O Canada!

The Obama administration added Canada Thursday to a notorious blacklist of countries where Internet piracy flourishes, reflecting a new, tougher line in Washington over the Harper government's chronic failure to deliver on promises of new copyright laws...

Canada now joins a group of countries designated as being especially lax in protecting intellectual property, including Algeria, China, Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Venezuela. No other advanced Western democracy is on the list and Canada is regarded as a lawless hub for bootleg movies, ripped-off software and pirated chips that bypass copyright protections.

Jack Gilbert

With all but two or three exceptions, since mid-month, poems of the day from poets.org have been entirely forgettable -- cerebral, complex and somewhat inert. Here instead is my own poem-of-the-day choice from one of the books below:

Jack Gilbert

IN DISPRAISE OF POETRY

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

Books recently come in the mail:
Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End
Robert Creeley, On Earth -- Last Poems and an Essay
Heather Spears, Poems, Selected and New
Thomas James, Letters to a Stranger
Jack Gilbert, Transgressions
Galway Kinnell, A New Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems
Thom Schramm, ed., Living in Storms: contemporary poetry and the moods of manic-depression
William Harmon, ed. The Classic Hundred


Books bought signed from their authors at recent readings/launches:
George Elliott Clarke: I and I
Barry Dempster: Love Outlandish
John Ralston Saul: A Fair Country

Barack's first hundred

The poetry of Obama's first 100 days.
Perhaps this should humble him too:
Afghan poets tackle scars of war

DUELLING WITH AMERICA

Tariq Ali is an Oxford-educated East Asian expatriate who has nevertheless maintained deep ties with his nation of origin. Famed for his silver-tongued oratorical skills, he kept a packed, multi-ethnic audience captivated with his account of American interventions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought out ripples of laughter and applause with caustic assessments of the Bhuttos, the Bush legacy, Barack Obama, and Michael Ignatieff.

In his most recent book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Ali describes how Americans called the shots in Pakistan, pouring billions of dollars into the military while the country’s poverty deepened, always finding the kind of general they wanted–profoundly fundamentalist or profoundly secular – to satisfy short-term, disastrously short-sighted policy aims. If they had wanted a hermaphrodite general, he joked, they would have found one. He didn’t mince words about the Bhuttos.

Although Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came in with an idealistic platform of land reform, etc. a la India, he didn’t put it into effect because fundamentally, according to Tariq Ali, he didn’t consider it necessary, coming from the landed gentry himself. The problem with his daughter Benazir was that she had married “a rogue” – one of the most corrupt landlords and administrators in Pakistan. She and Tariq Ali had been quite close. He helped Benazir write her inauguration speech and advised that if elected, she leave a positive legacy, including state schools for girls and a health centre in at least every two villages, so the poor wouldn’t have to go to the big cities for medical attention.

Like her father, she doubted she could enact such reforms without support of the power elites – an impossible condition to hope for from the start. Ali was as upset as any when she was assassinated – but found it absurd that the Western press should paint her as a sort of “goddess of democracy,” when in her political will she had left the leadership of her party to her husband.

Ali had written The Duel during the Bush years. Obama, Ali remarked, is almost certainly the most intelligent President in recent memory, one who can not only read books, but actually write them. “Unfortunately, if you wear Caesar’s robes and put on Caesar’s crown, you have to act like Caesar. The previous one was like Caligula. This one is more like Claudius.” He mused as to whether Michele would make a more decisive President.

Asked whether his own political convictions had changed over the years, Ali replied that of course times and he himself had changed dramatically, but that fundamentally, he had always remained on the left, in support of human rights and a better lot for the poor – “unlike certain liberals who have gone on to advocate the Iraq war and apologize for torture, like your future Prime Minister.”

—

CBC host Paul Kennedy wrote his interview notes on a coffee coaster. Jian Ghomeshi, the interviewer of Jonathan Goldstein a few hours later, wrote his on a couple of barf bags from two different airlines, which brought him to compare the merits of the two airlines, as well as other uses for those bags should the interview go like the notorious one that had recently taken place on Q. What’s with these CBC hosts? I thought. Well, both were very smooth and professional, which made these little foibles all the more endearing.

