trip that isn't of either A) someone standing at a microphone or B) a bookstore, here's a shot of me warming up the Canucks' spot for the engravers:

If you're in Toronto, I hope to see you on Thursday night. If you're in Vancouver, keep the place together until we're back in town for games six and seven, ok?

you know you're a writer when...

2011-05-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

... half of your vacation photos are taken inside bookstores.

It's been almost two weeks since the Vancouver launch of The Other Side of Ourselves, and the book is starting to show up here and there in the world, often in places I never would have expected. Chief among those, as part of a bookstore's main display (thanks to The Word Bookstore in Montreal!):

It's also popping up in other surprising places, like the McGill University Bookstore:

and at a latitude much too far North for a book written in Vancouver to handle, thanks to Brenda Schmidt's personal library:

More enjoyable than my book's appearance on bookshelves far from Vancouver (which is ridiculously enjoyable) have been the responses to the book that have begun trickling in. A heartwarming example is Daniela Elza's recent post on the book and launch.

Thank you to Daniela, and to all the bookstores and readers that are giving my little book a chance.

p.s. If you're in Toronto, you can give the book a chance next week, as I'll be participating in two readings around town (details here).

everybody worships

2011-05-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness...

There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

- David Foster Wallace, from a commencement speech given to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. You can read the full text here.

two toronto readings

2011-05-20T22:19:00.011-07:00

Instead of "launching" The Other Side of Ourselves in Toronto (see launch reports for Vancouver and Montreal here and here), I'm participating in two reading series, two days apart, at the end of May. I mentioned one earlier, and the details are in for the other. Here's the info:

Art Bar Reading Series
Tuesday, May 31st, 8:00 PM
Clinton's
693 Bloor Street West, Toronto
Featuring: George Elliot Clarke, Julie Berry, Allen Sutterfield and myself!
Free!

livewords: Readings & Celebration: Misunderstandings Final Issue
Thursday, June 2nd, 8:00 PM
The Black Swan
154 Danforth, 2nd Floor, Toronto
Featuring: Al Moritz, Sam Cheuk, Mat Laporte, Paul Vermeersch, myself, and many more!
By donation

If you're in the neighbourhood, it would be great to see you at either reading!

launches, cont.

2011-05-16T22:07:00.002-07:00

I'm just back from the Montreal launch of the Cormorant Books 2011 poetry line titles. A packed house took in readings by myself (The Other Side of Ourselves), Jack Hannan (Some Frames), Bruce Taylor (No End in Strangeness - and no relation to me, if you're wondering), and contributors Amanda Jernigan and Michael Lithgow from the Undercurrents anthology. The hardest-working-woman-in-poetry, Cormorant poetry line editor, Robyn Sarah, hosted the evening and read a few poems from other Undercurrents contributors who couldn't attend in person - including a fantastic poem by Daniel Karasik to close the evening. Though a hard fought battle, "poem of the night" went to Amanda Jernigan's "Blackout" - if you're curious about the poem, you'll just have to pick up a copy of Undercurrents...

It was a real pleasure to be amongst such talented and generous writers, and served to extend my state of delight that has been lingering since the Vancouver launch on Saturday. Speaking of which, a couple reports on the Vancouver launch have surfaced, one by Roxana Necsulescu for BC Bookworld here and another by Taryn Hubbard here (and thanks, Taryn, for the photo on this post). Thanks, Roxana and Taryn, for taking the time to write those up.

Next up, Toronto! Details are still coming in, but one reading has been confirmed. I'll be reading at the launch of the final issue of Misunderstandings Magazine (the issue will include a new poem of mine) on June 2nd. The details:

livewords: Readings & Celebration: Misunderstandings Final Issue
Thursday, June 2nd, 8:00 PM
The Black Swan
154 Danforth, 2nd Floor, Toronto
Featuring: Al Moritz, Sam Cheuk, Mat Laporte, Paul Vermeersch, myself, and many more!
By donation

If you're in Toronto, I hope to see you there!

was that real life?

