"Emoticons from Wikipedia": from _Dancing the Internet_—Artificially Intelligent Dance Music

The cover of my new book: Moon Baboon Canoe

This is the beautiful cover of my about-to-be-released new book Moon Baboon Canoe. The cover was designed by editor Stuart Ross and the book will appear with Mansfield Press.

Here's the back cover description:

A follow-up to his acclaimed The Porcupinity of the Stars, Moon Baboon Canoe is filled with Gary Barwin’s trademark humour, invention, musicality and craft. These witty and surprising poems confront subjects as diverse as time machines, elves, hummingbirds, birth and cows, yet manage to explore the perennial themes of poetry: delight, mortality, childhood, love, the natural world and squirrels. It is a moon-guided, baboon-paddled canoe of a book, and around each bend in the river we find the sources of our strength: consolation, goofiness and joy.

David Lee (bass) & Gary Barwin (voice and sax) flap Obviously for BookThug's 10th

The writer and musician, David Lee, and I played a set for the BookThug 10th anniversary concert. BookThug is a great literary publisher out of Toronto. They published Gregory Betts' and my The Obvious Flap a couple years ago.

David and I concocted a performance from the book (unfortunately Greg was out of town). David played bass and I read and played saxophone and this saxophone-like thing that my dad bought on the beach for me years ago, made of an alto sax mouthpiece and a piece of PVC tubing with appropriate finger holes. It actually sounds quite great and often sounds like an Armenian duduk, which, for me, is high praise indeed.

BookThug recorded the entire shindig. That's here. And you can hear individual performances by the various guests.

David and my performance is here.

Review of Seedpod, Microfiche

Scott Bryson was good enough to review a number of above/ground press chapbooks including my recent Seedpod, Microfiche (2013) in Broken Pencil #62. It can still be ordered here.

Here's the review:

Seedpod, Microfiche

Gary Barwin

Chapbooks with gimmicks can be a risky enterprise, but Gary Barwin is no stranger to themed works. His Franzlations (2011), for example, was a collection built on Franz Kafka-isms.

            The six selections in Seedpod, Microfiche could either be viewed as the poetic version of a word ladder puzzle (the type of brain-teaser that asks you to change one word into another, in a certain number of steps, by altering a letter at a time) or a written game of Broken Telephone. Barwin is changing more than one letter at a time in these poems – he adds, removes and rearranges several words from poem to poem – but the effect is similar: the opening poem (titled “1”) is transformed, bit by bit over six pages, into a wholly different verse, while retaining a glimmer of its original meaning.

            This could be considered a safe approach to writing poetry, but it also provides some desirable security for the reader. There’s an extra level of satisfaction to be garnered from a set of poems that are intimately connected, and Seedpod, Microfiche delivers that gratification.

            The connectedness of these poems is of course assured by their shared foundation, but it’s also enhanced by the repetition of particularly imagery: the power of dew drops to magnify, fish swimming silently, and a stethoscope (used literally and metaphorically) that pops up in the closing stanza of each poem. The titularMicrofiche appears repeatedly, as well, and the sentiments it generates are apt: zooming in; many from one; shining a light on part of a whole.

Celebrate Paul Dutton at 70

How I watched until the moon was caught in a tree: a comic strip poetry sequence

HOW I WATCHED UNTIL THE MOON WAS CAUGHT IN A TREE

a comic strip poem sequence that I made in about 1986 when I was studying with bpNichol (and clearly under his influence) but also in the sway of Frank Asch's lovely Happy Birthday, Moon picture book.

Interview at Papirmass: my father, delivering babies, infertility, and inspiration for writing

In this interview, I'm really happy that I got to talk about my father and how his involvement in delivering babies, infertility, and in women's health in general, has inspired my work and the particular short story that the amazing Papirmass art subscription series will be publishing in January along with the above image.

Recent visuals

Reading

after Stephen Nelson

After Volodymyr Bilyk

Squirrel: on childhood

SQUIRREL

I was a child and my parents replaced me with fog. The fog took my bedroom. My favourite breakfast cereal. The new bike. The fog got grandma’s cookies.

Then the fog grew up, began to shave and got a job. Then it got old. My parents got old, too. When they died, the fog couldn’t get up off the sofa but watched TV all day.

After five days, I opened the window and the wind blew the fog away.

I went inside. I chewed up insulation like a squirrel.




_____________________
Image: portrait of my mother carrying my brother

GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES

GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES

baby is an axe
baby is an axe handle 


baby listens to
the clear blue sky


one day
baby is clouds


baby is an anchor
down a well


baby’s hands
surrounded by water




left and right the oceans
baby tied to stone


baby is a bone sapling
soon it sprouts


baby is thin bones
like rain


baby tells wind
which way to breathe


the country of baby
needs its baby


baby a naked map
miles from here

DEAR MAYOR (a poem for Rob Ford)

DEAR MAYOR

I imagine skinning you
and you romp around the city
guts only

we won’t save taxes
think of the costs
protecting your insides

dear Mayor we stretch your skin
a blanket around us
keeps us warm for winter

we come and go through orifices
I won’t make the orifice of the mayor joke
but I just did

dear Mayor
I think about grief
(pause)

then that pinging sound
when everyone uses your stretched skin
to trampoline

babies there are babies
we bounce
I’m thinking only of the babies

we bounce
and the little pink heads which break
the clouds

and then
dear Mayor
the rain

Sounds about right: on a homophonic translation of a stanza of Rilke

I was teaching my poetry writing class at Mohawk college about alternate translation techniques and we discussed homophonic translation. I brought in a poem in German by Rilke and we set to 'translating' it.

