Friday, January 29, 2021
ABout "Nothing the Same Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy"—a video
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Thank you Charlie Parker
One day I want to write an essay about how studying saxophone in middle school opened up a vast world for me, that, as a little Jewish boy in Ottawa I had had no conception of. The rich imaginative, political, spiritual, powerful world of mostly black American musicians. I think about being in suburban Canadian bedroom listening to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and reading everything I could find about them. I'd babysit on Saturday nights and then make a pilgrimage to Sam the Record Man in the Bayshore Shopping Mall where I spent my earnings, learning about jazz. The world they lived in, their concerns, the sounds they pursued, the economic and political issues, the stories of their lives. Of course I could have no real understanding, but it was a portal, an opening that pointed to a much larger vision of what was and what was possible than I could have know otherwise.
Thursday, August 13, 2020
PREZ: Josquin by the Sea
Gertrude Stein Home Movie.
A video using a home movie of Gertrude Stein from 1927 along with a musical setting of her recording of "A Portrait of Picasso" ("What does history teach? History teaches that history teaches.")
Sunday, August 09, 2020
Friday, July 31, 2020
Cootes Paradise, a watershed
ReverBENT BANTER: a poetry & music performance
Monday, July 27, 2020
Four recent videos: Kaddish rabbit poetry book
Kaddish (from a Portuguese cantor singing the Jewish prayer for the dead.)
Rabbit (a transrabbitgrification of Bach'a Aria from the Goldberg Variations and the first Invention.)
Poetry Makes Nothing Happen (after Auden)(for Carl Wilson) The screen is the Max/MSP running the program that generated the sound.
The Book (for derek beaulieu_
Friday, July 17, 2020
Mind Blow Open by Algorithms: Some videos and music mades with Max/MSP
The first few examples include videos that I made to the music. The last few are audio and I've included the Max patch that I adapted from one of Tobias's examples.
Monday, June 22, 2020
MORE THAN A HAT TRICK: Reflections on Home
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Home, according to Google in 2015 |
MORE THAN A HAT TRICK: Reflections on Home
written for The Six-Minute Memoir, June 2020
He used to say that the town he came from was so small that if you began to say its name as you walked in, you'd have walked out before you'd finished. How small was it? Let me say it. Krekenova. I think I got to the blacksmith shop by the second syllable. Krekenova. It was a shtetl in Lithuania, near the big city of Kaunas. In the late 1920s when my grandfather emigrated, the big city wasn’t that big. The mayor’s car had the number 1 as a license plate. There were only 9 other cars.
Friday, June 12, 2020
The Marvellous Glitch: a performance
I did this reading tomorrow for POETIC LICENSE, a festival organized by HYP
How? I will have recorded it the day before yesterday and it will be broadcast yesterday to the computer screens of the audience. The reading is text with music, animation, video, sound poetry, rambling. And here it is, in all its time travelling glory, available now for your screens. 42 minutes of wordly wordingness. (including work from my selected poems from
Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, edited by the great Alessandro Porco.
Leonard Cohen said there’s a crack in everything that’s how the light gets through. But here, everything itself is a joyful, painful, and surprising glitch. It doesn’t work how we expect it to and that’s where things get interesting and marvellous.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
In memoriam, Isaak Grazutis.
My great-uncle Isaak died last night. I am honoured to have dedicated my forthcoming novel, centring around the Holocaust in Lithuania, to him. He was happy about that. A couple years ago, I interviewed him about his remarkable life.

Here are three pictures. One (above) shows Isaak (on the left) this year, at 90 with his wife, Galina; my aunt, my mom and my father. Another is Isaak as a young man—he was a painter—painting a familiar face on the wall in a sports stadium. Art students were required to do this, as well as plough fields on Sundays. The last is a painting by Isaak of a street in Vilnius.
When I showed him my last novel, Yiddish for Pirates, he examined it very closely, thoughtfully, tenderly, intelligently noting and commenting on each design feature—from cover, colophon, chapter headings, fonts, and so on. He was, after all an artist and graphic designer all his life. This was his way of engaging with it, and with me, and his reading in English wasn't quite up to the novel.
Despite the hardships he endured, he was an exceedly warm, positive man alert to life's joys, humour, and beauty.
