Our Lady of the Harbour

In Suzanne, the great song by Leonard Cohen, he refers to "Our Lady of the Harbour". Well, here she is, on top of the cathedral Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, here in Montreal. Around the base (below) and on domes on either side are angels. Angels also figure prominently in that song, as well as other Cohen songs and poems.

(NB, this post will be referred to in an upcoming interview on the online PQ magazine.)

Some links

• Literary journals with quick turn-around times
• Best poet portraits
• The perils of the poetry reading
• A great creative writing teacher
• Thesaurus rex
• New assignment: pick books you like

Chapbooking: some reflections

Kieth has an interesting post on the intricacies of chapbook production -- a guide for the DIYers. One thing though: for Sky of Ink, I downloaded a chapbook template from the League of Canadian Poets website, here. Downloads are free for anyone. We were able to alter its configuration to take legal sized pages folded in half, which is a size I like for poetry, as it provides "breathing room" especially for long lines. (It does limit, though, one's choices of paper.) The nice thing about this template is that you paste the poems in sequentially and it automatically recto-versos them for you in the right order. Then we take the file to our local copy shop and presto!

Chapbooks, as Keith says, can serve as a poet's business card. They're the literary equivalent of the music EP.

The chapbook length, as I've said elsewhere, is to my view the most suitable for poetry, considering the intense demands poetry makes on its readers; one can conceivably get through a chapbook in one sitting. The full length trade book demands a considerably greater a commitment. Was it Thorton Wilder who said that out of any city we create a village we call our own? Most poetry readers dip into collections; it could be said that out of every full-length collection, we create a chapbook we can call our own.

Besides, look at the organization of many a poetry collection: a lot of them are simply subdivided into parts -- a series of chapbooks.

For all its advantages as a reading experience, the chapbook in our culture has a problem of status. It is akin to the part-time job. Full-length books, like full time jobs, get all the benefits: reviews, prizes, inclusion in libraries, etc. -- even though part-timers may put in the most inspired work! (I know that's true of teaching, at any rate.) In the States particularly, there are a number of chapbook manuscript competitions with promise of prize $$, honour, publication -- some of these may even raise money for their publishers. You can find them listed every month in Poets & Writers. But there are precious few prizes for finished DIY-type chapbooks. The BP Nichol competition is one; the WCDR international chapbook challenge, in which our own Nina Bruck came out a winner for 2008, didn't run this year and appears sporadic, if not defunct. These are the only ones I know of. Can anyone out there suggest another?

Another disadvantage: chapbooks tend to get lost on a shelf.

So why make chapbooks? Well, these productions are a joy to make, and a means to grow. Publishing is an integral part of the creative process: juxtaposing poems in fresh combinations, seeing how they relate to one another, or how motifs repeat can be a real eye-opener. Ones' editorial skills are instantly honed when one prepares one's work for public exposure in this way. If one doesn't have a tradebook publisher ready to publish one's work, this can be a good intermediate step.

Christiane Frenette: After the Red Night

My review of Christiane Frenette's After the Red Night (trans. by Sheila Fischman) is up on the Montreal Review of Books website. I don't say as much, but I honestly feel this slender novel may well go down as a classic of Quebec literature. It is substantial and subtle enough to grace any university curriculum. Anyway, as the newspaper boy would say, read all about it.

A maquette of the next Sky of Ink chapbook -- that is, sans cover graphics, which are yet to be worked on. Raphael and I edited the poems over the last two or three of years of get-togethers, which took place more or less monthly. When he came up to visit at the cottage last month we selected the best; then, in a series of snap decisions I arranged them -- spreading them out on the living room rug -- in the order they've pretty much stayed. The latter process took all of about 5 minutes. It was fun for me and breathtaking for him. Some of these poems were drafted as many as 30 years ago: he told me it was like seeing his life flashing before his eyes. Raphael nevertheless had the presence of mind to film me doing it. It would be interesting to post that video here, eventually. We're both very pleased with the poetry. I would include one here, but I believe he wants to send some to a few better reviews before they're published in this form. I think as they stand they are well worthy of that level of publication -- say in Poetry or Descant. The chap, though, will probably come out sometime this fall.










Raphael Bendahan

Jocelyne Dubois' paintings online

"Dabble Dance 3" by Jocelyne Dubois

Jocelyne Dubois' paintings are online (yesterday I created a blogger site for them.) She is the author of Hot Summer Night, Sky of Ink Press's second chapbook. Her paintings are characterized by a great freeform playfulness and intuitive colour sense.

... SWAT!

Rejection is a fly you have to wave aside continually until
you die. You can take it as a tragedy or you can take it as...a fly.

diane tucker

(-- from a discusson on the League of Canadian Poets' list
serve. Diane gave me permission to quote this.)

Ekphrastic Painting #2: Caesura

Caesura

Here's another ekphrastic painting of a poem in Passenger Flight. An earlier version was published here. Some commentary on the process of creating that poem is to be found here. The text of the current version -- only slightly altered from that version -- you can read by clicking on the image above (or by buying my book!).

I was rather surprised to come up with a kind of native "spirit painting" for this one. I spent quite a lot of time -- a couple of hours of paint mixing and spreading with a kife-- on the graduated sky blue background, and I liked it so much that spare outlines seemed the only choice. Elements in the poem I chose to illustrate are "the landscape of a horse's back and haunches", "the dandelion gone to seed, seeds leaping from the porous sphere", "the contour of round sound", "moon setting over dunes", and the feather. Other elements are only implied.

