reading in vancouver

I'm reading in Vancouver on Monday. Details below, if you're in the area and interested.

In conjuction with the PRISM contest posted in the previous entry, PRISM is hosting a reading by award-winning authors Trevor Herriot and a. rawlings.

What happens when lepidoptery meets sleep studies? What significance do disappearing grassland birds have for the prairies and the people who live there? Join us for an evening of readings that explore our relationships with the natural world.

Monday, April 2, 2007
Free admission (no minors, sorry)
7 pm
Thea’s Lounge, UBC
6371 Crescent Road

Trevor Herriot is an award-winning literary non-fiction author. His first book, River in a Dry Land: A Prairie Passage (McClelland & Stewart,2000),received two Saskatchewan Book Awards, the Writers Trust Drainie Taylor Biography Prize, and the Canadian Booksellers’ Association Award for “Best First-Time Author.” It was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction. Jacob’s Wound: a Search for the Spirit of Wildness (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) also received several award nominations, including the Writer’s Trust Award for Non-fiction. Herriot has written two documentaries for CBC Ideas and is currently working on a book called Pastures Unsung.

a. rawlings is a poet and multidisciplinary artist. In 2001, she received the bpNichol Award for Distinction in Writing upon graduation from York University. She recently co-edited Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005). Her first poetry collection, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, was published by Coach House Press in 2006. Wide Slumber was listed in The Globe and Mail's top 100 books of 2006.

matrix: science poetry dossier

matrix has a newly designed website (complete with reviews available online, praise 'em)! matrix also has a spiffy call for submissions for their upcoming issue, the science poetry dossier, edited by gillian savigny! love seeing 'lepidoptery' adopted, what what. here's the call:

We are looking for neurotransmissions capable of navigating the synapse between poetry and science. Send us your sestinas on seismology! Your botanic love poems! Your geodes! Your epics of empiricism! Show us how your interdisciplinary genes express themselves. We at Matrix have been noticing a curious trend in contemporary poetry and like good little scientists we would like to study and classify its range. Until May1st we will be collecting examples of science poetry: a rare species of literature whose population is set to explode this spring in the 77th issue of our magazine. Whether you look to entomology or lepidoptery, geometry or chemistry, biology or geology we want the fruits of your creative fermentation. We will accept poems that use science as technique or subject matter as well as those that take it as inspiration or enemy. For the next few weeks think parasite maintenance, fractals, and geopoetry. Raid the scientist's treasury of terminology and dress your poems in the loot.

boring

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

John Cage

I

"To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied."

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

gold stars

congrats to conor green and anthony black for their championed soul, jon paul fiorentino for his winning loser, and to eiríkur örn norðdahl for his dirty eitur fyrir byrjendur.

i love you, LOVE YOU

!! = diamanda galás ripping open "i put a spell on you"

Only you can prevent forest fires?

lunar eclipse

my dad snapped this photo of the lunar eclipse, viewed near lake superior yesterday evening.

egg 0 insomnia recorded

just completed a third recorded rough draft of an excerpt from wide slumber. i've been working on this one for two weeks; it's "egg 0 insomnia."

prologue (pps. 7-10)
egg 0 insomnia (pps. 14-17, with hints of 40-41)
apnea (p. 24)

found fond: socialism, jazz, saturday

i interact with more people on a daily basis this year, it seems. with the high-school arts-in-ed program, i meet a stream of interesting students and teachers. the winter has me riding transit rather than cycling. jazz makkar's interning at mercury so we catch up weekly, and i'm sunlighting at ryerson so i now know 30 students via text and talk.

i don't plan much time for social activity, so i'm always pleased when it pounces on me. this past weekend was a lovely tiggerish surprise. i anticipated a fairly unforgiving itinerary of short-story marking, grant applications, and house-cleaning. that quickly dissolved with derek beaulieu's visit. we had a super brunch, and then poked through my collection of small-press items from canada and norway. around 4pm, we trundled off to the communist's daughter where we met up with jordan scott, chris ewart, and sandy lam (the latter two freshly returned from cuba and en route home to calgary).

the communist's daughter is arguably the most euphoric, communally pleasant pub in toronto on a saturday afternoon. michael louis johnson (trumpet player and heart-rending singer) waits tables as he serenades the tiny bar, accompanied by his bandmates known as "the red rhythm." our small group had a fantastic experience, trading stories and loving the live music.

sunday was back-to-marking for me, my small foray into social activity a saving grace for my work-addled brain. and monday was back to school but it was a pleasure to return to the ryerson classroom after reading week ended. so pleased to see students again, to witness dedicated and enthusiastic feedback. i missed them; i wasn't anticipating that! both sections are transitioning from short fiction to poetry, so the next two weeks promise to be full of challenging and intriguing thoughts.

tomorrow's a mixture of marking and lesson prep. if i get enough accomplished, i may head to the communist's daughter again as a reward, to soak in the sounds. and speaking of sounds, i'm pretty jazzed about lesson prep on "sound in poetry." i'll post a note on what i include once it's fixed.

picture of michael louis johnson @ communist's daughter. photo by sandy lam.

where (is) a word (is) in its natural environment

i watched Planet Earth on CBC; a baobab bloom unfurled from its banana beak to expose dozens of thin pollenators. the structure fascinated me... how could this movement, blooming, replicate in a textual environment? how does it already exist in speech? do patterns in nature, the impulses of nature inherently exist in English linguistic structures?

You must talk with two tongues,
if you do not wish to cause confusion
- Wyndham Lewis, Vortex No. 1: Be Thyself

leaves love. bears hate. tears flower. rocks challenge. backs break. plants ache. ducks act.
attacks moon. challenges rock. flowers tear. hates bear. challenge rocks. flower tears. hate bears. love leaves.

Love leaves its abusers.
- Songs:Ohia