A Painful Homecoming: Quill & Quire on Robyn Sarah's My Shoes Are Killing Me + Tour Dates

Montreal poet Robyn Sarah's  latest, My Shoes Are Killing Me, is featured in the new 80th anniversary April issue of Quill & Quire, where reviewer Jason Wiens calls it a collection of "poems recollecting emotion in the (in)tranquility of boomer twilight."  Here's more: 

The title of Robyn Sarah's My Shoes Are Killing Me speaks to the nostalgia that her poems explore: if nostalgia literally means "painful homecoming," then the "shoes" - read as metonymy for the past of her life's journey - cause at times painful reflection on the rest of the voyage...the frame widens to include the broader public spaces of Sarah's Montreal, then extends this frame further to the global scale....the nostalgia encompasses memories of the Jewish diaspora alongside the motto of the poet's province: "a past continuous, a past as presence. Je me souviens. A motto you can make your own."  

Robyn Sarah will reading this spring along the 401 in Ontario as well as the East coast and Montreal. For a listing of upcoming dates, see below. 

April 20th - Montreal, @ The Word, w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 21st - Kingston @ Novel Idea w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 22nd - Toronto @ Dora Keogh w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 23rd - Hamilton @ Bryan Prince Bookseller w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 24th - Windsor @ Biblioasis  w/ Robert Melançon and TBA
May 19th - Halifax @ Halifax Public Library w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 20th - Lunenburg @ Lexicon Books w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 21st - Moncton @ Attic Owl Reading Series w/ Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane

Among the Quick: Sum by Zachariah Wells reviewed in Quill & Quire + Tour Dates

Zachariah Wells's third poetry collection Sum was on deck in the 80th anniversary April issue of Quill & Quire, and reviewer Jason Wiens calls Wells "a poet who delights in sound patterns—internal and end rhyme in particular." Here's more:

Highlights include "Squalid," which recalls "the dollars / squandered down urinal drains in bars / of dubious repute," and "The Parkinsonian Reflexologist," which mixes cliches to sometimes hilarious effect: "if you get caught fucking the dog / deny the devil his Scooby-Doo." "Magic Man," in its celebration of the retired Blue Jays player John McDonald, is a paen to the underdog, one "Consigned to ride pine for lack of thunder / in his bat." Appropriating Hopkins's "The Windhover," Wells traces the inscape of this infielder, "sensei of the second sack."

Wells will be presenting from Sum as part of IFOA's 7th Annual Battle of the Bards on Wednesday, March 25th @ 7:30PM. He will also be embarking on an Ontario and Montreal tour with Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon in late April, as well as an East Coast tour with Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane in May. For full listings, see the dates below.

April 20th - Montreal, @ The Word, w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 21st - Kingston @ Novel Idea w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 22nd - Toronto @ Dora Keogh w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 23rd - Hamilton @ Bryan Prince Bookseller w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 24th - Windsor @ Biblioasis  w/ Robert Melançon and TBA
May 9th - PEI @ Confederation Center Public Library w/ M. Travis Lane
May 19th - Halifax @ Halifax Public Library w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 20th - Lunenburg @ Lexicon Books w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 21st - Moncton @ Attic Owl Reading Series w/ Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane

Happy 10th! Marilyn Gear Pilling on Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas

Robyn Sarah’s Little Eurekas is a book that has meant a good deal to me. I open it regularly and for a variety of reasons. From it, I may gain inspiration or add to my knowledge of specific poets or read about one or another of a wide variety of topics that pertain to poetry. Or I may want to enter a world where poetry is taken seriously and filtered through the sensibility of a writer and critic whose work I greatly admire. At times I open the book just to be in her company for an hour or two. This is a work that enlightens, entertains, surprises, and communicates the beauty, depth and necessity of poetry.

