Back again

I've been away due to a crisis. My partner, who prefers to go unnamed in this blog, and who is -- I feel have to add these qualifiers here -- an attractive, highly intelligent and creative woman, also happens to suffer from bipolar schizoaffective disorder. This time she became suicidal and had to be rushed to the hospital. All this has been very traumatic for me and everyone concerned -- our families and many friends, who I've spent hours on the phone contacting, consoling, etc. Anyway, she is stabilized -- evidently she neglected her meds, for a complicated series of reasons I won't go into -- and is in good spirits now, although still under professional care for an undetermined time.

All this has made me indisposed to blogging about literature and the arts. Instead, when I've had free time, I've been spilling forth reflections in a personal journal and playing the guitar.

Dutrope; Me; Li-Young Lee

Thanks to C. Dale Young (who learned about it from another blogger), I've discovered Duotrope, extraordinary site listing lit mags, response times, etc. As CDY was saying, it's more searchable that Jeff Baher's compilation. It's also more international (it has quite a few Canadian magazines), links to websites, etc. I think I'll put it on top of my magazines list.

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I've lined up a gig at Noches de Poesia, which has fast become Montreal's premier multicultural poetry venue, and one Montreal's premier poetry venues period. (Well, there are only about three or four of them.) I'll be reading along with four others (as well as performing some music) on Wed., Nov. 1 starting at 6:30. Further details here.

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This weekend I read through Li-Young Lee's Rose, which I recently received in the mail along with a batch of other books. I love this poet's emotional warmth and depth, his disarming ease and innocence of expression. Poignant works about childhood and father -- a kind of looming (yet disturbing) hero-figure -- blend into beautiful poems about his own fatherhood, woven together by such elemental motifs as hair, blossoms, fruit -- and despite what that descrption may suggest, nary a word trite or precious (tho he he does verge at a couple of points. Good for him, I say.)

The reason I ordered Rose is that about a year ago in The Sun I came across some damned good poems from that book. Here's one of them. (And here's an exerpt of the interview with Lee in that same issue -- and I see now that Ilya Kaminsky is one of the interviewers. Interesting.)

Of course, it's often best to read first books first: that's where so many poets quite definitively define themselves, and from what I had read of Lee, I wanted to see that. Now I'm inclined to order his latest, perhaps, and work backwards.

P.S. I see also now that there's an interview with Li-Young Lee in the current issue of Rock Salt Plum Review. Very interesting. I'll have to read it when I have a free moment. My essay is also there, but funny, it didn't leap out at me that Lee was featured in the same issue perhaps because I hadn't read much of him yet.

My humanity's in question

Got this hilarious message, replete with implications metaphysical and physical, in my Spam box:

The message you sent requires that you verify that you
are a real live human being and not a spam source.

To complete this verification, simply reply to this message and leave
the subject line intact

I guess spam sources are not real live human beings.

If you need a spam filter, by the way, Spam Bully does a great job of presorting your emails into folders entitled Inbox, Spam, Not Sure. (The vast majority of so-called spam I get, by the way, is stuff bounced back from filters because someone is using my website domain name as a bogus source .... making up addresses like xyzk@briancampbell.org to send out their junk )

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Oh yeah...

Wouldn't limericks classify as escapist poetry? Wouldn't doggerel and/or much of so-called light verse? Oh yeah, forgot about that. I guess because I don't read much of it (I guess 'cause it's forgettable. Duh. Scratch o' the head.)

A propos...

Whatever “unreal”, “fictional” elements it consists of – whether it takes us on a journey, is woven together with dialogue, hyperbole, astonishing juxtapositions, the tissue of myth – poetry situates itself in the reality we live, is a direct interpretation of that reality. It is portrait, emblem, not a parallel world. Hence there is no such thing as escapist poetry. Poetry is real; it is the ultimate non-fiction.

One of my poems has been taken by Cezanne's Carrot. It'll be appearing in their December issue.

The journalist ... is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

-- Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

"The Poets of Poetry"

Commentary: NORTH HATLEY

The Pilsen, where I wrote "North Hatley"

North Hatley, Quebec is an almost insufferably cute little tourist/cottage town twenty minutes' drive from Lennoxville (which, incidentally, was recently amalgamated into the city of Sherbrooke -- the locals, though, still call it Lennoxville). As I've taught at Bishop's University, Lennoxville, for the past seven summers, I've made more side trips here than I can count and spent more time here than, honestly, I could wish for. Once an exclusive country retreat for Montreal's Westmount wealthy, it now has a sizeable minority of Francophone residents. As with all towns like these up here, it is at its liveliest in the summer, and practically closes down in the winter. A number of the biggest mansions have been turned into pricey auberges (bed and breakfast inns) for the expense-account crowd. Conrad Black (that I'm quite sure) and other tycoons of his ilk have spent time here, as well as a some prominent members of the Royal Family (again, fairly authoritative heresay) and not a few from the underworld. Of the latter I'm certain: a major headquarters of the Hells is just down the road (well, in the other end of Lennoxville), a huge red-roofed house towering above a wooded hillside and surrounded by a rampart of high electrical fences topped by barbed wire. (The Hells, by the way, are unabashedly federalist-patriotic: above the house flaps a huge Canadian flag, perhaps the biggest east of Ontario. They're also, according to an ex- North Hatley waiter I know, hard drinkers and lavish tippers...or at least were. What with the latest prosecutions, they may be lying low.)

The town has several galleries of "naive" art, mostly trite things (gingerbread houses, apple-cheeked children, horses nuzzling under moonlight -- you get the picture, or rather, pictures) in golden frames done by wealthy women for wealthy women. Light summer theatre, weekly band concerts in one of two gazebos in the lakefront park (appropriately named Dreamland Park -- the lake, though, I must say is beautiful), restaurants with outdoor terraces, boat rides, ice cream -- well, that more or less rounds out this thumbnail sketch.

The poem was first-drafted two -- now three -- summers ago on the outdoor patio of The Pilsen Restaurant and Pub, on a Saturday afternoon after completing a yearly ritual: riding down the bike path from Lennoxville on a hot sunny day and quenching my thirst with a couple of beers on the terrace overlooking the water. The processions of pleasure boats on the river leading to Lake Massawippi were in full force, plenty of bikinis to ogle at (pls. excuse the synechdoche). I remember, too, being creeped out by some of the people around me -- square-jawed couples in mirrored sunglasses clearly on the take and the make, and indeed, some stockbroker or accountant type conducting frenetic financial transactions on his cellular.

French phrases I threw in (well, they came to mind before the English):

haute couture: high fashion (that, of course, you'd find in any good English dictionary)

le grand lit dans l'auberge: (literally) the big bed in the bed-and-breakfast inn

Funny, going back to North Hatley in the two summers since, the town seemed strangely innocuous. People I saw were not nearly as hard-edged as those I was exposed to at the writing of that poem -- rather, average, relaxed, friendly, even a little dowdy. Only last year I discovered the municipal beach, a humble stretch of sand serving mostly locals a fair piece down the road from the park. My partner and I also went to a couple of garage sales at some of the more modest, tumbledown cottages in town, chatted with their delightfully eccentric owners while picking up some interesting things. These experiences, of course, have given me other, extenuating perspectives. The poem -- like all poems, perhaps -- now seems the product of mercilessly selective attention. But then, the almost obsessive cuteness of the town is it's own exercise in denial -- and that, I think, I captured quite well.