In 1941 Lithuania, he literally walked away from the Nazis as an 11 year old. He and his aunt began walking out of Lithuania as the Nazis were arriving and the killing started. A truck full of Soviet soldiers told his aunt, "We only have room for one. Pass us the boy and we'll take him out of here." That was the last he saw of his family. (He did eventually connect with an aunt, years later, who had made it to Israel.) My grandfather—his nephew—eventually found him in 1979 in Chicago where he was working as an illustrator/designer.
Here are three pictures. One (above) shows Isaak (on the left) this year, at 90 with his wife, Galina; my aunt, my mom and my father. Another is Isaak as a young man—he was a painter—painting a familiar face on the wall in a sports stadium. Art students were required to do this, as well as plough fields on Sundays. The last is a painting by Isaak of a street in Vilnius.
When I showed him my last novel, Yiddish for Pirates, he examined it very closely, thoughtfully, tenderly, intelligently noting and commenting on each design feature—from cover, colophon, chapter headings, fonts, and so on. He was, after all an artist and graphic designer all his life. This was his way of engaging with it, and with me, and his reading in English wasn't quite up to the novel.
Despite the hardships he endured, he was an exceedly warm, positive man alert to life's joys, humour, and beauty.
Thursday, April 23, 2020
An actual rejection letter and a poem...
Thank you for submitting five poems to __________.
We are unable to accept your work for publication this time around. The Poetry Editorial Board responded quite variably and strongly to these poems, admiring their craft and wit and tonal range, but disagreeing no less variably on which they preferred and why. The poems struck a bit like bowling balls, knocking different readers down in each case. Other readers elsewhere may well respond differently, too, and most of the poems will likely find good homes, so you should certainly keep them in circulation.
Monday, April 20, 2020
A Transcreation of Der Lindenbaum (Schubert/Muller)
Friday, April 17, 2020
HOW VISUAL POETRY WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND MAKE YOU A SNAPPY DRESSER: A WORKSHOP
A WORKSHOP/TALK WITH:
Gary Barwin
Dani Spinosa
Michael Sikkema
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Kate Siklosi: She Bites (Two Visual poems)
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For poetry makes nothing happen
it survives, A way of happening, a mouth
—Auden: In Memory of WB Yeats
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from OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa |
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from OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa |
OUTLINE:
What is visual poetry?
What do you like about it, what interests you about it?
What does visual poetry do that more normatively textual poetry does or doesn’t do?
Do you think it is especially good in these times, or for the net?
What are some examples that excite or engage you (you could include a piece of your own.)
Something about your process or techniques.
An activity or prompt for viewers for making their own visual poetry.
All other business.
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Visual poem by Michael Sikkema |
LIST OF RESOURCES
Electronic Literature CollectIon
https://collection.eliterature.org/
Train Poetry Journal
http://trainpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
Languageye: Series on Visual Poetry by Gary Barwin
https://jacket2.org/commentary/its-poetry-it-aint
OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa (Invisible Publishing, 2020)
Luke Bradford: Four Paths (poems as labyrinths)
https://timglasetcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/0
7/Four-Paths-Free.pdf
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
After HOW NOT TO READ CELAN by Andrés Ajens (trans. by ErÃn Moure)
After "How Not. to Read Celan" by Andrés Ajens (trans. by ErÃn Moure) published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and dedicated to @ErinMoure who has been a constant poetry inspiration#translation #duduk http://DispatchesPoetry.com

Tuesday, April 07, 2020
Typewriter Music for Dani Spinosa
I made this piece of typewriter funk in celebration of Dani Spinosa's new book of typewriter poems, OO
And here's the eye "catching" video:
Sunday, April 05, 2020
WORSHIPFUL COMPANY, a story for a time of Covid-19
Julie Tepperman, through Convergence Theatre, created this amazing thing: she organized people to commission artwork from artists, including writers, who lost have lost work due to Covid-19 cancellations. The artists would create work based on prompts that these patrons provided. It's a fantastic initiative. You can read about it here. I was delighted to be commissioned to write a story. The prompt that I received from someone called Peter was basically something like the headline above (he recorded it.) It was a hilarious bit of satire. Below is the story that I created from the prompt. Thanks very much to Julie, and of course, to Peter for commission the story.
Jimmy, my neighbour, duckwalks down the front steps with a big flatscreen, puts it on the curb and goes back in. He emerges with a laptop and places it beside the TV, then leaves and returns with a couple of his fancy watches and puts them down, too.