I can relate to this...

....if it takes you a year to reject me, you need to send me your home address with the rejection letter so i drive to your stuffy apartment and smack you across the head for wasting my time and feeding my irrational dreamworld.

... safe sucks. programs like iowa, houston and columbia are injecting this industry with writers that are very polished technically, and most of the time, don't have one ounce of soul, originality, rebellion or ambition to save their lives. for every tc boyle there are a million ethan canins, most of them, far more boring and safe than he is.

Forgot something....?

This, from a French "Best Photos of the Year" sent to me by a friend...

A must-read

Here's one of the most interesting articles I've read in years: Steven Pinker's "The Moral Instinct". Raises all sorts of questions on the slippery basis of our moral judgments; also delineates some brilliant criteria to evaluate the same. Don't miss, also, the letters in response to the article by the likes of Peter Singer and others.

The poem that was posted here is now GONE. Maybe it will be reposted when it's published. Some reviews consider posting a poem here publication. It's a literary gag order, if you ask me. Anyway, thanks for the feedback, you guys -- it lead to a couple of revisions.

GARY SHORT COMES UP SHORT (or long, depending on how you look at it...)

Perseid Shower

Meteors break
through the late-summer night,

white blossoms scattering, furiously.
They don’t make a noise,

at least none
that we can hear.

They disappear in all directions
signifying desire

and its difficulty.
There. The half-moon floats

thin and translucent
as an insect’s wing. We say the moon is

half-full,
even as it wanes.

So much longing. . .
to witness the unfolding

across distance. How we must look
to anyone watching.

Here is the star cage.
Here the still life with black clock.


Gary Short
from 10 Moons and 13 Horses

This one was cited last month by Joshua Robbins. Not bad; the poem has some good lines in it, and sustains a definite mood. Now without the blah blah: the distracting commentary, pathetic fallacy, unnecessary conjunctions, etc.:

Perseid Shower

Meteors break
through late summer night,

White blossoms scattering,
furiously.

The half-moon floats
thin, translucent

as an insect's wing.

Here, the star cage:
Still life with black clock.

Better? Seems to me it is. I always appreciate it when others do the same for my verbal excesses...but it was the first version, apparently, that made it into print, or at least onto the Great Basin Poetry site.

P.S. there's an interesting discussion in the comments below. The upshot is, I think I may have gone too far with my exactor knife.

Back

Yrs. t. at Le Depanneur Cafe a few months ago... didn't get photos from last night... [Photo: Adrien Chevrot]

Just getting over two weeks and a half where work quite took over. This week I got called in for a full slate of supply teaching plus my 9 hour regular shift in the evenings. Last week, even more work. Made plenty of $$$ (for me at least) but already I feel significantly out of touch with Brian the poet. I'm looking forward to contacting him again.

Tonight though was truly refreshing: I performed some of my songs & read from my translation of Santos at Volver Cafe, sharing the stage with another singer-songwriter named Normand Raymond and an excellent Django Reinhardt-inspired jazz quartet lead by guitarist Philippe Albert. I'm happy to report that the cafe was packed. (40 people? 50?) And show went très bien. The audience was really warm and responsive, a happy surprise considering that there was no smoke in the air nor alcoholic drinks at the tables: just a lot of Latin Americans and French Quebecoises, whose hot blood more than made up for the cold air outside.

When a singer sings out, he or she breathes in as much as ten times as much air as someone sitting in the audience. So I must admit, nice it is to sing in a smoke-free environment: no bronchitis-like symptoms afterwards, no stinging eyes. Some day, perhaps, we'll look back on ashtrays in bars as we look on spittoons today: once a standard saloon feature, now those dinky brass chamber pots look just plain weird.

THE POET

For a long time he was a poet.
Children
called him a poet and
women did too.
Surely he was a poet
more than anyone I knew.
Even the pigs and the boars
grunted him poet.

He died returning from a distant land.
In his hut there was not one word of poetry.
Was he a poet who didn't write?
So a poet wrote a poem for him.
As soon as the poem was written,
the wind blew it away.

Then all the poems of the East and the West, old and new,
flew away, swish, swish,
every one followed suit.


--Ko Un
from The Three Way Tavern
trans. Clare You and Richard Silberg

In this doggy dog world...