The yellow circle was made with a bowl whose edges were dabbed in yellow paint. The use of a real feather was a last minute improvisation -- little inclined (and technically little able) I was to hand-paint or draw one. Luckily, Sekai, our teacher, had one on hand. Two days ago I varnished the painting to give it a lustrous finish -- and was able to fix the feather into place.

Some inside information of Creeley's "Sad Walk"

Some weeks ago, I posted Creeley's poem, "Sad Walk", from his posthumous collection, On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay; I also referred to it in my Rover review on that title. I just got a comment from the editor Sirena, a literary magazine, filling me in on what spurred that particular poem, which it pleases me to post here:

So that you know the context of this poem: when we were preparing a special issue of Sirena: Poetry, Art and Criticism, in honor of Bob Zieff (composer of many of the pieces played by Chet Baker), we sent Robert Creeley the music score of Zieff’s “Sad Walk”, along with a CD containing five variations of the same piece, and asked Robert to write a poem in reaction to what he heard; Creeley’s “Sad Walk” is what came out of it.

Jorge R. Sagastume
Editor of Sirena

Vehicule Press blog/Montreal Gazette poetry series

I just learned that Vehicule Press has a blog -- and that editor Carmine Starnino's postings there are quite informative, particularly about the Montreal literary scene.

From it I learned that the Montreal Gazette has a summer poetry series in its online arts section, wherein prominent local poets read a poem on video. I always welcome those rare instances in North America where literature is directly transmitted through the popular media, rather than parsed out to us through those questionable intermediaries, the reviewer and the interviewer. Certain Latin American papers, as I've pointed out before, do this all the time -- i.e. Managua's La Prensa and Mexico City's Exelsior. Would that this feature -- or something like it, possibly with inclusion of literary text -- last all year long.

Seems I'm on Vehicule's blogroll, and that's the occasion of my learning of their existence -- rather belatedly, since the blog has been up since 2007. Soon they'll be on mine.

"FIX" GETS FIXED INTO PAINT

Just got back from a painting class with my friend Sekai, where I did the above (& below) -- an acrylic interpretation of my prose poem "Fix" (seen here, in the Evergreen Review). "Fix" is included in my recent collection Passenger Flight, and here, fittingly enough, the text is affixed into the painting. This is the first of a series (I have two others, but they need a few touches to complete).

So, what do we call these: ekphrastic paintings? Usually ekphrasis is applied to texts that take after works of visual art, but according to this Wikepedia definition, it can be the other way around (i.e. a painting of a literary heroine, or even a painting of a sculpture). Here, though, the poems are included in the paintings that interpret them.

My friend Allen Sutterfield has a nice term, "text-visuals". His own "T-V series" consists of hundreds of poems paired with visual images that play off them in some way -- mostly magazine cut-outs, collages, photographs.

Whatever they be, I'd like to do a series of eight or ten, maybe put on a show somewhere. Or have them on display at a reading.

Beyond that, I have no painterly aspirations. With a bare minimum of technique, all I bring is raw sensibility to the canvas. But there you are.

Poetry Quebec (PQ)

It's high time I announced Poetry Quebec (PQ), the only online magazine dedicated exclusively to English language poetry in Quebec. The premiere issue -- launched on June 24, St-Jean Baptiste's day -- features the late Louis Dudek: a selection of his poetry, essays, and an interview. The coming issue, the editors tell me, will be dedicated to the memory of Sonja Skarstedt, who, as this blog noted, recently passed away. In an issue after that, I'll be featured; at least, I've been invited to do an interview. This is my first booking of an online "tour" I have yet to organize. The review also features a listing of English poetry events in the province -- a valuable thing, if they can manage to keep it up.

Creeley: On Earth

My review of Creeley's last book, On Earth, is up at The Rover.

Nozkowski

Just got back from three days away at my inlaws' (incommonlaws?) cottage near Kaladar, Ontario. On the way back, we swung through Ottawa and took in the National Gallery. The main exhibit, From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome featured some finely executed masterworks by the two artists in its title, as well as by Michaelangelo, El Greco, Titian, as well was by superb but lesser known artists. The quality of the work is of course unsurpassed -- a couple of drawings by Michaelangelo were worth the price of admission -- but I found all those papal portraits, altars and biblical tableaus under heavy institutional Roman architecture lugubrious & stifling, and was greatly relieved to wander over into Thomas Nozkowski's light, airy, unpretentious abstractions. Also worth taking in was a small exhibit of prints by Symbolist artists including Munch, Gauguin, Lautrec & others.

Nancy Lange

(click thru to see large)

An extraordinary multi-media event to go to this coming Sunday, in Laval near Montreal -- especially if you understand French. Nancy Lange is an exceptional poet, whose fourth full-length collection is coming out with Ecrits des forges. This is a collaboration of slides taken on travels through Greece, Turkey, Peru and Argentina, carefully synchronized with poems that relate to or are inspired to these scenes. I'm sure it will be a beautiful occasion: I saw a previous presentation of the same show this Spring, also in Laval. This time, she tells me, she has memorized her texts to further heighten the drama of the performance -- an hours' worth, all told -- and will be accompanied by a cellist.

RIP Sonja Skarstedt

I just learned from Stephen Morrissey that Sonja Skarstedt passed away after a long battle with cancer last Friday. She was only 48. Montreal poet, painter, editor, reviewer, playwright and recently filmmaker, she founded and edited Zymergy magazine, which ran between 1987-90, and Empyreal Press, which produced a number of Montreal authors, including Louis Dudek. For a heartfelt in memoriam by a writer who knew her personally, see this post by Stephen Morrissey. For more about her various fine productions, see www.skarwood.com