—

Jonathan Goldstein said he felt like a truck backing up. A.S. Byatt said she could hear ghostly fairy pipes in a forest. The source of their metaphorical inspiration? Feedback from hearing aids and cell phones in response to the elevated speakers by the stage – a new technological interaction designed to vex hosts and bring on flights of whimsy from featured guests.

--

This is my second (and last) entry on the The Rover's Blue Met Blog. It was fun wearing a Journaliste tag for a few days (at last -- a clear identity) and honing a somewhat different type of writing skill. Besides, I got free passes to a many interesting panels to which I would probably not have otherwise gone! Because I sold several copies if Passenger Flight to friends and acquaintances I bumped into on the crowded floor (feeling, mind you, a bit like a street hawker with stolen watches inside his trench coat), I almost broke even on my own book purchases and The Delta's usurious bar tab...

Carol Zardetto, Sergio Ramirez at the Blue Met

My first entry on the Rover's Blue Met blog:

Politics and the Writing Life

Imagine you come home, turn on the TV, make popcorn, settle into the couch and really try to get into a show. Meanwhile, your house is burning down. That’s how Carol Zardetto, a Guatemalan writer who spoke on Friday’s Politics and the Pen panel, described a Gen-X of younger, apolitical writers in her country. While turning away from politics is entirely understandable in the context of Guatemala’s unending political foment, in the end, she said, private life cannot be separated from public life, particularly in a country like Guatemala.

Both Zardetto and Sergio Ramirez, the other writer on the panel, have been seriously involved in politics. Ramirez served as Nicaragua’s Vice President from 1995-2000; Zardetto, a lawyer, served as a Deputy Minister of Education for a year in 1996 before being posted as Consul General in Vancouver. Both spoke of the difficulty of balancing the writing life and the political life, and of the inherent incompatibility of holding to an official line while trying to maintain the independence required of a writer.

Ramirez said he didn’t write a line for ten years when his Sandinista commitments most monopolized his time; at a certain point a panic set in and he literally “stole time” from his Vice Presidential duties, getting up at five in the morning to put in three hours of writing before starting his working day. While both writers have withdrawn from active involvement in politics, both concurred that it was important to maintain a sense of political commitment, and expressed appreciation for how their own political lives ultimately enriched their writing lives.

In the relatively benign political climate of Canada, of course, it is quite possible to live out an entirely “private” life – to tune out the disturbing news, to narrow-cast, to ego-cast. All one has to do, though, is look at a typical kitchen and all the products in it that come from foreign lands, to sense the pervasive influence of realpolitik on our lives.

As Carol Zardetto put it, no matter how much one may push politics to the margins of one’s life, it will always remain a lurking presence there – so one may as well try to understand and deal with it, to make oneself into a subject of history rather than its unwitting object, pushed around by forces one can neither control nor comprehend.

Haven't been back, because my computer has been in the repair shop.

The launch party was, I'd say, the most joyous I've ever had for one of my products. The cafe was almost full, and 20 books were sold. Almost all sales and signings took place before the reading; as a number of my friends were second language speakers, I invited them to read along, indicating the page number of each poem before I read it; a fair number of native speakers also took advantage of the opportunity.

So rare that people get to do that at a reading! Seems to me an option people should have more often. Photocopies handed out of a few of the poems to be read -- is that too complicated? In this age of e-mail and cheap photocopies, that should be easier to orchestrate than ever.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be blogging for The Rover at this year's Blue Met. I suppose I'll be cross-posting here. Among the events I'll be attending: Politics and the Pen with Carol Zardetto and Sergio Ramirez; John Ralston Saul being interviewed about his new book, A Fair Country; Interviews of AS Byatt and Tariq Ali; some international poetry evenings.

PASSENGER FLIGHT

TAKES OFF:

Arts Cafe, 201 FAIRMOUNT W. (AT ESPLANADE) , MONTREAL

SUNDAY APRIL 19 @ 7-9 pm

For Montreal area listeners: I will be interviewed & reading from Passenger Flight on "Arts Notebook" (Stan Asher) on Radio Centreville CINQ 102.3 FM, between 11:30 am and 12:30 pm, Saturday April 18.