Since Jan. 3, I've been marking CEGEP English exit exams six and a half hours a day, and this week (Monday to Wed.), doing double duty, teaching my evening ESL class for three. Add in two and a half hours of commuting, and that makes for some full days...

English CEGEPs graduate about 8 - 10,000 students a year, each of whom has to write a standardized English Exit exam -- a 750 word essay analyzing either a short story or literary essay -- to prove that he or she has achieved an acceptable degree of proficiency in the language of, if not Shakespeare, Hemingway or Atwood. There are about 50 markers -- about half are CEGEP teachers, about half "externals" like me (although I have taught in CEGEP for a session or two...). This session there are about 4,000 exams to be marked -- the papers are graded by two independent evaluators who then consult to come up with a consensus on two of three criteria, going for the higher grade of the remaining criterion if it remains a grade apart. Failures are passed on to supervisors for further adjudication. Ultimately, all this byzantine-sounding complexity adds up a system that ensures a maximal degree of fairness, I believe -- although sometimes I wonder what it says about trust (or trustworthiness) in CEGEP standards that this sort of test has to be given for students who have already passed their way through the system.

I got the news today that I didn't make the CBC shortlist this year. I could have guessed as much: last year they notified me I was on it on Dec. 18. (Therefore, fellow competitors, if you haven't heard from the CBC by Xmas, don't hold your breath -- definitely, send that work elsewhere!)

Funny thing is, this year's submission was much stronger than last year's -- a new-and-improved version. Shows you how subjective these things are. Boo hoo.

A lot of the CEGEP exams this term are quite good (some, of course, are atrocious), but occasionally we come across funny phonetically-based spelling errors. One student wrote, "This is a doggy dog world."

Yes it is. Woof woof.

From a Cafe Volver table: LEURS YEUX TOUJOURS PURS by Paul Eluard

LEURS YEUX TOUJOURS PURS by Paul Éluard
(click through to see large)

I'll try my hand at translating the above:

YOUR STILL PURE EYES

Days of sluggishness, days of rain,
Days of broken mirrors and scattered pins,
Days of eyelids closed to horizons of lost seas,
Days all alike, days barred shut –

For all that, I saw the most beautiful eyes in the world,
Silvery gods that held sapphires in their hands,
True gods, birds in earth and water,
I saw them.

Their eyes are your eyes, nothing exists
But their flight that shakes free my misery,
Their flight of star, of light
Of earth, of stone
On their floating wings
My thought sustained by life and death.

Paul Éluard
(trans. Brian Campbell)

A remarkable poem -- and the translation (or "trans version"), not bad, if I may say so myself.

Some crits, though, of the original:

The poet/editor in me would ax the whole final stanza: it's all implied by the second stanza anyway, and the final line is a classic false tail, abstract, weak. The revelation is all contained in "I saw them". (Then I might have kept the title literal -- "Their eyes still pure". Some instinct in me -- my dramatic instinct, I suppose -- made me go with the more definite "Your Still Pure Eyes".)

There are, though, some good things in the final stanza's "leur vol d'étoile," etc., but if they are to be saved they should be reshaped to make them to make them revelatory in a conclusive way. Merely asserting that "only they exist...", and falling back on "my thought sustained by life and death" -- that's commentary, not revelation.

To my mind, "mes jours de captivité" (final line, first stanza) -- translated literally it would be "my days of captivity" -- is also weak, since again all he's doing is summarizing abstractly what's already suggested by the previous lines. So I went for the more physical "days barred shut" -- at least that adds something, some emotional/sensational punch.

French is a gentle (should I say gentille?), whispery kind of language, and seems to sustain abstract nouns and adjectives more felicitously in its rhythms and passions than English. French poets, in my limited experience, embrace abstraction far more frequently than do Spanish or English poets, but it often translates tritely and seems rather ineffectual even in the original, to my mind. That's why, quite frankly, I'm no great fan of French poetry. Only two poets I've encountered really do it for me: Baudelaire and Rimbaud. May I be introduced to others.