2011-05-15T01:56:00.001-07:00

Thanks to everyone who came out to the launch for making it such a wonderful night. I wouldn't believe it really happened if not for the photos - which are, you know, photos of a poetry book launch, so don't expect much. Now that you've been warned, here are a few:

Jasper Sloan Yip and his band kicked things off...

then picked up the pace.

Next, Aislinn Hunter nuzzled the microphone...

and I did my best wistful poet impression...

inducing a buying frenzy at the sales table.

Thank you to everyone for coming!

Montreal, you're up next. See you on Monday!

anything going on tonight?

2011-05-14T14:29:00.002-07:00

As the HYPEcycle pedals along, I have posted a poem from The Other Side of Ourselves over at One Ghana, One Voice. It's called "I Have Gone to Keta: Daytrip", and you can read it here (and my bio and Q+A on it here). If you're wondering where in the heck Keta is, you can find out here.

For those of you exhausted by all the HYPE, don't worry, it will relax soon, as my Vancouver launch is tonight and Montreal launch is on Monday. I will also be doing some readings in Toronto in late-May - details (and HYPE) on that to follow. If you live in any of those cities, I hope to see you there.

There are a number of lit events in Vancouver tonight. If you're a Van-lit-lover, here's my proposed itinerary for the evening:

5:00 - 7:00: Cross Pollination Reading Series
7:00 - 7:02: Reckless speeding across town by car/bike/hovercraft
7:02 - 9:00: "The Other Side of Ourselves" Book Launch
9:00 - 9:02: Reckless speeding across town by scooter/airplane/marsupial
9:02 - 12:00: OCW #19 Release Party
12:00 - 12:02 AM: Reckless speeding across town by rollerblade/moonboot/catapult
12:02 - 3:00 AM: Reading is Sexy Memewar Fundraiser
3:00 - 3:02 AM: Quick ride home from a designated driver (never drink and hovercraft!)

Hope to see you tonight, Vancouver!

"The Other Side of Ourselves" Book Launch - Meet Aislinn Hunter

2011-05-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

As regularly readers of this blog will know, I'm launching my first collection of poems, The Other Side of Ourselves, this Saturday night. The evening will feature a reading from myself, as well as a reading by Aislinn Hunter and music from Jasper Sloan Yip. The details:

The Other Side of Ourselves Launch
Saturday, May 14th, 6:30 doors, 7:00 PM start
Rowan's Roof Restaurant and Lounge
2340 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Readings by Rob Taylor and Aislinn Hunter, music by Jasper Sloan Yip
Free, including free appetizers
Poster

In my efforts to MAXIMIZE THE HYPE I'm profiling the other two artists performing on Saturday. On Tuesday, I profiled Jasper Sloan Yip, and now it's Aislinn Hunter 's turn.

Yes, Aislinn, it's your turn!

Unlike Jasper Sloan Yip, who I know only through his work, I know Aislinn personally. She has been one of the great teachers in my life, and the teacher most directly associated with my writing. Similar to Jasper, though, it was her work that brought us together.

I read Aislinn's second book of poems, The Possible Past, in 2006 and couldn't believe that something that good was written by someone living in my city. A year later, I found the courage to ask Kwantlen University (where Aislinn teaches) if I could audit one of Aislinn's creative writing classes. They said no. So I enrolled (and have my one course of credit at KU to this day!). I won't go on too much here about how influential that course, and Aislinn's counsel since, have been on my writing life. I'm fairly certain, though, that I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am now without her advice and the influence of her writing.

Speaking of her writing, there is a disappointingly small amount of it available online. Here's a poem, though. And here are three more. To make up for the dearth of Aislinn Hunter stuff on the Internet, Aislinn offered original content for this post: an excerpt from The Possible Past and a short, but generous, Q+A.

from Barriers, in Six Parts by Aislinn Hunter
II

Refusal: the words no, never, I will not.
Scott's abhorrence at being asked
to turn back. Any word indicating sheer
implausibility. The way we speak in negatives
after a war. The addition of the word again.
The sound the body makes while dying.
The writer eyeing his second to last sentence.
The final foothold coming over the wall.

