For the last few months, Andrew Shields has been running what he calls the Daily Poem Project. Its final round, where people vote on the best daily poem since the project started, has its deadline at midnight tonight. You can read the poems, and participate, here. Sorry for the short notice! I'm back in Mtl. after a week of almost total absorption in teaching in this immersion program I'm in. (I have three more weeks to go.) Just before I left, though, I answered Andrew's call, and participated... it turned out to be an opportunity to read & evaluate some "top flight" contemporary American material. You'll see my short list with comments & final vote tomorrow.
PS. Andrew tells me (comment below) the deadline is actually Sunday night (Jul. 1) So as not to prejudice the voting, you'll see my take on probably Monday -- if and when I get a chance to sit down for a few minutes in the computer lab.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Seth
It was amusing to read Seth's rant on the sociology of poetry, a post from a couple of years back that still holds true... although he nearly goes apoplectic about Ron Silliman.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
I have only the faintest notions about site feeds, but this looks like one. And the first to register on my site meter, which for me has been a major source of entertainment over the last few years.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Stay tuned...
Today I'm packing to go away for another stint at Bishop's University (Sherbrooke, Quebec), teaching in its summer adult English Second Language immersion program (they call it the Executive Program: every summer we have a few top execs and occasionally, a minister of gov., but most are middle-managers, small businesspeople, & the like). My CV tells me this will be my 7th summer in that program (I'm actually its head teacher), although I also taught two other summers in other programs on the same campus. This time though, for personal reasons, I'll be only four weeks in that idyllic place, rather than the usual six. Unlike the last two summers, I'm not declaring a hiatus for this blog. Entries may be more sporadic than usual, but I have plenty of drafts on hand. I'm also planning a series of posts on "easy reading poets" I enjoy. So stay tuned...
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Poetry Plus
I arrived late on the scene for this reading (teaching obligations), and the cafe was mostly full, including many familiar faces -- Katherine Beeman (who read in the open set), Robyn Sarah, Anna Fuerstenburg, Ilona Martonfi, and my friend Raphael Bendahan, also featured... in my ten minutes I read After Reading Too Much Shields and Atwood, then Charles Baudelaire's Windows translated by Louise Varese (this transcription, the only one I could find on the net, has a number of ridiculous typos), followed by my own palimpsest of that poem that I wrote here. ("Palimpsest" is Maxianne Berger's term of a borrowing and reworking of key & recognizable elements of a famous earlier work, frequently a take-off set in a contemporary context. At the last League conference she read a marvelous one, a sort of Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock set in 2007.) Susan Dubrofsky and Rana Bose, editors of the webzine Montreal Serai, happened to be in the audience, and the former invited me to send in my take-off of CB for their next issue. I'll definitely do that. This Canada Council-supported site is nicely presented. The poetry is of uneven quality, but I see the archives do include the likes David Solway, Julie Bruck and Carmine Starnino. In any case, it's nice to get stuff out, get "international exposure" while supporting a local zine. Moral of the story: at poetry readings, always be sure to read some unpublished work. You never know who will be in the audience, who might offer to bring it to the light of day in print.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Another good poetry quote
This thanks to Peter:
From an interview with Michael Ondaatje:
"One of the things about poetry is that you are more suggestive, I think," he said. "You don't say 100 percent. You say 70 percent, or something like that, so that the reader also participates in the story. Now, in the poem, the minute you say too much, it dies. So reader and writer are in a simultaneous location making the final poem.
"I want to bring that into fiction. When I turned from poetry to fiction I thought, 'Well, I wonder if you can do that, too.'
"So you are being more suggestive, you are being very tight with words, very precise with words as opposed to poetic, which sometimes people think is too romantic. . . . And I think the forms of poetry, as the forms of modern art, are more radical perhaps than some of the forms of the novel."
From an interview with Michael Ondaatje:
"One of the things about poetry is that you are more suggestive, I think," he said. "You don't say 100 percent. You say 70 percent, or something like that, so that the reader also participates in the story. Now, in the poem, the minute you say too much, it dies. So reader and writer are in a simultaneous location making the final poem.
