Skin: a OCW fundraiser
Thursday, June 24th, 8:30 PM
One Two One Studios
121 Heatley St, Vancouver
Featuring: Um... poetry body art! Do you really need more?
$10
Word Whips: Inspired by "Child out of Time"
Thursday, June 24th, 7:30 PM
The Sidney and Gertrude Jack Gallery @ the JCC
950 W. 41st Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Fran Bourassa, Robin Susanto, me and more!
Free!
Poster (again!):
It seems, though, that one of the ideas we’ve inherited from the 20th century’s focus on destroying meta-narratives (God, morality, truth, etc.) is that anything is possible: I mean, that one can do anything they want, or be anything they want, that everything is bendable and flexible and, truly, anything goes. There are entire industries (self-help, cosmetics, some branches of medical science) that are devoted to selling the idea that you can have it exactly the way you want it, whenever you want it. This is the engine of modern consumerism, and, I feel, some part of me was cast in this fire. I suppose that’s what makes this personal.
The book, then, is in many ways also a reaction to this idea, as I’ve self-defined it. I suppose what I see myself struggling against is a more general co-opting of language (in politics, marketing, news, etc.) for the purposes of making things easy. I want to make things difficult again. But I want there to be a rung.
There are two ways to take the question 'What is poetry for?'... You can ask it neutrally, in which case there's a good answer. But you can also ask it as a challenge – what use is it? But you don't need to answer that one. Poetry shouldn't be on the defensive, because poetry doesn't have a case to answer...
If you burned every poem on the planet and you wiped every poem from every human mind, you would have poetry again by tomorrow afternoon... It's not something you do to language, so much as language does to itself under specific conditions – mainly shortness of time and emotional urgency. Any time that comes up, its grain and structure suddenly become apparent, all its music, rhythm and capacity for invention.
Spoken Ink
Tuesday, June 16th, 8:00 PM
La Fontana Caffe
101 - 3701 East Hastings (at Boundary), Burnaby
Featuring: Pam Galloway and Clélie Rich
Free!
Word Whips: Inspired by "Child out of Time"
Thursday, June 24th, 7:30 PM
The Sidney and Gertrude Jack Gallery @ the JCC
950 W. 41st Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Fran Bourassa, Robin Susanto, me and more!
Free!
Poster:
June (reading) Bug attack:
BLARGH!!!
Marta and I got up early today to watch Ghana sneak out a 1-0 victory over Serbia to kick off their Wold Cup campaign.There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.- Joseph Brodsky, from his 1987 Nobel Lecture (translated by Barry Rubin). Read the whole thing here.
Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.
The winners have been announced in the ABPBC's Poetry in Transit contest that I mentioned a while back. I cheated a bit and submitted a poem from my manuscript (instead of an essay), which managed to snag one of the three runner-up awards - the very cool prize of some PiT buscards! I think I'll post them on my bathroom walls, add a few handrails to the room, and maybe hook the toilet handle to a pull cord that's strung along the walls. Next stop! Anyway, I digress...