Cafe Volver

"Since Feeling is First" by e.e. cummings
(Click through to see large)

Volver is a new cafe that just opened up in my area -- at 5604 ave. du Parc, just above St-Viatur. Owned and run by two Argentenian women, Nora and Sofia (that's Nora pictured below), it aims to be a Latin American-style "cafe culturel", with art exhibits, music performances and poetry readings. What won me over especially is its poetry friendliness: laminated on most tables is a poem. Most are in French and Spanish, by the likes of Paul Elouard, Emile Martel, and Octavio Paz; above is one by e.e. cummings. Light, air, and friendly cheer warm up this cavernous space. At the present time, events can be booked for free. I've booked the next League of Poets (W)Rites of Spring fundraiser there, on April 3. On Sat. Jan. 19, there's a Peña -- a celebration of music, poetry, & song -- to which I've been invited; other performances are on the books, and bulletin board outside. At the same time there's lots of cafe competition in the area -- The Depanneur, The Arts Cafe, and Cagalie (formerly the Cafe Pharmacie Esperanza) are all homey places that stage events and vernissages (otherwise known as art openings), and Cafe del Popolo, Montreal's mini-Mecca of spoken word, is not too far away -- so I can only hope this one takes off.

Books read in 2007

As I said last year, I keep track -- even of page numbers (subtracting blank pages at beginnings of books to come up with my totals.) It's a little game for me. This year, my grand total is a record breaker since I started keeping track around 1990: 7,536 pages, about 20.6 a day if you average it out. (Of course, font sizes vary, but I like to think these cancel each other out, sorta.) Not included are individual poems or articles read on the internet, in magazines, anthologies and collections -- that would augment the total considerably, but keeping track of those would be too obsessive, no fun anymore. Audiobook page numbers I calculated by looking up the print editions on Amazon. These are books read (or listened to) last year from cover to cover (a few were begun the previous year). Hyperlinks are to posts about these books on this blog:

POETRY
Sharon Olds: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002
Angela Leuck: Flower Heart
Artie Gold: The Beautiful Chemical Waltz
Nancy R. Lange: Femelle Faucon (French)
Theodore Roethke: The Waking
Elizabeth Glenny: A Periodic Sentence
Mark Strand: Blizzard of One
Gwendolyn MacEwen: The T.E. Lawrence Poems
Hafiz (trans. Daniel Ladinsky): The Gift
Pablo Neruda: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (trans. W.S. Merwin) (reread)

CHAPBOOKS
Eric Folsom: Northeastern Anti-Ghazals
Pris Campbell: Abrasions
Nina Bruck: Still Light at Five O’Clock

POETRY/CRITICISM or ESSAYS
Jack Myers & Don C. Wukasch: Dictionary of Poetic Terms
Robert Pack and Jay Parini, ed. Introspections: American Poets on their Own Poems
Michèle Lalonde: Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose
et poemes

FICTION
Don DeLillo: The Body Artist. (Audiobook)
Stephen Mitchell’s adaptation of Gilgamesh. (Audiobook)
Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia. (Audiobook)
Frank McCourt: Angela’s Ashes (Audiobook)
John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces.
Heather O’Neill: Lullabies for Little Criminals.
Don DeLillo: White Noise.
Emmanuèle Bernheim: Sa Femme. (French)
Sara Sheard : Almost Japanese

NON-FICTION
Clotaire Rapaille: The Culture Code.
The Dalai Lama’s Book of Wisdom
Richard Hughes Seager: Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism
SGI: Ordinary Heroes
Edward de Bono : de Bono’s Thinking Course
Piero Ferrucci: The Power of Kindness
Harry G. Frankfurt: On Bullshit
Naomi Wolf: The Beauty Myth.
Daniel G. Amen: Making a Good Brain Great
Alan Watts: The Book
Naomi Klein: No Logo

LITERARY JOURNALS
Saranac Review, #3 (Summer, 2007)
I include this, because its the one journal I read from cover to cover. It's as big as a fair-sized book.

Here are the books I have yet to finish, with the number of pages read this year:
The Practice of Poetry: 64 p. (inc. introduction)
Primo Levy: The Periodic Table: 126 p.
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: 380 p.
Jon Franklin: Writing for Story: 174 p.
Theodore Roethke: Words for the Wind: 24 p.
Robert Creeley: Selected Poems: 267 p.
The Classic Hundred Poems (Audiobook) 190 p.
Sherwin B Nuland: How We Die 23 p.
Ko Un: The Three Way Tavern (trans. Clare You and Richard Silberg): 34 p.

OK, so call me an egghead! But I'm sure many of you out there would leave me in the dust (or rather, frying pan).

Next year, I'd like to read a lot more poetry. Say, 25 books at least.