"I want to bring that into fiction. When I turned from poetry to fiction I thought, 'Well, I wonder if you can do that, too.'
"So you are being more suggestive, you are being very tight with words, very precise with words as opposed to poetic, which sometimes people think is too romantic. . . . And I think the forms of poetry, as the forms of modern art, are more radical perhaps than some of the forms of the novel."
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Li-Young Lee on Poetry
The Summer 2004 issue of Rattle contains a wonderful interview with Li-Young Lee. Among the gems is this passage about wholeness:
...what I really love when I read a poem is the visceral experience of a sense of wholeness ... every poem is a portrait of the speaker, right? So if my experience of that speaker is a kind of integrated, a deeply integrated but at the same time highly differentiated psyche ... then I get a real sense of satisfaction, a sense somehow that in the poem the intellectual function is informed of the emotional function and they are both informed of the erotic function and the erotic function is informed of the spiritual function. Sometimes I have a problem when I read a poem that's just the mental function, it seems uninformed of the physical functions or the emotional functions or the spiritual functions. Or even a poem that is just the spiritual function working overtime but uninformed of the other functions. So what I love is a poem that somehow posits, proposes, a condition of wholeness.I too subscribe to a notion that a poem ought to express as much as possible a poet's entire being, but seriously doubt I could articulate that notion better than Li-Young Lee does here. Thanks to Robert Peake for sharing this. I love Li-Young Lee's poetry. For more on him in this blog (inc. links to poems and interviews), click on the label below.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
In Fine Form
Getting back to Edmonton -- I had a good time at Canadian League of Poets' AGM, meeting friendly and intelligent poets, launching Undressing the Night at the city hall, attending seminars, participating in council meetings where I learned of the travails -- in all their Byzantine intricacies -- of running an arts service organization in these funding-tight times.
The most memorable seminar I attended was one on form poetry. It is significant that at least two-thirds of the poets present -- and there were about 75 or 80 in all, by my guestimate -- attended this seminar, rather than one scheduled at the same time on the Poem Made Visual, about video poems, concrete poems, etc. Panelists included Kate Braid, one of the editors of In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry; poet Ted Blodgett, who writes consistently in form, and Steven Michael Berzensky (aka Mick Burrs), who has written dozens of what he calls "liberated sonnets". All of them commented on the paradox of how constraints generate creativity, how student work so often shines within the strictest frameworks, how accomplished poets enter unknown regions under the mysterious momentum generated by these schemata. Kate started compiling In Fine Form when, asked to teach a course on writing poetry in form, she couldn't find an an anthology with Canadian content. She and Sandy Shreve came up with the idea of creating one of their own. They imagined they might compile a small book to show off high calibre Canadian work -- but surprised themselves to find, upon scouring the Canadian poetry section of the Vancouver Public Library, 1400-plus poems dating from the 1800s to the present worthy of setting aside for possible inclusion. A limited call for submissions lead to 1,000 more of what they considered to be high-quality form poems. Then the difficulty would be, as all editors find, selecting a manageable number from this astonishing superabundance.
Clearly a strong interest in form poetry is abiding, and probably resurgent after nearly a century of free verse predominance. (Actually, poetry in strict form -- rhymes, repetitions, incantations -- has been around since the dawn of humanity, and still is in the popular mind what largely constitutes "poetry"; it is free verse that is the upstart.) What these panelists found was that among Canadian poets, there has not been been such strong contention vis-a-vis form vs. free verse as in the US; many Canadian free-forms people, including some of our most flamboyant personalities (Irving Layton, Milton Acorn and BP Nichol come to mind), delve frequently into fixed form with more than creditable results; fixed form is largely viewed as simply another way to create poetry. In the States, polarized camps have come quite literally to demonize each other -- the "Post Avant" vs. the SoQ (to borrow Silliman's terminology), the Language poets vs. the New Formalists.
