Back

rare sunny morning on the sun deck

Back in town -- was away for a writing week at a cottage near St-Adele, Quebec, the same one Jocelyne and I rented last year (more pictures here). It was a great retreat -- although for the most part the weather was awful. Out of seven days, we had two sunny ones (but still cool, as my sweater attests), and the rest of the time it was gloomy, raining, and cold -- too cold to use the sun deck or swim in the lake. A couple of nights it went down to the single digits (C., that is). We had to use the wood stove (which was fun -- like almost anyone, I love watching fires) and wrap ourselves in warm blankets. Still, I got some good writing done -- four poems, two among my best, methinks -- and lots of reading, including Orhan Pamuk's Snow, Sherwin Nuland's The Art of Aging (my god, how I'm thinning up there! Maybe that's the occasion) and poetry by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Jack Gilbert and a number of podcasts from Poetry magazine (more about those later). J. meanwhile did a couple of good short poems and two paintings. We punctuated our solitude with visits from friends. Among them was my friend Raphael Bendahan: we spent a day selecting and editing poems for the next Sky of Ink production, his chapbook, whose working title is By All Accounts.

The cottage is a great place to focus, and a tremendous relief from our own clutter and the city noise, but weather-wise, we have not had luck. Last year, too, it also rained almost every day, and we've had dominant bad weather in previous years. A couple of friends have bought a cottage near La Chute and invited us to stay for free. I think next year we'll be doing just that -- and waiting for a decent forecast before setting out.

Poetry Plus

Above, yours truly reading at the Arts Cafe Poetry Plus reading on Tuesday night; below, Jocelyne Dubois (my partner), launching her chapbook, Hot Summer Night, published by our own (that is my and Raphael Bendahan's) Sky of Ink Press. The place was quite packed, actually -- despite the empty seats up front (they had just been vacated), people were standing in the back. We were both well-received, and Jocelyne sold five copies of her book, all to "strangers" (close friends had already received a free copy.) Overall, the reading was a good one for Poetry Plus: Julie Mahfood read some particularly dark, touching and tightly written poems; Steven Manners read some ascerbic, conversational pieces that were well done; and there was a woman in the open set -- I forget her name, but she's the attractive woman with the loop earrings pictured to the far left in the picture up top -- who reada piece that blew us all away drawing on her harrowing experience surviving Hodgkin's Lymphoma. All three I'll keep an eye out for. Carolyn Souaid -- who happens to be my editor at Signature -- turned in a fine reading despite suffering the throes of a migraine headache. I look forward to reading Paper Oranges, her new book.


Here we are afterward, listening to another featured reader. Jocelyne is looking through another chapbook that was available for sale that evening.

back from the rock...

Me in jaw-droppingly beautiful Newfoundland. At Cape Spear, just outside St. John's, to be exact. (Click thru to see large.) The League of Poets' Conference/Fest was perhaps the best one ever -- good seminars, great side trips, excellent night life, and, for me -- some CREATIVITY! More later...

A fantastic writing room

I return quite mellowed after about a week away. I have the good fortune of having a friend with a cottage near her summer home who rents it to friends at a very reasonable rate. It's on Lac Connelly, near St-Hippolyte, about an hour north of Montreal. My partner and I made it our writing/reading room for the week. Click on any of these photos, & they'll fill your screen. Views from the front room, which is surrounded by windows:

This tree has a special significance. I'll get back to it later. Below, yours truly at his Thinkpad (why didn't IBM come up with Imaginepad? Createpad?):


It was a productive week, free of distractions: I wrote four prose poems to pretty nigh completion plus three quite promising poem drafts and part of a song. My partner, meanwhile, wrote a draft of a short story.

Books & Stuff read: The Saranac Review #3 (the first review I've read from cover to cover -- it turns out I was not disappointed in what I was saying before, all the poems are good, as well as a number of the short stories) Theodore Roethke's The Waking and some of Words for the Wind out of his Collected (this was really suitable to this setting), some of Creeley's Selected, a pretty fair portion of Michèle Lalonde's Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose et poemes including her famous (and still apropos) protest poem, Speak White, plus Femelle Faucon by Quebec poet & friend Nancy R. Lange. I also listened to selections of William Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats in the MP3 version of A Hundred Classic Poems. This of course punctuated by walks in the woods, and swimming & sunning (when weather permitted) by the lake.

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By the way, I just added a "Currently Reading" section to my sidebar -- some titles I'm reading right now.

"Undressing the Night"/"Walkups" launch pics

I'm back from Edmonton and have plenty to report. But I also found in my mailbox these photos of last week's Montreal launch... so thought I'd share them first. Credit goes to Adrien Chevrot, Artiste-photographe.
Myself and Elizabeth Robert, reading from Lance Blomgren's Walkups (me, the English original, her, her French translation)

Above, myself and E.R. reading from Undressing the Night (me, my translation, her, the Spanish original)
Myself and Danielle Shelton, Editor-in-Chief of Adage Editions, reading from Walkups.
Yours truly, entertaining with some songs in the first intermission...
... and signing a book for a friend who had to leave early. I think this shot is especially cool, as it captures both my literary and musical selves, so rarely seen together, in one succinct image. Will definitely use on the website. It was taken from outside, through the cafe window.

Below, Marie-France Bancel (singer) & friends providing the second intermission's entertainment... mostly Brazilian bossa-nova. (Marie-France is also an excellent French-language writer and spoken word artist, by the way.)
Some of our audience at Le Depanneur Cafe.

Translators and Walkups publisher shot. We're all sweltering in the June 3 heat. The writers were in absentia for this event -- Francisco Santos, author of Undressing the Night, had family commitments in Toronto, and Lance Blomgren, author of Walkups... well, he lives in Vancouver. Nevertheless... "A good time was had by all", etc.

