My panic whenever reviewing poetry can be explained with a story once told to an interviewer by Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. For an unauthorized lyric sheet, the band’s Japanese label had transcribed her indecipherable singing into English lines like, 'Hit me with your airplane / I don’t mend no fence / Yeah, baby, I’m a mud dancer.' Poetry criticism’s failure, I’ve always thought, is that it runs at a similar interpretive deficit as Japanese music industry interns pitted against Scottish post-punks singing in doggerel.
David McGimpsey (Sitcom), writer of knee-slapping, rhymed-and-metred poems about such pop culture legends as the Fonz and Mary Tyler Moore, is currently the 'indie artist in residence' at Broken Pencil magazine.
The National Post's Mark Medley interviews Jeramy Dodds, who discusses the lengthy process behind Crabwise to the Hounds as well as the connection between writing and working as a research archeologist:
'It seems to me like there's some sort of interpretation that occurs in reverse order,' he says. 'These poems are being built up of all this junk, really. Junk from the language.'
Despite my abiding conviction that a moratorium should be placed on poems about Glenn Gould (whose frequent appearance in Canadian poetry has made him into something of a verse cliché), I feel bound to admit that Jeramy Dodds imbues the clutch of Gould poems in his first collection with the same idiosyncratic brilliance that the famed concert pianist injected into his own art.
Open Book Toronto interviews Margaret Christakos just in time for the Toronto launch of her new poetry collection, What Stirs, on November 6 at David Mirvish Books.
Read what Christakos has to say about the writing process, her influences and her latest project:
a.rawlings, author of wide slumber for lepidopterists, visits the Kootenay School of Writing on Friday, November 21 to perform with Jonathon Wilcke.
a.rawlings at the Kootenay School
with Jonathon Wilcke
Friday, November 21, 2008
Ten Sixty Seven, 1067 Granville Street (back alley entrance)
8:00 p.m.
RM Vaughan (Troubled) reads on Thursday, November 13 at Rust Belt Books in Buffalo, New York. Vaughan will be joined by Richard Owens (Delaware Memoranda) and Jose Felipe Alvergue (us look up / there red dwells). The event will be followed by a short Q&A. Refreshments will be served.
RM Vaughan in Buffalo
with Richard Owens and Jose Felipe Alvergue
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street
Buffalo, NY
7:30 p.m.
In addition to being the start of the summer movie season, a time for flowers and the last name of Rod Stewart's friend Maggie, May is also the month of Doors Open Toronto and the start of Book Expo America! But here's the thing about May: it's the fifth month of the year, and as such (and because we're stumped for sale ideas), we're taking a fifth of the price off every title on the Coach House site!
From May 30 to June 1, the largest publishing event in North America – Book Expo America (or 'BEA' to those in 'the biz') – is hosted at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City, and Coach House will be there. Like every year, the Expo provides booksellers and publishing industry workers a preview of exciting new things happening in the world of books.
