Israel, coffee cups, winter, politics, philosophy, and Hazlitt

Delighted that my poem about Israel (and coffee cups) is now up at Hazlitt. Really, when I consider it, I believe that this is the most cogent and sensible statement of the situation in the Middle East that I've heard in a long time.

And thanks to editor Linda Besner for including it.

Comedy, capitalism, punctuation, New York City, Twitter, and me: some recent activity

I gave an interview about comedy, capitalism, Civilization, youth culture, social media and writing. This is in advance of my performance at the series, London Open Mic on Feburary 4th in London, Ontario.

I'm reading in New York. The last time I read there I had to wear a turkey hat. (It was the "Literary Death Match.") This time, I'm thrilled to be performing with Geof Huth, Erica Baum, and Richard Kostelanetz at what looks to be a fantastic exhibition of visual poetry, The Future is Here Again: Visual Language, curated by Nico Vassilakis and Holly Crawford. The performance is on February 5th in New York city. 

I just got my copies of the Best Canadian Poetry of 2014, edited by Sonnet L'Abbé. Sonnet really drew on a wide and interesting range of work to include here and I'm very happy to be included. She chose a piece of mine from Ottawater, "3 Pastorals," a more-or-less visual/glyphic poem.

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The Paper Street Journal wrote a review of Hugh Thomas, Craig Conley, and my Franzlations. Nice to hear about readings/readers of the book even a coupla years after it first appeared. Here's how Craig recorded it on his always amazing Abecedarian blog. And thanks James Puntillo for the review.

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And there's this kinda hysterical review of a recent reading of mine in Toronto at the Plasticine Poetry series. Thanks, Christian Christian.

The World is Square unless it's Round: Euclidean Poetry

The Kama Sutra of Words, Pwoermds, a forthcoming book, an interview, a Rusty Toque, audio turnips and a door

Four recent things.

1. An essay in which I write about poetry and the Kama Sutra of words, Geof Huth's one word "pwoermds," Aram Saroyan's third eye, and the limits of meaning. Also, bad word play.
Thanks Nico Vassilakis for curating this for Coldfront magazine.

The essay where I write about one word poems and visual poetry.

2. An interview with me about writing, creativity, cell division, and what I hope to write with Kathryn Mockler at The Rusty Toque.

3 One of my sound piecse based on archival performance recordings of the iconic Canadian poet bpNichol included in the excellent online audio journal Huellkurven. There's lots of great stuff in this issue, including work by Anat Pick and Kaie Kellough. Here's my turnips a door

4. The cover (see above) for my upcoming collection of short fiction, I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 with Anvil Press.

Here's the details:

I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457

short fiction by Gary Barwin

At times comic, tender, dark, compassionate, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin’s latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world. Raging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are mysterious, luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness, the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, “what makes them so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.”

128 pages | $18 can/usa | 5.75 × 8 | Paperback | 978-1-77214-013-2 | Pub. date: June

Poem ("Inside the Gun")

POEM

inside the gun
the absence of bullet

inside the bullet
the absence of my friend

my friend who runs into the bullet
while we enjoy this poem

by the end
I will convince you that
this poem did nothing

inside this poem
the absence of my friend

My new book: the wild & unfathomable always

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Xexoxial 58 • Gary Barwin  

the wild & unfathomable always

$6.00

 Order here!

Here, language is a human/machine hybrid in the heavens, an optical organism floating between the stars. Letters are geometrically entangled, warped, contorted, highlighting frustrated embodiment and the way we bend or play with meaning. There is magic here, and illusion. There are creatures of mad science and silent comedy. Gary Barwin is a Pharoah of the new dynasty, building vispo monuments in the sky.

 —Stephen Nelson

 Compelling compositions that surround you between constellations, language and symbols in a simple but intense utopia. The wild & unfathomable always immerse you in a passionate work of shapes and spaces defined by clearly delimited structures, going beyond the essence. Fascinating. Unfathomable (in) all ways.

