end of the road

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!

astonished at what is chosen by others

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 coordinated 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.

what a strange thing!

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)...

my soul has grown deep like the rivers

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.

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

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...

incredibly delayed reading report

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

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...

... 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).

launches, cont.

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!