Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 40
February 24, 2014
Poetry in Voice 2014
Announcing this year's judges for the Online Semifinals: Martine Audet, Bathelémy Bolivar, Alice Burdick, Brad Cran, Jon Paul Fiortino, Ariel Gordon, Rino Morin Rossignol, Jeanne Painchaud, Stuart Ross, and Ian Williams.
* * *
So I'm pleased to be (on-line semi-final) judging again this year for Poetry in Voice, which is a poetry recitation contest for Canadian high schools.
Being asked to spend an afternoon, or really several afternoons, listening to students recite Canadian poetry...I mean, how could you be a poet and not be for that?
Apparently, there are 377 schools competing this year, which I was glad to hear includes a few new Manitoban entries.
It's also nice to see that Franco-Manitoban poet Bathelémy Bolivar has been added as a judge. Manitoba's French poetry scene is small but dedicated, which I learned when I helped program the bilingual edition of Aqua Books' Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Reading Series back in the day.
Manitoba's francophone community is the largest outside of Quebec, so it's good to see them represented here.
Out-loud poetry! Fun!
February 21, 2014
Drunk Betty: Deerstalker
Caught out at the end of the breeding season – greedy buck, thick sticky snow – the skittish doe carried his load for weeks longer than her cousins & second cousins & sisters.
But after a long winter & a kicky spring she dropped a two-headed fawn, her first, in a back yard.
Image by Darryl Joel Berger.Ten weeks in, the skittish doe left the fawn safe & unsound under a shrub. Twenty feet away, her matchstick legs were taken out by a carful of careening teenagers.
At first, the homeowner thought the two heads were her rusty garden spades – surprised by that first blizzard & left out all winter - but then she spotted the fawn at the other end of the yard, the light through the clouds starved & cold. Twins, she thrilled, near-sighted. And put out freezer-burned corn.
So the two-headed fawn survived its first week alone. So it ambled here & there, on legs like hand-dipped candles.
Its tawny spots were fed by vacant lot fodder – clover & crab grass & blue plastic bag – an indigestible bellyful.
The fawn was all soft bones & bleating teeth when it fell. It broke down & was broken down. Not like a flooded car. Not like a butcher’s diagram. The fawn’s collapse at the foot of a scrub tree was soft & fine.
And so the fungi in its crowded roots were fed by two-headed fawn & two-for-one plastic.
The mushrooms grew blue & its spores were blue & it heaved them like cigarette smoke though the fawn’s tiny splayed ribs & then Drunk Betty – Bettina to her sad mother waiting at home – breathed them in.
It was a two-headed high.
* * *
This story is part of the bestiary that Kingston artist/writer Darryl Joel Berger and I are building. Image/text is so much fun.
But after a long winter & a kicky spring she dropped a two-headed fawn, her first, in a back yard.
Image by Darryl Joel Berger.Ten weeks in, the skittish doe left the fawn safe & unsound under a shrub. Twenty feet away, her matchstick legs were taken out by a carful of careening teenagers. At first, the homeowner thought the two heads were her rusty garden spades – surprised by that first blizzard & left out all winter - but then she spotted the fawn at the other end of the yard, the light through the clouds starved & cold. Twins, she thrilled, near-sighted. And put out freezer-burned corn.
So the two-headed fawn survived its first week alone. So it ambled here & there, on legs like hand-dipped candles.
Its tawny spots were fed by vacant lot fodder – clover & crab grass & blue plastic bag – an indigestible bellyful.
The fawn was all soft bones & bleating teeth when it fell. It broke down & was broken down. Not like a flooded car. Not like a butcher’s diagram. The fawn’s collapse at the foot of a scrub tree was soft & fine.
And so the fungi in its crowded roots were fed by two-headed fawn & two-for-one plastic.
The mushrooms grew blue & its spores were blue & it heaved them like cigarette smoke though the fawn’s tiny splayed ribs & then Drunk Betty – Bettina to her sad mother waiting at home – breathed them in.
It was a two-headed high.
