Stuart Ross's Blog, page 3

Unboxing The Book of Grief and Hamburgers

Over and out.

The Elements of the Short Story

Nope, this isn't an instructional blog post. "The Elements of the Short Story" is a short story of mine that appears in the new issue of the Vancouver-based lit magazine sub-Terrain. I think it might be my best story ever (though that isn't necessarily saying a lot—depends on your perspective!).

This story is nuts.

I am also pretty excited to be in an issue of the mag that also contains work by my friends Clint Burnham, Evie Christie, Kevin Spenst, Carlyn Zwarenstein, Tamara Faith-Berger, Matthew Firth, and Lillian Necakov.

That's the closest I've had to being at a party since Covid descended upon us.

News coming soon about my third short-story collection, coming out in fall 2022.

As they say in Xanadu,

Over and out.

My 2022 New Year's Poem

 I don't know how long I've been writing a poem on New Year's Day. I do remember that my holiday tradition has its roots in a cardboard leaflet I sent out to friends and contacts probably in the late 1980s. The front cover of the first one read, "Seizing Cretins!" Gradually that morphed into a New Year's Day poem that I sent out through Canada Post, and I eventually switched to email when my recipient list got really long and expensive.

For the seventh year, Conan Tobias of Taddle Creek has asked me to record my poem over the phone and posted it up on the magazine's blog. Here it is.

And if you'd like to read along…

LIFE BEGINS WHEN YOU BEGIN THE BEGUINE

 

for Charles North and Ron Padgett

 

A pancake of snow slides down the side of the building.

It passes floor after floor. A pigeon and a blackbird

stop in midair to watch it and soon get bored.

Someday we will be able to talk on the phone

and see each other like we are on TV. I’m not kidding.

Someday we will each have a real television 

right in our own living room and we will watch

Jack Benny and Edith Piaf circle each other,

masked. Plus there will be ads for cigarettes and bras.

Someday we will have a rectangle with four wheels

that we can move around in. At night, it will sleep

in our “driveway.” Don’t forget to put the top up!

The sidewalk peers up and sees a pancake of snow

approaching. For the first time it experiences suspense.

I pronounce every word as if I have no mouth.

I keep all your letters in the credenza and end

all my letters with a cadenza. O beloved chunk

of geography, please put Ljubljana in my backyard.

We can ride up and down the funicular.

Someday a stack of pages will become attached and

declared a book. As James Tate once said,

“My cuticles are a mess.” Inspired, I wrote

a Broadway musical about cuticles, choreographed

by Busby Berkeley. It closed after just one day

but changed the lives of those who saw it.

Look. Someday we’ll understand each other. Someday

we will learn how to grieve. Someday we’ll

realize what happened. Just sit back and wait 

till the pancake hits the pavement.

 

Stuart Ross

Cobourg, 1 January 2022

Over and out.

I read some poems for Peter F. Yacht Club

I don't know why Ottawa poet and compulsive publisher rob mclennan calls his annual event and anthology Peter F. Yacht Club. Maybe he even told me and I forgot.

Anyway, in this season of surging Covid cases, there will of course be no Peter F. Yacht Club reading at the Carlton Tavern on Armstrong Street, a scuzzy, vegetarian-unfriendly, but otherwise friendly bar that rob has made into an Ottawa literary landmark.

So rob invited a bunch of past PFYC contributors to record short videos so he could assemble a video mag this year. I took part, reading three poems from the past year or two. Actually, I wrote one of the poems just a few days ago, during an insomniacal night of despondency.

You can find my readings, and readings by many other fine poets, right over here.

I've been a very bad blogger in recent years. A lot of pretty good things have happened for me literary-wise, even as my extremely modest star fades, perhaps because I'm old now and irrelevant, perhaps because I left Toronto, perhaps because my writing has gone downhill.

Wishing you all well in 2022.

Over and out.

I'm reading in the Lit Balm Surrealist Poetry Extravaganza!

I was invited recently to take part in the Lit Balm Surrealist Poetry Extravaganza! Lit Balm is one of my two or three favourite online reading series, and it's hosted from the US and Australia.

Yesterday was the first instalment of this festival of the surreal: Fantastic readings by Dean Young (oh my gawd, Dean Young!!), Clayre Benzadón, Dan Raphael, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, and Dominique Hecq. A panel included Young, along with Andrew Joron and the legendary Penelope Rosemont (who is also reading in today's instalment).

It's an extraordinary honour to have been invited by Lit Balm organizers Jonathan Penton, Cassandra Atherton, and Mark Vincenz.

I'll be reading on August 7 at 5 pm EDT. It's intimidating! But I'll do it!

Look forward also to readings by Paul Hoover, Maxine Chernoff, Pierre Joris, Charles Bernstein, and so many more!

Over and out.

Vax Populi: I read with Alice Burdick

I read online on June 22 with one of my favourite people and one of my favourite poets! That'd be Alice Burdick, of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, whose first four full-length poetry collections I edited. Her most recent book is Deportment, a selected volume edited by Alessandro Porco. (I suggested the project to him!)

We called our reading Vax Populi. And there will be more Vax Populi readings!

Over and out.

Reading at Poetry With Pakriti, July 3, 9:30 am EDT

 On Saturday, July 3, at 9:30 am EDT, I'm reading for the wonderful series Poetry With Prakriti, hosted by the Prakriti Foundation in Chennai, India.

It happens, of course, on Zoom.

I believe I'll be the third Canadian poet featured, following Ayesha Chatterjee and George Elliott Clarke in recent months.

I'll be reading a selection of new and older poems, and then the host and I will have a chat.

You can register for this reading right here.

Over and out.

For those wanting to study poetry for the first time…

Once again, I am teaching Poetry: Introduction at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies. I just finished my first semester leading this online course last week, and it went even better than I'd hoped. I got fantastic feedback from the students, many of whom felt their whole view of poetry had exponentially expanded.

The course is based on 10 asynchronous lessons, and bolstered by four (I might change it to five) live online workshops.

Within the loose restrictions of the prescribed learning outcomes, I was able to create the course and choose the textbooks and other readings myself.

You can take Poetry: Introduction from anywhere in the world (though if you're in Dubai, as one of last semester's students was, those live workshops will start at 3 in the morning!).

The next semester begins on May 10. Here's all the info.

Over and out.

Ah yes, my halcyon days…

Just a year ago, I appeared in this multiple-choice question produced by the Halifax Public Library. It remains a glorious marker of my noble achievements as a Canadian writer.

Over and out.

Motel of the Opposable Thumbs on the ReLit Long Shortlist!

 The ReLit Awards are catching up on four years worth of awards, and I'm so pleased to see that my last solo poetry book, Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, made their 2020 Long Shortlist. There are a lot of really good books on that list, including Mark Laba's Inflatable Life, which I edited for my Feed Dog Book imprint at Anvil Press, and James Hawes's first full-length collection, Breakfast with a Heron, from my alma mater, Mansfield Press.

I've had a few books on the ReLit lists in the past. Damned if I can remember them all now. But I do remember that Buying Cigarettes for the Dog won in the short story category back in 2010.

A couple of other entries in this batch of ReLit catch-up awards are exciting for me, both of them also Feed Dog Books: the outrageous The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent, by Steve Venright. and the sublime The Headless Man, by Peter Dubé.

Over and out!