—Mara Patricia Hernandez

 If you imagine, for a moment, that there is a world so solid and firm that you can understand every part of it, you are thinking of anything except these poems, which twist perception, textual meaning, and expectation into the shapes of balloon animals controlled by the optical illusion that is the gift of sight itself: We see only when that part of us that perceives the visual, that produces sight, is drowned by darkness. Only from within a pure darkness, can we accept the lift of sight. In this sequence of poems--part visual play, part letteral display, part meaning subsumed by vision--we see the contours of our understanding of the world without seeing the world itself, ever. We move into a parallel universe, where everything is recognizable but so recognizable that we recognize not a bit of it. This is language made dreamlike; we drink the wordlessnesses oh so pregnant with words.

 —Geof Huth

Video of work from The Wild and Unfathomable Always (Xexoxial Editions) with music derived from the Comet 67P recorded by the Philae lander.

A setting of a short text (Limit to the Size of Night - for Amy Catanzano) using the audio from Comet 67P by the Philae Lander

Some of my favourite Star Wars Stormtroopers are Jewish

I remember attending the premiere of Star Wars while in high school And I remember listening to Joseph Campbell talking (from George Lucas’ dazzlingly beautiful library at his ranch) about the mythic structure of the series. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, etc. And I’ve seen remarkable images by West Coast indigenous artist Andy Everson where he appropriates Star Wars’ imagery and patterns them with West Coast Native iconography/decoration, a really brilliant mash-up which speaks to colonialism, power, myth, our expectations and how cultures interact. There is another non-Native artist who has also—though to my eye—less successfully and less interestingly done the same thing.

I wondered what it would mean if I appropriated these images? My background is Jewish. The ‘iconography’ of my people would involve Hebrew calligraphy and perhaps a Hamsa (the hand with protects against the evil eye.) And there would be an extra frisson with the Star Wars imagery given that some of the Empire imagery is itself riffing off Nazi German iconography (as well as Japanese: cf. Darth Vader.)

Nazi Stormtroopers don’t look like Star Wars stormtroopers but the connection is there. So. I covered a Star Wars stormtrooper helmet Hebrew and included a hamsa. Something else to note. The Hebrew is from a font which looks like Hebrew but actually replicates English letters. Another interesting faux syncretism.

And, of course, in the current geopolitical climate, it is hard not to consider this stormtrooper image in relation, not only to past Nazi militarism, but I think it does engage with images of Israeli force.

But I think the goal of art is to raise interesting questions, to problematize….but not to give any answers, particularly simple ones.

Blog Hop, Writers Tag (AKA MyWritingProcess Blog Tour)

Yiddish pirate flag

Fellow Hamilton writer Krista Foss tagged me (thanks!) in the venerable writers' process blog tour thing. I've actually done this once before but it was before the invention of electricity, the alphabet, and self-reflection and so I happily agreed to do it again—though I've taken a very long time since she tagged me, I think it had something to do with indolence, sloth, confusion, a whole bunch of writing projects, being the writer-in-residence at Western University this year which I enjoying tremendously, and, like I blame for everything, Facebook. D'you know that they sell your information to advertisers? D'you know that they own EVERYTHING you post? D'you know that…oh never mind…here's a few things about Krista:

This spring, she published her first novel, Smoke River (McClelland and Stewart). Here's what Lisa Moore had to say about it: "a morally complex, magnificently vivid novel full of characters who live and breathe. This is a dazzling debut.” Couldn't Lisa think of something nice to say? I mean, really.

Krista also tagged another excellent Hamilton writer, Sally Cooper. "She’s the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Love Object (2002) and Tell Everything (2008) as well as oodles of short fiction that has shown up everywhere from Grain and Event to Hamilton Arts and Letters. She recently finished her first collection of short stories, Ripple, and she is hard at work on novel number three, all while raising two high-octane youngsters and teaching at the Humber School for Writers and Humber College."

I'll have to figure out who to tag, but for the moment, here are my responses.


1) What are you working on?

Something that I enjoy about writing is that this question and its answer isn’t exactly clear to me. What is ‘what’ and what is ‘working on’?  I feel like I exist in a swirl of emerging, inchoate, burgeoning, abortive, fragmentary, germinating, ageing, aphasic, wind-like, crumbling, swarming projects. Oh wait. That’s just my house.

But I do I engage with these writing project the way I engage with a solid wind. Or a fleeting brick. Or a half forgotten dog.

Which is to say, I have many writing things I’m thinking about, edging forward, editing, weeding or feeding, “dreaming of dreaming what they were dreaming,” as I say they say in Jewish mysticism in the novel I’m working on, Yiddish for Pirates. I find it productive to exist as if in a workshop full of things to tinker with.