* * *
This story is part of the bestiary that Kingston artist/writer Darryl Joel Berger and I are building. Image/text is so much fun.
February 20, 2014
winter nest
* * *
A terrible photo of an altogether fascinating nest, woven from deer fur and grasses and something flowering.
It was the size of the palm of my hand. It was resting on the snow. And I wanted to tuck it in my pocket...but I resisted.
everything on top of the snow
All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. February 20, 2014.* * *I went walking in the Forest today. It was cold but there was so much sun and I hadn't been there for weeks and weeks...
We've towering heaps of rubbled snow everywhere. Turning into traffic, when the boulevards contains heaps taller than most people, makes more than a little nervous. And the snow mountain, where the city stores the snow scraped off the streets in the southern half of the city, looms over Route 90.
But here, the snow is thick and smooth, like a mattress laid over the fussiness - downed logs and shrubs and bleach-blonde grasses - of the forest.
I spent my walk shooting the things on top of the snow. And trundling through all that snow, when what I wanted to see wasn't close to the side of the path.
February 7, 2014
videopoem-ed
* * *
The lovely/talented Kevin Spenst videopoem-ed my "Bicker" in advance of our reading April 17 at McNally Robinson Booksellers.
I especially love the overexposed merlin clip...
Our Winnipeg reading is a part of Kevin's Chapbook Tour of Canada in April and May, launching the two chapbooks he published this past year with Vancouver's The Alfred Gustav Press and Hamilton's serif of nottingham.
February 5, 2014
Reprint: The Poetry of the P****
From the February 6, 2014 edition of the The Uniter, the University of Winnipeg student newspaper.
* * *
So...I know that I once joked, while touring Hump, that I was the poet-most-Googled-by-perverts.
(It was because I'd posted an early draft of my "Tit Poem" here to the blog and, surprisingly, there's a global need for poems about boobies.)
But even so, I wasn't completely prepared for the headline of this Uniter article. But the funny thing is...I'm not mad.
I was a volunteer arts reporter at the Uniter when I was 19. The next year, I got the Arts & Entertainment Editor gig. I reviewed books and plays and movies and interviewed bands. And, as editor, I helped other people have the same fun-in-print. After two years as A&E Editor, I became the Canadian University Press field worker and visited all the student newspapers in my region, dispensing dubious wisdom.
It's been nearly twenty years since I left the U of Wpg and my various jobs at the Uniter. And so I was proud to be interviewed by Kristy Hoffman for the June 29th issue of The Uniter four years ago, when Hump came out. I was a double alumna, right? And writer Adam Petrash was great to work with this time round: well-prepared, thoughtful, professional.
But The Poetry of the P**** took me right back to my student journalism days in a way that being interviewed for an article hadn't.
I remember the long/strange production nights, where we'd type in weird/crude headlines and giggle. But we always changed them to something more...well, thoughtful. More professional. I remember the to-dos when student journalists across the country would print things that teetered on the edge of being racist/sexist/homophobic, of being libelous (like this week's Sam Katz lawsuit, for instance...), or even just of being in poor taste.
But mostly, I remember is how young and impetuous everyone was, when I worked at the paper. So I'm a little embarrassed. But I understand.
(Okay, two more memories from my time at the paper, mostly because I'm a broken machine: I remember how I sliced off the tip of my finger with an exacto knife when I was trimming articles to fit on the flats that went to the printers. How I giddily confessed to my co-workers that I'd BLED on the flats. I remember the waxer we used to stick articles to the flats, how I used it when I had a genetics assignment that required lining up chromosomes on a page. How I lost a chromosome in the waxer. )
February 2, 2014
Tough to connect with characters in intriguing, dystopian tale
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae LeeRiverhead Books, 368 pages, $33
American novelist Chang-rae Lee writes what could be called Ivy League fiction.
After doing an MFA at Yale, his first novel, 1995's Native Speaker, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Since then, on top of his work teaching creative writing at Princeton, Lee has written a book every four or five years, which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2010 for The Surrendered.