- Marilyn Gear Pilling

Happy 10th! Robyn Sarah on The Lily Pond

Sometime in 2007, fellow Biblioasis writer Mike Barnes sent me, in manuscript, an essay he’d just written called “Two Rooms”, asking for my response.  From the first paragraph, I found it electrifying, astonishing, and (remarkably) strangely beautiful despite its harrowing subject matter. It described his hospitalization, in his early twenties, following a bizarre self-mutilation, and what came after: misdiagnosis, two years of failed drug trials, electroshock treatments, a staff meeting that nearly saw him transferred to a long term care facility; then months of near-coma resulting from a prescription dosage error.  “Two Rooms” was the genesis of The Lily Pond: A  Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis, 2008), a series of four interlocking personal essays that probe the impact of mental illness on a life over a period of thirty years.

The Lily Pond is a one-of-a-kind book.  It is so much more than a book about mental illness; it could hardly be further from a self-help book or a popular-style “recovery memoir”. There is not a buzz-word to be found in it, not a single stereotype or oversimplification, not a second’s pandering to the voyeuristic impulse of a public hungry for sensational true stories. No sermonizing, no self-congratulation.  Instead, with humbling honesty, and bringing a formidable intelligence to bear on the subject, Barnes gives us a rare inside look at mental illness and its treatments, interweaving autobiography with reflections on paintings, literary works, myth, metaphor, and scientific lore.  His interest is in the psyche’s resources for healing and in the universals of the human condition as filtered through the particulars of his life experience. His book is, perhaps more than anything, a work of philosophy and a testament to human resilience and creativity.

One of the things I love in The Lily Pond is the voice in which the essays unfold: measured and sober, meditative, freeassociative, often mesmerizing, yet enlivened by unexpected turns of the imagination (think Oliver Sacks, think W. G. Sebald.)   It’s a book that digs deep and wakens wonder – a deep-sea dive of a book, able to pull me in again and again to surface each time with an enriched appreciation of the things that matter in life. 

Words to Go, Pause for Breath

Now on Words to Go:
Robyn Sarah's
Pause for Breath.

Words to Go host
Carole Giangrande.

Happy Friday, all. A parting shot of poetry for the weekend: the final instalment of Carole Giangrande's Words to Go features Biblioasis's own Robyn Sarah. Words to Go is a showcase for new writers and the spoken word, and was heard in over twenty countries around the world. Podcast 50 is a lovely feature, but a sad one, as this is the final podcast in the series. A big thank you to Carole for her dedication to poesy and storytelling. And a good weekend to you all!

CNQ shortlisted for National Magazine Awards

Congratulations are in order to Lynn Coady and Caroline Adderson, whose short stories published in Canadian Notes & Queries Magazine have been shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards.

Lynn Coady's "Dogs in Clothes," which appeared in CNQ 85 and Caroline Adderson's "Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen," which appeared in CNQ 86, both made the cut along with six other works of fiction published in Canadian magazines this year.

Further congratulations go to the numerous other Biblioasis authors who were shortlisted for various National Magazine awards, including Patricia Young in both the "One of a Kind" and Poetry categories, Lorna Jackson in the Fiction category, Russell Smith in the Personal Journalism category, and Robyn Sarah in the Poetry category.

The winners will be announced at the National Magazine Awards Gala June 7th at the Carlu in Toronto. For more information, head over to magazine-awards.com.

Good luck to all our finalists!

Ho Hum (Hardly!)

Afternoon, all. As we enter the 2 PM hump of the day I thought I'd make today's daily verse dose topical. The following is from Robyn Sarah (who will I'm sure be happy to know that there are no pictures of her yawning on the internet. Or at least none that I could find).

Ho Hum

from Pause for Breath (2009)

A yawn is guileless. It disarms.

And yet we early learn
the protocols of Yawn:
Cover your mouth.
Make like an Indian, wah-wah-wah.
Hide it, if you can.

A stifled yawn pops the ears,
spares others a sighting
of tonsils. Tongue curles
backwards in its cradle,
jaw winches its hinges,
eyes wink to slits and skin
draws tight around the mouth;

in the cave of the throat
a controlled wind
shudders and dies.