Here’s some of the things scattered about there:

I just finished responding to the first round of edits for the pirate novel, sent by my brilliant and insightful editor, Amanda Lewis at Random House Canada. The book is coming out in 2016. I’m amazed that adding only a few lines to a 420-page book can hugely change the emotional physics of its world. Of course, if someone knocked on my door and said, succinctly, “You’re under arrest,” that might change my world, too. Eh, Josef K?

Going back into the world of that book was a bit challenging. It’s like that Borges story, where the modern French writer Pierre Menard attempts to channel Cervantes to come up with the exact words of Quixote as if for the first time. Now imagine if Menard attempted to channel Cervantes responding to his editor? Actually, I’d love to find out more about historical editors. Is there a record of editors assisting writers in early times?

I’ve a new fiction/prose poem collection coming out in spring 2015 with Anvil Press. I, Dr Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 and I’ve been working on edits like a mad dental hygienist. Image floss.  Grammar drills.  Metaphor overbite. I’ve sent the edited MS to Brian Kaufman at Anvil. Soon, I expect his edits. After working on the novel, this collection seems very different. I think I learned many new skills in working intensely on the novel. Character, plot, and setting, for example. I’ve heard they can be quite effective elements in fiction. Cool. I’ll have to try that.

I’m also in the final stages (layout decisions) with mIEKAL aND of Xexoxial Editions for a new visual poetry collection, The Wild and Unfathomable Always. In visual poetry, the layout is the message. Or a significant part.

And last night, Gregory Betts and I met with Natalee Caple—we have an informal (and very secret) writing group—to talk about Natalee’s ongoing project, but also about a collaborative MS that Greg and I are working on.

And this morning, I added a couple paragraphs to a collaborative story that Christine Miscione and I are working on. It’s been a while—Christine has a novel coming out this season and I’ve been busy with other things—but it was good to move this bewildering story forward.

I’m also working on multimedia piece based on the sound poetry of bpNichol. I’m taking recordings of bp performing and integrating them into new music, sound poetry, text and visuals that I’m writing.  I haven’t worked on a big music piece for a while and I’m thrilled to be rolling my twelve-tone sleeves up to my well-tempered elbows.

 2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Hmm. I’ve been calling my novel a tragi-comic-bildungsroman-swashbuckling-metaphysical-satiric-post-colonial-linguistic Canadian Jewish pirate novel. I think it’s like all the others in its genre.

 3) Why do I write what I do?

I write many kinds of things. I learn through exploring different kinds of work, by being attracted to different kinds of writing and different kinds of process, to wanting to ‘get in on the action’ that is inherent in different kinds of material and types of writing. (How is a novel different than a series of visual poems, or procedural work?) I feel like I’m always triangulating the ideal but then discovering that I find the corners of the triangle more interesting that the ideal that I thought I was aiming for.

How does your writing process work?

I don’t think that there is one process. Or even one ideal process. And my process varies even within a single short work. I think I am continually looking for ways to expand the range of techniques, procedures, habits, solutions or routines that go into my writing both individual and collaborative, and my work with editors. Which isn’t to say that I try not to fall back on the same salmagundi of ways to write. But trying out new forms, learning from other writers, and working with new collaborators and new material keeps things fresh as I fight against falling into the same neural runnels, or returning to the processual comfort foods only. I do trust the process in that I believe the process knows more than me, knows more than my conscious brain or the pleadings of my little immature heart which is always having some kind of writing tantrum. If I trust the process, trust the disorganized, inscrutable way that the writing might proceed, trust that if I pay attention, keep close to the work and keep at it, be open to radical revision, and try to be sensitive to what is emerging, what might emerge, even if it is very different than I expected, I often find myself engaged with much richer material. I might set out to catch some giant fish which I’ve head about, but then find myself immersed in a vast school of bioluminescent creatures which I don’t recognize and which amaze.

New chapbook: The Wild & Unfathomable Always

My book of visual poems, The Wild & Unfathomable Always is arriving soon as Xerolage issue 58 from mIEKAL aND's Xexoxial Editions.