Lee's most recent book, the dystopian On Such a Full Sea, represents a departure for the Korean-born writer.
Having written about the intersections of class and race in books that referenced Korean comfort women during the Second World War (A Gesture Life) and orphanages in post-Korean War South Korea (The Surrendered), Lee has abandoned specific histories for imagined ones, and race for class.
This shift is front and centre in the book's opening passage:
"It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore. We think, Why bother? Except for a lucky few, everyone is from someplace, but that someplace, it turns out, is gone."
So, instead of the United States of America, we have the Association of Charter Villages, run by multinational corporations instead of governments.
The villages are home to the upper class and ultra-rich. Middle-class people live in directorates, which are basically company towns, producing goods for Charter citizens such as fish raised in tanks and vegetables cultivated in greenhouses.
On Such a Full Sea's main characters, a young couple named Fan and Reg, were born and raised in B-Mor, a directorate assigned to a group of immigrants from China, which is close to the Charter village Seneca.
Though there are few perks in the directorates, there is the security of (crowded) housing and (increasingly limited) medical care. Lower-class people live in the open counties, where there are no illusions: If you can't afford something, you try to take it by force.
A cynical reader would note here that this state of affairs isn't that different from our current circumstances... but what is different is that the citizens of Lee's imagined world all eventually contract C, or cancer.
And Reg, a gangly 19-year-old gardener, is somehow C-free. When medical tests reveal this fact, he is whisked away by administrators.
Fan, a diminutive 16-year-old tank-diver, resolves to find him and leaves B-Mor for the outlands. She doesn't have any inkling where he might be, but leaving seems to be a logical first step.
She spends the rest of the novel moving in the opposite direction from most upwardly mobile Association residents: from B-Mor to the outlands to Seneca, a Charter village.
Interestingly, although Fan spends little to no time in B-Mor, her story is narrated by a directorate resident who prefers the first-person plural. He is the one who describes the ins and outs of Association society, who reflects on the changes to B-Mor after the disappearance of Reg and the departure of Fan, and who tries to make sense of all their lives.
So the question remains: is On Such a Full Sea a fully formed dystopia? A fully formed fiction?
While Lee's imagined world has some interesting flourishes and some ingenious ideas, it never coalesces into a completely convincing whole.
And while it is masterfully written, in Lee's trademark formal diction and elaborate, slightly overwritten sentences, ultimately we know Fan and Reg the way our anonymous narrator does: by name and in passing.
Although On Such a Full Sea probably won't be counted among Chang-rae Lee's successes, it does make for a most interesting departure.
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae LeeRiverhead Books, 368 pages, $33
American novelist Chang-rae Lee writes what could be called Ivy League fiction.
After doing an MFA at Yale, his first novel, 1995's Native Speaker, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Since then, on top of his work teaching creative writing at Princeton, Lee has written a book every four or five years, which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2010 for The Surrendered.
Lee's most recent book, the dystopian On Such a Full Sea, represents a departure for the Korean-born writer.
Having written about the intersections of class and race in books that referenced Korean comfort women during the Second World War (A Gesture Life) and orphanages in post-Korean War South Korea (The Surrendered), Lee has abandoned specific histories for imagined ones, and race for class.
This shift is front and centre in the book's opening passage:
"It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore. We think, Why bother? Except for a lucky few, everyone is from someplace, but that someplace, it turns out, is gone."
So, instead of the United States of America, we have the Association of Charter Villages, run by multinational corporations instead of governments.
The villages are home to the upper class and ultra-rich. Middle-class people live in directorates, which are basically company towns, producing goods for Charter citizens such as fish raised in tanks and vegetables cultivated in greenhouses.
On Such a Full Sea's main characters, a young couple named Fan and Reg, were born and raised in B-Mor, a directorate assigned to a group of immigrants from China, which is close to the Charter village Seneca.
Though there are few perks in the directorates, there is the security of (crowded) housing and (increasingly limited) medical care. Lower-class people live in the open counties, where there are no illusions: If you can't afford something, you try to take it by force.