"Not for the faint of heart" (Part 2)

Well it was in reference to a certain bell-lettrist from Kingston that I used the faint-of-heart phrase on Monday, but I suspect really what put it in mind was a recent review of Cathy Stonehouse's Something About the Animal. Not for the faint of heart indeed. The Literary Review of Canada is now offering a lengthy, thoughtful, & commendatory look at Cathy's work:

Whether examining the impact of generational cycles of violence, the psychic trauma of warfare or the coming of age in a Lawrencian working-class town, Stonehouse has written a collection of superbly crafted and keenly insightful stories.

The review's available in the print version only, I'm afraid, though a few other essays are available for download via the LRC website. It's a good issue, and worth hunting down. (Especially--she says, elbowing in a plug--since it also features work by Robyn Sarah. Way to go LRC!)

Span

From Robyn Sarah's Pause for Breath (Biblioasis, 2009). I like to read this poem alongside Sonnet 116--would it be Valentine's Day without the Bard's only quotable poem on love?--so I've included a link below.

Span

We write on Time
until our rhyme
runs out,
until the chalk itself
has dwindled to a nub
and less than that,
a smudge of powder
on a fingertip,
a powder shed
upon the ground.

Our frail agency
in the world, this:
our brave chalk line,
our mark on Time -
first firm, then skipping
like a vapour trail,
and soon enough rubbed out
by Time's felt brush
in Time's fell hand
(or by a celestial Thumb.)

What then can our intrepid cursive prove?
- Still, let us make our rhyme a rhyme of love.


Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

The statue (Chronos clipping the wings of Eros) is from the Rococo Garden in Veitschöchheim on Main, near Würzburg.

Truth and Lies in Poetry

Robyn Sarah has taken over the helm as guest-blogger at the Best Canadian Poetry blog this week, and her first post is up, on Truth and Lies in Poetry.

Some years ago, at a poetry event, I heard a fellow poet preface his reading with the remark, “A good poem is like a good lie.” He meant, I assume, that both are verbal constructions that succeed based on the extent to which they can persuade us to believe them. Maybe he was half tongue-in-cheek, intending to be provocative, but nobody around me seemed provoked. I understood what he meant, but my own thought at the time was, “I could not disagree with you more.”

A successful lie manipulates language to achieve the effect of truth, but to me, a good poem is true. The power of the words comes from authentic emotion which is the moving spirit behind the poem. The words move us because the poet has been moved to words. Or, as I put it in the concluding sentences of my essay, “Poetry’s Bottom Line”: “Whatever else it is or does, a poem should deliver to us unmistakably the sense of an urgency behind the words. The sense that there was a need to say this. That the poet means it. That every word is a meant word.”

All too often, reading contemporary poetry, what I feel is, So many dishonest lines! Lines that sound beautiful but that aren’t meant. If you aren’t really paying attention, you can be seduced by them. But if you’re listening closely, they don’t ring true. They have the sound of trying too hard, or of trying to put something over. They sound as though they are listening to themselves, admiringly, rather than speaking from a real place inside the poet. The words may be gorgeous, they may be clever, they may have dazzle or flash, but they aren’t speaking in a real voice.

For the rest of this post, please go here. And if you like what you read there, then you may also want to check out Robyn's excellent essay collection Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry, where you will find a lot more of the same.

Echoes in November

The National Magazine Awards were announced earlier this week, and Zach Wells was nominated in "the one of a kind" for an essay on a poem in another Biblioasis author's book: 'Echoes in November,' by Robyn Sarah, from Pause for Breath. It's an exceptional essay about an exceptional poem, and it is now online here.

Gesundheit

Over at the Contemporary Poetry Review, Jason Guriel has an excellent analysis of Robyn Sarah's poem Gesundheit, from October's Pause for Breath.