Another interesting poem of the day. I love its macabre humour.

Death Barged In
by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

In his Russian greatcoat
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.

He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.

Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed
between us.

Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck,
From now on,
you write about me.

Revenge of the Nerds

The Berryman video brings to mind a highly engaging article by Amy Shearn in the March/April issue of Poets and Writers, entitled Revenge of the Nerds -- where are the badly behaved writers? Why, she asks, don't writers get to be barely functional, substance-abusing eccentrics anymore? She recounts that during her years in University of Minnesota's MFA program,

... my classmates were more egghead than cokehead. At our parties we played dominoes, complained about the school's administrations, and went home early so we could get up the next day and write.

She goes on to observe that "as a whole, today's eminent writers are not known for Keats-style stunts like boozy fistfighting. One is hard pressed to imagine John Updike or Jhumpa Lahiri or even Jonathan Franzen leaping Byronically into the Gowanus Canal for a swim ..."

Why are writers no longer glamourous, edgy, Big Personalities anymore? Some factors Shearn cites are the greater difficulty making a living as a writer; the fact that many have to teach to make a living ("you can't go around getting drunk if you're trying to get tenure" writes one; and another, "I basically work four jobs.... There's little time for me to indulge in anything rehabworthy"); that in today's professionalized literary climate, the heavy promotional demands require qualities of sobriety, control, and cheerful persistence more than ever before. Meanwhile, the public demand to know writers is diminishing -- vanished, even. As novelist and essayist Charles Baxter puts it,

It has to do with glamour, a despised category. But glamour is a quality of the aura surrounding someone, a sort of magical charisma: It reflects our wish to be that person -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, back then -- and our wish to tear that person to pieces, as the Furies ripped Orpheus to pieces. When an artist is no longer envied, the aura fades, as does the glamour. Rock stars still have the aura; they are gods, and gods drink and get drugged up and go wild and have sex with everybody and die young. Writers are no longer gods, and everybody knows that.

Pretty sobering stuff. Even if some writers are living lives of edgy, irresponsible chaos, Shearn writes, who is there to notice it?

If a novelist goes wading in the fountain at the Plaza and no one recognizes him, does it count as an irreverent stunt?

Lots of wading into public waters in this article. But to put it another way Shearn doesn't: To that generation of writers (especially poets) of the 50s and 60's, the ideal of the inspired genius, formed during the Romantic period, was still pretty prominent.The alienation that arises in an increasingly anonymous, stratified and indifferent society was rendered all the more painful by the prominence of that ideal... and many of those writers -- so many it became downright stereotypical -- responded in ways that unwittingly matched social expectations, at least for the Romantic, inspired geniuses they were or aspired to be. Nowadays, it seems, substance abuse, marital instability, moodiness and outrageous public behaviour have themselves become tiresome Romantic cliches. And I can't help but concur with Shearn's concluding words: "Whether this is a blessing or a curse I suppose time will tell, but one thing is certain: The next generation of literary biographers (if there is one) will have some pretty dry material waiting for them."

John Berryman

This Easter weekend finds me reading -- and enjoying -- The Dream Songs. Funny, I ordered it from Amazon at least three years ago, and since then the book has sat in my bookcase, untouched. Must have to do with sheer size -- at 427 pages, it's a door stopper. Also I just couldn't seem to work up the mood to delve deeply into the brilliant but wounded thrashings of a this sad-sack suicide of a poet. But the book called to me -- especially after reading a number of relatively tame contemporary collections. And now it's yielding its rewards.

The video above captures the man in full flight. Even slur-drunk (as he is here, & often was), the man was, as Victoria Chang recently put it (not to describe him, but a friend who's doubtless like him), a walking, talking intellectual storm.

As for the poetry itself, it's edgy, intense, wildly innovative even today (perhaps I should add, especially today) ... as one critic put it, Berryman is an American original, & the character of Henry, a permanent addition to its literature. Within the odd formalist constraint of his celebrated 3-stanza, 18-line form, B. took total liberty to twist the language into a slapdash, colloquial yet erudite aesthetic. Check out this diction:

Henry sats in de plane & was gay.
Careful Henry nothing said aloud
but where a Virgin out of a cloud
to her Mountain dropt in light,
his thought made pockets & the plane buckt.
'Parm me, lady.' 'Orright.'

