Language Matters...

Launch of Language Matters Anthology

Interviews and selections of 22 Quebec anglophone poets

Tuesday, Sept. 10, 7:00

Bain St-Michel, 5300 rue St-Dominique, Montreal

I’ll be playing a couple of my songs at this event!

Montreal: League of Poets Benefit reading/party

This Sunday December 18th, the Words & Music Show presents a special performance and party featuring 16 poets from the League of Canadian Poets, as well as music by Maica Mia, and more.
The evening will present work from a Who's Who of the Montreal poetry scene, including:

Fortner Anderson
Rebecca Banks
Maxianne Berger
Jennifer Boire
Brian Campbell
Endre Farkas
Charlotte Hussey
Catherine Kidd
Nancy R. Lange
Julie Mahfood
Lesley Pasquin
Elizabeth Robert
Bryan Sentes
Carolyn Marie Souaid
Heather Grace Stewart
Vincent Tinguely

It all takes place at the
Casa del Popolo (performance space)
4873 St-Laurent (walk in past the bar and 1st door to your left) Sunday December 18th Doors open 8PM; show starts 9
$5

The Words & Music Show is hosted by poet/performer Ian Ferrier. It is sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Quebec Writers' Federation, CKUT 90.3FM and Wired on Words Productions.

For more information, write to the
poets@wiredonwords,com

Reading

Visual Arts Centre Poetry and Prose Reading

Wednesday October 20, doors 7pm, show 7:30pm, $5 at the door

School of Art / McClure Gallery: 350 Victoria Avenue, Montreal

http://www.visualartscentre.ca/

Ian Ferrier is one of the core writer/performers in the North American scene. His CD, What is This Place, was released by Bongobeat Records, 2007.

Fortner Anderson has published several audio recordings of his work and has read in Canada, the United States and Europe. http://www.fortneranderson.com/

Aspasia Worlitzky is Spanish teacher and comedian. Book of poems: ¿Adónde vas madre? Anthology: Conjuro de luces, Voces sin fronteras, Presencia femenina.

Endre Farkas is a poet and playwright who is often ahead of his time and loves the curves of life.

Brian Campbell's second poetry collection is Passenger Flight (Signature Editions, 2009). He has been published widely, and was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Award. http://www.briancampbell.ca/

Dale Matthews's first poetry book, Wait for the Green Fire, was published by New Orleans Poetry Journal Press in 2010.

Mike Di Sclafani is a musician, videographer and sound artist. He took part in the Agence TOPO’s multimedia exhibit Astres (2006) creating the sound effects

Local Scene: Griffintown Garden Reading

Poèsie au Corridor culturel // Poetry in the Cultural Corridor

Place to Grow // Un endroit à la croissance : Poèsie

Saïd Azzaoui

Brian Campbell

R de Smit

Angela Leuck

Ehab Lotayef

Dale Matthews

Abby Paige

Lesley Pasquin

erika white

& Micro ouvert // Open Mic

mardi le 24 août à 19h // Tuesday August 24th at 7 pm -

corner Ottawa & Dalhousie (Griffintown)*

*The closest metro is Bonaventure... the gardens are due south. To come by bus, the #107 south from Peel or North from Charlevoix...get off at Peel & Ottawa. There is also the Wellington bus, #61, which leaves from McGill Metro and lets you off at Wellington & the Expressway...walk up to Ottawa and turn left.

News

Three of my poems have been solicited and accepted by The Saranac Review, including the title poem for my prospective collection, "You Told Me to Write a Love Poem".  The poems will appear in the issue after the next one -- that is, in 2012.  I'll have "poems forthcoming" in my bio for a good long while -- not a bad thing -- and it feels good to be published again in that fine review.

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

I'll be appearing on CKUT's Tuesday Morning After show tomorrow morning.  Jeff Mackie will be interviewing me about "Passenger Flight" and other matters poetic, starting at 8:30 am.

Hmmm... how many tune in to literary programs on university radio as the sun rises over breakfast?  How many tune in online?  Hello out there, whoever you are!

Poets in the Griffintown Cultural Corridor

I just got included in this event, part of the Montreal Highlights Festival (Nuit blanche à Montréal), which takes place in several locations around town. If the schedule goes well, I'll be reading between 2:50 and 3pm. Others on the bill: Carolyn Marie Souaid, Celine Pitre, Endre Farkas, Erika White, Ian Ferrier, Throw Poetry Collective, and more.  (Click on poster to see large.)

MY OWN

A recent prose poem of mine appears in Apparatus Magazine, a Chicago-based online review of a surrealist bent.

My writing room

There's a little feature about my favourite place to write here at Ms. Julie's blog.

More installments of "Can Poetry Matter? -- 15 Years Later" to come. (The lines come out all zig-zaggy and it takes a while to rearrange them... what a chore!) Have been busy with supply teaching, regular classes, a hefty head cold that turned out not to be swine flu. Now a book review for The Rover -- Sina Queyras' Expressway -- is pushed right to deadline. So I must turn to that, expressly.