For me, when using homophonic translation, it's possible to maintain the constraint of the original sound of the poem strictly, not allowing the poem to veer from the original phonemes. However, it's also possible to use the sounds and the associations of the words as a starting point, as a way of generating raw material which can then be revised.

I thought it might be interesting to post the original German stanza and then the various generations of edits stemming from this original, as I worked to create a working independent poem.

Seeing the various versions here, makes me think that I'd like to consider them all as stanzas of a longer poem—a series of variations with a kind of villanelle-like echo. I'll get back to you on that if I'm able to make something of the whole.


Homophonic translation of a stanza of Rilke

Original

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

Sign black is come to stab my eyes
so muddy and wordy, that the night stops me
It is obsessed with a thousand stabs
and winter stabs our world with bitter kindness

Black sky comes to stab my eyes
and wordy the night stops
I’m obsessed with these thousand stabs
for winter stabs our world with its bitter kindness

The black sky stabs my eyes
The warden, so angry, the night stops
I’m obsessed: it must be a thousand stabs
And winter stabs our world with its bitter kindness

windows break the eyes
fracture into night
a thousand stars
winter with its bitter kindness

An astounding augmented reality bookwork by Amaranth Borsuk & Brad Bouse.

My discussion and interview with Amaranth Borsuk about her and Brad Bouse's astounding augmented reality bookwork, Between Page and Screen is now up at Jacket2.

Astounding discussion/review of Franzlations

Menachem Matthew Feuer wrote this mindblowingly great review/commentary about Hugh Thomas, Craig Conley and my book Franzlations: The Imaginary Kafka Parables.

His blog is about schlemiel theory. There is such a thing and, nu, it is fascinating.

Squaring the Vowels: On the Visual Poetry of Judith Copithorne

My discussion/interview with Vancouver writer Judith Copithorne who had been created visual poetry since 1961 now up on Jacket2.

Eye plus eye equals H: temporal flux in the visual poetry of Karl Jirgens

I speak with Karl Jirgens about time, Heraclitus, Apollinaire, visual poetry, the brain, and sine-wave typography in this interview/discussion in Jacket2.

Writing as Social Plastic: Adam Dickinson's The Polymers

My interview/discussion with Adam Dickinson about his plastic inspired visual poetry and writing at Jacket2

Inside Stephen Harper

inside Stephen Harper
there’s a little dog

inside the dog
another dog

inside this dog
it’s Stephen Harper

and inside him
a still smaller dog

in a Stephen Harper mask
kidding, it’s really Stephen Harper

it’s Stephen Harper
all the way down

Stephen Harper what did you do?
why do you make things so small?

On Animals, Objects, and our Love

I was asked to write a brief commentary about a piece of mine for an anthology engaging with our contemporary notion of animals. In my poem, deer and chairs are conflated. The following is brief, and, by the ending, fulminating, response.

*

I think about how our modern notion of what is 'other' blurs inanimate objects with animals and vice versa. For much of culture, outside the hospitable firecircle of the human, the light fades quickly, only a few animals allowed as pets or as marvellous outliers of the non-human to sit by us.  (And this not to mention, the humans we leave out in the cold, which is another discussion.)

I have the idea that much of modern culture places animals into the same category as robots or other automatons-- task-accomplishing machines with only the illusion of agency and/or emotion.

Since the animal is commodified in the way of the inanimate, it is easy to place it in the same category as these other emotion-simulation machines. 

But, further,  we even look on our other non- objects with such love, intimacy, and affection. They may as well as living beings that we love. Our emotional connection, our heartaching being-longing for our shoes, toasters, chairs, designer table is often so palpable and powerful, that the categories between animate and in-animate often begin to blur. 

And though our toaster doesn't have agency, we may feel that we love it like a non-human living thing. In the past, they gave names to swords that they loved. Names to ships. Now we feel some of our objects pass into our emotionally intimate world. How different is a deer leaping over the fence into the garden than a sullen, left-slouching shed, a silent chair, innocent and blinkless, forlorn, discovered in early morning in the shadow by the hedge?

This is the capitalist non-human spirit world. We are like consumer shamans, surrounded by the non-human ghosts of things we may love and own.

Chair. Coffeemaker. Car. Horse. Deer. Swallow. 

They are more than arbitrary linguistic categories. We are able to colonize the animals and objects of the world with our tenderness, our hunger, our desire.