I'm with Lan?uage: Reading at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Thanks to the brilliant poetry scholar, Alessandro Porco, I'll be reading at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington next month (Wednesday, November 19th.) He made this lovely poster for the event.

Language is always an emigrant

On Writing: an essay on handwriting and our default voices and ways of writing.

'the tongue is not in exile' —Yiddish proverb


Not just a "mother tongue," but a "mother script," my little essay on handwriting, scripts, and our default voices and ways of writing. 

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Thanks to rob mclennan for inviting me to contribute.

My Inaugural Reading as Writer in Residence at Western University (with Steven Slowka)

International Talk like a (Yiddish) Pirate Day...

"A broch upon your pestilient kishkas for you are a sneaking hintl puppy, as are any who submit to be governed by the chazer rich who want only their own security, for the whelps have not the beitsim otherwise to defend what they get by such dreck-mouthed knavery. And,” he continued with an ostentatious wave of his hand, “a broch upon ye altogether. And damn them for a pack of crafty gazlonim thieves, and you, who serve them, for a petseleh of hen-hearted shmegeges. They villify us, the momzers do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor and weak under the cover of law, and we plunder the rich with no protection but our own chutzpah. You should rather join our minyan than sneak after the groyseh tucheses of villains for bread."

This speech, from my forthcoming Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada, 2016) is a paraphrase of the speech that Edward "Black Sam" Bellamy is reported to have given, at least according to Cpt. Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pirates
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thanks to Craig Conley for the image

Tor Lukasik-Foss and I remain very very still at the Art Gallery of Ontario

To Lukasik-Foss and I recently performed, along with live model/artist Tanya Hampshire at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Our performance riffed off the current Alex Colville exhibition. These snapshots show Tanya posing in the iconic "To Prince Edward Island" pose with binoculars. 

Our performance was based on the concept of a drawing class, and indeed, there was an actual drawing instructor and AGO patrons sitting on donkeys (the art kind) with paper and pencils sketching us. Tanya actually works as a professional life model and she was remarkable in becoming vibrantly immobile. A living sculpture. 

Tor and I explored a number of ways of disrupting the notion of being live model: We had changing silent-movie-style subtitles for the poses. I posed with a book which I intermittently read from (though always the same frozen page of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller). Without moving, we gave voice to our thoughts as 'live models.' Tor delivered a brilliant monologue about being concerned that people would draw him with a big head. We screamed without moving. Yodelled. We thought of ourselves as channelling Wes Anderson films, themselves very influenced by the aesthetics of Colville. (There's a great riff off To Prince Edward Island in Moonrise Kingdom.)

It was a remarkable experience for me. Not only were we performing in the presence of Group of Seven sketches and paintings (see the Lawren Harris above) as well as Norval Morrisseaus, but the performance was somewhere between a performance art installation where we eschewed a dramatic perforative arc, but instead were some kind of live installation and an actual performance where we played with elements of performative drama and development. 

And here, the AGO brilliantly misspells both my first and last name in a bit of conceptual legerdemain. 

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thanks to Lesley Chan for the photo which includes me.

My First Day as Writer-in-Residence at Western University

I greet my first writer at the London Public Library part of my Western University Residency

First day as Writer-in-Residence at Western: a grandmother from a small farming town (she'd never heard of Charles Dickens) brings in her life story. "My sister had wild black hair and liked to bite. It was how she dealt with what happened." And a grad student came in to show me mind-blowing visual poetry and to talk about post-conceptual poetry.

My Inaugural Reading as Writer-in-Residence at Western University (with Steven Slowka)

Astral Original of the Hebrew Alphabet

Astral Origin of the Emblems 
and Hebrew Alphabet

J.H. Broome

1881

from the brilliant Writing System tumblr

Chessbard by Aaron Tucker.

Aaron Tucker has created this amazing site, Chessbard which translates chess games into poetry. You can play classic games, play a game against a chessbot, or modify games. The site then 'translates' the game into poems: both a White poem and a Black poem. Aaron has also written an essay about the project and its development.

I was delighted to be able to contribute to the site. I created some poems (by modifying a classic game) and wrote a discussion about what I did and about chess in general. Read it here.

Really fascinating.

And while you're thinking about chess, definitely check out the very lovely, Calvino-Chess Dictionary by Craig Conley. You can buy the book or read it online. I'd recommend the book!

Sign of Four