Largehearted Boy and the Light Lifting Playlist

Over at Largehearted Boy Alexander MacLeod offers up his Light Lifting inspired musical playlist, which has already sent me scrambling for If I Should Fall From Grace and Mule Variations, two of my favourite albums. A good way to end a Friday.

From Alex's post:

I wrote Light Lifting with a lot of different music running through my head. Most of the stories in the book revolve around decisions or moments of change where one set of circumstances gives way to another. There are a lot of transformations in here, some more intense than others, so the songs vary quite a bit between the fast and the slow and the new and the old.


"Miracle Mile"

This is a story about two nearly world class distance runners who have to sign over their lives in order to achieve something that almost nobody else really cares about. The intensity of their training isolates them from other people and forces them into places where the normal rules don't apply. When they were kids in high school, for example, they used to race the freight trains through the dark in the rail tunnel from Detroit, under the river, and up to Windsor. I'm going with "If I Should Fall from Grace with God" on this one because one of boys wears a lucky Pogues T-Shirt as part of his superstitious warm-up ritual. I'll follow that with "Lose Yourself" by Eminem because nobody works a rhyme better than he does and because he knows all about the things that get ‘Imported from Detroit.'


"Wonder About Parents"

I guess this is a story about the tough accommodations that come along with any relationship so "Hotel Yorba" by The White Stripes gets the call. More Detroit truth here. Anybody who's seen the real Hotel Yorba knows the shelter it provides isn't deluxe, but it will do until the next day arrives. This is earlier White Stripes, back when Jack and Meg were still together or kind of married and that fits in with the story, too. I'll back it up with "There's an Arc" by Newfoundland's Hey Rosetta!, mostly for the line - "This could be our reward. This could be it." Check out the one-take video for this song: a victory in low-tech film making.

Read the rest of his playlist here.

Reminder: Montreal Poetry Pandemonium This Sunday!

The Devil's Engine, No. 2

When reading a poem or a poet for the first time, how do you know when you're in good hands? Or: as readers, how important is the feeling of trust?

David Starkey

Assuming the poet is capable, if not accomplished--and most people who publish widely enough for me to come across their work are--I think it depends more on me than on the poet. There are certain things I value in a poem--an idiosyncratic voice, rich diction, close attention to sound--and if those elements are present in a poem, I feel as though I'm in good hands. I'm less interested in extensive philosophizing and experimentation for its own sake, so while I can acknowledge that a poet with those predilections is talented, I may not want to spend as much time with her or his work. Maybe the issue isn't so much one of trust as desire. Yes, there are plenty of "good hands" out there; I just don't want to be in some of them....

Joshua Trotter

To me, as a reader, the feeling of trust is of extreme importance. And because I have a short attention span, trust must be gained quickly.

I find I quickly trust an author who shows control over medium and material.

More importantly, however, I trust an author who trusts me.

But I am an unreliable, invisible stranger. To trust me, the author must must have a high level of self-trust. This self-trust is signalled by: A willingness to surprise. A willingness to mix the serious with the not-so-serious. A willingness to go out on a limn

and risk losing me.

Thus, (to answer the first part of your question last) I know I’m in good hands when I don't feel like I'm being held by the hand.

Shane Neilson

Trust is fleeting. Most of the time I don't trust myself; I don't trust myself to know what I'm doing when writing, I don't trust myself to know when a poem is finished, I don't trust myself when I want to destroy a poem and completely reenvision it.I don't trust myself when I feel the urge to publish the poem in a magazine. (That urge to publish is an inherently untrustworthy one!) And, when I see the poem in print, I don't start trusting it then, either. I remember an interview I read 15 years ago in Poets and Writers. In it, a poet discussing his recently published book on a railway disaster said that his book consisted mostly of poems published in magazines, and that this was because he didn't trust the unpublished ones. Your question immediately made me think back to this interview, and provoked this question in me: why trust what someone else likes when I don't even fully trust what I like? It's outsourcing trust.

The question of trust is a very difficult one. But, if forced to answer it, I'd say trust the poem, and not the poet. That's an old answer, I know. I'd also say that trust is earned on a poem-by-poem basis. Good poets can hope to have only a few poems in their books... I've lost faith in a poet probably forty times over in any given collection.

This Cake Is Also For The Party

This past week I spent an inordinate amount of time with David Hickey, who's 2nd collection with the press, Open Air Bindery, launched last week. It was a race to the finish line, with the books only arriving from the printer in the nick of time. But, unlike with most of our titles, this one did not arrive finished: no, not having enough to do, we thought it would be best to do a title label. I told David that if we did a label he'd have to come down and help glue them into place, and he and Erica made the trip down twice to get through all 500 copies.

Here's about 400 of them.

We've decided that we might actually be in trouble if the GG or Griffin Prize comes knocking, though I suppose we'll cross that proverbial bridge when we come to it. We may need to conscript some other Biblioasis writers should we ever have to reprint. We've also decided that, henceforth, every Biblioasis poet should have to have a hand in the physical creation of their book. Turned out to be a lot of fun. And the book turned out to be among our more beautiful.

And there was also cake! Courtesy of Erica Leighton.

Encore Lit Interviews Norm Sibum

I pointed out a few weeks ago that Norm Sibum has been keeping a blog for some time, and that Thirsty readers might want to check it out on occasion. CNQ contributing editor Michael Carbert interviews Norm today over on his online magazine Encore Lit about the blog and just about everything else it touches on:

More than one literary commentator [Ed. note: Messrs. Wells and Starnino] has expressed surprise that Norm Sibum now has a blog. Author websites are common, but blogs where the posts are both daily and lengthy, not to mention written in a truly idiosyncratic style, are not typical. One sees from the posts themselves that you’re surprised to find yourself pursuing this project. Why a blog?

Yes, I am somewhat surprised to find myself ‘pursuing this project’. I knew at the outset I was taking leave of my senses and felt quite ridiculous for the first month or so writing up my ‘posts’. But it passed. The fact that it passed perhaps ought to trouble me. So why a blog? I don’t know, to be honest. Any number of reasons recommend themselves. To keep my hand in somehow, poems coming more slow; to hear the sound of my voice rattling on — dreadful thought, that one; to organize my thinking, if at the expense of the long-suffering reader. The thing is, a number of people tell me they follow the posts on a semi-regular basis, so I have some excuse to continue. I give it a year, at the end of which I will assess whether or not the posting has been a good or truly rotten idea.

