Fun Sites

Another plan I have is 'World Peace through Formal Introductions.' The idea is that everyone in the world would be required to meet everyone else in the world, formally, at least once. You'd have to look the person in the eye, shake hands, repeat their name, and try to remember one outstanding physical characteristic. My theory is, if you knew everyone in the world personally, you'd be less inclined to fight them in a war: "Who??? The Malaysians??? Are you kidding??? I know those people!!!

-- George Carlin

I was reminded of this quote when I looked and listened today through 6 Billion Others, a site featuring hundreds of people from all over the world talking about their experiences of such universal things as Love, Family, Dreams, Fears, Nature, God, etc. Very touching, very revealing. The clips are often too short for the interviewees to say all that much, but their faces -- captured beautifully in an intimate, high-res lens -- speak lifetimes. Thanks, Pris, for pointing this one out.

Kittenwar as I've said before, is perhaps my favourite site to go to escape the real wars we humans create. Vote for the cutest kitten. Contrary to their own policy, the site managers allow too many readers to enter pictures of their adult cats into the competition: this diminishes the cuteness factor considerably. But if you want to experience an all out cuteness attack, check out the winningest kittens.

A Softer World is an internet comic featuring little monologues (or dialogues) over photographs. Deadpan, acerbic, oddly cryptic -- but often strangely poetic and surreal.

The Daily Show site features video outcuts from some of Jon Stewart's most cutting introductory sequences -- as well as from the most recent week's programming. If you don't have time to watch this brilliant show, this is a good place to catch what you missed.

Links to all these sites are now listed under FUN on my sidebar, beneath the poetry-related sites and above the literary reviews.

Past the post

Robert just wrote a wonderful post on "The Poet as Specialist". Well worth reading.

My previous post, by the way, was my 500th since joining blogspot nearly three years ago.

Misplaced priorities bigtime

At a restaurant last night, a couple of friends and I were discussing something out of the usual for, if not poets, this blog -- the astronomical costs of the Iraq war. We hear these almost unimaginable numbers -- right now, 455 billion dollars and counting, just for the US -- but what do they mean in relation to the entire budget of the US gov.? So rarely in mainstream media do we see a pie chart clearly showing the spending proportions and therefore the real priorities of the Unitedstatesian government. If we saw that the military cost, say, five or more times as much health or social welfare or education, we could obviously conclude that the United States was indeed a war-mongering nation. Well, after a quick Google I found this quite reputable-looking site called The National Priorities Project, which does include several pages of cost breakdowns. And here is the closest thing to that pie chart we were talking about. So ... war mongering? You bet.

P.S.: That pie chart, tho, only represents federal spending. What I would like to see is a chart depicting the spending priorities all levels of government put together. That would be a truer measure of the American (ahem, Unitedstatesian) nation's priorities. Federal spending though shows things to be pretty badly skewed, nevertheless. Besides the obvious numbers -- 56% (and probably more) for military spending vs. 8% for education, employment and social services combined, 6% for health care and only 3% for natural resources and the environment -- what can one make of that whopping 4% for veteran's services and security? It suggests that the best -- maybe the only -- way to guarantee yourself decent social security in the States is to hire yourself out as a soldier in one of the President's wars and get yourself shot -- but not killed. Good job if you can do it. Good luck if you try.

Blinded to my own eyes

In cobbling together my prose poems (right now I have about 40) into a manuscript, I discovered that no less than 15 of them have the word "eyes" in them, and in no less than 12, they get prominent mention. (e.g. here. And here. In the latter, "eyes" get somewhat prominent, if passing mention.) When does a motif become irritating crutch? Funny thing is, up to now I wasn't even conscious of the motif (therefore, likely, crutch). Now that I've uncovered it, the repetition of "eyes" "eyes" "eyes" is annoying. In some cases, I'll probably change it to "vision", "gaze" or the like. In a phrase like, "your body prone, eyes closed, what are you dreaming?" I could change "eyes closed" to "breathing softly" or the like, an improvement even in originality. Some uses, though, are unalterable. I'll have to spread these out and arrange them in the manuscript so that it does become an appealing motif. Or jettison them altogether. One thing's for sure: if eyes ever come up again in new drafts, I'll be strongly inclined to strike 'em blind.

Another reason why Eve may have eaten the apple (golden fruit?).

