Obvious Performance and new chapbook: Chora Sea

(from Max Middle's Picasa Web Album of the event)

(from Pearl Pirie's Humanym's blog)

Pearl Pirie just posted a discussion of Greg Betts' and my recent reading at Max Middle's great AB Series in Ottawa and also about our new chapbook by the fantastic Emergency Response Unit press. I had the pleasure of meeting Pearl at the reading. Her blog's always worth checking out.

Our performance was about 50 minutes based on our book MS, The Obvious Flap. It included sound poetry, computer music, props (see banana, above) as well as masks. Here's the introductory description that we gave to Max Middle to read

The Obvious Flap is a performance derived from a booklength poem of the same name. It is a musical flux of recurring and recursive images exploring the luminous fringes of language, thought and emotion.

Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions have a clear structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music.

This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas.

In this performance, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, a computer-age Pierrot and a Monkey-man from the planet Merz, go prospecting together deep into the mind to see what all the obvious flap is about.

Emergency Reponse Unit had a fabulous launch of their fall chapbooks and our new chapbook at Magpie in Toronto last night. The place was packed with a warm and enthusiastic crowd. Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner design beautiful publications and they are thoughtful and insightful editors, and the only small press publishers of mine who budgeted for a beer (each!) for the authors. I didn't cover my bed with the new chapbook and roll around over it, but it was close...

Here's the new chapbooks that they launched in addition to Greg's and my Chora Sea:

Nashira Dernesch This Snowing Under
Anya Douglas Poems
Andrew Faulkner Useful Knots and How to Tie Them
Marcus McCann Force quit
Leigh Nash five-seven-five: train poems