Rob: My favourite poem of yours is "Barriers, in Six Parts" from The Possible Past. Could you tell me a little about its composition? What drew you to the story of Scott's failed Antarctic expedition (the sheer drama of it, or something else)? How did you come to the structure of the six sections, one for each "barrier"?

Aislinn: Scott came late to the party actually. Over the years I guess I had been reading a fair bit of exploration non-fiction - Shackleton, Mallory, the Franklin expedition and so on, not with purpose but just in the way that as one gets older one wants to get a sense of the story behind the name. In this way Scott was there when I needed him but he wasn't my starting point. The idea for the series came out of The Possible Past's larger experiment: trying to see if the tenets of post-modern historical fiction could be applied to or enacted in poems. One of the things post-modern historical fiction tends to insist on is a barrier between the past and the present. My thinking at the time was that there are all kinds of barriers - literal ones and liminal ones, abstract ones and so on - but also that barriers accrue. The formal contrivance - to insert each barrier into the next poem and grow the poem by two lines at a time - came out of that idea of accrual.

Rob: Your latest book, A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: paratexts, is a collection of lyric essays on things, and how they resonate. Has your research on thing-theory changed the way you look at poems? At poetry books? If so, how?

Aislinn: I'd like to think I've always been sensitive to the poem as a physical object. Maybe because I come from a place and generation that tended to discover poems in books or on the page (in my case it was sneaking into my older sister's high school textbook to read Purdy and Atwood). Stories seem to come to us more naturally and in a variety of forms - I mean you get them in the playground, on TV - but we don't often turn on the radio and find a poem, or hear them recited at parties. This, I think, makes its space, the 'locale' the poem inhabits, special. I remember once on the board at Prism the idea, in a funding crisis, of placing small ads at the bottom of some of the journal's pages and how vehemently I was against it, especially for poems. I may have eventually caved on small literary ads after the short fiction - I'm ashamed to say - though neither came to pass.

My academic work has, if anything, encouraged a slightly lop-sided sensibility toward book things and 'high' aesthetics. I love what's 'beautiful' and living in and studying in the UK has reinforced my preoccupation with classical beauty and the illusion of pre-industrial design. I have Montaigne on my iPhone for example and reading him there in snippets sort of empties the work out for me, ditto the 'poem of the day' I sometimes look at online. There's a kind of, I don't know, tide washing in and washing out feeling about it, and not in a good way. At the British Library website you can 'turn' the pages of a William Blake manuscript on a huge table-size tablet and it is frankly, amazing, but it's amazing because it helps democratize access to Blake's stunning and perishable work, and it preserves it (in so much as a hard drive or flash memory preserves anything). But for me, bratty, puritanical, spoiled me, it's 'less' somehow, though that is borne I think out of my willingness to travel a long way to get to a good museum and the academic privilege of knowing I can have access to the actual thing if I want it.

Aislinn's latest broadside -
click the image to expand

Over the years I've had two poems done up as broadsides, one by a poet/publisher in Chicago who solicited a poem. There is something deep and resonant and scary about seeing your work like that - large and ornate. To think of all the time invested into typography, inks, getting it onto the paper, designing the surround. This is a signed thing in more than just the literal way.

I worry that we take too much for granted. I think my first and second year students sometimes type up their early efforts and think 'Well, it looks like a Seamus Heaney' - and you know what, it does! So, I guess I'm getting picky about the distinction between looking and seeing. Taking a page from Heiddeger I guess I'll say that the thingness of the thing - the poem's giveness - is what happens when we read the work, and that while what we see - it's external thingliness - informs us, it is really what emerges as voice or whisper that shapes our ultimate seeing.

Rob: Your second book of poetry, The Possible Past, came three years after your first, Into the Early Hours. Since then, it's been seven years of poetry-book silence. Did Peepshow let you scratch your lyric itch, or perhaps has the itch naturally diminished over the years? Or is the third book on its way soon?