Sunrise on Lac Connelly

I happened to get up at about six last Thurs. morning, just before the sunrise, and caught this unusual glow in the sky. It looks like northern lights, but it did not shimmer or throb as northern lights are wont to do (not that I pretend to be an expert on northern lights, having only seen a few faint shimmers). I think it's the sun's rays filtering through some gauzy cloud or mist, although it's rather high in the sky for mist. "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning" -- & sure enough, there was a severe thunderstorm later that day. Maybe that's an explanation for any high-hanging mist. Click on these photos, and they'll fill your screen.
"The crack of dawn". That reddish glow, of course, had disappeared by this time. Below, another view, with the camera tipped vertically. This is of course is the kind of light favoured at the ends of sentimental movies, covers of Watchtower, and the like. Unfortunately, those tacky associations do take away from the sort of amazement I ought to feel.
Well, here he is: Mr. Sol himself. Not so unusual a photo, that's for sure. Of course, it's my camera lens that has broken the sun's rays into a ringed spectrum. But that glow in the sky I captured quite accurately up above. It's not due to any trickery on my part (I'm incapable of that) or the camera's -- although perhaps my only witness is the little guy below, who sat perched on this rock and seemed to watch this whole spectacle with me. (Unless, of course, he was dozing. Quite likely. Dzzzzzzz.)

Why at sunrise or sunset does the sky glow orange or red? If you need an explanation or refresher on that question, here's a good site.

P.S. That Emil Nolde painting I chose seems to have been prophetic.

A fantastic writing room

I return quite mellowed after about a week away. I have the good fortune of having a friend with a cottage near her summer home who rents it to friends at a very reasonable rate. It's on Lac Connelly, near St-Hippolyte, about an hour north of Montreal. My partner and I made it our writing/reading room for the week. Click on any of these photos, & they'll fill your screen. Views from the front room, which is surrounded by windows:

This tree has a special significance. I'll get back to it later. Below, yours truly at his Thinkpad (why didn't IBM come up with Imaginepad? Createpad?):


It was a productive week, free of distractions: I wrote four prose poems to pretty nigh completion plus three quite promising poem drafts and part of a song. My partner, meanwhile, wrote a draft of a short story.

Books & Stuff read: The Saranac Review #3 (the first review I've read from cover to cover -- it turns out I was not disappointed in what I was saying before, all the poems are good, as well as a number of the short stories) Theodore Roethke's The Waking and some of Words for the Wind out of his Collected (this was really suitable to this setting), some of Creeley's Selected, a pretty fair portion of Michèle Lalonde's Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose et poemes including her famous (and still apropos) protest poem, Speak White, plus Femelle Faucon by Quebec poet & friend Nancy R. Lange. I also listened to selections of William Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats in the MP3 version of A Hundred Classic Poems. This of course punctuated by walks in the woods, and swimming & sunning (when weather permitted) by the lake.

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By the way, I just added a "Currently Reading" section to my sidebar -- some titles I'm reading right now.

Green Landscape with Red Cloud
Emil Nolde
1867 - 1956
141 images

Time out for at least 9 days. Tomorrow I'm off to my very own writing centre, in a countryside very much like the one pictured above, where for certain there's no internet access.

The Saranac Review (une autre fois)

Is Saranac Review ever good! Last night I got up in the wee hours (insomnia) and read about half the poems in the current issue, #3. Just lapped them up. All of them are interesting, engaging, or excellent; and so far there is one lengthy poem, Alphabet of Bones by Alexis Lathem, that is a true tour de force. Quality like this in reviews is so rare, as Jordan Davis so eloquently pointed out in a blog post about a year ago. (Kinda makes yrs. truly feel good to be included.) Almost all the poets get one or two selections, and yet the poems blend harmoniously and reflect off each other. The magazine as a whole has a sense of flow and completion. It's well- and purposefully edited, in other words.

This review, by the way, allows simultaneous submissions on the condition that poets notify them of acceptance elsewhere. Clearly, this gives the lie to editors who forbid "sim subs" on the grounds that it makes a coherent selection next to impossible.

Tim Lilburn

These three things, religion, philosophy, poetry, seem roughly the same to me; they reach for the same things. At the center of each is a loneliness, a sizable ache for return, for the enjoyment of a larger self where you can roam. And each requires, or calls out, a way of life, a practice or singleness of attention that spreads through a person. All three, by nature, are katabatic; they dream of going deep. I’m not talking about religion and philosophy as solely a series of positions—this sort of thing strikes me as betrayal of what both are—but as the enactment of stretching longing. And prayer, conversation and metaphor with its music, the rooms in which the three respectively live, all give me a similar sort of pleasure.

Writers' Centres

Tired of all the distractions of writing at home? If you live in Edmonton, you can go to the Writers' Centre. A great idea I would like to see replicated closer (i.e. a lot closer) to chez moi.

