…again with Ariel Gordon! First we storm the capital–Ottawa October 5, then we take Toronto Oct. 7! We will be reading with local poets: Christine McNair, Pearl Pirie, Damian Rogers, and Melanie Janisse.

Ottawa, 7:30 -9pm

Location: Collected Works Bookstore

1224 Wellington St. w.

Do come! It’ll be great fun!
…
* * *

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. She has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press), and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She recently won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Christine McNair’s work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, CV2, the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Descant and a few other places. Her poems were featured in Dalhousie Blues, a collaborative project with Sean Moreland, Jamie Bradley and Caleb JW Brasset (ex-hubris press, 2009). Her work was also included in the Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House, 2010) and Rogue Stimulus (Mansfield Press, 2010) anthologies. She is one of the hosts of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes program and works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie’s been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010), her first trade poetry collection, follows years of a small voice gaining in strength, and in volume, through so much subtle activity and quiet disconnect that by the time she was noticed, she was already everywhere, and already a confident voice. Her chapbooks include over my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010) and boathouse (above/ground, 2008). She blogs at pesbo, Humanyms, and a few other places. Poems have appeared thru dandelion, ditch, PRECIPICe, Dusie, 17 Seconds, 1cent, and Ottawater.

Toronto, 7:30-11pm

Location: Holy Oak Cafe

1241 Bloor St. W.

Damian Rogers was born and raised in suburban Detroit. She has published poems in various North American magazines, including Brick, The Walrus, Matrix, Maisonneuve, and MoonLit. Her first collection, Paper Radio, came out with ECW Press in October 2009 and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Rogers lives in Toronto.

Melanie Janisse is a native of Windsor, Ontario. She holds degrees Communications from Concordia University and Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Now a resident of Toronto, Melanie keeps active as a visual artist, poet, designer and shop owner. Orioles at the Oranges is her first collection of poetry.

Many thanks to the League of Canadian Poets, Palimpsest Press, and Coteau Books, who have enabled our swanning about the country, books in hand.

…in case you’re interested in learning some new or old things about poetry, I’ll be teaching a course this fall at the University of Regina Extension. Sure, poetry but we’ll be doing workshopping, line breaks, metaphor, some basics, some topics, some discussion. Eight classes of fun. And of course, we’ll be learning something about poetry. I hope you’re as up for this as I am!

… in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, and I like it! Cool too to be reviewed alongside established writer Allan Safarik!

…this time with me!

…is sometimes what I believe happens when I begin to write. I dig out the words I want and put them together, one piece at a time. I often think I should take a sculpting class, that I would enjoy working with my hands.

I suppose I could say that I’ve sculpted many a head of hair over the past twenty some odd years. I’ve officially retired from that profession now, although I do find the time to hassle my friends about how their locks look upon occasion.

And because words and sculpting often go together, here’s something for you to ponder.

…mini review!

Short but sweet.

of Interruptions in Glass can be found here.

…So, just on a whim I googled the question: how many songs with the word “want” in them, and of course, there really is no answer that I could find, only other questions. How many songs with the word “sun?” How many songs with the word “cherry?”

And I suppose no answer is better than the huge list I generated looking up the word “want” on youtube. And when I think about it, being left wanting more is the best part of desire.

Not to leave you in the dark about wanting to know when you can hear me read, here’s an overview of my brief western tour with the lovely Ariel Gordon:

Calgary
Monday, April 19 ~7:30pm
Pages on Kensington

Edmonton
Tuesday, April 20 ~ 7-9pm
Audreys Bookshoppe

Athabasca
Wednesday, April 21 ~7:30pm
Alice B. Donohue Library

Lethbridge
Friday, April 23 7:30pm
Henotic

Eastend
Saturday, April 24
Wallace Stegner House
Afternoon Tea (Time TBA)

Wanna come out and play? (Insert wanting song tune here).

…Sure, that’s pretty vague, and yes, I’m at work working away on grant applications. I have 15 minutes of break time, and what do I do? Work away at poetry matters. I’ve updated the Vertigo web page, frustratingly enough. I’ve discovered pages aren’t really a good thing to have on a widget bar as they can’t be categorized. And of course, then my brain went down the path of categories, and why labelling is such a sticky matter (heh).

So, to get to the point in less than 15 minutes. I’m labelling myself as a poet this year with my second book of poetry coming out from Coteau in less than one month. I’m reading at some fancy places, some great places, some wonderful places, and with a terrific poet. I’ll try to post more on the upcoming category of poetry readings, thus categorizing the world with the label called “me.”

Watch for me in Saskatoon at Lydias on April 11, 2010 at 8pm, and in Regina, April 12, 2010, 7:30.

Time’s up!

…a quote from Robert Kroetsch.

So, I haven’t written much lately. Not on the blog, not on my poetry, although I’ll admit to having written about 300 emails in the past few days; however, it’s not for the lack of thinking about it–though I’ll admit I didn’t try too hard either. Tonight I had a moment of exhuberance, the urge to write a blog post after reading a thoughtful post on Brenda Schmidt’s blog about the long poem/short poem from a SWG session this fall. Funny thing is, after reading Brenda’s post I was certain I had written down exactly what Kroetsch had said, but after re-reading my notes, I wasn’t so sure anymore. It wasn’t until I had re-read the notes, and began to write this post about what I thought I knew that it began to click. In my notes I wrote: “failure of the long poem—not like this” (and I underlined “like this”). And tonight it really registered, how I thought I knew at the time what he was saying, and I wrote what I knew, thinking then that I knew what he meant, but in the end, it was/is impossible, because I don’t have it. And that’s what he was saying. The moment we have it is the moment it slips away, and we fail. But, I’m comforted by the simple fact that we “dare to fall off the page.” And that keeps us going.