A cynical reader would note here that this state of affairs isn't that different from our current circumstances... but what is different is that the citizens of Lee's imagined world all eventually contract C, or cancer.
And Reg, a gangly 19-year-old gardener, is somehow C-free. When medical tests reveal this fact, he is whisked away by administrators.
Fan, a diminutive 16-year-old tank-diver, resolves to find him and leaves B-Mor for the outlands. She doesn't have any inkling where he might be, but leaving seems to be a logical first step.
She spends the rest of the novel moving in the opposite direction from most upwardly mobile Association residents: from B-Mor to the outlands to Seneca, a Charter village.
Interestingly, although Fan spends little to no time in B-Mor, her story is narrated by a directorate resident who prefers the first-person plural. He is the one who describes the ins and outs of Association society, who reflects on the changes to B-Mor after the disappearance of Reg and the departure of Fan, and who tries to make sense of all their lives.
So the question remains: is On Such a Full Sea a fully formed dystopia? A fully formed fiction?
While Lee's imagined world has some interesting flourishes and some ingenious ideas, it never coalesces into a completely convincing whole.
And while it is masterfully written, in Lee's trademark formal diction and elaborate, slightly overwritten sentences, ultimately we know Fan and Reg the way our anonymous narrator does: by name and in passing.
Although On Such a Full Sea probably won't be counted among Chang-rae Lee's successes, it does make for a most interesting departure.
January 30, 2014
Missing Robert Kroetsch
When Robert Kroetsch died in 2011, I wrote a eulogy of sorts here, offering my condolences to Kroetsch's family, to his many friends and colleagues, his many ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and ex-lovers, but, mostly, to his readers.
But I’ve been thinking of him again. I miss him.
And I need to evict the image of a broken old man dying by the side of the road, so I’ve decided to approach him via his writing, via the books that were most important to me as a young writer.
* * *
We were raised on my mother’s voice, going big/small as she read Dennis Lee and Shel Silverstein’s poems, and on my uncle’s Playboys in their warped cupboard at the cabin in northwestern Ontario.
At the time, I loved my mother’s delight in reading the poems, page after page at bedtime, laughing with us, leading the laughter.
Now, I also love that she didn’t mind us rifling through the pile of girly mags, as long as we put them back when we were done. That she told us it was okay, how warm and full we felt, the tingly sprawl.
(We were great humpers of pillows, my mum says.)
So: long summer afternoons looking at naked ladies, feathered hair and red lips. My sister and I liked the cartoons best, we agreed. We liked the wryness, even as we knew the jokes weren’t for us, exactly.
All of which is to say is that for me, the roundness of Frank Newfeld’s illustrations and the local musicality of Dennis Lee’s poems in Garbage Delight and Alligator Pie somehow met the endless parade of cartoon-y nipples in the Playboy cartoons and made Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1970).
From the first page, I recognized Hazard Lepage. He was familiar, big and small at once, like my dad and my uncle and my various ‘uncles.’
At the cabin, on vacation, my dad and uncle would incite the kids to play lopsided game of hide and seek. They’d go hide somewhere in the bush with a beer in each pocket and we’d have to find them, which wasn’t hard, given that they’d eventually forget they were supposed to be hiding and would laugh and shout, telling stories, telling the kids to get them more beer. And then they’d ‘hide’ again.
My uncle peeing discreetly off the side of the fishboat. And, later, buttoned-up, showing me how to fillet a pickerel. He thought I was silly when I held the milky crystal I dug out of their eyes up to the light, but he let me do it. What I remember now is the ruined shimmer of scales on the cutting board and his knife, how maniacally sharp it was.
But that recognition wasn’t just about my male relatives, it was about me, too.
I was in second-year university when I first encountered Hazard (and, by extension, Kroetsch) and just starting to move in and out of relationships fluidly, gauging looks and gestures, learning about desire and inevitability but also about consequences, especially those consequences that were particularly female.
