OGOV #2 and open mic

One Ghana, One Voice #2 is up! check it out.

also, High Altitude Poetry is hosting an open mic at the Highland Pub (SFU Burnaby Campus) on April 2nd, starting at 7 PM.

i may be driving and may have carpool space. maybe.

that building will never hold up

my poem/short-short-story 'that building will never hold up' has been published on the feathertale site. you can read it here.

also just posted on the feathertale site: Colin Stewart's poem 'Navy Spheres'.

nifty.

from "The Finding of Form"

Special techniques to be expected in most poetry:

...

6. An assumption that readers and listeners will be willing and able to project beyond the poet’s immediate thought, to draw on all their own resources of intelligence, sensitivity and human intuition, to explore their own subconscious, to match or excel the poet’s - in short, to write their poems while reading and listening to his...

-Earle Birney, The Finding of Form, from The Cow Jumped over the Moon, 1972.

OGOV issue #1!

the first issue of One Ghana, One Voice, featuring the work of Prince Anin-Agyei, has been launched! take a read here, and please help spread the word.

duotrope = neat, me = walking billboard

I just came across this site that lets you track your submissions to lit mags - and through that hold the mags accountable:

http://duotrope.com/

It lets you keep track of when your submissions are sent and responded to, and how they are received (acceptance or rejection, personal comments or form letter, etc.)

More importantly, they then compile the data so you can search magazines by rate of acceptance, speed of reply, etc. For instance, members of the site report Contemporary Verse 2 as taking 235 days on average to respond to submissions, while remark takes a mere 2.3 days. Neat, eh?

Also, they've just added a section for High Altitude Poetry which, apparently, accepts "Literary" and "Experimental" poetry:

http://duotrope.com/market_1939.aspx

The HAP posting still needs more contributors before its stats can become active, so if you're interested, sign up and get involved.

p.s. One Ghana, One Voice launches on Saturday. Terribly exciting.

i'm home: some CanCon to celebrate

And how do the players feel about it
this combination of ballet and murder?
For years a Canadian specific
to salve the anguish of inferiority
by being good at something the Americans aren't
And what's the essence of a game like this
which takes a ten-year fragment of a man's life
replaced with love that lodges in his brain
                   and substitutes for reason?

- from "Hockey Players" by Al Purdy

my body has been devouring me for months

my body has been devouring me for months.
no matter how i feed it, the acids work
their way around the food, gnaw at
my stomach lining.

my body has been devouring me for months
and i do not know how to work my way
around it. i write poems. i pray.
i go jogging. i ask my friends for
comfort. i ponder the meaning of life.
i wash dishes. i scrub clothes. i’m
not even sure what it means to live
anymore, unless i am doing it,
unless it is this giving in, this bleeding out.


from the March 2007 issue of High Altitude Poetry

read more of my poems from HAP here.

from the lone copy of ‘The Malahat Review’ in the stacks of the Balme Library, Legon University, Accra

O let’s sing the rough wine of the earth,
beat the board with the glasses of fall,
while either a guitar or the silence go on bringing us
love-lines, the language of nonexistent rivers
or adorable stanzas with no sense at all.

- from ‘Wine’ by Pablo Neruda, as translated by Anthony Kerrigan. The Malahat Review #25, January 1973.

January 17th, 2007, Ada Foah

he drops the bamboo pole
deeper and deeper until he hits sand
then he quickly works his way up the pole:
three thrusts, each one lurching the boat
forward, breaking the bow against
wind-fluttered whitecaps.

he dips, turns, waves,
climbs his bamboo ladder,
the dog in the bow yapping
aimlessly.

i smile and wave back,
for a moment almost believing
that if i pushed my pole down
i would hit seabed,
i would move this vessel forward.


from the March 2007 issue of High Altitude Poetry

read more of my poems from HAP here.

and then someone comes along and says it better...40 years earlier

this interview excerpt from Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor in many ways says what i was trying to say in my "Ghana @ 50" feature much better than i did, and in far, far less words. at the least, it serves as a nice companion to the feature:

Serumaga (interviewer): How do you see the African society itself, trying to transform itself under the new circumstances? Is it succeeding, or is it, in your view, failing to do this?

Awoonor: Well, I think it was one of the African leaders who talked about us having to sort of jet-propel ourselves into the twentieth century, and this is a fact; and within this process of jet-propelling ourselves into the twentieth century, we are going to commit all kinds of blunders, and the blunders are self-evident in the situation which Africa is in today. Politically or socially, the whole question of economic organizations and social organizations, or political institutions, has really come out to show that we have not had our education properly in terms of what we are trying to do; we become black Europeans, either black Frenchmen as you see in most of the French-speaking African countries, or black Englishmen as you see in most of the English-speaking African countries. But I think there is a medium somewhere, there is a centre somewhere, where some kind of security is going to be achieved which has no relationship with political institutions - either political ideologies or concepts of democracy, or what not and so on. Those concepts might come in handy and useful, but then the basis is going invariably to be found in the society which we are trying to change, the society which is going to drive jet air-planes, and is going to use railways and is going to build harbours and so on.

- except from an interview in African Writers Talking, 1967

2 poetry sites: one new, one good-as-new

the first is a personal project, which i hope everyone will work to promote as best they can, as the poets who will be involved would really benefit from the exposure:

One Ghana, One Voice


the second is Leopold McGinnis' new-and-improved literary wonder:

Red Fez v.2.0

Red Fez has been nice enough to publish a number of my poems in the past, and the current issue is quite good. check it out!