Lasternational Pwoermweird Moermthd

"

inspiradical

sporeadical

occageonally

monoccupy

monopolite

snowfake

wordinary worryginal wordynary

langwage relangwish langwash

lova spermanent zyghoti

utterrorist uterrurist

utterus utter(us)

(   )terus

borning  

(ï)

pwoemwend

"

Two Songs homophonically translated from German translations of Emily Dickinson

SONG

all around my daughter, the light is new
someone died in a hat under an airduct
let’s call him André. I loved André
and his hat. such a sad vermillion

my daughter names things
André’s the first best man
his ears and that wig that make me laugh
my daughter the light around trees

like the light on passersby
on bricks and
when in surgery
hearts


SONG

I dream only the beginning of dreams
in my latest, I’m a grub
I wake only to die on a train
a river through night
my simple mouth says, ‘home on the wange’

I dream only the beginning of dreams
in one, I’m early life, shiny like mica
I wake repeatedly
always on a rock
worrying bitterly and for a long time

I dream only the beginning of dreams
in another, nothing good comes of war
I wake, find myself in a storm
surrounded finally by warlike and merciless
flutes with great thighs

Innernotational Pwoerrmd Moth - Day 26:

;

semicolonly ; 

semicolonely ; asemicolon ; semicolonel semicolong

hemidemisemicolon

;

Unnatural Pwoermd Manse: Day 25

,

commatropic

,

ANECDOTE AJAR: after Wallace Stevens' Anecdote of the Jar

ANECDOTE AJAR

no air

it of rose in wilderness 

nothing and Tennessee

and a wild

the bare

it, too, placed gray 

was dominion took 

everywhere

the in up jar 

bush

like round longer 

was the hill

the and Tennessee 

round and it

and of 

or that jar-sprawled hill

it port tall 

else wilderness

surround 

it slovenly was

it did bird jar 

around ground

and the upon not made 

I give upon 

Time Machine: on the grief of friends

I am always torn between writing poems that create 'language wonder' and the impulse to 'console', to make real, to capture the flying slippery Heisenbergian fish that is human experience. Not that these things are mutually exclusive.

I was recently thinking about a friend's loss of her mother and read (on Facebook) a comment by writer Natalee Caple to a friend who was grieving about the sudden death of her brother. The exchange with this woman whom I only know very slightly through some email exchanges, was very touching. The tragedy of her brother's death is terrible and her grief is wrenching. Reading Natalee's heartfelt and consoling words, I had the impulse to write something. To console. 


I created this poem inspired by these lines by Natalee and thinking about our friends who are grieving.

TIME MACHINE
(for Nikki Reimer
after lines by Natalee Caple)

dear friend
I have invented

a third eye and
a new kind of footwear

also a time machine
I will save

the one you love
like a rabbit from a hat

I draw the words
from your lips

you tell me
where to be

what to do
I wear a long red cape

my new footwear
I pull my hands

out of the future
rest each finger like sky

on his resting body
he opens his eye

I open my eye
listen to his whispering

he knows you
he loves you

each star a guitar string
seen from inside

bpNichol Chapbook Award News and Call for Submission

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 2012 BPNICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD 

A $2,000 prize will be awarded for the poetry chapbook judged to be the best submitted. Interested authors or publishers should submit three copies of a chapbook of poetry in English published in Canada in 2011. Chapbooks should be no less than 10 pages and no more than 48 pages. Submissions should include a brief C.V. of the author, plus address, telephone number, and email address. 

Send to: Meet the Presses / bpNichol Chapbook Award, PO Box 26, Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S6 The closing date for submissions to the 2012 competition is May 31, 2012. Please email Meet The Presses for more information: meetthepresses@gmail.com. 

ANNOUNCING A NEW ADMINISTRATIVE BODY FOR THE BPNICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD 

In the spirit of the original Phoenix Chapbook Award, which was adjudicated for its first two years by Frank Davey and bpNichol, and continued as the bpNichol Chapbook Award for 23 years by Phoenix Community Works Foundation, the award recognizes excellence in Canadian poetry published in chapbook form. With the demise of Phoenix Community Works Foundation, the Meet the Presses collective is pleased to assume management of the award. 

Meet the Presses is a Toronto-based collective devoted to promoting micro, small and independent literary presses. This collective has come together in the spirit of the original Meet the Presses event begun in Toronto in the mid-1980s by Nicholas Power and Stuart Ross. Members of Meet the Presses have organized a variety of curated public events, and all the events focus on independent publishers of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. 

Meet the Presses – an unfunded and non-profit collective – consists of members Gary Barwin, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Paul Dutton, Maria Erskine, Ally Fleming, Beth Follett, Leigh Nash, Nicholas Power, and Stuart Ross. Chapbooks written by members of the Meet the Presses collective are ineligible for the award. Authors of chapbooks published by members of the collective remain eligible for the award.

THE BPNICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD 2011 WINNER 

Claudia Coutu Radmore for Accidentals (Apt. 9 Press)

HONOURABLE MENTIONS 2011 

Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, Game Show Reversed (BookThug) 

Toronto Poetry Vendors, Vol 2, No 1 (authors: Laurie D Graham, Sachiko Murakami, Aisha Sasha John, Linda Besner, Mathew Henderson, Nathaniel G Moore, Adam Seelig, Moez Surani, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Matthew Tierney) 

Special mention for excellence in production: JackPine Press 

The judges for this year’s competition were Maggie Helwig and Bill Kennedy.

