Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 92
November 7, 2010
flare
FortWhyte Alive, Winnipeg, MB. November 7, 2010.
* * *
Not the forest, I know. But within shreiking distance. And I really like this shot...
November 4, 2010
The Keystone of Canadian Poetry
So CV2 is middle-aged. But I'm two years older. Which makes me middle-aged +2.
In any event, the Winnipeg-based lit mag is/has published two special editions celebrating its oldness.
They've also done a country-wide tour, featuring past contributors from Halifax, Toronto, and Vancouver.
It was very nice to see that Jeannette Lynes (who edited Hump) was reading in Hfx and Bren Simmers (a fellow Sage Hill attendee in 2003) in Van.
The Winnipeg event will be November 20 and features eight of nine or Winnipeg's best poets. And you should go.
This isn't a completely altruistic mention, as I've a poem in the second issue - with several dozen other poets - but still. Go.
* * *
CV2 35th Anniversary Launch
When: Saturday, November 20. 7 pm
Where: Aqua Books (274 Garry Street)
Cost: FREE!
Contemporary Verse 2 is celebrating 35 years of publishing fine poetry and critical writing with the launch of two Special Editions, and a reading by 9 Winnipeg poets, each a key contributor to CV2 over the years. Join us for an evening of poetry, prizes and celebration on Saturday, November 20 at 7:00pm.
Readers for the evening include Allison Calder, Maurice Mierau, Charles Leblanc, Rosanna Deerchild, Meira Cook, George Amabile, Dennis Cooley and Sarah Klassen.
In addition, there will be an introduction by editor Clarise Foster, and copies of both Special Editions will be available.
About the Special Editions:
CV2: The Early Years explores the first ten years of the magazine, including writing by Roo Borson, Marilyn Bowering, Patrick Friesen and 26 others, as well as original, type-written correspondence between once regional editor bpNichol and the CV2 editorial collective. Also featured are a series of lino cuts by contributing artist Arthur Adamson.
CV2: The Keystone of Canadian Poetry turns 35 continues where the first edition leaves off, with a look at CV2 magazine's contribution to literary arts in Canada over the past 25 years. Over 75 of Canada's best-loved poets are featured in this issue, both French and English, including all the poets from this year's Coast to Coast Reading Tour.
In any event, the Winnipeg-based lit mag is/has published two special editions celebrating its oldness. They've also done a country-wide tour, featuring past contributors from Halifax, Toronto, and Vancouver.
It was very nice to see that Jeannette Lynes (who edited Hump) was reading in Hfx and Bren Simmers (a fellow Sage Hill attendee in 2003) in Van.
The Winnipeg event will be November 20 and features eight of nine or Winnipeg's best poets. And you should go.
This isn't a completely altruistic mention, as I've a poem in the second issue - with several dozen other poets - but still. Go.
* * *
CV2 35th Anniversary Launch
When: Saturday, November 20. 7 pm
Where: Aqua Books (274 Garry Street)
Cost: FREE!
Contemporary Verse 2 is celebrating 35 years of publishing fine poetry and critical writing with the launch of two Special Editions, and a reading by 9 Winnipeg poets, each a key contributor to CV2 over the years. Join us for an evening of poetry, prizes and celebration on Saturday, November 20 at 7:00pm.
Readers for the evening include Allison Calder, Maurice Mierau, Charles Leblanc, Rosanna Deerchild, Meira Cook, George Amabile, Dennis Cooley and Sarah Klassen.
In addition, there will be an introduction by editor Clarise Foster, and copies of both Special Editions will be available.
About the Special Editions:
CV2: The Early Years explores the first ten years of the magazine, including writing by Roo Borson, Marilyn Bowering, Patrick Friesen and 26 others, as well as original, type-written correspondence between once regional editor bpNichol and the CV2 editorial collective. Also featured are a series of lino cuts by contributing artist Arthur Adamson.
CV2: The Keystone of Canadian Poetry turns 35 continues where the first edition leaves off, with a look at CV2 magazine's contribution to literary arts in Canada over the past 25 years. Over 75 of Canada's best-loved poets are featured in this issue, both French and English, including all the poets from this year's Coast to Coast Reading Tour.
November 2, 2010
Regina, SK: October 4
Vertigo Reading Series
John Toone, Jonathan Ball, Ariel Gordon, Gillian Harding Russell
The Vertigo Reading Series is a platform for emerging and established writers in any genre to share their work with an audience and sell their books in sunny Regina, Saskatchewan. It takes place once or twice a month with the exception of July and August, generally with four readers per event.