Montreal’s Robyn Sarah also presents an exemplary model for the painstaking poet. Like Wiman, Sarah publishes little but what she does publish tends to be fully realized (which means you get the feeling, reading her words, that she can account for the choice that led to every one of them) and necessary (her poems stopper a gap, a need). In retrospect, it was necessary for Wiman to draw our attention to that flock of birds, wasn’t it?, and in “Gesundheit,” published in Maisonneuve, last summer, Sarah draws our attention to the banal business of sneezing, perhaps as no other poet has:

Gesundheit

Orgasm of the nose

the sneeze

builds to hairtrigger pitch

and sweet release.

Echoes itself, betimes.

Atchoo . . . aaaatchoo! (it rhymes),

or comes in multiple,

whole strings of sneeze.

Sneeze ladylike, in a hanky.

Sneeze workmanlike, in a grab

of the grubby shirt.

Or (caught unawares)

sneeze a grand unprotected sneeze

in open air.

Some with a toothpick or a twist

of tissue, tease a sneeze,

a private trick to clear the sinuses.

A sneeze rattles the face.

Loosens the mucus.

Paves the way for the trumpeting

honk and blow—

A pepper sneeze, a pollen sneeze,

a feather sneeze, all alike

pledge to untickle in a rush,

give leave to raise

a just-a-minute finger

before succumbing to the flush—

a microsecond’s uncontrol,

a dispensation to go blotto

with impunity,

going where it takes us,

brakeless,

making the noisy noise

it makes us make.

A sneeze bobs the head.

Single or double bob,

or strings of pigeon bob,

brings blessings down on it.

That “grab / of the grubby shirt” is a delight as is the extraordinary, sonically intricate last verse paragraph, whose repetitions and internal rhymes bear the reader irresistibly along as if she, too, were committed to a sneeze from which she couldn’t pull out, a launch sequence that’s “brakeless, / making the noisy noise / it makes us make.” Unlike Wiman’s poem, though, which carefully rolls out an argument, Sarah’s poem is all perception, choosing to approach its subject from multiple angles. In the process, “Gesundheit” catalogues more sneezes than we knew existed, like an ambitious, unblinking anthropologist let loose among previously undocumented behaviors. The result is a showy, shameless, but, finally, wonderful splurging of real talent.

the rest of the essay, which looks at poems by Steven Heighton, Christian Wiman, Derek Walcott and John Ashberry, can be found here.

There is also an excellent essay in the Winter 2010 edition of ARC on Echoes of November by Zach Wells. Check it out.

Montreal Reading Tuesday March 9th: Sarah, Sibum & Wells

Hosted by Carmine Starnino. Mark it down and spread the word. The event serves as the Canadian launch for Norm Sibum's Smoke & Lilacs, the first reading since Zach Wells was shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize earlier this week (more on this later) for Track & Trace, and the first Montreal reading since Robyn Sarah's wonderful launch at the Word for Pause for Breath back in October.

Pause in the Globe

Robyn Sarah, the veteran among this group of poets, has produced another fine example of lyric craftsmanship in her ninth collection, Pause For Breath. The pause Sarah meditates on is nothing less than the brief time of breathing between one's entry into the world and one's exit from it. Her poems demonstrate the mindfulness of one attending to the quality of each inspiration and exhalation onto the page.

for the rest of this review, please go here.

Robyn Sarah Spotlighted

Poetry Quebec is currently spotlighting Robyn Sarah over at their website with an interview.

Poetry Quebec: Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec?

Robyn Sarah: I was born in NYC but that was because my father was doing graduate studies at Columbia at the time. I am Canadian by parentage (both parents Canadian) and have lived in Montreal since the age of four. My mother’s parents came to Montreal in the 1920s, escaping the devastation and economic distress of post-war Poland.

PQ: When and how did you encounter your 1^st Quebec poem?

RS: Am I supposed to remember? I don’t usually ask poems to show me their passports when I encounter them.