Aislinn: Well, I did a second Masters degree in there, in Writing and Cultural Politics and I'm half way through my PhD so that has been time consuming. And I'm going on year seven for the bloody novel I'm working on, though I'm making good progress. Part of me doesn't see the point of producing another book - in any genre - if it isn't a leap in craft and idea. Years ago I tucked into my sleeve Ondaatje saying that it took him seven years on average to 'fill the well', it seemed like a reasonable amount of time. I have about half a manuscript of poems in a drawer - a narrative series that came to me in a fit during a writer-in-residence gig in St John's - and about 10 or 12 of the poems have been published in journals. I tried for a Canada Council grant to work on it and got rejected - twice. So I'm not sure if the work is any good. And that's okay. My good friend Joel Thomas Hynes was saying to a group of young writers recently that he had the feeling there were maybe books he had to write to write the book he wanted to write. I think I'm in that with poems. To make a leap means sometimes to leap and land so you can leap from there; not every landing is a destination, it would be arrogance to think so.

Let me leave you with a nice, small thing. Yesterday searching with 'find' in my computer for something to do with a textbook, I found buried in an old file a reference letter I wrote on your behalf a few years ago. It made me laugh a bit, the idea of being a reference for you at all as you seem to me now to be such a full-fledged poet. But what was great was how true the praise seemed then and how true it seems now, how easy it was to use words like curiousity, engagement and rigour. I talked about how startling even your spontaneous writing exercises were, how interested the whole class was in your thinking.

I can't wait to have the collection in hand this Saturday. Congratulations on the book, Rob. It is no small thing.

"The Other Side of Ourselves" Book Launch - Meet Jasper Sloan Yip

2011-05-10T16:16:00.004-07:00

The Other Side of Ourselves Launch
Saturday, May 14th, 6:30 doors, 7:00 PM start
Rowan's Roof Restaurant and Lounge
2340 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Readings by Rob Taylor and Aislinn Hunter, music by Jasper Sloan Yip
Free, including free appetizers
Poster

Over the next few days, I will attempt to MAXIMIZE THE HYPE by giving you a chance to get to know the other performers. First up, Jasper (and his lovely band)!

Jasper Sloan Yip, Mark Brichon and Stephanie Chatman. Ain't they lovely?

I can't say I know all that much about Jasper (here's a formal bio, if you want one) other than that he's a local boy, and I saw him perform once and was very impressed. That night, I picked up his album, Every Day and All at Once, and it's been on heavy rotation at our house ever since.

He's quickly on his way to "making it big in that kind of way that's hopelessly unattainable for poets" (his song "Slowly" recently hit #4 on the The R3-30), so it will be a real treat to see him and his band on our little book launch stage while we still have a chance!

A great online source for his music (other than his website and mySpace page, of course), is his CBC Radio 3 page, where you can stream a goofy number of his songs for free. You can also download a song for free here.

Now, embedded video time!

Here's a lively song with a not-so-lively video:

Here's the band on a green couch in a park:

And here's Jasper displaying his darn good taste (and talent!) by covering Wilco's "Jesus, etc.":

Look for a great show from Jasper and the band on Saturday night. I hope to see you there!

african writing + the internet

2011-05-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

One of the great things that technology will give us is an outlet for our own critical perspectives which will help moderate skewed Western perspectives. An example: recently the Guardian had someone do a blog piece on Ben Okri's "The Famished Road" and he said the book was a waste of space - within minutes respondents from across the globe were taking him to task, letting him know that he didn't understand the context or the subtext, and because of this he found he had to moderate his tone. Something as simple as that can change the way the world reads, and can expand the readership for writing from Africa. In the "print only" days, that Guardian piece would not have had those responses and would have become "law" in print, with everyone heralding it as authoritative; with the web, it became dialogue.

- Nii Ayikwei Parkes, as part of a two-part Roundtable Discussion on African Writing and the Internet that we've been running over at One Ghana, One Voice.

The discussion has had a number of highlights, including a reference to Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap), which I hadn't heard of before, and plan to use liberally in my future defences of poetry. You can read part one of the Roundtable here, part two here, and participant bios here.