* * *
We stumbled upon Cafe Orange Izakaya, the venue for our reading, while walking the 13th Ave neighbourhood, where, fatally, everything was closed.
John pointed down the street and kept on saying, "That's open. Right there. The patio has people one it."
And lo and behold, the Vertigo poster was on the door.
So we sat on the patio, in the sun, and had Korean food. Which is really best case scenario for me.
After some backyard chit chat and dinner at Regina poet Tracy Hamon's place - where I was staying, while the boys were crazily meant to drive back to Winnipeg after the reading - we headed over to the venue.
My favourite part was the couple that was trapped behind me. I paused and asked them, over the mic, if they'd like to escape. They graciously emerged from their niche and I kept reading, to the accompaniment of the audience member who laughed at all my bad jokes and small vulgarities.
After ditching the boys, we had a last drink/nibble at La Bodega, which is my new Regina tradition.
Saskatoon, SK: October 3
TIP Triple Header ft. Jonathan Ball, John Toone and Ariel Gordon.
Featuring established poets from across Canada and further diversifying the stage with a cascade of local emerging poets, Tonight it's Poetry (TIP) is Saskatoon`s only weekly poetry series and performance series of its kind in Saskatchewan.
* * *
If Brandon was the land of plenty, Saskatoon was all scarcity. Except that it all worked out and we were shown great - if last minute - hospitality.
We drove straight from Brandon to Saskatoon, thinking we'd get something to eat once we arrived. But then nothing was open, not even the Bulk Cheese Store we joshed about and then seriously considered patronizing.
We had to split up, the boys staying with a friend of Jonathan's and myself with the lovely/talented Bernice Friesen.
Which meant proper Irish tea when we waited and WAITED for the boys to come pick me up the next morning.
The highlight of the reading was when we each read each other's poem. I read JB's Pomegranate poem from Clockfire, which I thought was too perfect, given that I almost wound up with one on my cover.
Did I mention I really like my spiky cover? I do! I do!
Brandon, MB: October 2
Poetry Explosion (i.e. our workshop + reading) was co-sponsored by THE HAWKWEED LITERARY FORUM as part of SEE, dir. by Di Brandt, Brandon University Canada Research chair in Literature and Creative Writing, together with Dale Lakevold, BU Creative Writing program coordinator, and the Brandon Folk Music and Art Society, dir. by Shandra McNeill, as part of WORD@FOLKFEST Winter Workshop Series, with generous support from the League of Canadian Poets.
* * *
We had a splendid time in Brandon. The events were well attended, included snacks and they'd even ordered in books. Which they implored us to sign!
Yea, Brandon was the land of plenty, at least when it came to this tour. We ate well - sushi, steak/shrimp - we each got our own suite at the hotel, and the hotel bar had doubles for $1 more than singles!
The only mishap was that the front desk missed my request for a wake-up call. Which meant that I woke up at 9...and was supposed to be at the lobby, packed-up and ready to go, at 9.
The boys were merciless.
Brandon: October 2
Our workshop + reading was co-sponsored by THE HAWKWEED LITERARY FORUM as part of SEE, dir. by Di Brandt, Brandon University Canada Research chair in Literature and Creative Writing, together with Dale Lakevold, BU Creative Writing program coordinator, and the Brandon Folk Music and Art Society, dir. by Shandra McNeill, as part of WORD@FOLKFEST Winter Workshop Series, with generous support from the League of Canadian Poets.
Which is a good mouthful, I know, but we had a splendid time in Brandon. The events were well attended, included snacks and they'd even ordered in books.
Brandon was the land of plenty, at least when it came to this tour. We ate well - sushi, steak/shrimp - we each got our own suite at the hotel, and the hotel bar had doubles for $1 more than singles!
The only mishap was that the front desk missed my request for a wake-up call. Which meant that I woke up at 9...and was supposed to be at the lobby, packed-up and ready to go, at 9.
The boys were merciless.
October 29, 2010
Manifesto-ing
So I ran from work at Aqua Books yesterday to attend the launch of the second volume of Alchemical Press' Imagination Manifesto.
I was in a writing group with Greg Chomichuk - the artist/writer behind Alchemical Press - the summer before I got knocked up, and I'm really impressed with what he's come up with since then, what he's trying to do, what he IS doing.
At the launch, he did a exercize with audience members called the Exquisite Corpse.
He had different people draw the head, torso and legs of a monster on pieces of paper, which he then collected for use in the next issue of the Imagination Manifesto.
Which is both clever AND interactive, to my mind.
Except I was too tired to play along and so just sat there with my launch wine, watching Greg badger people into drawing just one more set of legs or another head...and even making sure that the penis-head someone drew wasn't given to his high school students for completion.