Your posts ground themselves quite deliberately in a specific locale, with detailed references to the restaurants and terraces you frequent and the people you encounter, while simultaneously discussing geo-politics and events happening around the globe. Is this juxtaposition primarily an aesthetic one, or do you sense that developments in Washington or the Middle East do resonate in your corner of things here on Sherbrooke Street West?

Resonate is a word that renders me exceedingly nervous. One hears it used so often that one wonders, what with just about everything resonating, if we can expect rolling blackouts sometime soon. I am doing in the blogs what I have always done in the poems, just that I am permitting myself to be awfully chatty and, well, prosy. The blogs may lead in the end to better poems; then again, look out, wretched bit of verse at 3 o’clock—To further treat with your question, one’s street corner is always ‘the world’ to some extent or another, and time is fluid. The poet Hesiod wrote his verse a long, long time ago and yet, I know at least one Hesiod out in the Townships who is just as cranky and as red-necked as the poet was. This man, as he listens to his Mahler and Beethoven, vents continuous, unrelenting streams of bile. In that sense, these juxtapositions you speak of in my writing do not reflect an aesthetic position on my part; it just seems a quite normal state of affairs.

For the rest of the interview please go here.

Toronto Star Reviews Simic's Snowman

In a joint review of Goran Simic's Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman and Priscilla Uppal's Winter Sport, Barbara Carey has this to say of Simic's book:

Though often surreal, Simics imagery is also striking and emotionally resonant. Take this achingly expressive metaphor of loss and longing: “Hundreds of empty gloves become butterfly nets / chasing postage stamps / flown from the envelopes of those who read stars.”

Speaking as a “sleepwalker” who can’t shake memories of a nightmarish past, Simic goes on to write: “There is nothing here for those who live / where passersby wish each other / sweet dreams and good night.” Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman doesn’t offer a vision of the world as an innocuous place where people can sleep untroubled. These poems are disturbing, yes, but also hauntingly evocative.

You can read the whole review here.

Conflicts of Interest: A. J. Somerset

Over at Open Book Toronto, Nathaniel Moore interviews A. J. Somerset:

NGM:
Do you think it's easier to market a novel over a short fiction collection?

AS:
I think that a novel is unquestionably easier to sell than a short story collection, simply because a novel is about something. A short story collection is about a dozen or so somethings, so it's hard to put a hook into the general reader. If you look at the success of Annabel, before the awards season, almost all of the discussion surrounded what it's about. People praised it first and foremost for its subject, called it necessary and essential. George Murray called it "dangerous," a risible remark. The book really doesn't challenge its audience, but they get to talk about how bold the subject is. How can a short fiction collection, no matter how accomplished, compete with this?

The readership of short stories, Alice Munro notwithstanding, is restricted to people who appreciate the short story as a form. It's a small readership, but dedicated. If you choose to write short stories, you simply won't get much sales unless you're shortlisted for an award. Mind you, the same seems to hold true of the novel in Canada's dismal literary culture.

The sad thing is that novels are sold on what they're about, when they should be about more than just one thing. You have three hundred pages to allow the story to expand and to swallow all of life, but our novels so rarely do this, because we don't demand it of them. Our best short stories do. I was reading Alistair MacLeod's As Birds Bring Forth the Sun recently. Those stories are huge. They encompass so much. And yet we let a novel get away with being so small in its concerns. The novel has so much room to breathe, and so often, it doesn't. We should hold the novel to a higher standard.

NGM:
What do you personally prefer to read?

AS:
I'm not sure that I have a preference. I'm fairly omnivorous, except that I don't really read genre fiction these days. That's what television is for, my genre fix. Also, it's only in the past couple of years that I've gone out of my way to read a lot of Canadian writers and keep up with what people are writing in this country. I'm suspicious of CanLit as a category, when you consider that Canada has the population of California; if Californians went on and on about their regional literature in the way some Canadians do, you'd rightly dismiss them as crackpots.

I do prefer short novels. I haven't read William Vollmann, and I'm not sure I can bring myself to. There's an unfortunate tendency in some quarters to rate a novel by its utility as a blunt instrument during a home invasion: if it's that thick and heavy, it must be good. Or, more accurately, if it was that much of a chore to read, then you must be real gosh-awful smart to have got through it. To me, every page over three hundred had better be worth it. If you write a 450-page novel, you'd better have a vision 450 pages wide. No number of sly pop-culture references can justify the longevity of The Simpsons; it's the same joke a thousand times. The same applies to books; the more time you take up, the more you should have to say. If you think you need 450 pages to get it done, try condensing it into a screenplay. You don't have that much time; people will walk out of the movie. Too many novels are sold by weight, not volume; you get the sense that there was some settling of the contents during shipping.

For the full interview please go here.

The Devil's Engine, No. 1

Welcome to the first installment of the Biblioasis interview series. The following is posted with a special thanks to Josh Trotter, who remarked that this question made him think of radishes (eradicate: to pull out by the roots). So thanks to Josh! And without further adieu ...


Is there anything in your own poetry that you try to eradicate?

Shane Neilson:

The means of eradication is editing. When I write a poem, I don't think: Don't Do This. I think: Try To Do This. If I were aware of tics, habits, predelictions, I'd be more likely, in trying to avoid them, to write a poem that did what it set out to do. Which is: to not risk anything. Zach Wells, my editor for Meniscus, framed my poetry thus (I paraphrase): that I am writing for the emotional uppercut, that I'm trying to make people feel. But in doing so, the poems can totter, top-heavy, whilst straining for power. He also gave me, during the editing process, a countervailing quote that I treasure: Pound said 'Only emotion endures.' I must agree with Ez. But I would! So, when the poem reaches first-draft completion, I inspect it. I look for sentimentality. I think of Alden Nowlan, an early hero, who also swung for the fences, but who often wrote poems that were whiffs. I then divest the poem of manipulation, of unearnedness. Naked emotion? Hardly. Raw emotion? Nope. It's emotion that I've refined, dressed, and dignified. That way endurance lies.