Author Interview/Passenger Flight review at Concordia Link

Brian Campbell explores modern techniques of torture and technology in Passenger Flight. GRAPHIC JONAS PIETSCH

PASSENGER FRIGHT
Brian Campbell publishes post-9/11 prose poems
by Christopher Olson

We’ve come a long way since Leonard Cohen wrote those famous lyrics, “She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.”

“Now everything comes from China,” said Brian Campbell, whose book of prose poems, Passenger Flight, invokes global warming, globalization, 9/11 and state-sanctioned torture.

“The Angel,” originally published in the 1980s, views torture from the point of view of the torturer and resonates a tad differently post-Abu Ghraib. When Campbell wrote about torture, he was referring to German SS physician and lead human experimentalist Josef Mengele.

Most of the book, however, was written starting in 2006... read on.

That's me reading from and giving a talk about Passenger Flight at the U. of Winnipeg last week. If the picture's a little blurry, it's because it was taken without a flash. It was a really enjoyable event -- made me wonder if I had missed a vocation (i.e. being a prof). I read about 7 poems, talked about how they came to being -- and the audience, about 45 (mostly) creative writing students, were attentive and asked good questions.

As for the reading at Aqua Books, well, it could have been better for a bunch of reasons, most of which I won't go into here. The limited attendance (8 -- typical for a bookstore poetry reading featuring a relatively unknown out-of-towner) was made to feel skimpier by the huge mausoleum-like upstairs room (I mean, it has a stage and about a hundred seats in rows) the organizers chose to hold it in. The bookstore is funky and attractive, and to their credit, they hold a lot of events, but relative unknowns be forewarned: if you're coming in from out of town, request that the reading take place in some intimate nook among the books, as is pictured on their website.

ADDENDUM:

This blog has been receiving a lot of visits lately via a post by the owner of Aqua Books. Granted, this was not my best reading. Combining music and poetry in the way I did (it had been suggested by a couple of audience members) was not a great idea; I did read too long. Some people told me they enjoyed it nevertheless. There was a multitude of factors behind this reading going the way it did. However, it does not warrant the kind of personal attack this individual has leveled against me. I’ve delivered excellent readings before, and indeed, have since. If anything positive has happened besides this having been a learning experience, it's the fact that he's brought people to my site. I invite all those readers to look around, read recent reviews of Passenger Flight as well as of my music, and enjoy the discussion, quotes, and links to other fine articles about literature and the poetic life.

... the tour continues...

Click thru to see large...

Passenger Flight lands in Winnipeg

WINNIPEG LAUNCH OF PASSENGER FLIGHT
Featuring Brian Campbell + Lori Cayer
Aqua Books
Friday, October 2, 2009, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
274 Garry Street (between Graham and Portage)
Winnipeg, MB


Please join us in welcoming Montreal poet and singer-songwriter Brian Campbell, who published his latest book with Winnipeg's Signature Editions. Brian will be joined by Winnipeg's Lori Cayer.

Our Man

Here's the cover of the Cohen anthology. The launch date is this Thursday the 17th at Westmount High School auditorium, 4350 Ste-Catherine W. (just a little west of Atwater metro, I'm told), at 7:30 pm. Admission $5. Haven't seen the tome yet myself. Margaret Atwood will be in it, I'm told; I just learned on Jack Locke's facebook site that poets participating in the launch include: Ann Weinstein, Jason Camlot, Ann Lloyd, David Solway, Donna Yates-Adelman, Michael Mirolla, Jeffrey Mackie, Angela Leuck, John Fretz, Grace Moore, Rona Feldman Shefler(a classmate of Cohen's,) erika n. white, Sandra Sjollema, Ryan Ruddick(Westmount High teacher,) Brian Campbell, and Eleni Zisimatos. A number of good poets here. No news as to whether the man himself will be in attendance. On Sept. 21 there's a gala which I can't attend, because I'm teaching that night. Details on Jack Locke's site.

Update, Sept. 17: Home from the launch of "Leonard Cohen, You're Our Man". A well-produced book, a classy occasion. A number of the poems were good-- and the DVD of praise for LC from the international space station was a surprise.

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.

"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.

Our man...

I just learned today that a poem of mine has been accepted into the Leonard Cohen: You're Our Man anthology, a local production to come out on Sept. 21, in celebration of the bard's 75th birthday. In the call for submissions, poets were invited to respond to one of LC's poems with a poem of their own. I did a palimpsest of Two Went to Sleep. Apparently, 75 poets from around the world are to be published in this anthology -- including Margaret Atwood.

My prose poem Fix is finally up at the Evergreen Review -- and it's the lead-off poem in the current issue. Looks like the review has a new look, too -- much an improvement, I'd say, over previous online issues. The poem is one of the more political poems in Passenger Flight.