Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 60

Arman Kazemi interviews me and others about Digital Poetry

CBC’s Arman Kazemi interviewed me, Nikki Reimer, Christen Thomas, Sonnet L’Abbe, and others about digital poetry. I ended up relating some of my opinions back to my book Ex Machina, which I consider digital poetry although it has no digital edition.

Finally! Haiku Horoscopes site back up, thanks to Ryan Hill

Thanks to Ryan Hill for fixing my Haiku Horoscopes site. Apparently, I screwed it up when I redid this site at one point. Anyway, the site is still out-of-date but you can search through the archives and so forth. I’ll be revamping the site this summer, so let me know if there is anything you specifically want to see on it!

“Shelf Esteem” Love

It disturbs me how much I love Emily M. Keeler’s column “Shelf Esteem” over at Hazlitt. As somebody who constantly reorganizes or simply stares at his library when he should, in fact, be writing (alternately enthused or depressed by shelves sagging beneath the weight of the literary tradition), it’s a great break from my own shelves. Whenever I am in another person’s home, I seek out and fondle their bookshelves, voyeuristically, and so Keeler has wormed her way into my heart with this feature. If you haven’t already checked it out, then check it out. It’s supercool.

Review of Joe Hill’s N0S4A2 in the Winnipeg Free Press

The online version of the review is missing the first paragraph — until it is fixed, here you go, followed by the link to the remainder of the review.

“What would you do for a lifetime pass to a place where every morning is Christmas and unhappiness is against the law?”

(read the rest of the review here)

Creative Writing 101 with: Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age)

[I hate when a singer says] ‘I wanna tell you something.’ And you’re like, ‘What the hell’s “something”? Why don’t you tell me what it is?’

(from the Mohr Stories podcast)

Occasional Poem Upon Reading Elizabeth Bachinsky’s New Book The Hottest Summer in Recorded History

I say house

when what I mean is apartment

too.

Starnino vs. Ball (well, not really)

I’ve become aware of an odd impression people seem to have, the impression that Carmine Starnino and I are opposed wills. To be sure, I disagree with Starnino about many things. Most of those things involve modern poetry. Anyway, in part because of an interview and a review that mimics Starnino’s rhetorical bombast, people seem to think that I have it out for Starnino, and that I disagree with him on everything.

In fact, I agree with most of what Starnino writes — except for his views on the so-called “avant-garde” (I have come to prefer the term “post-avant” from Gregory Betts’s wonderful Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations). Anyway, what gets me thinking about Starnino today is the recent online publication of his essay “Steampunk Zone” by Lemon Hound, which includes mention of myself and Clockfire. This online reprint completes a little “arc” of sorts of pieces by Starnino and myself that (in my view) can be fruitfully read together to delineate where I stand from where Starnino seems to stand. I think careful readers will find that we stand closer than one might expect, although with important moments where we jet in opposite directions.

So, without further ado, here’s a reading list for you:

* Maisonneuve publishes Carmine Starnino’s essay on bpNichol, “Captain Poetry” — This essay reviews BookThug’s republication of The Captain Poetry Poems Complete by bpNichol

* My talk with Maurice Mierau, also in Maisonneuve, responding to Starnino’s essay on Nichol

* Lemon Hound reprints Carmine Starnino’s essay “Steampunk Zone” — This essay also appears as the introduction to The Best Canadian Poetry (in English) 2012, edited by Carmine Starnino, which includes my poem “Salvador Dali Lama” (reprinted from Branch) … I was very impressed, when Starnino was compiling this “Best of,” that he contacted me to ask what publications he should read to make sure he didn’t overlook the “best” experimental writing. I haven’t had time to read through the collection yet, but I did notice that a longlist at the back includes work by derek beaulieu, Louis Cabri, and Rachel Zolf — although he doesn’t actually include them in the shortlist/collection, this is still an acknowledgment that would likely surprise many.

* Those two essays by Starnino are included in his latest collection of prose, Lazy Bastardism. Maurice Mierau, my co-reviewer in the above interview, asked me to review the collection for The Winnipeg Review, and so my review of Lazy Bastardism is also online.

Judging from the limited response my review has received, only Maurice Mierau, Sina Queyras, and Carmine Starnino himself seem to have actually gleaned that it is a rather generous review. Starnino sent me a nice note about it — what I always say about Starnino, who I’ve never met, is that although I disagree with him often and in public, I get along with him in private/online insofar as we are acquainted, in large part because I never get the impression that he is about to cry over a criticism. I have never taken criticism personally (although, to be fair, I have been lucky with reviews for the most part), and so I appreciate that quality in others, especially since hurt feelings are too often flown like flags in Canadian literature.

I was in Calgary recently having supper with my friend derek beaulieu and he noted that although he is hardly a fan of Starnino’s in any way, he appreciates (in a general way) the Starnino project of boldly saying what you think about that poetry stuff. beaulieu noted that the trend among experimentally-minded reviewers/authors is to quote, quote, quote, and so we find out what Derrida thinks but not what they think. You can’t accuse Starnino of saying what somebody else thinks, no matter what you might think of his opinion, that’s for sure.

Anyway, a reading list of sorts for the five people who actually care what Starnino thinks of Ball and vice versa.

Thank You, Manitoba!

April Poetry Reviews

My monthly poetry review column is online at the Winnipeg Free Press, this month featuring:

* Water Damage by Peter Norman
* Glossolalia by Marita Dachsel
* Archive of the Undressed by Jeanette Lynes
* How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir by Amber Dawn

Steven W. Beattie on The Politics of Knives

An extremely adept reading of The Politics of Knives by Steven W. Beattie has appeared on his site, That Shakespearean Rag. He does an especially nice job of contextualizing the poem “Psycho” both within a history of film analyses and according to the avant-garde techniques I mimic. I am an oddity as a writer in that I often mimic avant-garde techniques (in this case, the “cut-up” technique) rather than actually executing them. I also tend to be densely allusive, and Beattie does a good job of teasing out some of the instances when I allude within and across the text, which other reviewers have overlooked or at least not written about:

The opening three poems form a triptych that serves as a kind of invocation to the muse, also seeding the ground for what is to come. The insistence on knives reappears in “Psycho,” and again in the title sequence, in which words and phrases have been blacked out, literally excised as though having been sliced through. The blacked-out portions call to mind redacted government documents, an association made explicit in the poem’s last line: “What to do when the sheep elect wolves.” (This is also an example of Ball ratcheting up the tension in the language by substituting a declarative statement for what would more commonly be cast as a question.) The wolves here echo the “chiselling” teeth of an early poem, and prefigure the book’s final image, of the mythical Cerberus, “that most terrible of dogs.”