I didn’t-want what Hazard didn’t-want: kids or a real job. He wanted to breed the ideal horse, despite the fact that were very few horses left working on farms. I wanted to somehow figure out how to write for a living, despite that I was firmly and irrevocably female.
And so Hazard Lepage’s tomcatting, his determination to do what (and who) he wanted looked familiar, even if it wasn’t exactly for me.
What you understood, as a reader, was that Hazard was a hazard, to himself and to those around him. You wanted him to marry Martha and have kids to shout at through the bush AND you also wanted him to keep wandering, his pecker hanging out while he looked for a woman/mare.
I wasn’t anywhere near having my own child the first time I read The Studhorse Man, but I recognized my foolish parents in it and the choices they made for me and away from me. I recognized its myth-making, its snorting blue horse and blizzard and pile of bones from my time at the cabin, its painted turtles and shotgun shells and rock, but also from other books.
But I’ve been thinking of him again. I miss him. And I need to evict the image of a broken old man dying by the side of the road, so I’ve decided to approach him via his writing, via the books that were most important to me as a young writer.
* * *
We were raised on my mother’s voice, going big/small as she read Dennis Lee and Shel Silverstein’s poems, and on my uncle’s Playboys in their warped cupboard at the cabin in northwestern Ontario.
At the time, I loved my mother’s delight in reading the poems, page after page at bedtime, laughing with us, leading the laughter.
Now, I also love that she didn’t mind us rifling through the pile of girly mags, as long as we put them back when we were done. That she told us it was okay, how warm and full we felt, the tingly sprawl.
(We were great humpers of pillows, my mum says.)
So: long summer afternoons looking at naked ladies, feathered hair and red lips. My sister and I liked the cartoons best, we agreed. We liked the wryness, even as we knew the jokes weren’t for us, exactly.
All of which is to say is that for me, the roundness of Frank Newfeld’s illustrations and the local musicality of Dennis Lee’s poems in Garbage Delight and Alligator Pie somehow met the endless parade of cartoon-y nipples in the Playboy cartoons and made Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1970).
From the first page, I recognized Hazard Lepage. He was familiar, big and small at once, like my dad and my uncle and my various ‘uncles.’
At the cabin, on vacation, my dad and uncle would incite the kids to play lopsided game of hide and seek. They’d go hide somewhere in the bush with a beer in each pocket and we’d have to find them, which wasn’t hard, given that they’d eventually forget they were supposed to be hiding and would laugh and shout, telling stories, telling the kids to get them more beer. And then they’d ‘hide’ again.
My uncle peeing discreetly off the side of the fishboat. And, later, buttoned-up, showing me how to fillet a pickerel. He thought I was silly when I held the milky crystal I dug out of their eyes up to the light, but he let me do it. What I remember now is the ruined shimmer of scales on the cutting board and his knife, how maniacally sharp it was.
But that recognition wasn’t just about my male relatives, it was about me, too.
I was in second-year university when I first encountered Hazard (and, by extension, Kroetsch) and just starting to move in and out of relationships fluidly, gauging looks and gestures, learning about desire and inevitability but also about consequences, especially those consequences that were particularly female.
I didn’t-want what Hazard didn’t-want: kids or a real job. He wanted to breed the ideal horse, despite the fact that were very few horses left working on farms. I wanted to somehow figure out how to write for a living, despite that I was firmly and irrevocably female.
And so Hazard Lepage’s tomcatting, his determination to do what (and who) he wanted looked familiar, even if it wasn’t exactly for me.
What you understood, as a reader, was that Hazard was a hazard, to himself and to those around him. You wanted him to marry Martha and have kids to shout at through the bush AND you also wanted him to keep wandering, his pecker hanging out while he looked for a woman/mare.
I wasn’t anywhere near having my own child the first time I read The Studhorse Man, but I recognized my foolish parents in it and the choices they made for me and away from me. I recognized its myth-making, its snorting blue horse and blizzard and pile of bones from my time at the cabin, its painted turtles and shotgun shells and rock, but also from other books.