And then he picked one corpse at random and drew it on the canvas that was sitting on an easel next to the podium.
He drew this monster in five minutes. (The skyline was already present...) Which is hateful, I know. Especially when you consider that the stories underlying the images are just as strong.
When I went up to get my book 'signed' - which means both a signature and a sketch in graphic novel-land - Greg squinted at me.
"Do you want a hero or a monster?" he asked.
Given that my book title was on the cover as a part of the blurb I'd given them via my participation on the jury for Best First Book at last year's Manitoba Book Awards - and that my book is mostly about tits - there was only one possible answer to that question.
"I want a tit monster!" I said.
And that is what I got.
I also got really drunk very quickly on launch wine, given that I had run straight from work and not had dinner. (They had eight bottles of wine for the event! Eight! So the four glasses I drank was not so entirely gluttonous...)
Yay! Fun!
I was in a writing group with Greg Chomichuk - the artist/writer behind Alchemical Press - the summer before I got knocked up, and I'm really impressed with what he's come up with since then, what he's trying to do, what he IS doing.At the launch, he did a exercize with audience members called the Exquisite Corpse.
He had different people draw the head, torso and legs of a monster on pieces of paper, which he then collected for use in the next issue of the Imagination Manifesto.
Which is both clever AND interactive, to my mind.
Except I was too tired to play along and so just sat there with my launch wine, watching Greg badger people into drawing just one more set of legs or another head...and even making sure that the penis-head someone drew wasn't given to his high school students for completion.
And then he picked one corpse at random and drew it on the canvas that was sitting on an easel next to the podium.
He drew this monster in five minutes. (The skyline was already present...) Which is hateful, I know. Especially when you consider that the stories underlying the images are just as strong.
When I went up to get my book 'signed' - which means both a signature and a sketch in graphic novel-land - Greg squinted at me.
"Do you want a hero or a monster?" he asked.
Given that my book title was on the cover as a part of the blurb I'd given them via my participation on the jury for Best First Book at last year's Manitoba Book Awards - and that my book is mostly about tits - there was only one possible answer to that question.
"I want a tit monster!" I said.
And that is what I got.
I also got really drunk very quickly on launch wine, given that I had run straight from work and not had dinner. (They had eight bottles of wine for the event! Eight! So the four glasses I drank was not so entirely gluttonous...)
Yay! Fun!
October 23, 2010
Gary Barwin collection firmly in experimental tradition
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon
HAMILTON writer Gary Barwin's latest collection, The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House Books, 96 pages, $17), is firmly in the experimental tradition.
Even though Barwin has supplemented what he calls his "old-school English language technology" (i.e. writing) with poetry-generating software, it is important to note that this is not a dispassionate surrealism.
There's a real depth of feeling and a surprising lyricism in these poems, such as "Inside H":
"we mist the sky with our blue plum lungs / make heaven heron-dark with our breathing / fog the limits with spirit and blue exhalation."
Those who enjoy playing connect-the-dots can follow this poem back to Vancouver's bpNichol, who grew up in the H section of Winnipeg's Wildwood Park.
Literary sleuthing aside, this is a collection for both the heart and the head. Highly recommended.
* * *
You could argue that every poet has a crow poem in them. It turns out that Winnipeg's Ken Kowal had a book's worth.
Though he has been writing and publishing for many years, Gimp Crow (Turnstone Press, 70 pages, $17) is his first full collection.
That maturity shows in Gimp Crow's dissonant musicality, its playfulness with language and structure that's undercut but also underlined by the poet's short, tight stanzas.
See his "parting shot": "Bad bye Gimp Crow / Un great full duck / Go wander coop Blow / Get lightning struck."
In addition to its clever anthropomorphism, Gimp Crow also explores the age-old exhortation "Go west, young man," which is as relevant now as it was when Manitoba was founded.
Which means, of course, travel poetry from the point of view of a crow. And other strange pleasures.
* * *
Toronto poet/prof Catherine Graham's latest book, Winterkill (Insomniac Press, 64 pages, $12), is the last of a trilogy written from the bottom of a water-filled limestone quarry.
Given that the quarry adjoined Graham's childhood home - and that she lost both her parents as a young woman - it should come as no surprise that the depths she's been plumbing here are largely those of grief.
And so, like grieving, working through this poetry is a slightly irrational process.
For instance, Graham invests the colours red and green with layers of meaning to the point that it verges on self-induced synesthesia.
But the repetition of this and other motifs (wings, water) is incantatory - and effective.