At times he reminds me of Creeley with his tight, nervy confessions. At times, of blowzy, ribald Bukowski. Like Bukowski, Berryman is as likely to end a poem with a wisecrack as with an image. At times, too, I hear the gravelly intonations of Tom Waits. The video ends with a remarkable recital of one of his signature poems, Dream Song #14 ("Life, friends, is boring"). In any case, in Berryman's bleakness there's feisty delight -- proof positive that a well-put downer can be an upper.

I just discovered: Victoria Chang is back.

Mei-Yao Ch'en

An Excuse For Not Returning the Visit of a Friend
by Mei-Yao Ch'en
translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Do not be offended because
I am slow to go out. You know
Me too well for that. On my lap
I hold my little girl. At my
Knees stands my handsome little son.
One has just begun to talk.
The other chatters without
Stopping. They hang on my clothes
And follow my every step.
I can't get any farther
Than the door. I am afraid
I will never make it to your house.

I like this April 9 poem of the day. It captures domestic confinement so perfectly. I believe I was asked to review this book of translations for The Rover. If this is true, this poem bodes well.

My copies arrived this afternoon in a little white van -- the kind of unmarked van notoriously used by terrorists. But this one brought, well, a different kind of explosion. The books look perfect -- not a flaw I can see. My partner and I popped a bottle of bubbly. What a wonderful feeling! Only happens a few times in a lifetime, that.

Via Silliman et al

Jilly Dybka, great source of news on things poetry, has closed her blog for now. This comes as no surprise, given recent health problems and expressions of blogging-ennui. All my best wishes for her. Here are a few articles that grabbed my attention and held them through, culled from Silliman, George Murray & other sources:

• Garcia Marquez has called it quits.

• Remember the vanity press? How quaint that sounds. Here's why...

• Is poetry dying? Bah, humbug, I say. But despite National Poetry Month and other campaigns, the NEA finds that poetry readership has declined to its lowest point in 16 years.

• Talking with Erin Mouré. And what chatter in the chatter boxes!
  

• Is this identity theft? Site claims identities of 1,800,000 authors.

• Memorizing poetry.
  

One thing I've often wondered: how does Silliman get all his article links? And what never ceases to astound me: how does he keep up with it all?

Rita Dove

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Return to Vienna
by Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me....
The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward —
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning —
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed —
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's
home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I
would rage again.

I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it. . . . It is impossible

to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I've named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I'm deaf? —
I also cannot stop listening.

Today's Poetry month daily poem from Poem.org. A fine dramatic monologue, this one captures Beethoven's regal, tempestuous nature as he confronts his growing deafness. I love the first three stanzas, the vivid picture they create of the calm paradise to which he has retired, belied by the dread of his own approaching storm. I can almost hear growing crescendos of his 6th symphony, the Pastorale --although he may have been totally deaf by the time he got to that composition. Where I find the poem gets flabby is in the final two stanzas. Too talky, too equivocal, too much commentary. If I were to revise this poem, I would take away the explanation of Titan. Who needs it? Just the name Titan is enough. And end the poem with

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I am deaf?
-- for I am always listening.

Rae Armantrout

Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

•

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

•

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.

The third Poetry Month daily poem from Poets.org. Not bad, two out of three that grab me. (Last year, I think it was two or three in the entire month.) According to Poet.org's write-up on Rae Armantrout,

In the preface to her selected poems, Veil, Ron Silliman describes her work as: "the literature of the anti-lyric, those poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical...possibilities."

This poem exemplifies those remarks.

Passenger Flight has been printed; the printer tells us that the copies will be shipped from the plant in Cap-Saint-Ignace, near Quebec City, today; I'll receive them either today or Monday. What quick turnaround time! Editing was finished a little more than two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, I've discovered the book is available for advance order at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Chapters/Indigo.

Jack Gilbert

Like this one from Jack Gilbert. It's the first National Poetry Month Poem-a-day from Poets.org .

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
by Jack Gilbert

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.