The Vancouver Sun spotlights Jen Currin, Jordan Scott

On Saturday, March 29, the Vancouver Sun ran an article about National Poetry Month, and focused on Vancouver native Jen Currin and her new book Hagiography. Jordan Scott (Blert) was also mentioned in the poetry story. Please see below link and reprinted article.<!--newline--><!--newline-->http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/weekendreview/story.html?id=844448dc-dbf8-4390-9092-c3276a75ca48<!--newline--><!--newline--><!--newline-->Gargle with words, make a poem<!--newline-->Rebecca Wigod<!--newline-->Vancouver Sun<!--newline--><!--newline-->Saturday, March 29, 2008<!--newline--><!--newline-->Hagiography is a great-looking book. On its glossy cover there's a picture of a taupe and black two-storey house with a halo floating over it, against a cool turquoise sky.<!--newline--><!--newline-->The poems inside are divided into sections called Death, Childhood and Birth -- reverse order. In between are sets of love poems, each labelled Intermission.<!--newline--><!--newline-->The language is simple but challenging. If you're literal-minded, it will frustrate your expectations.<!--newline--><!--newline-->A Childhood poem called 'The Stove Refuses to Cool' begins:<!--newline--><!--newline-->They arrest people who stop to take pictures.<!--newline--><!--newline-->That's why my sister's spine is crooked.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Only half a piece of paper.<!--newline--><!--newline-->A few lines down, we read:<!--newline--><!--newline-->Just as the rain teaches patience,<!--newline--><!--newline-->teeth fall from the trees.<!--newline--><!--newline-->The most experienced gravedigger<!--newline--><!--newline-->speaks softly of washing his mother.<!--newline--><!--newline-->With National Poetry Month mere days away, I asked Vancouver poet Jen Currin what she's up to in Hagiography (Coach House, 85 pages, $16.95), her second book.<!--newline--><!--newline-->'I'm a bit of a collagist,' she explained the day after her 36th birthday.<!--newline--><!--newline-->'I always carry around a notebook in which I gather from what I'm reading, from what I overhear, from dreams, from conversations .... Part of my engagement with the world is to gather and try to make something cohesive with it. It might be very weirdly cohesive, or cohesive to me and 10 others, but I am trying to make something whole.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->She grew up in Portland, Ore., in a bigger-than-usual family. She has eight siblings.<!--newline--><!--newline-->She's well educated, with a bachelor's and a master's degree from U.S. universities, and she plans to do a second master's at Simon Fraser University.<!--newline--><!--newline-->She teaches writing at the post-secondary level, showing students that, despite what they probably learned early in life, understanding a poem doesn't necessarily mean cracking its code. It can also mean 'experiencing it with their other intelligences.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->She belongs to vertigo west, a poetry collective made up of eight women who love Anne Carson's work.<!--newline--><!--newline-->The French modernist poet Max Jacob, one of Currin's influences, said something like, 'Love a word, repeat it, gargle with it.' That works for her because she feels having a deep and intimate connection with language means 'messing with it a bit.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->In one of the book's Intermissions, a poem called 'The Town in Her' contains the line 'An eyelash on the toilet seat.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->After it comes: 'No piracy can make me more improbable.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->Coach House says Currin's poems 'push life's barely hidden strangeness into the light.' Savouring a cup of strong coffee, she said she is drawn to the language of dreams, to non-linear narratives and to stories told in fragments.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Yet she insisted that she isn't trying to be obscure or difficult in her work. 'Maybe 'theory' is too large a word, but I have this idea that we all write exactly what we can.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->She added: 'I want people to read my poems. As a poet, if you have a readership of 50, you're big-time.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->You can hear her at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir, along with William Stobb, author of Nervous Systems.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Another Coach House poet you'll enjoy discovering in April is Jordan Scott. He has struggled with stuttering all his life and attempts a 'poetics of stutter' in his book, Blert. It doesn't just embrace stammered speech but also investigates where a stutter comes from. He'll read at Robson Square on Thursday, April 17 and at the Central Library on Wednesday, April 23.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Note, too, that Elise Partridge, a Vancouver poet who has been published in The New Yorker, has a new book out. Chameleon Hours is published by House of Anansi, which says she writes 'lyric poetry -- clean, bracing, unadorned.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->-