* * *
Victoria resident Gary Geddes has published more than 35 books over his long and distinguished career.
His new collection of poetry, Swimming Ginger (Goose Lane, 96 pages, $20), consists of ekphrastic poetry based on the Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll, an artwork from approximately 1127 AD that depicts the city of Bianliang (modern-day Kaifeng in northeast China).
Compliments are due Fredericton-based Goose Lane, which it seems has spared no expense in publishing it, including full-colour reproductions of the scroll.
French flaps notwithstanding, Swimming Ginger is specifically written from the point of the view of people depicted on the scroll.
As such, it follows the same modus operandi as Geddes' The Terracotta Army. That book - originally published in 1984 and reissued this fall by Goose Lane - was written from the point of view of a handful of the more than 8,000 individually sculpted life-sized statues interred with the first emperor of China.
Swimming Ginger takes the conceit one step further than its predecessor, however, in that Geddes gives the scroll's creator house room.
He then permits himself a long poem in his own voice on perils of life and art-making that impishly slips in and out of the vernacular of the other poems:
"This is neither ballad nor hymn, / my friend. 'Song' among the classics / refers to dancing, so get up // off your butt and shake those buns."
Winnipegger Ariel Gordon's first book of poetry, Hump, was published this past spring.
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon
HAMILTON writer Gary Barwin's latest collection, The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House Books, 96 pages, $17), is firmly in the experimental tradition.Even though Barwin has supplemented what he calls his "old-school English language technology" (i.e. writing) with poetry-generating software, it is important to note that this is not a dispassionate surrealism.
There's a real depth of feeling and a surprising lyricism in these poems, such as "Inside H":
"we mist the sky with our blue plum lungs / make heaven heron-dark with our breathing / fog the limits with spirit and blue exhalation."
Those who enjoy playing connect-the-dots can follow this poem back to Vancouver's bpNichol, who grew up in the H section of Winnipeg's Wildwood Park.
Literary sleuthing aside, this is a collection for both the heart and the head. Highly recommended.
* * *
You could argue that every poet has a crow poem in them. It turns out that Winnipeg's Ken Kowal had a book's worth.
Though he has been writing and publishing for many years, Gimp Crow (Turnstone Press, 70 pages, $17) is his first full collection.
That maturity shows in Gimp Crow's dissonant musicality, its playfulness with language and structure that's undercut but also underlined by the poet's short, tight stanzas.
See his "parting shot": "Bad bye Gimp Crow / Un great full duck / Go wander coop Blow / Get lightning struck."
In addition to its clever anthropomorphism, Gimp Crow also explores the age-old exhortation "Go west, young man," which is as relevant now as it was when Manitoba was founded.
Which means, of course, travel poetry from the point of view of a crow. And other strange pleasures.
* * *
Toronto poet/prof Catherine Graham's latest book, Winterkill (Insomniac Press, 64 pages, $12), is the last of a trilogy written from the bottom of a water-filled limestone quarry.
Given that the quarry adjoined Graham's childhood home - and that she lost both her parents as a young woman - it should come as no surprise that the depths she's been plumbing here are largely those of grief.
And so, like grieving, working through this poetry is a slightly irrational process.
For instance, Graham invests the colours red and green with layers of meaning to the point that it verges on self-induced synesthesia.
But the repetition of this and other motifs (wings, water) is incantatory - and effective.
* * *
Victoria resident Gary Geddes has published more than 35 books over his long and distinguished career.
His new collection of poetry, Swimming Ginger (Goose Lane, 96 pages, $20), consists of ekphrastic poetry based on the Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll, an artwork from approximately 1127 AD that depicts the city of Bianliang (modern-day Kaifeng in northeast China).
Compliments are due Fredericton-based Goose Lane, which it seems has spared no expense in publishing it, including full-colour reproductions of the scroll.
French flaps notwithstanding, Swimming Ginger is specifically written from the point of the view of people depicted on the scroll.
As such, it follows the same modus operandi as Geddes' The Terracotta Army. That book - originally published in 1984 and reissued this fall by Goose Lane - was written from the point of view of a handful of the more than 8,000 individually sculpted life-sized statues interred with the first emperor of China.
Swimming Ginger takes the conceit one step further than its predecessor, however, in that Geddes gives the scroll's creator house room.
He then permits himself a long poem in his own voice on perils of life and art-making that impishly slips in and out of the vernacular of the other poems:
"This is neither ballad nor hymn, / my friend. 'Song' among the classics / refers to dancing, so get up // off your butt and shake those buns."
Winnipegger Ariel Gordon's first book of poetry, Hump, was published this past spring.