In Fine Form is well worth buying, by the way. I also have The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Stand and Eavan Boland -- a volume in which, despite Norton's compendious reputation, comparatively few of hundreds of possible forms are covered: just the Villanelle, the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Sonnet, the Ballad, Blank Verse, the Heroic Couplet, and the Stanza along with what they call Shaping Forms, viz. the Elegy, The Pastoral, and the Ode. An additional chapter brings together examples of so-called "Open Forms" without much explanation. In In Fine Form, not only are these categories explained and amply exemplified but also Blues, the Couplet, the Epigram, the Fugue (a term the editors came up with after Robyn Sarah's poem "Fugue"), the Madrigal, the Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, the Incantation, Palindrome, the Rondeau family, Syllabics, Triolet, plus definitions and examples of other forms or modes such as Acrostic, Anglo Saxon, Limerick, Lipogram and Visual. (Funny: they didn't include the Liposuction or the Implant.) The Norton Anthology brings together the most stellar examplars in the language: it's pretty hard to beat Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, and Theodore Roethke's The Waking as far as villanelles are concerned. For a poet, though, these can be downright intimidating acts to follow. The Canadian anthology is a more varied and approachable: the quality ranges from excellent (some of these selections give those in the Norton a good run for their money) to, well, serviceable. Much of the work by is comparative unknowns; a fair number of the poems by living, breathing peers in the CanPo scene. Thus as a living, breathing, unknown myself, I feel, hey, I can do that too and writing in form becomes a wholly natural, accessible option.
The most memorable seminar I attended was one on form poetry. It is significant that at least two-thirds of the poets present -- and there were about 75 or 80 in all, by my guestimate -- attended this seminar, rather than one scheduled at the same time on the Poem Made Visual, about video poems, concrete poems, etc. Panelists included Kate Braid, one of the editors of In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry; poet Ted Blodgett, who writes consistently in form, and Steven Michael Berzensky (aka Mick Burrs), who has written dozens of what he calls "liberated sonnets". All of them commented on the paradox of how constraints generate creativity, how student work so often shines within the strictest frameworks, how accomplished poets enter unknown regions under the mysterious momentum generated by these schemata. Kate started compiling In Fine Form when, asked to teach a course on writing poetry in form, she couldn't find an an anthology with Canadian content. She and Sandy Shreve came up with the idea of creating one of their own. They imagined they might compile a small book to show off high calibre Canadian work -- but surprised themselves to find, upon scouring the Canadian poetry section of the Vancouver Public Library, 1400-plus poems dating from the 1800s to the present worthy of setting aside for possible inclusion. A limited call for submissions lead to 1,000 more of what they considered to be high-quality form poems. Then the difficulty would be, as all editors find, selecting a manageable number from this astonishing superabundance.
Clearly a strong interest in form poetry is abiding, and probably resurgent after nearly a century of free verse predominance. (Actually, poetry in strict form -- rhymes, repetitions, incantations -- has been around since the dawn of humanity, and still is in the popular mind what largely constitutes "poetry"; it is free verse that is the upstart.) What these panelists found was that among Canadian poets, there has not been been such strong contention vis-a-vis form vs. free verse as in the US; many Canadian free-forms people, including some of our most flamboyant personalities (Irving Layton, Milton Acorn and BP Nichol come to mind), delve frequently into fixed form with more than creditable results; fixed form is largely viewed as simply another way to create poetry. In the States, polarized camps have come quite literally to demonize each other -- the "Post Avant" vs. the SoQ (to borrow Silliman's terminology), the Language poets vs. the New Formalists.