Marsha Pomerantz:

What I try to eradicate in my poems is my desire for the reader’s approval, or at least evidence of that desire. I was brought up to be a good girl, but writing, as we’ve been reminded here (March 24), is on the side of Satan. So I have a conflict. What better to do with a conflict than, even while reaching out across my own lines, deflect it toward the reader? Who are these hypocrites lecteurs, these semblables of mine, and why are they messing around with my poems? Ah yes, I invited them.

Sometimes my ambivalence toward the reader expresses itself as a false promise. “What Birds Mean When They Say That” leads a dance around a pond, with much visiting of flora and fauna and overhearing of “frogs in mid-blurt.” But regarding the intended explication, the poem comes up dry at the end. No clue about meaning, ornithological or other.

In a couple of other poems, the reader is addressed directly, in a tone that’s taunting or coy. “Turner II,” a prose poem, views the Houses of Parliament burning, does the laundry, visits political hotspots, reminisces about the childhood favorite Eloise, then ends with a tease: “Fun is not the word for it. But wait a minute, I’ll tell you what is.” In the ensuing silence I picture readers fidgeting in their armchairs, looking at their watches, wondering when the revelation will arrive. Those sitters in judgment, serves them right!

Then there’s “Table of Equivalents,” a pastiche of quoted and misquoted equivalents ranging from culinary to moral, which ends, “I give you that the sky begins beneath your feet. May I have a receipt?” Not asking for approval, mind you, just confirmation of goods delivered. Evening up the score.

I venture to address the reader earnestly only at a remove—for instance, through the mouth of a dead cow in a Damien Hirst installation. The cow, its interior exposed in slices soaking in formaldehyde, says, “Feed me, please / your possibilities, / and I will fatten you.” For me, this reciprocal feeding and fattening is how art works. For the cow, recalling Pharaoh’s dreams of fat and lean, fat is prosperity. But will the reader, in this age of the ultradiet, agree to take on girth?

I just remembered: I don’t care. But I’m sure the cow does.

Zachariah Wells:

Pound said to go in fear of abstractions. Frost quipped that when a poet is issued a poetic license the bearer should be entitled to only three uses of the word "beautiful." I don't try to eradicate intangibles from my poems. I simply tend to bar the door to their entry. If I try to eradicate anything, it's this prejudice against them. Occasionally "beautiful" is le mot juste. But three uses might be going too far.

________________

If you have questions you'd like to put to our poets, please send them to tmurphy@biblioasis.com.

Audio: Hickey, Trotter & Wells in Windsor

The first of three readings went off in Windsor last night at Phog lounge and, in addition to reading, Zach Wells recorded the whole of it. You can listen to it here.

If you find yourselves near the Central Branch of the London Public Library this evening (7 PM) you could catch them at it again; and they will be doing a swan song at the Dora Keogh on Wednesday in Toronto at 7:30 as well. We will hopefully see you there!

One Question Interview: Goran Simic

Goran simic is the subject of Alex Boyd's latest one question interview. Alex asks him:

The acknowledgements for your latest book of poems say you wrote it in English to gauge how comfortable you were in the language and how much you sound like yourself. What are your thoughts on that?

To read Goran's response, please go here.

Review of Trotter's All This Could Be Yours on the Rover

Abbey Paige from the Rover has some enthusiastic praise for Trotter's All This Could Be Yours...

Some poetry is on a strict diet: spare and controlled; not-saying and half-saying; healthy silences leaving lots of white space on the page like the white space on an empty plate. It can all leave a reader feeling hungry, and sometimes that’s how the reader wants to be left. But when in the mood for a juicy, greasy, unctuous, metaphorically caloric poetic experience, this reviewer recommends Joshua Trotter’s debut collection, All This Could Be Yours.

Crowded with sound and cluttered with allusions, Trotter’s poems are studies in abundance. They work on the same intimate and playful level as nursery rhymes, drawing the reader in with clever wordplay and creating a musicality so irresistible, meaning insinuates itself like a subtle flavour. What results is a bewitching combination of familiar pleasure and strange surprise — plenty for the brain to chew on.

To describe the book as a poetic binge is not to suggest that Trotter is just hot-dogging. While his colourful language packs the poems like a Chinese buffet, he often turns to traditional recipes when it comes to form (the sonnet in particular), rendering them with loving flare. Much contemporary poetry written in form can feel stiff, but Trotter is able to employ form so naturally that it melts into the poem, providing structure without drawing attention to itself.

Read the rest of the review here.

Spring Poets Take Region by Storm

In As For Me and My House, Sinclair Ross’s best-known novel, we meet a schoolteacher and word-lover named Paul. It’s springtime. Paul is trying to push a car out of a mudhole, and he fails. He’s tired, he’s wet, and he has to walk nearly a mile to find a team to pull the car out. But as Paul is tramping along, a thought occurs to him, and he brightens for a moment. “I just remembered,” he says to his companions: “weary, you know, comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word, meaning to walk across wet ground.”

Paul isn’t the first word-lover who has wearied himself in a springtime journey. April—which has been National Poetry Month in Canada since 1999—was for centuries the month for holy pilgrimages. Travellers since Chaucer have claimed that poems help pass long hours on the trail. This April, therefore, Biblioasis poets David Hickey, Joshua Trotter, and Zachariah Wells will join countless others as they hit the roads of Canada, trying to see if poetry can’t make spring showers smell a little sweeter.

In “The Soloist,” Trotter describes men listening to a singer. “It’s not with sweat their clothes are wet, nor rain,” he says: “Her song slides down the sides of their bowed brains.” But whether you’re looking to be soaked with song or just want to beat the weather, the Biblioasis reading is where you should be. Therefore! Break out your umbrellas, slip on your duckboots, and splash your way to The Phog (Windsor), the Central Public Library (London), or Dora Keogh (Toronto). On April 4th, 5th, and 6th, you can celebrate “the drips, the drops, the trickles” of spring with three of Canada’s liveliest poets. All doors open at 7PM. I know we've mentioned these readings before, but hey! it's April, and poesy's on the brain. --TKM.