Period from jwcurry

Comma from jwcurry

semicolon from letter from jwcurry

Sonnet Wikileaks Comma

SONNET

My poem is created from a robotic

synthetic voice singing the entire

HTML for a page on how to build

a bomb, the entire available

Wikileaks corpus (you could recreate

the pages by writing down what

the robot sings); of course there’s also

a drum beat and some beautiful strings.

The second part comprises vast blow-ups

of certain commas from culturally significant

texts, blown-up so large that you can see

each tiny irregularity, each imperfection

in the paper & in the printing. There is

no third part. There are only the first two. 

Ant Nationals Pwoermd Mash: Day 18

*


unnoun

nkn w n

 nowfall

_now_lake

sheenchange

 tonehenge

graspblade

ideath

Microwaveable: a Lyric Poem

MICROWAVEABLE

we love force

comb the ant tribe

like distant writing

shed forelegs

stimulants, guns

without safety or craft

we are spores without souls

we work like fruit

drain the sea

with our dogless wagging

what’s the desiccation of another jelly fish

the death of farflung lungs

inside, our cells do the wave

when the moon stumps by

QR Codes of the URL King

But soon...we shall gather by moonlight at a crossroad with our smartphones raised, e'en as we scan the moon itself or the venous varicose backs of our own heads, all that is hidden shall be revealed, all that is secret shall be known with the rising of the URL King.

Aberrational Pwoermd Manse: Day Sventeen - Ports of Spitch

disnoun

reverb

abjective

oddverb

propposition

dangerund

Anternational Pwoermd Mouth - Day 15: !ighght

.

3utterfly

li /    /   /  / ght

/antwise

li(                           )ht

&nt

glimp6e

shifpt

!  (frog and pond seen from a distance)

April vispo for Satu

QR Man

Inner Ash Knell Pwoermd Minks: Day 14. Titanick

.

Titaniceberg

~~T~~^

~~T^~~

~~^~~

.

Update: Recent activities, performances, enthusiasms, reviews, anthologies, paper cuts.

Here's a bit of a round-up of some recent news. Things that have happened or are about to.

1. I'm delighted about the upcoming performance of some of my music: I wrote a couple settings of a poem of mine and one of Rilke's for Project in Motion, the New Mexico dance company of an old high school friend dancer/choreographer Hilary McDaniels Douglas. One of the pieces sets a translation of the Rilke by Kameron Cole, another old friend from high school. Hilary and I are going to meet after 30 years at our high school reunion this May. Ah, the vertigo of time passing!

2. I'm excited to appear in The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (ed. by Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill which comes out this November from Fantagraphics Books.

3. There's a great review of The Porcupinity of the Stars by Shane Neilson in the current Arc Poetry Magazine.  (See the scan below!) review. I'm really pleased that he discussed the representation of family in the book, something that hadn't been mentioned by other reviewers.

4. Very happy to appear in H.L. Hix's anthology Made Priceless, a diverse group of people writing about objects that have been important to them.


5. I'm leading a discussion for Hamilton's LitChat (a cool little discussion/talk series--thanks Jennifer Tan!) on April 15th, 7:30-9 at Homegrown Hamilton. I'm discussing:  "Alternational Media: Small Press, Micropress, Poetry Zines, Chapbooks, Broadsides, Blogs, Online Journals, Literary Ephemera, and DYI Publish, what they are, how they are made, and what their context is."


6. Thrilled to be reading with Erin Moure, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Gregory Betts at the Grey Borders Series in St Catharines. This series (currently and excellently curated/hosted by Eric Schmaltz) is responsible for making St Catharines into an exciting centre for readings/literary events. (A shout-out here to the amazing Max Middle for doing the same for Ottawa with his A B Series.) My reading: 27 April 2012 @ 7 pm, Niagara Artist Centre, (354 St. Paul Street, St Catharines. )

7. The mighty, enthusiastic, and indefatigable Amanda Earl once again has featured a broad range of interesting writing in her Angel House Press site for  National Poetry Month. Today, one of my poems. 


8. My breath is braided. I'm waiting for my copy of M.D. Dunn's new book, Fancy Clapping.  I really like this book. And, lo! I e'en wrote a blurb and an image of mine is on the cover.


9. This isn't my news, but I'm a big fan of Mansfield Press and what Stuart Ross and Dennis DeKlerk have done with it. There's a series of upcoming reading.launches to promote their amazing spring releases. One is nearby Hamilton and includes Stuart Ross and his great new book, You Exist. Details Follow


SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2 PM, PARIS, ONTARIO Mansfield Spring Poetry Launch: Featuring Nelson Ball (In This Thin Rain), Alice Burdick (Holler), Jaime Forsythe (Sympathy Loophole), David W. McFadden (What’s the Score?), plus Mansfield editor Stuart Ross (You Exist. Details Follow., Anvil Press). With special guest Kemeny Babineau. Green Heron Books, 47 Grand River Street North, Paris, Ontario. Free. 

I'm a national powered monk: Day 13 -- We are Duchampions.

the horsedoxy of sea choruses: for Stephen Nelson

fleshold

penstoke

pencilia

pensile

freshold

treehold

pragrammatic

hourgrass

ourglass

hipboard

neighl

heighth

corneacopia

eighthth

widthst

heightth

franzcapraphilia

drphilphilia

transitdental

incisdental

aardvaardvark

manateetotaler

eyeslash

emutiny

retiny

darthsalvadermohammedali

duchampanzee

baboom