------

Apparently, there is one somewhat closer to home -- the Toronto Writers' Centre. It's quite impressive: check out the promotional video. This one, though, might be called the Toronto Writers'-With-Money Centre, as the full memberships fees are $175 + GST per month. To pay that plus a Toronto rent, you (or a generous benefactor) have to be doing well indeed. (The Edmonton Centre is in a public library, and is free.) However, there are daily rates for associate members (about $15 a day) and similar rates for out-of-province visitors, so I might take advantage of it when I visit TO (I have parents/friends there... it is my former hometown.) Thanks to Pearl for that information.

Pressed & dried

Two copies of Saranac Review arrived today, with my poem somewhere in the midst of its 170-odd pages and 50-odd contributors. Initially it was a kind of a bitter-sweet feeling, finding oneself in the midst of such a huge lineup after such a long wait (nearly a year, in toto). It is, though, a glossy, lovely review... and it's a pleasure to see one's words in old-fashioned print. Other Canadian contributers I know: Barry Dempster, Brian Bartlett, Tom Wayman, + Louise Warren, a Quebecoise translated into English, whom I should know. The rest Americans I don't know, some with impressive credentials. I read a couple of poems with interesting imaginative leaps. Good company, in other words. I look forward to looking at their work over the next few days.

Today (now yesterday) I spent 4 hours or so cleaning house -- it was that rainy day we were waiting for after so many sunny days and scorchers. Then I spent about 6 or 7 hours going through online lists of Canadian poetry book publishers at the Canadian League of Poets website and at CV2's site, reading & copying their submission guidelines, paying special attention to whether they want whole manuscripts, samples, etc., looking at their author lists etc. and sorting them into an A-list, B-list, C-list and D-list according to prestige/desirability, + an additional category, Chapbooks & Alt. Formats. I actually got the whole job done: it's possible to cover this whole country in one long sitting. There are about 35 book presses in all -- just under one for every million of us, think of that! -- 20 of which got onto my A and B lists. For a break, I played some interesting 8-bar blues riffs I learned off the net. Right now, my back and neck are sore.

SUMMER SPECIALS, ANYONE?

Does anyone know reviews that read (or at least accept) submissions during the summer? Three off the top of my head: Harpur Palate, West Coast Line (its reading period is July-August), and the internet review Octopus. Internet reviews tend to be more flexible in their reading periods as well as publication schedules than print, so many of which are affiliated with universities ... going through my links lists, I don't doubt I could find several, but you know these lazy summer months. I would prefer that they came to me! (If I find others, though, I'll list them here...)

Guess whose birthday it is? Not only is the bio fascinating, but the circumstances around his most famous short poem.

Easy Readin' Poet #3: Billy Collins

I wrote about this guy before, and this is what I said:

Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.

I was talking, by the way, about his 2002 new & selected, Sleeping Alone Around the Room. I enjoy the once-through, a few poems the twice-through, but three times, well... comparisons come to mind of eating candy floss. This ex-Poet Laureate, though, is too easy to diss. Here's a personal favourite:

PURITY

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Why publishers pass on masterpieces.

Was it ever thus...

"But if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane companions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."

Plato, Phaedrus 245

CONTEXT

I don't like poems that seem to say, "Guess what I mean." And I don't much like symbolist poems, in which people and things are standing in for the real subjects, who for some reason are absent. I also don't care for surreal or impressionist poems that assume a reader wants to help interpret the poet's dreams.

This is not to say that I think everything in a poem should be on the surface. Not at all. It's simply to say that there should be a surface, a place for a reader to stand. Young journalists used to be taught to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why in the first compressed paragraph of a story. I would go so far as to say that the first four of these ought to be answered in a single reading of most poems.

-- Miller Williams, in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems

I quote this not because I like it, but because I generally agree with it; with the second paragraph I exclaimed, "Yes!". (Strange confluence of attitudes...) I suppose I would say poems that keep you guessing too long. I find the first paragraph a bit reactionary for my liking. But the journalist questions, which I've never thought to apply to poetry, provide an interesting criterion to assess accessibility, even reader/writerly fulfillment. Generally, I don't feel satisfied with poems I write unless they communicate clearly on most if not all of these basic levels. But such a stricture makes me want to see what I can get away with and still feel satisfied with the effect of the poem... e.g. a poem that clearly answers the question who, but not what, where, and when, or what but not who, where, and when. Maybe such a poem would achieve a greater universality than one that clearly demarcates its where and when.