Light Lifting: Two Atlantic Book Award Nominations // L.A. Times Review

We're a bit behind here, but on March 22nd it was announced that Alexander Macleod's Light Lifting was short-listed for two Atlantic Book Awards: the Margaret & John Savage First Book Award; and the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Winners will be announced May 19th.

Light Lifting was also reviewed yesterday in the L.A. Times, it's first major U.S. review:

Every so often a new writer comes along with a true gift for language — not necessarily heavy with metaphor or profound imagery but has an elegant, conversational simplicity. It takes a certain clarity of mind not to burden sentences, and Alexander MacLeod has it in the story collection "Light Lifting." For example: "I ate my lunch with Tom every day and every day it was the same thing." "The sun just kept streaming down on us, all bright and summery. It wasn't right and I kept wishing for it to be darker so I didn't have to see it all so clearly." The stories veer toward darkness — he explores two world-class runners and the insidious nature of competition; the trauma of peer pressure; the terrors of young parents, the proud sorrow of single mothers and the embarrassment of their children. MacLeod's graceful writing lends these and other scenarios a humanity, a community of hardship and survival. In this way they move forward; the characters move forward; life goes on.

Battling Bards

Good luck today to David Hickey, Zach Wells, and Robyn Sarah, who will be fighting for Biblioasis at the Battle of the Bards. If you're in TO near the Harbourfront Centre tonight, you should check it out. Brigantine Room, Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West, Toronto, 7:30 PM.

CNQ 81 is In the House

CNQ 81 is in, and should be on newsstands and making its way to mailboxes by week's end. The Genre Issue, contributors include Margaret Atwood, Mike Barnes, August Bourre, Brian Busby, Grant Buday, Devon Code, Emily Donaldson William Gibson, Alex Good, Jason Guriel, Jeet Heer, Michael Libling, Roy MacSkimming, Steve Noyes, Anna Porter, Patricia Robertson, Mark Sampson, Brett Alexander Savory, Marko Sijan, Ray Smith, David Solway and James Turner. There's fiction by Halli Villegas, poetry by Jacob Arthur Mooney, a North Wing graphic novel adaptation from the Handmaid's Tale, and an X-Ray broadside (for subscribers) by David Hickey.

What? You don't subscribe? Well ... there's still hope for you. Get in touch with us and we'll add you to our (not quite) burgeoning lists. We tend to be a little biased, but we think it's one of the best damn journals in the land. And by far the best looking as well!

Speaking of Fall Poetry....

Eight poems from Amanda Jernigan's forthcoming rookie collection GROUNDWORK are up at the UK's Bow-Wow Shop.

Here's Wayfarer:

Wayfarer

At Ithaca

my waves begin,

who juggle sand,

who gather in

the wrack of land

and cast it up

upon the sea.

This is no common

tapestry.

I weave them gold

and green and grey

to the horizon

where they break.

I ravel in

the shuttle's wake.

And each day's labour's

lost, they say.

They do not see

how, slowly, the

horizon line

is worn away.

Some even tide

the night will fail

(it is but weft)

and day reveal

my landfall: as

you know, your sail.

You can find the other seven here.

Word has reached us in our suburban onion field that Amanda has had yet another poem, from another collection that is in process, accepted by Poetry Magazine. Congrats!

Speaking of Poetry...

Over at Open Book Toronto, Writer-in-Res Jeff Latosik offers this on Joshua Trotter and his recently released ATCBY:

Joshua Trotter

Books: All This Could Be Yours (Biblioasis, 2010)

Cred: Widespread publication.

Relevance: With a title that could be equally at home in a modern advertisement, Trotter shows us from the get-go two of his chief selling points: a tongue and cheek playfulness and a gift for aphorism that's -- and this is the trick with aphorism -- always perfectly timed. Trotter's lines are charged in a way the reveals a deeply studied but also deeply committed mind--to not only poetic tradition (along with a fierce intelligence), but to the complicated world. There is no speaking from on-high, no capital P poetics, and no straining for profundity in Trotter's aesthetic universe.

Is currently working on: Releasing ATCBY (it was released last fall).

Sample: http://www.arcpoetry.ca/2010/1...

For the rest of the series, including some thoughts on James Langer's Gun Dogs, please go here.

Open Air Bindery (& other related Poetry News)

The first of our Spring poetry titles arrived on Friday afternoon. David Hickey's second collection, and second with the press, Open Air Bindery offers as our own cover bumpf says "a tight fantastic collection of songs, stories and covenants, whose subjects range across art, astronomy, snowflakes and suburbia." I'll have more to say about this book shortly; I was rereading it last evening and was quite moved by many of the poems, one of which I'll leave you with at the end of this post. For now it serves as a reminder to let Thirsty readers in on a few upcoming poetry events (before I turn my attention to accountants: see last evening's post).

Wednesday, March 30th (the day before a certain dreaded deadline): The IFOA Poetry Slam. Despite the images this conjures, mainly of Zach Wells head-butting David Hickey, this promises to be a civil affair, and there will be three Biblioasis poets in attendance: the aforementioned David Hickey and Zach Wells; and Robyn Sarah, author of, most recently, Pause For Breath. I wish I could be there. I trust all Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes will be in the area to cheer our crew on.

Monday, April 4th: David Hickey, Josh Trotter & Zach Wells descend on Phog Lounge (7:30 PM) in Windsor, Ontario for a night of poetry and (surely) wine. Last time I was at Phog Lounge with Zach I nearly got beat up. (And no, he had nothing to do with it.)

Tuesday, April 5th: The same trio descend on the Central Branch of the London Public Library: 7 PM-8:30 PM. Come early to this one, as it looks like it will be a packed house.

Wednesday, April 6th: The same trio, again, descend on Toronto, and the Dora Keogh on Danforth, 7-9 pm.

Monday, April 11th: For those of you in Rome (yes, that Rome), David Starkey will be reading at the fittingly named John Cabot University in that city. (NB: to all Biblioasis poets: We had nothing to do with that one, so don't get your hopes up.)