PQ: When and how did you first become interested in poetry?

RS: I began reading and writing poetry as a young child, and was confirmed in both habits by my early teens. I have written an essay on this subject. It is called “I to my perils: How I Fell for Poetry”, and was first published in The New Quarterly (commissioned to kick off its “Falling in Love with Poetry” series.) The essay is reprinted in my book of essays, Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry.

PQ: What is your working definition of a poem?

RS: Still working on it.

PQ: Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details.

RS: Not really. It’s a nice idea. I wish I did.

PQ: What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other?

RS: For me, poems usually begin with a phrase I like the sound of. I call these “tinder words”. They come to me from nowhere—sometimes they occur as part of a letter I’m writing or a journal entry, or in conversation; sometimes they just come into my head and I jot them down. Poems germinate from them, sometimes within days, sometimes not until months or years later. I rarely know what a poem is going to be “about” when I start playing around with one of these phrases. I guess this means my poetry is ear-driven, though I am not a “sound poet.”

For the rest of the interview please go here.

Pause For Breath: The Montreal Launch

We'll be heading down to Montreal for three events, including the above at the Word bookstore on Wednesday evening. If any Thirsty readers happen to be in Montreal please stop by for what promises to be a wonderful launch for a wonderful collection.

Pause For Breath

The first of three poetry titles we're expecting in the coming week or so arrived in the driveway this afternoon: Robyn Sarah's wonderful Pause For Breath. Sarah's ninth collection, it offers meditations on the times and on time itself, offering up what I think some of the most quietly beautiful poems of her career. The book itself turned out quite beautifully, printed as it was by the Coach House crew.

To celebrate its launch on this last weekend of summer, perhaps then a poem on summer's passing.

Once was full summer

Once was full summer.
Down the valley blew
a cheesecloth wind,
screening the curds of cloud
from the whey of haze.

Soon the mists burned off.
Sun sipped the dew
from the long grasses,
then laid them limp with heat;
waxing towards mid-day,
made them sweat
their own juices,
meadow-sweet.

Sun made his rounds
under the blue dome,
striding his realm
while all afternoon
hills cooled facing hills
with their shadows.

Two Poems:: Robyn Sarah & Norm Sibum

As this is a season of three poetry books -- Shane Neilson's Meniscus, Robyn Sarah's Pause for Breath, and Zach Wells's Track & Trace -- and I'd like to buy a few additional days respite from the pleasures and pains of trying to keep this spot fresh, let's begin this new season of Thirsty postings with two poems by Biblioasis authors. The first by Norm Sibum, reading from his Pangborn Defence: A Suite for the Good doctor O (Ormsby, that is). The next, Robyn herself, readingThe Star, from her soon to be released collection, Pause for Breath. Videos courtesty of the Montreal Gazette. And I promise that we'll see more of one another the other side of this weekend.

Robyn Sarah Speaking at U of T March 23rd

The "new" New Quarterly

Once a Salonist, always a Salonist... If you needed any further proof that CNQ & TNQ (or Biblioasis and TNQ) share certain ...aesthetic leanings, look no further than the latest fab issue of The New Quarterly. Of particular note, there is a feature on the work of Robyn Sarah, with a spread of five poems from her upcoming fall poetry collection Pause for Breath. Editor Kim Jernigan interviews Robyn about her forthcoming book, and poetry in general; TNQ also has reprinted W. J. Keith's excellent review of Robyn's essay collection Little Eurekas. This alone is worth the cover price.

But there's more, of course. There's a contribution from the wonderful Peter Sanger, and an essay on his poem by CNQ contributing editor Amanda Jernigan; a wonderful little piece by regular CNQ reviewer Mark Callanan; three poems by Jason Guriel (who, along with Callanan, contributes poetry to the current CNQ; and three stories from Dave Margoshes's Metcalf-Rooke nominated Stories from my Father. The cover photo is by the wonderful John Haney.