In Fine Form is well worth buying, by the way. I also have The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Stand and Eavan Boland -- a volume in which, despite Norton's compendious reputation, comparatively few of hundreds of possible forms are covered: just the Villanelle, the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Sonnet, the Ballad, Blank Verse, the Heroic Couplet, and the Stanza along with what they call Shaping Forms, viz. the Elegy, The Pastoral, and the Ode. An additional chapter brings together examples of so-called "Open Forms" without much explanation. In In Fine Form, not only are these categories explained and amply exemplified but also Blues, the Couplet, the Epigram, the Fugue (a term the editors came up with after Robyn Sarah's poem "Fugue"), the Madrigal, the Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, the Incantation, Palindrome, the Rondeau family, Syllabics, Triolet, plus definitions and examples of other forms or modes such as Acrostic, Anglo Saxon, Limerick, Lipogram and Visual. (Funny: they didn't include the Liposuction or the Implant.) The Norton Anthology brings together the most stellar examplars in the language: it's pretty hard to beat Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, and Theodore Roethke's The Waking as far as villanelles are concerned. For a poet, though, these can be downright intimidating acts to follow. The Canadian anthology is a more varied and approachable: the quality ranges from excellent (some of these selections give those in the Norton a good run for their money) to, well, serviceable. Much of the work by is comparative unknowns; a fair number of the poems by living, breathing peers in the CanPo scene. Thus as a living, breathing, unknown myself, I feel, hey, I can do that too and writing in form becomes a wholly natural, accessible option.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
"Undressing the Night"/"Walkups" launch pics
I'm back from Edmonton and have plenty to report. But I also found in my mailbox these photos of last week's Montreal launch... so thought I'd share them first. Credit goes to Adrien Chevrot, Artiste-photographe.
Myself and Elizabeth Robert, reading from Lance Blomgren's Walkups (me, the English original, her, her French translation)
Above, myself and E.R. reading from Undressing the Night (me, my translation, her, the Spanish original)
Myself and Danielle Shelton, Editor-in-Chief of Adage Editions, reading from Walkups.
Yours truly, entertaining with some songs in the first intermission...
... and signing a book for a friend who had to leave early. I think this shot is especially cool, as it captures both my literary and musical selves, so rarely seen together, in one succinct image. Will definitely use on the website. It was taken from outside, through the cafe window.
Below, Marie-France Bancel (singer) & friends providing the second intermission's entertainment... mostly Brazilian bossa-nova. (Marie-France is also an excellent French-language writer and spoken word artist, by the way.)
Some of our audience at Le Depanneur Cafe.
Translators and Walkups publisher shot. We're all sweltering in the June 3 heat. The writers were in absentia for this event -- Francisco Santos, author of Undressing the Night, had family commitments in Toronto, and Lance Blomgren, author of Walkups... well, he lives in Vancouver. Nevertheless... "A good time was had by all", etc.
Myself and Elizabeth Robert, reading from Lance Blomgren's Walkups (me, the English original, her, her French translation)
Above, myself and E.R. reading from Undressing the Night (me, my translation, her, the Spanish original)
Myself and Danielle Shelton, Editor-in-Chief of Adage Editions, reading from Walkups.
Yours truly, entertaining with some songs in the first intermission...
... and signing a book for a friend who had to leave early. I think this shot is especially cool, as it captures both my literary and musical selves, so rarely seen together, in one succinct image. Will definitely use on the website. It was taken from outside, through the cafe window.Below, Marie-France Bancel (singer) & friends providing the second intermission's entertainment... mostly Brazilian bossa-nova. (Marie-France is also an excellent French-language writer and spoken word artist, by the way.)
Some of our audience at Le Depanneur Cafe.
Translators and Walkups publisher shot. We're all sweltering in the June 3 heat. The writers were in absentia for this event -- Francisco Santos, author of Undressing the Night, had family commitments in Toronto, and Lance Blomgren, author of Walkups... well, he lives in Vancouver. Nevertheless... "A good time was had by all", etc.Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Off to Edmonton!
Tomorrow morning I'll be off to Edmonton for five days to attend the Canadian League of Poets' AGM/Poetry Fest. There I'll be taking part in meetings of the National Council, attending panel discussions (those that interest me most this year are Form Poetry and Technology: Enabling Poetic Collaboration -- these and others are open to the public, by the way), participating in an open mike, attending the Anne Szumigalski lecture (this year it's being given by Mark Abley), a reception/awards dinner, and taking part in the book launch announced below. I'm also looking forward to a pub crawl and dinner, conversation and sharing of poetry with League friends. And of course, I'll be checking out the town, including the Xanadu above. (Actually, following the logic of the poem, this would be the pleasure dome and Edmonton the Xanadu -- but calling it Xanadu seems so much more evocative of its bizarre bazaar Byzantine qualities...)