Thursday April 14th: Marsha Pomerantz reads as part of the Poetic Justice Series at the Liberty Hotel (fittingly, a former prison)

Saturday, April 16th: David Hickey will be reading at the always fabulous Cobourg Poetry Festival

Sunday, April 17th: Joshua Trotter and David Hickey will be reading as part of of six poet/3 press night in Montreal at the Sparrow on St. Laurent. Doors open at 7:30.

More, quite likely, to follow.

For now, Hickey's The Astronomer's Apology

Sorry for the sound of my steps
on the floor—wherever I
walked, it creaked. There was a new

moon above and I swallowed the dark
(it still comes out now as I speak).
Sorry, too, for the door, I didn't quite close;

the cold pulled you out of your sleep.
It's what the new moon does: it
deals out the stars; it dances, it drinks

and it cheats. All day long,
the planet revolved; it turned in
the troposphere's keep. With new moon

above, I swept through the dark. Then
I swept the dark off my feet. Still
I'm sorry, this morning, when

I came back to bed, if my hands had lost
all their heat. It’s an old tune, love,

what you lose in the dark,
what follows you back to the sheets.

Ides of March

It's a sunny day around the Bibliomanse, and while voluntarily standing between the pipes in the driveway and being used for target practice (as solid a definition of publishing as I have come up with in recent days) my mind has been wandering: to Elizabeth Taylor (namely: The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues); my own annoying virtues and vices (though mainly, of late, the latter); how those who declaim the loudest are often the most fearful; to the creeping horror I feel over an impending Aid to Publishers application and the extent to which I will go to avoid it (witness this blog post); the not-so-quiet desperation all publishers must feel when talking to accountants; to what we have to do as publishers to sell a book, and how much we can reasonably and rightly expect from our writers when we do so; about the to-ing and fro-ing between a certain poet and dynamo on this very subject over at Ephemeris; about the Ides of March and where the knife will come from; about Factotums and the book trade; how poorly we have, as publishers, made clear what it is we do here, and how much we do, and perhaps what we might do to change that; how a single 'thank-you' covers far more ground than a thousand belated apologies; from wage slaves to salary-serfs to whatever-the-hell I might be; to John Hartford and tall buildings, and how, even on a sunny early Spring day when I should be outside, I'm quite thankful that I don't work in them, even if it would mean that I'd get a bloody day off.

Also I've been thinking about Abraham, or one poet's portrait of him, and that I too will look forward to a time that "the incoherent promises of God go to seed / And miracles take root in the world..."

Library Journal Reviews Pigeon Wars of Damascus

Library Journal raves this week about Marius Kociejowksi's Pigeon Wars of Damascus. Scratch one down for the Yanks. (Of course, if Marius had set Pigeon Wars as historical fiction, say, and told the story of a trapped princess sold into a Syrian seraglio who used pigeons to get information to her lover in another land, who in turn used said information to bring down yet another (19th century, mind) middle-eastern autocratic regime, Pigeon Wars would have won a god-damn Governor General's Award.)

Sigh. Don't mind me. It's a Friday, after a long week: my bile runneth over...

So: to the review:

Kociejowski (The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey) combines stories of people currently raising and training pigeons in Damascus, Syria, with mythic views of pigeons in Arab and Islamic literature. His Damascus is not a city of monuments but one of alleys, markets, and alienated individuals who guide him to an understanding of the disintegration and emptiness in an Arab culture that was once rich and strong. Most poignant is the chapter "The University of Pain," in which Kociejowski explains the losses mourned in today's Syria, the collective melancholy made bearable by a willingness to see humor and humanity among scenes of destruction and brutality. Kociejowski writes beautifully, weaving together his insightful personal portraits with richly suggestive stories from Islamic and Arab history. He makes it clear that the weakness of current Arab culture has internal causes but occasionally reminds us that the impact of the global economy and overwhelming military assaults on Syria's borders have contributed.
Verdict An unusual, poetic, and throught-provoking introduction to Arab culture, not for the physical traveler but for the reader who wants to gain insight into a culture.—Elizabeth R. Hayford, Evanston, IL

Introducing The Devil's Engine: A Thirsty Interview Series

An interview, according to the OED, is most commonly a face-to-face meeting for the purpose of formal conference. The word comes from Latin (inter, between, among, mutually + videre, to see, understand) through French (entre-voir). Early English usage, though similar to the contemporary, also carried with it an inflection that has been partially lost: an interview was a “mutual looking,” a “quick glimpse,” or—more abstractly—a partial insight. To have been interviewed was to have been glimpsed among other people and things.

In the sixth book of Paradise Lost, as day breaks on the second day of the War in Heaven, the angels of God view Satan’s troops as they gather together in a conspicuous knot. The angels had been victorious the day before, and while their leader Zophiel cautions them to remain “aware” (546) of their foe’s power, the predominant feeling is one of surprise and relief. The forces of evil have not scattered, as expected, and won’t have to be chased down. So the armies collect themselves; the fighting is about to commence; and then, briefly, there is a pause.

This moment is one of the two instances where Milton uses the word “interview” in the poem: “At interview both stood / A while” (6.555-56). It appears again in Book 11, in Adam’s vision of the future, when he witnesses a marriage ceremony, and where the rites seem at first to be a “happy interview, and fair event / Of love and youth not lost” (11.593-94). In this second instance, it seems clear that the “happy interview” is an interview not to be trusted. All is not as it appears. The tents that Adam saw, we are told, belong to the family of Cain, and are in fact “the tents / Of wickedness” (11.607-08).

In the first example there is also deception afoot. Satan’s forces have created a war machine, a device of “devilish Enginrie, impal’d / On every side with shaddowing Squadrons Deep, / To hide the fraud” (6.555). The attempt of the devils to hide the Engine is what the good angels are seeing when they stand “At interview.” They catch only a partial glimpse of the Engine itself. The results of this interview are disastrous: the good angels come close to losing.

The Miltonic interview might at first seem somewhat removed from, say, a press interview, or (dare she say it), a job interview. In some senses, however, it is also exactly the same. Both are opportunities to watch someone disguise what they wish to keep hidden—and that, frequently, is evil. And if, as for Blake, a “true Poet” is one who is “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” then one who interviews a poet must be prepared to move among devils to spot them.

In that spirit, then, the Thirsty blog is proud to present The Devil's Engine: a series of interviews with Biblioasis authors. In celebration of National Poetry Month, the first four installments will focus on verse, but other genres and forms will follow. Altogether, the focus of these interviews will be what our writing reveals, what it conceals, and how much of either it ought to do.

Check back over the next few weeks for thoughts by Marsha Pomerantz, David Hickey, Joshua Trotter, Salvatore Ala, Zach Wells, Robyn Sarah, Goran Simic, Amanda Jernigan, and more.

Encore Lit Reviews Combat Camera

Reading Combat Camera, A.J. Somerset’s brave and gritty debut novel, one discerns here and there evidence of influence from Nathanael West’s classic Miss Lonelyhearts: the disillusioned and powerless protagonist trapped in a job that threatens to destroy his soul; the amoral boss given to endless philosophical pontificating; the vivid depictions of the squalor and desperation of the lost and disowned. For West, all that squalor was easily found in America during the Depression. In Combat Camera, the sordid setting is the realm of hardcore internet porn. Any influence from Nathanael West, however minimal it may actually be, is of course a good thing, but unlike the great American satirist, Somerset offers his protagonist something Miss Lonelyhearts never gets: a viable opportunity for redemption, a possible second chance. West was never so cruel.

Once a prize-winning freelance photographer and first-hand witness to the bloody conflicts in El Salvador, the West Bank, and Chechnya, among other hellholes, Lucas Zane is lost. Damaged, in a number of ways, and burnt-out, Zane simply exists, alone and beyond hope, in a tiny apartment in Toronto. But Melissa, one of the porn “models” he photographs, presumably recognizing a decent person and potential ally beneath the numb exterior, begins to wake Zane up and starts giving him ideas. Not the usual ideas, not the kind you might expect, but ideas instead about reviving his career, returning to legitimacy. Zane even starts to act on these ideas, despite his better judgement.

...

For the rest of the review, please go here.

Montreal Poetry Pandemonium

Biblioasis is pairing up with Vehicule and Coach House Press to bring Montreal-area poetry lovers a night of new verse, in celebration of National Poetry Month. Mark down the date, and we'll see you there!

Story Hour: Clark Blaise & Bharati Mukherjee

In my internet travels this afternoon I came across this video of Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee reading at Berkeley. Biblioasis-o-philes will be seeing a lot of this pair this year, as both are publishing new works of fiction this May. We'll be launching Clark's new short story collection The Meagre Tarmac at the end of April at Blue Met in Montreal; Bharati's New Miss India, from which she reads here, will be out a few weeks later.

Goran Simic: Exile in Alberta

From the Calgary Herald

Goran Simic has nothing against butterflies, but he can't write about them.

In 1992, Serbian nationalists began their siege of Sarajevo. Simic was a well-known and well-read author, and no friend of the nationalist cause. He had criticized it in print, citing the xenophobia and hatred that came with it. The bookstore he owned and his family home were shelled and destroyed. His mother and brother, and many friends, were killed.

"I'm so happy to see my face every morning," he said, over a plate of spicy fish at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Edmonton recently. "Oh my, look, you're still alive. Once you survive horror, everything else is wonderful."

First, the late Susan Sontag helped get him out of Sarajevo. Then PEN Canada, an organization committed to protecting freedom of expression, brought Simic to Toronto in 1996, where he was a senior fellow at Massey College. At that time, his English was poor. He was one of the best-known writers in the former Yugoslavia, but once his fellowship year at Massey College was finished, and he emigrated to Canada, he was obliged to find work.

He found himself as a labourer in a Holt Renfrew warehouse.

"There is no country in the world that wants a poet," he said.

"They want a bricklayer or a computer scientist. Many authors get lost."

Since last fall, he has a salary and an office at Stanley A. Milner Library as Edmonton's 2011 writer-in-exile. He has been, for much of his career since the siege of Sarajevo, a "war poet," interpreting what he had seen, heard and smelled during and after the siege of Sarajevo - his sophisticated, multicultural hometown, an Olympic city, "the Jerusalem of Europe" that was reduced to what Simic has called an "ashtray."

It has been his job to ensure, in some small way, that what happened is not forgotten. "They're still digging up bones," he said.

In the fall of 2006, at Litfest, author John Ralston Saul challenged the City of Edmonton to host a writer-in-exile. As a university city, an arts city and a city of immigrants, it seemed a natural fit.

Few of the people who heard his speech knew what a writer-in-exile was. But a week later, then-city councillor Michael Phair, John Mahon from the Edmonton Arts Council, professors and administrators from the University of Alberta, MacEwan and Athabasca universities, and representatives from organizations, such as the Writers Guild of Alberta and Litfest, were meeting over a cheese tray at City Hall with the executive director of PEN Canada on speakerphone.

Less than a year later, Edmonton's city council chambers were jammed to welcome Jalal Barzanji, an Iraqi writer, as Edmonton's first writer-in-exile. Saul returned to make a rather astonished victory speech, suggesting that Edmonton's collaborative model - currently between the University of Alberta and the Edmonton Arts Council, with an office donated by Edmonton Public Libraries - could be a model for the rest of the country. Next came Rita Espeschit from Brazil and Sheng Xue from China.

"It brings writers, all of them very successful in their home countries, but relatively unknown here, in contact with the Canadian writing community," said Miki Andrejevic, chair of the City of Edmonton Writer-in-Exile program. He lives not far from Simic and the two of them have become fast friends. They regularly meet to play table tennis and scheme about literary and cultural ventures.

Barzanji, Espeschit and Xue were enormously active in the role. So is Simic. His poetry and short stories have been published around the world, his opera librettos - a long collaboration with British composer Nigel Osborne - have been performed all over Europe. His puppet theatre shows are now classics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A full-length documentary has been made about him, When You Die As A Cat. Simic and Serbian writer David Albahari, who has lived in Calgary since 1994, are two of the most famous writers in Canada - though few Canadians have heard of them.

This weekend, Simic will launch his first book of poetry written in his adopted language, a marvellous collection called Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman.

He is currently working on a book of short stories about Alberta and translating Canadian writers into Serbo-Croatian. We met on one of the coldest days of the year, and Simic was the only person in downtown Edmonton who wasn't complaining about the weather. Like butterflies, weather isn't among his preferred themes.

He has been thinking about his experiences as a persecuted writer and as a war survivor, as he watches the demonstrations in the Arab world.

"It's a great victory for freedom of speech," he said. "It's proof that people can change history.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

There's a MacLeod on the Air

Hello, all. Tune in tomorrow morning at 7:50 to CBC Radio Sydney, when Steve Sutherland of Information Morning will be interviewing Alexander MacLeod. Also, if you're near Sydney NS, you might want to think about stopping by the Governor's Pub at 7 PM to hear Alex read: he's there tonight, and at the Boardmore Playhouse Theatre (Cape Breton University) tomorrow at 11:30.

Click here for CBC Sydney.

Water in the Wasteland

There are no oases in the Bible. There are many deserts, of course, especially in the Old Testament, but for the most part, the desert is home only to relentless hardship. Exceptions are a sign of God’s favour (like when the manna drops down in Exodus, or when water springs from the rocks for Jacob's people). Still: even for the chosen, respite from thirst is rare, and one never knows when it will be bestowed. Water has few fixed locations. It follows those who are favoured by God.

This is why, when the Samarian woman asks if Jesus can quench the thirst of his people, Jesus’s answer is so compelling. “Art thou greater than our father Jacob,” she asks, “which gave us the well?” “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,” replies Jesus. “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

To have the Spirit, Christ suggests, is better than having a well (which, in ancient Samaria, was already a pretty good piece of luck). The metaphor of ‘living water’ releases the Samarians from a dependence on external signs and physical wants. One need no longer troll the desert looking for water as a symbol of God’s grace, for, as Christ suggests, God’s grace abides eternally within; His presence is imminent to all.

So. There are no oases in the Bible. In neither the Old nor the New Testament. Not in the former, because relief and respite were as nomadic as God’s people, and thirst used to smite God’s foes; not in the latter, because we are told true sanctuary resides in the Spirit. Either way, the result is the same: the good book is oasis-free.

* * *

I’ve been thinking about this since Thursday. Thursday was my first day at work. Dan had come in to my office to explain some of the finer points of writing sales handles for our distribution catalogue in the States. The phone rang; Kathleen answered; the conversation was brief.

“It was those people again,” she calls out from the other room. “It’s happened twice in the past few weeks.”

“What people?” asks Dan. “The Christians? They call all the time.”

“Yeah,” says Kathleen. “I don’t know why they keep thinking we publish religious books.”

I look at Dan. He looks back at me. I start to smile. It had never occurred to me before.

“It’s because,” Dan says, “of the name.”

* * *

So. I thought about this for a while. I concluded the Christians could have thought any one of three things.

The first thing was—improbably—that we are an oasis for bibles. (I imagine empty pages flocking to us and pressing their faces into globes of ink, that have bedewed the floor with scripture).

The second—more probably—was that we are an oasis for the Biblically-minded. That’s what got me wondering about the oasis itself, and thinking perhaps there was an oasis metaphor in the Bible that I’d missed, some sacred palmy pool to which they were referring, and which my Catholic education had bypassed. So I read. I thought, no, it seems there’s no reference. More so, the joke’s on them. Looking for an oasis in the Bible is a mistake. The real oasis is in Heaven.

It was the third idea—the least probable, yet the most suggestive—that gave me pause. I had been thinking about signs. I had been thinking about what it means to feel oneself in the presence of God (or, for that matter, of many gods). Water in the desert? A pretty clear sign. So is Jesus, standing there, in person, speaking in his own voice. But a few generations down the line, what happens?

What happens is, the manna eventually runs out, and the voice of God grows faint. All one has is stories: one has books. For the majority of people divine presence is a matter of hearsay. And the more distant one is from that sense of original presence—a presence that for Thomas Love Peacock characterizes the iron age of poetry—then the harder it is to find one’s oasis, one’s figurative place of rest.

That’s why I love the stories of Augustine and of Mohammed. They mark a threshold. Augustine, not yet a Christian, is brought to a Bible, told by a voice to take it and read; and Mohammed, visited by the angel Gabriel, is commanded similarly. Read. The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr. In both cases, divine presence points to its own record, and says it is I.

* * *

Today marks my second week on the job. I’ve drunk a lot of extraordinary literature. And I have no doubt that Biblioasis is a place where people, thirsty for quality, have come. In the last seven days I’ve read unpublished poetry by Amanda Jernigan and David Hickey; I’ve read Claire Tacon’s forthcoming novel; I’ve read the newest collection of short stories by Clark Blaise, which is the closest thing to manna anyone will taste this year. All this has reinforced to me that Biblioasis, like Jacob’s well, is a place from which discerning readers will draw for many years; it is a place they will never find dry.

Yet as I settled into my office, and as shades of Augustine and Mohammed began to peer over my shoulder, it occured to me that this press believes in more than being an oasis for literature. Biblioasis, I thought then, may well believe that literature is the oasis for us all; and a good book is the best kind of presence, holier than blood and more thirst-quenching than wine. I look forward to working amid such spirit.

—TKM

Full Time Poetry

from the Concordia Link:

Joshua Trotter’s debut poetry collection, All This Could Be Yours, won immediate favourable reviews for no reason other than its authenticity and aesthetic simplicity.

When Michael Lista of the National Post picked Trotter’s release as one of the five best collections of poetry of 2010, he made it clear that having only one Canadian on board was not another Canadian content quota-based choice.

“To include Canadians’ work for publication based on any other rubric than their merits is to prolong artistic infancy,” he stressed.

Trotter recently moved to Montreal and is pleased to have a job that allows him to stay at home and do what he loves to do: write poetry.

He claims to have no particular theoretical concerns and, like many other writers, he writes because he has no other choice, and because doing otherwise would mean his own demise.