BC2

My partner took this one of me in Restaurant St-Sauveur (St-Sauveur, Quebec) late last October. After more than a year, I thought it was about time to show another image of moi-même.

Local Scene: Cafe L'Enchanteur

That's me on the left at last Sunday's show at Cafe L'Enchanteur -- playing a new, unheralded, unknown "hit" of mine called Cry Baby Cry, that for some mysterious reason, had them all clapping along (actually, not so mysterious: it was you who started it, Benoit!). The clapping was so distracting I almost forgot the lyrics I had been practicing all week... The crowd (photo below, taken at some other point in the show) was packed into the place shoehorn-wise: I think the cafe manager had told us the capacity of the place, and not the actual number of seats, and on our side we had forgotten to include ourselves (7 musicians, soundman, plenty of stage space) in the count. Fortunately because of the cold evening not everyone showed up who had tickets -- or the doors would have been blown off the joint. A good evening, tho, was had for all involved. Back to the writing life!
(For more on my music, album etc. check my website.)

MEN PLAYING WITH WORDS: CANTO PUBLISHED IN DUSIE

Francisco Santos, myself, and Allen Sutterfield
on the evening we wrote "Canto"

It was a suffocatingly muggy evening, June 14 of this year. Both Allen and I were in Toronto, and had arranged to get together with Francisco at a friend's place, where Allen, who resides now in Guelph, Ont., was staying. Since wine seemed a necessity (isn't it always where poetry takes place?), we made a long treck in the stifling heat along Danforth Ave. to the nearest LCBO to pick up a two litre bottle of cheap Italian red, and almost lost our evening in a pizza joint waiting for an excruciatingly slow with-the-works to go... as we waited, though, we did read and discuss a couple of poems from Anna Akhmatova' Selected, which I had picked up at a used bookstore along the way. By the time we got back to our friend's place, it was already closing on 9 pm. As Francisco and I were living/staying halfway across town, it seemed the evening was up almost before it began. (We had planned this get-together weeks in advance.) Over drooly pizza and sweaty juice glasses of wine (our friend's wine glasses were stored we couldn't find where), we laughed ironically at the inconvenience of throwing a party -- or doing anything worthwhile, it seemed, on the spur of the moment in Toronto. Suddenly something in our conversation -- I think we were talking about Creeley, who had recently died, and I remember now I even read out "I Know a Man" earlier that evening -- reminded Francisco of a verse he had written more than two decades ago, which he remembered as this:

Llévate este silencio
de
ave

para que conozcas
el
vuelo
de mi
canto

which I immediately translated as this,

Take this silence
of a
bird

that you may know
the flight
of my
song

Francisco wondered if I had included it in the bilingual selected which I was in the process of bringing together at the time. He had always had an affection for this verse because it brought together silence/bird/flight/song and notions of taking/knowing/possession in one brief utterance... great concentration of language was evidently a poetic ideal of his, too.

Well, I hadn't.

Allen, trickster that he is, suggested this possible alternative (he doesn't know Spanish), which he intoned in a deep south accent:

Take
the silence of a bird
that you
may know
how my song
flies

Then Francisco came up with another variation, and somehow or other, we were off: a game was created: to see how many variations on that verse we could come up with using those exact same words. These we jotted down in Francisco's notebook, which we passed around round-robin style. Each time we came up with a wilder and more improbable variation, we doubled over in gales of laughter. At one point -- after about fifteen variations, when it seemed there were no possibilities left, the notebook was passed to Francisco. After a moment of mulling, he came out with this:

Take

silence

this bird

know

flight

canto

"Hey, Francisco," we objected, "you didn't use all the words!"

"But this is an exception!" he said back with a raised finger. Gales of laughter again.

Henceforth exceptions, if exceptional, were allowed. I came up with a variation on his variation, and then we came up with six more conforming -- more or less -- to the original constraints. At this point, our friend came back. We all knew we had done something pretty significant artistically.... we were elated, minds on fire. A title sprang forth -- Canto -- and a dream of little chapbook and reading somewhere, at the Art Bar Poetry Series or Guelph's Woolwich Arms. In any case, it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable evenings of pure creative fun any of us had had in a long time. At our request, our friend -- Tony Marques, I'll let his name be known, another dedicated word craftsman who remains in an unpublished nether world -- turned on his computer and I transcribed what we had written into a wordpad file, and emailed it to all of us.

Tony took the picture above with my camera to commemorate the occasion.

That was that... or so it seemed.

The next week, looking through one of Francisco's earlier collections to find the poem and include it in the selected, I discovered that he had misremembered it: that he had written comprendas (comprehend, understand) el vuelo de mi canto, not conozcas (know). I called him up to see which version he preferred for the bilingual edition. He said, ah yes, but I much prefer comprendas. Subtler, he said. But know sounded better rhythmically in English, so I stuck with my translation of that evening -- but tacked the original Spanish version on as the concluding variation in Canto. After 23 variations, I suppose the singer would understand the song...

Anyway, Canto I later submitted to Dusie -- it struck me as down their particular alley -- and it was taken. You can read it here.

My first blog photo

Well, with this I enter (on this blog at least) into the narcissistic world of image for the first time. Pictured here is me in Dec. 2003 in the offices of the daily La Prensa in Managua, Nicaragua. I'm about to be interviewed, along with Francisco Santos (the poet whose selected poems I translated under the title Undressing the Night) , by the editor of La Prensa Literaria, the weekly literary supplement of that paper. (For some reason the article never appeared, although some of Francisco's poetry did....)

More images to come.

May I not fall into the pool!