UNDRESSING THE NIGHT
launch
at Edmonton City Hall
Edmonton, Alberta
Saturday, June 9, 7-9pm
under the auspices of the
Monday, June 04, 2007
Gift economies
I write somewhat addled by wine after returning from our launch. It was a enjoyable event, attended by 25 or so discerning souls, with poetry readings in 3 languages (yes, we lived up to that billing -- couldn't help but, in fact), lots of music (some provided by moi) and variety. I enjoyed reading Francisco's texts -- boy, are they good -- with Elizabeth Robert, and also acquired a deeper appreciation of the deadpan wit of Blomgren's texts when I re-read them with Elizabeth, who read her French translations. Most of the audience seemed to enjoy the readings too; we got several compliments that I took to be sincere. Rather typical of poetry, sales were nevertheless slow: we sold 4 copies of my translation, 5 of Walkups. I've heard tell of poetry launches selling one or two copies (these dire statistics are usually kept hush-hush, as R.W. pointed out in a comment a few posts ago), so this was not entirely unexpected. Reflecting on my audience, I don't have any reason to be disappointed. Several of my guests had bought copies already. I suppose a few of hers had too. A couple of people there were, I think, genuinely interested in buying my book, but had literally empty wallets. These are poets who live on an especially frayed shoestring -- so I take their word for it. You can be sure that special arrangements, if and when we cross paths again, will be made. Free drinks were provided with each sale, and I decided to give away free "promotional" CD's (or copies of my book) with each sale too . The cafe, whose huge air conditioner over the entrance has long been broken, was uncomfortably hot. At the end of the evening, we raffled off a number of our books and CD's (Adage, the other publisher, had quite a few remaindered books to give away) and gave free drinks for all eight or nine guests who remained. So it was a fun celebration in all, a generous gifting away of cultural products, with the usual words exchanged about how poetry is indeed a gift economy, etc. I'm actually proud of all my cultural products, so getting them into hands that could not otherwise readily afford them is really quite gratifying. Better than having them under my bed. I have lots of booze left over from our celebration, enough to keep my partner and me well stocked for the next few weeks. Not to mention books.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
MONTREAL LAUNCH OF UNDRESSING THE NIGHT
Click on the poster to enlarge it so it's readable.
Further details of this launch, which takes place tomorrow, and a launch in Edmonton the following weekend, are below. (I posted this about 10 days ago and moved the post up.)
DOUBLE LAUNCH IN THREE LANGUAGES:
Selected Poems of Francisco Santos / English translation by Brian Campbell
and
WALKUPS: SCÈNES DE LA VIE MONTRÉALAISE
Prose Poems by Lance Blomgren / French translation by Élizabeth Robert
206 Bernard St. W., Montreal
SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 7:00 - 10PM
Leonard, Suzanne & stuff
My namesake, Pris Campbell, did a good public service a few days back with a post featuring Leonard Cohen's recent Suzanne video, the lyrics of that classic song, and perhaps most interesting of all, a link to a lengthy interview with Suzanne. I never met her, but have a close friend who ran an alternative art gallery here of which she was an habituée. He remembers her as an eccentric, whimsical, delightful woman, and very bohemian -- as this interview bears out. It seems she has fallen on hard times of late, which is really too bad. (Check Pris' post for details.) Let's hope Leonard and/or friends can find it within themselves to scrape together the wherewithal to bail her out and ease her suffering. As he himself put it, she did give him his best song.Some quotes on poetry, compliments of R.W. Watkins, my good squawkbox demon (I have no evil ones, as yet):
"Poetry is things that poets write."--Robert Frost
"Poetry is news that stays news."--Ezra Pound
"A good poem is like a good hot beer shit. You think, Uh, I've done it. And there's the smell of the turds, the fumes and everything. And you flush it away, and the water flows in, and there's a sense of sadness. That's what a good poem is like, a good hot beer shit. Got it?"
--Charles Bukowski
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