Over the Starnbergersee / with a shower of rain

Cruel, schmuel. Welcome to April, friends of the Bibliomanse, which is for dozens of reasons a damn fine month. Anakana Schofield's Malarky was officially brought to bookstores yesterday and feted with Guinness shots and soda bread (pictures to follow); we have launches upcoming for Alex Boyd and Mike Barnes, in Windsor, London, Toronto; Claire Tacon undertakes a criss-crossing country tour, arm-in-arm with Jamella Hagen from Nightwood; and, of course, there are the poets. Oh yes. They're coming out of the woodwork, much like Louisiana termites. There will be plenty of poesy-content this month on Thirsty, but for starters, those versifiers looking to whet their quills might check out the site for National Poetry Writing Month. Don't be put off by the abbreviation (how does one scan NaPoWriMo?): this site brings together the 575-plus poets who have committed to writing and blogging a poem a day for 30 days. We here at the Bibliomanse will be doing something similar, in homage of the month in homage of the season. Check back daily for the best and brightest of the Bibliopoets. And since yesterday was (fools notwithstanding!) the true beginning of poetry month, today will be a double feature, beginning with (appropriately enough), a hailing by Norm Sibum. Enjoy, folks. And happy April.

Salvo

Norm Sibum

from The Pangborn Defence (2008)

Quote me, you hosers, the notion that life
Can’t defeat the wise man, the one who’s prepared,
And I’ll respond in the negative and bring
Chaos theory through your doors.
Disparage fortune as a flaky goddess,
Whim of some poet’s capering caprice,
And to the drift that chance tosses at us,
I’ll say, ‘Patience, you’ll get your innings.’
So now rain and thunder. Now the downpour,
And the leaf-heavy branches lift and fall
And hiss, so many sweepings of castanets.
They’re beyond philosophy’s reach :
The roses blooming against the brick.
But it’s as if something in the American mind
Would gut the flowers of their intricate hells
And build camps of detention in the emptiness.

For more from Norm Sibum (on talking poetry with "young people," and many many many other things): Ephemeris.

Get On Up: A Claire Tacon Guest Post

I didn’t start writing fiction until my mid-twenties. Before then, I was more interested in poetry and drama—completing an undergrad in theatre studies and working for a few years at CanStage. I’d swallowed the theatre Koolaid by the pitcher and kept a copy of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space on my nightstand. When I wrote a script and showed it to my mentor, however, she said she liked the writing but didn’t think it was a play. Why didn’t I rework it as a story?

At the time, the comment was devastating. It felt like my characters were being sentenced to a lesser existence—they’d never live in print as fully as they would on stage. They’d be robbed of the tension that theatre creates between the performer and the audience, the marriage of textual and visual elements. I went out with friends that night and got wasted. After sobering up over noodles at Swatow, I went home, opened a new Word doc and tried to rewrite the play as prose.

What’s stayed with me as I’ve focused on writing fiction is an appreciation for seeing the written word performed. In those five, ten minutes at the mic, non-playwrights get to snatch some of the magic of theatre. Some readers are able to push the spectacle—Allen Ginsberg reciting Blake, or Daniel Tysdal leading the crowd in a collective reading of a Cohen poem. Others, like Jessica Westhead or Suzanne Buffam succeed with understatement, letting their writing do the heavy lifting. No matter how subtle or bombastic the reader, listening to text filtered through the human voice rarely fails to yield new insights.

For writers, readings give us the rare opportunity to see people react to the work as it’s being read. (Unfortunately, most readers bristle when the author hovers over them, assessing their every twitch.)

It also brings unpredictability to a fixed form. Alongside the potential to connect with an audience lurks the possibility of disaster—what if no one laughs? What if there are fewer people every time I look up? What if I’m struck with the runs mid-sentence? After one reading, which I thought had gone well, a sweet, older gentleman informed me that he was familiar with the road I’d mentioned in the passage. His aunt and uncle had died in a horrific car accident on it. There wasn’t much to say after that.

This spring, I’ll be touring In the Field with Jamella Hagen, whose blisteringly good poetry collection Kerosene came out last year with Nightwood. Honestly, I’m looking forward to every minute of it. Three people more interested in the free cookies? Great! Forty people being polite? Sure! For better or worse, there’s a feeling of being present that comes from standing in front of a group and putting one’s writing on display. In theatre school, I was always a terrible actress. Somehow now that I’m reading my own words, it feels more comfortable. Even when the vibe is less than electric, there’s still a thrum, an intensity of feeling alive that’s rare and precious.

The Tacon/Hagen Tour, Spring 2012 

April 24: Windsor (w/ Mike Barnes)

April 29: Ottawa, Ottawa Writer's Festival/ Plan 99

May 1st: Art Bar, Toronto

May 2nd: Pivot, Toronto

May 6th: LitLive, Hamilton

May 7th: Virus Series, Niagara Falls,

May 8th: Cobour Poetry Workshop, Cobourg

May 14th: Regina

May 15th: Pages on Kensington, Calgary (w/ John Lent)

May 16th: Kelowna, BC

May 24th: Robson Square Reading Series, Vancouver

May 28th: Bolen's Books, Victoria

Other events in London, Guelph, Waterloo, and elsewhere forthcoming ...