Here's an article from the Huff post contending that Paul Krugman is dead wrong in his analysis of the economic meltdown. What the writer, Stewart "Bondad" Hale, argues is that while Krugman blames the introduction of securitization into the banking system for the debacle, in fact it's a perfect storm caused by a complex of causes including deregulation, poor oversight, questionable ratings, etc. It's an informative analysis, but I wonder if he is simplifying Krugman (who is no doubt simplifying his own message to make it media friendly) in order to "shoot him down". Seems to me Hale's claiming there's six eggs, while Krugman, half a dozen. Nevertheless, a worthwhile read to those of us in the dark about what many of these financial terms mean.

My review of Shannon Stewart's Penny Dreadful and Phil Hall's White Porcupine is up at The Rover:

With the momentous recent political and economic news, it may be all too easy to overlook what Ezra Pound called the “news that stays news.” Poetry has never pretended to be breaking news, but well executed, it can revive old verities with an immediacy that surpasses any reportage à la CNN. Read on…

To press...

Here it is, in its final form. After back and forth emails featuring proposals and rejections of much uglier alternative fonts -- an exchange that I saw could go on forever -- I decided for simplicity's sake to stick with the original font, which is, after all, quite attractive.

Here's the text on the back cover:

In Passenger Flight, Brian Campbell takes us on a harrowing but exhilarating ride through the heavy turbulence of the twenty-first century. This collection of free-wheeling, elegantly crafted prose poems conjures scenes of tenderness, random violence and phantasmagorical dreams evocative of the chaos of this post-911 world.

Urbane, captivating, Brian Campbell’s images are as vertical as the city he describes and the sky overhead. Often blackly humorous, he records the frustrations and celebrations of ordinary living, juxtaposed to a time-space immensity which can only overwhelm and defeat. For Brian Campbell this overriding theme of transience and frailty is positive as well as scary. Standing grounded in his craft and his humanity, he can still startle in wonder, and his words open and lift the heart. —Heather Spears

Brian Campbell’s prose poems are epiphanies – discoveries of transcendent meaning in the context of the everyday. Herein is philosophy as play, social critique as wit, and wisdom as awe. —George Elliott Clarke

It was quite an honour to get such ringing and eloquent endorsements from such fine writers. I mean, it quite blows me away. (More about that whole sticky matter of blurb endorsements later.) Editing was done as of last Monday. The next step is out of my hands.... I can only keep my fingers crossed that the book will arrive at my doorstep before the launch on April 19...

Shane Book

Looks like a poet to watch out for. I like what I heard on this archive (namely, the poem Stark Room) -- surreal, surprising, imagery-rich. No less than three of his manuscripts got short listed for this year's CBC Literary Awards. That may be a record.

THE OBAMA WATCH... trenchant observations from Krugman

I can't help but agree with what Paul Krugman says here . His Blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, is worth following. I usually access it through the Huff Post, which I've been checking in on pretty well daily. I paste his post here because it will quickly get lost among the updates.

March 20, 2009, 9:05 am

AIG

Preliminary thoughts on the tax bill:

1. It’s not the way you should make policy — it’s clumsy, and it will punish some innocent parties while letting the most guilty off scot-free

2. But — there wasn’t much alternative at this point. And for that I blame the Obama people.

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

"Friends" and "Wacky Woo", two prose poems forthcoming in Passenger Flight, have appeared in Nth Position.

Sense and Sustainability aftermath

In all, it was a decent affair, attended by 25-50 people, not bad considering that this was the first such conference and, outside the University, not well publicized. Standout readings (I won't mention myself... I was standup, and it will be up to to others to say whether I was standout) were Vince Tinguely reading "Oilers", Darlene St-George's "Earth and Sky", photo-manipulée, Ian Ferrier performing "Blue Train" and accompanying himself on guitar, Jeffrey Gandell's hilarious and self-revealing prose piece about online dating, "Going Awol: Reflections on Lavalife, the Israeli/Palestininan Conflict, and Dating Across Enemy Lines", J.R. Carpenter's "Air Holes", and Carolyn Souiad's "The Dormant Butterflies of Earth: Readying Themselves for Takeoff". Interesting that the poets on the program engaged themselves more directly with the environmental crisis than the fictionists, for whom nature or world politics was an allusive backdrop for their narratives. The buffet -- pleasant. Free food always appreciated. My criticism: too many readers. Sitting through 26 readers of -- putting it kindly -- varying quality left me pretty bummed out. (In all there were 30 readers through the day.) What this conference needed, to vary the pace, was discussion panels.

Sense and Sustainability: U of M Colloquium

This coming Saturday, I'll be reading from my poetry and talking a bit about it at the Sense and Sustainability Colloquium at U of M, a conference concerning the environmental crisis and cultural expression. I'll be on panel 9: Poetry and Visual: Nature, Humans, Objects, room S1-111, Pavilion Jean Coutu 11:00 am to 12:10 pm. Entrance is free. Here are the panel members:

Panel chair: Sina Queryas

• Darlene St. Georges: “‘Earth and Sky’ Photo-manipulée (artworks)”
• Erica N. White: “A Reasonable Aesthetic: NeoPagan Approaches to the Art of Conservation”
• Vincent Tinguely: “A reading of ‘Oilers’”
• Sandra Sjollema: “Where the Wilderness Lives”
• K. Gandhar Chakravarty: “Sustainability: From Montreal to Kolkata”
• Sandra Stephenson: “Birch Polypore and other poems that go to the heartwood”
• Brian Campbell: “The Global Body Breaks into Sweats”

On Friday, all the panels are academic in nature, although the keynote speaker, Clive Ducet, is a poet. On Saturday, from 9 to 5, are the writers and artist's panels. (Odd that they didn't mix the artists/academic panels a bit more...) Names that leap out at me from Saturday's lineup include Gail Scott, Mary Soderstrom, Ian Ferrier, J.R. Carpenter, Barry Webster, Carolyn Marie Souaid, Oana Avasilichioaei, Bryan Sentes, Ilona Martonfi, Michael Mirolla, and Marcia Goldberg. All these are Montreal-area writers, although I understand there are others from out of town.

Off with your heads! Oh, it's only a proposal...

Seems that the Harper government, such as it is, is still hell-bent against the arts --when will they ever learn? -- with a proposal to chop funding from magazines with a circulation of less than 5,000 due to lack of "cultural relevance". Which of course would all but do in cultural magazines like New Quarterly, Antigonish Review and Descant, but saves the likes of Canadian Biker, Flare, and Inside Motorcycles, which also receive substantial funding. Of course, they're telling us it's only a proposal. Like saying -- by the way, we think we might behead you -- but, it's only a suggestion. Here's an impassioned and informative post about it by Don Wells at Biblioasis, thanks to Zach's blog.

Taxiing towards the runway...

It's official: Passenger Flight will be taking off on April 19, where it will be launched at Arts Cafe, Montreal, at 7:00 pm. Other dates and details (so far I've lined up Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal in another venue) can be found on my website and on that of Signature Editions (see News; under New Titles, you can find back cover blurb, etc.).

Today I received the PDF galleys; just finished checking over the corrections. The font and layout are beautiful. (We may yet slightly change the cover font.) More later...

Did you know?

Quite a cool video on the dizzying pace of these "exponential times".