Two April Readings

Oh April, the month when we feverishly try to get all of the poetry out of the way for the year!

I'm very pleased to have been invited to take part in two readings for National Poetry Month. The details:

Spring Poetry & Food Event For Kidsafe
Wednesday, April 15th, 7 PM
Chocolate Arts Cafe
1620 West 3rd Avenue, Vancouver
Featuring: Danny Peart, Rachel Rose, and me!
$20 (includes soup, desert, coffee - all proceeds to Kidsafe)
Get Tickets and Donate Here
Poster:

A Feast of Poetry
Friday, April 24th, 7 PM
North Vancouver City Library
120 West 14th Street, North Vancouver
Featuring: Raoul Fernandes, Pam Galloway, Rachel Rose, David Zieroth and me!
Free! And free appetizers!
RSVP via the NVCL Calendar
Poster:

If you haven't guessed yet, the League of Canadian Poets has set this year's Poetry Month theme as "Food" (because "Poetry... you know... about feelings and stuff" doesn't quite have that ring to it).

So come for the food, but stay to watch me try to convince the audience that my poems about family, nature, and sadness are actually about food. I'll call it "soul food" or something. Oh god... I really don't know how I'm going to pull this off...

I'd love to see you at either event (or both)!

why should a writer be expected to be a social commentator?

Why should a writer be expected to be a social commentator?... How can someone who spends her days changing dashes to parentheses and then to commas have the inside track on anything of world-shaking import? Writers are like mushrooms, thriving best in moldy basements, where they are happiest checking facts and doing the cryptic crossword puzzle. Don’t bring them up, blinking, into the merciless light of day, where they will have to reveal their ignorance to people with more money, people who have different kinds of shoes for every kind of sport.

What those well-shod folk don’t recognize about writers is that we write to learn about things, not to teach them to others. We write to find out what it is we’re writing about. You read for the same reason — to find out what it is you’re reading to find out. We’re all just asking questions here, and what questions deserve are answers. Not opinions.

- Susan Glickman, expressing what I think every time I sit through a post-reading Q+A at a Writers' Festival, in her essay "In My Opinion", published over at The Editor's Weekly. You can read the whole thing here. Thanks to the Vehicule Press blog for pointing this out.

poems that are alive will have a life of their own

I teach punctuation as a form of orchestration and musical notation. I teach close reading, rhetoric, transitions. But the opposite of all this, equally important, cannot be taught; it can only be remembered and acknowledged. After a poem is written, something of what has happened outside the writer’s consciousness can sometimes be named. But during the writing, the poet cannot know everything about the poem. In lyric poems, I suspect the poet often enough may not know much of anything. Not what it is about, not where it is going. The poem needs its first draft intoxication, its subversive trickster energies, its whistling in the dark, its unexpected and unfendable off pang of longing. A poem too sure of itself will have no crack for breathable air to enter, and will die for lack of permeability. Poems that are alive will have a life of their own, beyond the control of the writer. The writer’s only task when that life arrives is to get out of its way.

We are the amanuenses of our poems. They dictate us. Or so it seems to me. We learn everything we can of craft so that what we know can be of service to what wants to come through us.

- Jane Hirshfield, in discussion with Ami Kaye about the themes of her essays (later collected in her excellent book Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry), over at Pirene's Fountain. You can read the whole interview here.

good poems always travel in more than one direction

I’ve come more and more to believe in the presence and centrality of... invisible ink [in poems] — or, to use a different metaphor, to believe that there is a set of hidden clockworks beneath the surface of any poem we find ourselves moved by. This is true, paradoxically, even of poems that seem to tell everything outright. A poem may seem naked or plain, but if it moves us, there will always be something else at work, under the surface of its words. This second, undertow life is what differentiates poetry from instruction manuals, journalism, or, for that matter, a diary-type journal. Good poems always travel in more than one direction. They do not soothe us with platitude knowledge, they broaden us with complication, multiplicity, permeability to the subtle, and with unexpected perceptions, gestures of language, and comprehensions.

In addition to this larger scale dimension of hidden energies in poems, there is also a set of particular craft devices that might be described as “invisible ink.” One example is the deliberate choice to leave something out. A poem can convey an emotion or event’s presence by walking around it, revealing its shadow, alluding without naming, pressing back against it. Poems can create meaning in the same ways that mimes create walls, tables, balls, out of thin air and their own responses. This mode of communication falls into the category of what rhetoric calls periphrasis. Think of those Chinese scrolls in which the moon is a circle left uncolored. It is simply the paper, unpainted. That is an act of visual and physical periphrasis — the ink brush touches everything but the moon itself, which is, as in the physical sky, beyond any actual touch or reach.

- Jane Hirshfield, in discussion with Ami Kaye about the themes of her essays (later collected in her excellent book Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry), over at Pirene's Fountain. You can read the whole interview here.