David 'Long and Sweet' McFadden, The Obvious In(ter)vention; National Missing Feet Month, Showy not William Tell, Not THAT Christian Book

From a mountain overlooking the Banff Centre.

A recording of a performance of selections from The Obvious Flap by Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, From at In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge at the Banff Centre for the Arts on February 19, 2010. The book of the performance of the book is coming out from BookThug next year.

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And for your Poetry Month celebrations:

Check out Amanda Earl's NationalPoetryMonth.ca featuring a month's worth of great writing, a new poem posted each day. As she says, read it "every day
in April for 30 days of fish, klingon, asemic writing, Gertrude, Alice, comedy, intrigue, lust, love, flâneurs, frostbite, visual poetry, water, hearts, kidneys, lungs, ghosts, gusts, ghouls and gulls from Budapest, Belgium, England, France, the USA and Canada."

I have a poem there about missing feet. Perfect for springtime. And there's no need for the other shoe to drop.

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What you didn't know? It's also International Pwoermd Writing Month (originally national pwoermd writing month! Get writing those one word poems. Smash the atom of language. Join up and/or follow along here. This is one of Geof Huth's projects. If you're looking for inspiration and an idea of what is possible, check out Geof's new book of collected pwoermds, NTST, just out from if p then q out of the U.K.

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Not in April, but a big enough cause for celebration to retroactively spill into the previous month is David W. McFadden's new selection, Why Are You So Long and Sweet: Collected Long Poems of David W. McFadden, ed. by Stuart Ross and published by Insomniac Press. The launch is May 11th at the Magpie in Toronto. McFadden's long poems do things formally and procedurally that are exciting, daring, adventurous, exhilarating, surprising, and inventive. Whereas his short poems often delight by playing against expectations, his long poems often blow open those expectations: you don't have any idea where he might go and there's nothing to do but try to get a seat in the front car, raise your arms, and wait for your heart rate to quicken as McFadden takes you on a ride through through the strange and wonderful theme park that is modern life, poetry, and consciousness.

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At the Banff Centre, a sign warns to use the subject lyric 'i' with caution. Are you the mountain? Are you the Romantic poet with a unique conception of the mountain? Are you going to sign your name in the snow and then proclaim "I think I shall call them, 'The Rocky Mountains."?

And, while we're discussing the lyric subject and the I poem (the iPoem?), you might want to look at Christian Bök's "Two Dots over a Vowel," for his discussion of Steve McCaffery's "William Tell: a Novel." He mentions my tongue-in-cheek (or stump-of-lettertongue-in-lyric-subject's word hole, actually) discussion of his discussion of McCaffery. My idea, of not dotting the i (a(nec)dotal?), of having a broken sign, a partial signifier, of foregrounding one small piston of the language machine, was created with an eye to illustrating how language is always a trompe d'oeil, a tromp through itself, a triumph of trumpeting, a blowing with and of its own horn.

BTW, Christian and the amazing CCMC are performing in St Catharines, Ontario, tonight. To wit:

Grey Borders Reading Series #23.... is proud to present

Christian Bök
CCMC – featuring Paul Dutton, Michael Snow, and John Oswald.

Thursday 1 April 2009 7:00 pm
No Cover, Licensed

The Niagara Artists’ Centre
354 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines