if you're after getting honey
then you don't go killing all the bees

The first page of a poetry series I'm working on. Right now it's called "again and again".

Enunciation of the fervor. A blip in the cosmos. Drip of syrup tipples from fork edge. Times fodder. Food loosens, grips down the gullet. Shot a pierce. An arrow pierces air and finds comfort. Lines betray. Try deep breathing into belly. Spill over your thighs and sink. Meet three folds of body. What thrills through which body when words like circumspect slot into their places. Putting letters through their paces. Letting.

Is it normal to notice language this much?: A co-worker was telling me about how her Dalmation attacked the neighbour's Chow and I said "Isn't it like, five times the size?" And then I didn't hear anything else she told me because all I could think about was all the "i" sounds in that sentence, all the words that go letter-i-letter-e, the progression of "s" throughout the sentence, the odd rhythm (iambic mixed with spondaic, I think). And of course I've had that sentence in my head all day...

The question is, am I obsessively noticing that stuff, or do I say the things I say according to some need to align words in poetic ways? Oh no, that sentence rhymed too (sort of).

Ugh. I think this might be the cause of some major failures to communicate. I think I sometimes say what sounds best (poetically) instead of what I mean.

Oh well, communicating is one of the least interesting things there is to do with language anyway.

Still under the thrall of Saturday night's movie, The Visitor, which is refreshingly complex, quiet, slow-paced, but still engaging, romantic, clever, and deeply yet subtly critical of the perennial dangers of fear, complacency, bureaucracy.

It left me wondering what I can do.

The immediate answer is nothing, as I'm not American so can't vote or otherwise affect American immigration policy. The slightly less direct answer is to work in immigration law, which I've considered before, but I honestly don't think that's an area of law in which my strengths lie. The oblique but most significant answer is to be more engaged with politics, policy, law - to understand who represents us and what decisions they are making and how those decisions affect us, at all levels, from municipal to federal to international.

Canadians always have recourse to the comforting yet deceptive notion that we're not doing as badly as they are - our immigration policies are never quite as Draconian, our detention policies are never quite as constitutionally unsound, our social policies never as regressive, our criminal justice system never as cruel. But is any of that even true?

We currently have a prime minister who openly models his governance after the Bush administration, with one major difference: he's intelligent. He's competent. He doesn't want open debate, and for the most part, we're not demanding it. The foundations of democracy are eroding or at least being obfuscated, and we're not complaining.

My thinking in this area is always muddled, nihilist, conspiracy-theorist; I tend to overstate things. But I'm tired of being afraid of what governments can do, I'm tired of the false dichotomy of powerful against good.

The unfortunate result of reading in Vancouver and seeing so many Vancouver writers in Calgary is that I want to go back... I miss the beach, I miss the old buildings, I miss the humidity, I miss the trees, the uneven sidewalks, the density, the little produce stores, the electric buses, the hills....
Of course when I'm in Vancouver, I miss the sky, the light, the smell of snow, the smell of Chinooks, some strange unnameable quality of Calgary that I can't quite put my finger on...
I will never be content.
Merely form ill fitting into form...

Happy: Finally bought a bookshelf and was finally able to rescue a box of books from storage. Earlier this year I sorted some of my books by genre, so I grabbed one of the poetry boxes and am now surrounded by many books I sort of forgot I owned, such as Erica Hunt's Local History, Nathalie Stephens' somewhere running, Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack, Susan Holbrook's misled, Dionne Brand's No Language is Neutral, Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K, Steve McCaffrey's Seven Pages Missing and on and on...

Even happier: The bookshelf is one of those big square IKEA ones that can probably fit another two boxes' worth of books at least...

Why is poetry always a feast or famine? There were many enticing events over the last couple of weeks, but I couldn't make it to all of them. Partly because they coincided with the first few weeks of my new job and the last few, agonizingly drawn out, weeks of the bar course. Now that I'm all settled in, homework-free, and refreshed from sleeping for most of yesterday, there are no events on the horizon...

Anyway, starting three weeks ago: My fellow LINEbooks author Kim Minkus launched her book 9 Freight at Pages with a lovely reading. Here's a measure of success: although the audience was small, I'm pretty sure everyone there bought at least one of her books. As should you.

Then two weeks ago, the Old School reading persevered through a number of setbacks, including Calgary's ridiculous week-long callback to winter weather. Again the audience was small but very receptive. Jill Hartman, Emily Cargan, Brea Burton and Julia Williams all read brilliantly and made me feel all envious and anxious and I need to write new stuff!!

Thursdays have been bad days for me, because I usually stay up late Wednesday nights finishing my bar course assignments, and so I missed the Spoken Word Festival event the Thursday before last featuring David Bateman, Hiromi Goto, Jordan Scott, Karen Hines, and Ivan E. Coyote. I regret not seeing all of them, but particularly Ivan E. Coyote, who I saw at the Spoken Word Festival about four or five years ago and thought was incredible. Even though I was living in Vancouver for three years after that, I never managed to see any of her performances for one reason or another, but I've since read all of her books. Her writing is quite different from most of the authors I read, but it's wonderfully original, straightforward and profound.

Last weekend, I made it out to Vancouver for my reading with Julia Williams at the Kootenay School of Writing, sadly one of the last events at Spartacus Books, which has to relocate due to rent issues. Spartacus has been a great place for readings, very spacious, comfortable and welcoming. The reading went really, really well. Julia read a mix of poetry and fiction, interspersed with sardonic commentary. I've always admired her ability to extemporize wit. I read for longer than I usually do, but it was great, especially when the audience started interrupting me to ask questions and getting me to repeat one poem and generally to explain myself. That's the best response you can get from a poetry audience, I think - just the sense that what you're reading is making people think. Hopefully, the audio recording will be up at the KSW site soon.

Last Tuesday, Jordan Scott launched his latest book blert at Pages with his usual mesmerizing and haunting performance. I haven't read blert yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Again because of the curse of Thursdays, I missed derek beaulieu's launch of his new book Chains at the Uppercase Gallery, but I plan to visit the exhibition of his visual poems sometime over the next month.

Friday was the final event of the Spoken Word Festival, featuring Sachiko Murakami, Steve Collis, Colin Browne, Weyman Chan, and Fred Wah, at the Art Gallery of Calgary. I'm running out of positive adjectives and don't want to repeat myself too much. But what the hell: lovely, brilliant, wonderful, fascinating, etc. Colin Browne and Fred Wah in particular can teach everyone a thing or two about how to perform poetry.

And that's all, for now... Actually, I won't mind a lull in events too much, I have a lot of reading to catch up on.

Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on something that needs no advocate but itself.... Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than notoreity. Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become of us if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe reasoning from either extreme.

- Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Letter to a Young Contributor," 1862; quoted in My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe

If you're in Vancouver tomorrow, hope to see you there.

Things I noticed this week:

There's a store across from my bus stop that sells tennis rackets and skis called "What's Your Racket and Ski". Maybe they figured one pun was enough...

A coffee mug I used at work had the motto for Calgary Independent Reporters Inc. on it: "Stepping into the Future... Today!" Awesome.

This is probably the kind of thing I shouldn't expend too much energy on, but it annoyed me, and I believe in getting things on the record:

This is a note sent out to the English Literature Students' Society email list about the reading I organized and hosted last Saturday:

Well, today was certainly an interesting day. I headed downtown earlier this evening with the intention of going to the Old School reading at the Truck Gallery. I got downtown to the gallery’s front steps, only to be confronted with a sign stating, quite clearly, that the reading was open to “members and invited guests” only. This caveat had not been mentioned in any of the advertising for this event, including the official mailing list, the readers’ promotions, and the University of Calgary English Department webpage. Not feeling inclined to try bluffing my way past the doorman (and probably woefully underdressed anyway in my khaki cargo pants and fleece sweatshirt), I decided to call it a loss and caught the next train home. Bugger all to show for my time. So let this be a lesson to all you event planners out there – if you’re going to make your do an exclusive party, be a nice chap and let people know ahead of time! My apologies to any of you who tried the same thing as I did, based on the fact that I listed this event in my last newsletter, and got the boot at the front door.

This is the email I sent in reply:

I'm sorry you had so much trouble getting to my reading last night, but I can't imagine that there was a sign like that outside the Truck Gallery. I certainly didn't see one. Maybe you were at one of the fancy restaurants on either side of it? Or the jazz club on the corner? The Truck is in the basement of a pretty old and run-down office building, and there is no way they have a dress code, doorman, or members only policy.

It bothers me that you have sent a notice to your entire mail list insinuating that I would be careless enough to invite the public to an exclusive event. I've been organizing events in Calgary for close to ten years, and my reputation in the writing community is very important to me. I'm sure your mail list is large enough to have some influence on people's opinions.

Obviously, the event was open to the public, or I wouldn't have advertised it all around town. I was hoping someone would post a correction of some kind to the email list, but so far no luck.

One of my new favorite bands, The Duke Spirit:

Petition against Bill c-484, Unborn Victims of Crime Act

There's a bill under consideration at Parliament right now that purports to protect pregnant women by making it an offence to cause injury to an unborn fetus, but which, quite obviously, will merely make it easier to impose restrictions on women's right to choose to abort their pregnancies.

The bill has passed second reading, so it's well on its way to becoming law. Canada has not had any legal restriction on abortion since 1988 (although procedural policies have certainly restricted many women's access to facilities where safe and timely abortions can be performed).

I was involved in a Students for Choice club in my last year of law school, and the vitriolic opposition to the concept of choice frankly shocked me. Just to be clear: I don't advocate abortion. I think having to choose whether or not to end your pregnancy must be the worst experience any human being could ever go through. But if the choice has to be made, the decision should rest solely within the power of the women who have to make it, not within the power of men in suits in Ottawa or anywhere else (well, unless they're the father... you know what I mean).

Anyway, sign the petition here. Read more about it here, here, here and here.

Know all men by these presents...

He cannot guarantee long time until the entire garage will fell off.

Words herein importing a number of gender shall be construed in grammatical conformance with the context of the party or parties in reference.

Is “tot lots”a term of art?

The road supposes to be fully completed...

Find the problem if there is one and fix it!! Lawyers fix problems.

The roof has no support at all, and was built with negligence.

Yes, gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence, when we write. That doesn't mean I can relegate women to what we "should" or "must" be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.

- Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 13

Emily Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape.

- Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 27

Apparently I started this blog over five years ago (April 10, 2003, but I hid the first year and half or so of posts). Back then very few poets had blogs. Then most poets had blogs. Now most poets have abandoned their blogs. And still I blog. And still, as far as I can tell, hardly anyone reads this. How charmingly futile.

I ordered a bunch of books about three weeks ago, then forgot what I'd ordered, but decided not to find out, so that I'd be surprised when they came. Today I was pleasantly surprised to receive The Book of Beginnings and Endings by Jenny Boully and My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. Nice work, self of three weeks ago.

Best parts of working in a law office:

1. Clients come in a lot, so there is always coffee.

2. Saying things like, "Did that fax come in for the Smith file?" or "I'm working on the Jones file right now." Who knew that could be so satisfying?

Searching for David Bowie videos on youtube led me to a cover of "Hurt" Bowie did with Nine Inch Nails, which reminded me of this video of Johnny Cash covering "Hurt," still affecting and disturbing and lovely.

This sentence is like a cul-de-sac, you can walk along it but you won't really get anywhere:

The knowledge of the innkeeper and his staff of the plaintiff’s somewhat limited capacity for consuming alcoholic stimulants without becoming befuddled and sometimes obstreperous, seized them with a duty to be careful not to serve him with repeated drinks after the effects of what he had already consumed should have been obvious.

Well, blog, I've enjoyed our time together, but I have to go be a lawyer now.

Maybe I can visit you on weekends...



UPDATE: I'm not actually miserable, just adjusting.

I'm not big on hippies, but I love this Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song.

"almost cut my hair
it happened just the other day
it was gettin' kinda long
i coulda said it was in my way...

but i didn't and i
wonder why
feel like lettin' my
freak flag fly"

Today I'm trying to remember how to publicize a poetry reading. Remember way back in the day when it was all about making lame-ass posters and putting them up around the university or on 17th ave and expecting people to a) notice them and b) remember where to go when? I miss that in a way. Although it is definitely better to spread the word electronically and not have to leave my house or pyjamas.

I used to read the Poetry Foundation blog mainly for Christian Bok's posts, now I read it mainly for Linh Dinh's posts.

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots,
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man had hoped for a happy or useful of glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.

- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

Reading philosophy is a skill I have yet to develop. I've read about a third of de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity and really have no idea what she's getting at. I'm reading through a thick haze with sudden passages, like the above, bursting into clarity.

Caught the new Joe Strummer documentary last night. Maybe it was the wine I drank prior, or my semi-traumatized emotional state going in, but I walked out of that movie wondering how I got so distracted, so complacent, so bloated and ineffectual. I want to trim fat, I want to walk away clean, keep walking, keep writing, forget success and failure, forget status, forget reception.
I want to be productively angry.
I want to wear army boots again. Why the hell did I stop wearing army boots?

Overwhelmed by fonts.

Anxiety: too many projects, too little resolution, too many self-imposed deadlines, too many books on the go, too many lists, too many possibilities, too little focus, too much coffee, way too much chocolate.

Very taken with Rita Wong's forage lately. It's an incredibly full book, confronting so many different issues and taking on so much complexity. I thought a useful way to start summing up why I like this book so much might be to list in general terms the subject of some of the different poems. The list soon spiraled out of control, and I was just skimming the surface of her poetry: genetic engineering, US patents of wheat, seeds, grains, transgenic pigs, laundry toxins, chinese launderers, native american naming, chinese remedies, war, resistance, discarded computer toxins, oil, economy, smog, body toxins, prisons, wealth, weaponry, chinese language, capitalism, consumerism, endangered species, food, powell street, pride, connection.

It's a serious book, but also ironic ("disaffect, reinfect me.") and playful. Many pages have quotations in hand-written script scrolling along the sides, or Chinese characters nestled among the poems. The visual effect is one of having access into an author's notebook, where ideas and observations ferment among foraged materials. It's a subtle balance of political and personal, an organic panoply of affront at the myriad outrages committed on, by, and for us. Which us? Many us-es. It's a complex text, sensitive to the constantly shifting power imbalances that configure status in the hyper-capitalized, post-colonial, globalized world.

One of my favorite poems in forage:

canola queasy

vulture capital hovers over dinner tables, covers hospitals a sorrowful shade of canola, what gradient decline in the stuck market, what terminal severity in that twenty-year monopoly culled the patent regime, its refrain of greed, false prophets hawk oily platitudes in rapacity as they engineer despair in those brilliant but foolish yellow genetically stacked prairie crops. how to converse with the willfully profitable stuck in their monetary monologue? head-on collisions create more energy but who gets obliterated? despite misgivings i blurt, don't shoot the messy angels with your cell-arranging blasts, don't document their properties in order to pimp them, the time for business-as-usual died with the first colonial casualty. reclaim the long now. hey bloated monstrosity: transcribe your ethics first or your protein mass shall turn protean mess and be auctioned off in the stacked market and so you can reap endless cussed stunts.

- Rita Wong

I've been working on a couple of different "poetic statements" for the past few weeks, a form I'm not very familiar with. I seem to be going through some kind of academic backlash phase where I don't want to write about theory at all. I'm trying to make really honest statements about what I think about poetry without reference to academic jargon, and I'm finding it fairly difficult. Sometimes I think I've written interesting and complex observations, other times I think I'm just stating the obvious. The worst is when my attempts to state things honestly devolve into confessional, emotive psychobabbling. It's really disturbing how closely my concept of my poetics is linked to my concept of self. I'm not sure if that's a strength, in terms of writing, or if it's simply an inability to transcend the familiarity of the lyric. I think it's useful to put some effort into examining all this, why I write, what I expect from writing, etc. But there is an element of avoidance in it: I haven't actually written any poetry in quite some time. Oh well, stringing words together in some fashion is never really a waste of time, right?

I'm so upset that McNally Robinson is closing its Calgary location. Sure, it's a blow to the literary scene, since it's one less free, convenient, and most importantly, licensed location for readings. But even worse, it'll cause a major reduction to my quality of life. I live downtown, in a city of a million people. I should have easy access to all kinds of culture. But sadly, no, there are no other bookstores in downtown Calgary. Not even a Chapters. Oh yeah, I guess there's a Coles, but it's one of those sad, off-putting mall bookstores. And anyway I don't like to spend my money at the Indigo-Chapters-Coles empire.

Walking to McNally's, browsing their poetry section, their magazines, their prairie writers section, their sale section, maybe having lunch or a coffee, hitting a couple of clothes stores on the way home - this is one of the most satisfying ways I can think of to spend my time. I guess I could walk across the river to Pages on Kensington. I was there this afternoon, and I noticed they have a pretty impressive poetry section lately (they stock my book). But it's a much smaller store, and they don't sell remaindered books at superlow prices like McNally's and big box bookstores. I can't buy books (other than poetry books) for retail! That's absurd. Just last week, at McNally's, I bought a J.M. Coetzee novel and a University of Oxford Press book on Athenian democracy, each for under five dollars. How could I possibly make such random purchases at retail prices?

I was at Higher Ground earlier this afternoon, writing, and I noticed some lanky slacker type guy reading the same book on Athenian democracy I've been reading, which he clearly also bought at McNally's. In a city without an independent outlet-style bookstore, where are the kind of people who sit around coffeeshops all afternoon reading for fun and self-improvement supposed to acquire their reading materials? Damn you, McNally Robinson, the forces for good in this city are so few, how can you abandon us?