As a result, his collection of poetry is less than a book in and of itself, but an expansion of and an expedition into his own metamorphosis.

Unlike most contemporary poets, who are often reluctant to seek comfort in traditional styles, Trotter is not afraid to explore all of them; he sneaks effortlessly into sonnets and refuses to call iambic pentameter an archaic formula.

It is as through rhythm and rhyme in most of his poems make a way out of his brain, and it is this same phonetic property that helps him brush off any imperfections when he reads them out loud.

“In front of an audience, a poem’s chaff becomes obvious. Public readings are an excellent threshing tool. All the dumb, boring, show-offy stuff becomes evident,” said Trotter in an interview on Canadian poet rob mclennan’s blog. “During readings, I edit on the fly.”

Beyond the sonorous quality comes the subject matter, which is an unusual coalition of memory and illusion, and a valiant attempt to render them tangible. His poems, as if they had a life of their own, are merely canals connecting a flowing and flexible stream of consciousness.

His airy style alludes to fictitious landscapes as much as it does to a “weightless, insubstantial, ordinary mortality”—and language serves to connect the dots between these. In this panorama, it is nature in all its immensity that fills the void.

Don’t be surprised if you feel the spirit of e.e. cummings running and jumping through Trotter’s poems, for there is a lot of material with as much comparable confusion and potential in here.

Stay tuned for Trotter’s upcoming public readings in Montreal sponsored by Biblioasis this March.

Found: Salary Serf for Biblioasis Employment (Or, Introducing Tara Kathleen Murphy)

When we put out our call a month ago for a Biblioasis Salary-Serf, we were not quite sure what we’d find. Truth be told, our job-description was meant to frighten away the wrong sort of candidates as much as it was meant to attract the right. We didn’t want someone who would be happy working for Bertelsman, or someone who saw this job as a mere foot in the door, a necessary period of resume and cache building before moving onto some more glamorous multinational existence in Toronto. We didn’t want anyone who thought that this job would be glamorous at all. As several people had commented privately and publicly, our Salary-Serf Call-to-Action was not really even a job description. It was far too wide-ranging and all encompassing and, to any sensible person, terrifying. But I also think that anyone who has spent any time in the small press trenches could have easily identified with what was written there. Indeed, in some ways, it only scratched the surface of what we do here, and what the new hire can expect to be involved in.

What I did not want – despite mentioning the hoped for publishing program experience – was a publishing professional. This is neither the place nor the position for someone who would think of him or herself in such a fashion. Into my seventh year as a publisher, I’m still nowhere near professional status, and don’t expect I’ll ever be so. I’m not sure it’s something I even aspire towards. This is still very much on-the-job training; I am still, on my best days, having too much fun; I am learning too much; I love it too much. And that, more than anything else, mattered to me. Finding someone who might just share the same enthusiasm for the work that I, most days, still have. It’s the only justification one can have for the long hours, the meagre pay. (Oh! That there was even meagre pay!) You must find it meaningful. “Blessed,” Thomas Carlyle writes, “is he who has found his work,” and I consider myself quite lucky to have found my own. More than anything else, I wanted the person I eventually hired to bring the same enthusiasm to the job. I wanted to know that, whomever we hired, they would care for our books and our writers as much as I do. As it was our new hire that reminded me of the true and fitting meaning of the word amateur, I believe that we have found the right person.

We had a dozen or so applications and letters of intent; we quickly narrowed these down to half-a-dozen, then three, and finally two. We wavered near a week between these, switching back and forth. We finally settled on Tara Kathleen Murphy, and not even a week into her involvement with the press we know we’ve hired someone quite special, who has already, in a few days, contributed to the press in several meaningful ways.

Tara comes to us from Western, where she is working on her doctorate in English. Before that she worked at McGill under Robert Lecker, where she finished a Master’s Thesis on the Porcupine’s Quill and Gaspereau Press, perhaps the two presses I most admire (& collect) in the country. She worked at the Word bookstore in Montreal under Adrian King-Edwards, one of the finest booksellers in the country. Tara has given a lot of thought to the role of the independent press in Canada, to the relationship between the physical book and its contents; she has a solid understanding of the industry and the independent press scene in particular. She’s a very fine editor, copy-editor, poet and artist; she has a good head for publicity; she’s an exceptional reader; and she seems to have solid administrative sense. She’s a bibliophile and book collector (I’ve never really been able to trust book people who are not). And she wants to get that old platen press in the garage up and working again. Bless her.

Just as importantly, she knew our books, bought our books, loved our books. She was familiar with our authors; particularly our poets. And she spoke of a small press life as one, at least in part, of service and community, and of the importance of finding meaningful work. It was as if she had read my mind.

But perhaps it is best to let Tara herself speak. Thirsty readers will be seeing a lot of her around here over the coming weeks and months and years, as will anyone else who deals with the press: at shows, readings, events, conferences. Many of our authors can expect to hear from her directly quite soon as well.

From her cover letter, applying for the Salary-Serf position. When I had read this, I had a sense I may have found my assistant:

"Part of this fastidiousness stems from my love of books as objects. I've been building my library for years, and right now I'm nourishing collections of typography manuals, small-press ephemera, and books about books. I couldn't say which item is my favourite (though my first-edition Memoirs of Montparnasse, unearthed in a church basement sale and bought for a dollar, is high on the list). What I can say is I've always believed that we have a moral obligation to produce quality work that lasts. Whether it's the extra fifteen minutes spent on a press release, or the extra cash spent for a sheet of Zephyr Antique Laid paper, the care we take speaks for itself. It's the best way we have of showing others that the stories we tell matter.

"I have always been personally invested in how books are made, and for this reason I have an enormous respect for the small press world. There's also no question that my interest in printers and publishers has done a lot to shape my own work ethic, which has served me well. It would be a privilege to apply my skills in an industry that I love, and to work for a press that I so deeply admire."

And it is a privilege to have her working with us.

Sunrise Launch Reminder

For those of you in Edmonton this Saturday, Goran Simic will be launching his new collection Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman at Audrey's at 2 pm. Help spread the word to all who can attend. Here, below, is a recording of Alan Rickman reading Goran's Sarajevo Spring.