Thanks to Peter Pereira, an excellent article written by David Biespiel. Check it out:


Now consider the balkanized world of American poetry. Like Americans everywhere, America's poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns. Over here you have the post-avant prose poets, over there the kitchen-sink confessionalists, and across the road are the shiny formalists--and no one ever breaks bread together. As with politics, where you have "I'm voting for That One" liberals and "Time for a Tea Party" conservatives, poetry has evolved into a self-selected enclave, and also--exactly like other sectors of American life--it has stratified into enclaves within enclaves that are hyper-specific and self-referential.

Is the Canadian poetry world as balkanized?  Precisely because there aren't as many of us here, the blurring of distinctions between us is more apparent than in the US, where, owing to sheer numbers, the illusion of self-referential, polarized camps is more easily maintained.

My review of Angela Hibbs' Wanton is up at The Rover.

RICH IN WIT AND IMPLICATION

Angela Hibbs’ poetry is one of leaping semblances, wry cleverness, and urgent, dark confessions. Wanton, her second book, is actually two lengthy chapbooks sewn together: the first, a pastiche of dark, edgy poems mostly concerning an ill-fated love or oppressive father, the second, a long series of linked verses concerning unseemly goings-on in an imaginary [...]More →

Angela Hibbs

THERE IS A ROOM RESERVED FOR THE HOPELESS

The bright yellow paint is chipping.
The inmates do not share the time of day
or even the most casual of glances.
We've less to speak of
than you can imagine.

The clock is the book most often referred to.
The Reader's Digest books
may well be rigged.  We swallow pills
and eight cups of water
and three square meals
from clock-shaped plates
with hour and minute hands for fork and knife and clatter
a little too loudly.

We observe the trolley
enter at eight, twelve and five.

Turns are taken
at bemoaning the chill
the food caught on the journey
from a kitchen we've never seen.

Within the reserved room
is the room to which our smoking
is reserved.  Weeping is welcome everywhere.

I was told he was working on a book called E=9,
the hopelessness of its completion
was grounds for his admission.
My ingrateful dozing through breakfast
makes them hope
I'll vacate soon.

-- supplementary material for my review of Angela Hibbs' Wanton in The Rover.

Passenger Flight in blogworld...

Pris Campbell has posted a plug for Passenger Flight, along with two prose poems from it:  "Claire Obscure" and "Fishy". Thanks, Pris. 

Pris has a good lively blog, and has written, I daresay, some excellent poems herself.  (Although we're not related, the family name-resemblance did bring us into contact when I saw our names beside each other on Ron Silliman's blogroll some years back...)

Dix Mille Villages NDG Fair Trade Coffee House

Tomorrow night (May 7) I'll be participating in Dix Mille Villages Fair Trade Coffee House, an annual event. A couple of poems, two or three songs, all with commerce/exploitation as a theme. Here's the lineup, for the evening.  Location:  5674 av. Monkland, Montréal, QC, 514-483-6569.  Admission PWC.  If it's anything like last year, it'll be a good evening's entertainment.

8.00-8.15
Singer, world music, Franklyne: http://www.myspace.com/franklynemusik
8.15-8.30
Jennifer Ansell-Clarke, Story Teller
8.30-8.45
Brian Campbell: Songwriter and Poet w/guitar, http://pages.videotron.com/campbell/
8.45-9.00
Over the Top Quartet, http://www.overthetopquartet.blogspot.com/
9.00-9.15
Ehab Lotayef, Poet, http://www.lotayef.com/
9.15-9.30
Singer/Songwriter and Accordionist, Gillian Kirkland: http://www.myspace.com/gilly
9.30-9.45
John Hickey and Shayne Gryn, musician and story teller, http://www.documentia.ca/storyteller/ and http://www.shaynegryn.com/
9.45-10.00
]Jack n Jenn, Folk/Rock duo
10.00
TBC – Gospel Choir

Breaking the silence

Has my blog been quiet lately, or what? Last month, without really planning to, I took a break that quite frankly, began to look definitive. And this, National Poetry Month, no less -- both here and south of the border.

Work of late, freelance deadlines, tax deadlines, & personal stuff don't begin to account for my flagging interest. True, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, have siphoned off much audience and responsiveness... a phenonomenon that has been remarked upon by far more active and popular bloggers than moi-meme.  This blog, like many others, has gotten quiet. Look at all the goose eggs after postings below. Attention here, as everywhere, as been fragmented, diluted, dissolved by the sheer excess.

For a long time -- five years or so -- I've posted and crossposted for the love of it, to contribute in some humble way to the store of knowledge and reflection, the availability of certain poems and poets.  I've enjoyed the immediacy of layout, publication, and feedback -- the chance to hone critical skills, to write some things that evolved into articles elsewhere and even poems, to make some key social connections. It's been a good run.

But underlying the present ennui is a resentment:  why should the Great Pharoah Google reap all the profits (and those profits are indeed gargantuan) while we cyberslaves toil to build their palaces and pyramids? Now that they're scanning & photographing everything under the sun and even much of what's beyond it, I'm inclined to tell them to go fuck themselves.  And shove this humble contribution up their ass.  As for me, I'll go off and read books in print, write books in print, write my diaries in private (where I can vent without the shit hitting the fan), and cultivate real friendships with people whom I can speak to and touch.

With that, I press DELETE! 

Out, out, brief (electronic) candle! 

Such fun, rhetoric. 

For all that, I can still see that this blog will have its uses.  I've enjoyed writing this, for instance.  I've got a review coming up in the Rover:  some poems I don't have room for there, I'll post here. I've got a few good posts in hand.  Even as I feed the monster, I still find pleasure in sharing with whomever, whenever, through this medium. Yes, the slavemaster is gentle, if inexorable.