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.

FIVE videos + fundraiser + Project Space

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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!