Wednesday, May 15, 2013
On Writing #1: Anita Dolman
A little less inspiration, please
(Or, What ever happened to patrons, anyway?)
Anita Dolman
Oh, the bucolic life of a poet. Sleeping in every day to the sound of birdsong, reading in bed, perhaps arranging coffee or lunch in the city with an equally literary colleague. Then, when the mind is properly primed with artistic influences, creative thoughts and insightful reflection, sitting down in a quiet room to do some writing, reconsider one of last week’s poems, then write some more before, finally, checking your messages to find out where your words of beauty and wisdom have most recently been accepted, how much money the publishers will be offering you, and who, this week, would like you to come read to their expectant audience of You-enthusiasts.
This is what I imagined when I was a little girl and, from what I hear at my five-year-old’s school, is often what many grown-up (or, at least, tall-as-they’re-going-to-get) non-writers consider life must be like for those of us on the other side of the pen.
It is, of course, about as ridiculous as thinking the pen itself has organized a way to pay the bills, clean the bathroom, bake a cake for your in-laws, fix the kitchen drawer, fill out the tax forms, find a place to stick your child during next Friday’s PA day, call your mother, call an accountant because you’ve given up on filling out your own tax forms, make a grocery list so you can go to the store after your son is in bed tonight, do laundry, scribble down that one line you managed to think of before your shower ran out of hot water—assuming you still remember it, but at least you got to shower today, so stop complaining—make coffee, think about giving up, make some more coffee, make dinner, and, finally, figure out where to buy a replacement kitchen drawer, because it turns out you are either a lot stronger or a lot more frustrated than you thought you were and it is now a small heap of painted wood lying on the kitchen floor, wrenched nails poking up like a guerilla warfare trap, while you stand there still holding the antique-bronze handle and counting to ten very, very slowly.
But don’t worry; your loving and supportive spouse has called from his evening job to rescue you. Oh, no, wait. It’s not to rescue you; it’s because he needs love and support, too. His boss has refused his vacation request, a bottle fell on him from a top shelf, and (remember, now: all your friends told you not to marry a fellow writer) he’s frustrated the contract still hasn’t arrived for the anthology he was accepted for three months ago, and has he mentioned lately how hard it is to get any time to write?
Luckily, the bottle was just a Canadian merlot. It only grazed his left shoulder, but, of course, that’s the one he pulled this week when your son jumped on top of him while he was vacuuming the living room. Oh, and he’s heading to the pub after work, so he’ll be home late tonight, because—and who could blame him here—not only is he having a bad day, but you sound rather . . . angry… instead of calming and soothing like the wedding vows promised him you would be when he needed you.
You understand his decision, though; between a beer and you, you’d take the beer right now, too, if you could.
And, say, speaking of escape, exactly where the #$@% is that quiet room you were supposed to have, because the one you’re in has a phone that won’t stop ringing (how would you even know if your air ducts needed cleaning, and if they did, is there seriously no one closer than Pakistan who can make it happen?), a pot that just bubbled the perfect amount of milk onto your stovetop to require exactly 10 minutes of hard scrubbing later to remove, and a five-year-old who has decided his new career aspiration is to grow up to be in a revival of Stomp!, for which he is currently practicing on your hardwood floors with his winter boots on.
While you take a deep breath to help you process how best to deal with the chasmic distance between your lifestyle and anyone’s idea of bucolic, you realize that the cat has had another furball in a mystery location, which you are able to detect clearly by smell, if not yet at all by sight.
Oh, look, she had it on your late grandmother’s tea towel, which she somehow managed to tug off the hook, tearing it only slightly in four locations before covering it in wet, hairy vomit.
Well, at least that’s handy for clean-up.
On the upside, now that the mystery of the hidden throw-up has been solved, you may—after dinner but before your husband gets home late and you race to the grocery store to put the week’s groceries on credit before the suburban busses stop running at 10:30 p.m.—be able to submit some of the 12 poems and three short stories you’ve had rejected this week.
Maybe you should try that new magazine that three of your equally “literary” friends have recommended to you, based on the sincerity of its rejection notices (the editors say “Sorry” right in the first sentence!). Sure, the magazine is online-only, and it doesn’t pay, but one of the board members has some prestige, so it could go on to be something, assuming it’s still around right now, which you’ll need to check first.
Of course, that means you won’t be able to dust the house before your in-laws come for coffee tomorrow, but for god sakes, you baked them a cake, and their grandson is the best reader in his class, even if he does get in trouble at school for talking down to his teacher (your husband and you are starting to seriously worry that, dancing aspirations aside, he may become a writer; oh, please, please, Universe, let him become an architect or a geologist or a circus performer instead).
Say, where the hell is he, anyway? And what’s that pinging sound in the laundry room?
Ugh. Saturdays are useless.
Maybe you can write next week.
Anita Dolman [photo credit: Pearl Pirie] is a poet, fiction writer, editor, mom, wife, friend, daughter and volunteer living in Ottawa. Her poetry and/or flash fiction has appeared in journals, websites and magazines throughout Canada and the United States, including The Antigonish Review, Ottawater, Geist, The Storyteller Magazine, One Cent, PRISM international, Utne, The Fiddlehead and Grain, and in the anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books, Ottawa, 2006). Her flash fiction will also appear in the anthology Postcards from Nowhere (Quarry Press, Kingston) in summer 2013. Attempting to simultaneously complete a manuscript of short fiction and function as a human being, she is trying to reconcile a nonlinear philosophy of time with the realities of her wall clock’s incessant and irritating pointing at numbers.
(Or, What ever happened to patrons, anyway?)
Anita Dolman
Oh, the bucolic life of a poet. Sleeping in every day to the sound of birdsong, reading in bed, perhaps arranging coffee or lunch in the city with an equally literary colleague. Then, when the mind is properly primed with artistic influences, creative thoughts and insightful reflection, sitting down in a quiet room to do some writing, reconsider one of last week’s poems, then write some more before, finally, checking your messages to find out where your words of beauty and wisdom have most recently been accepted, how much money the publishers will be offering you, and who, this week, would like you to come read to their expectant audience of You-enthusiasts.
This is what I imagined when I was a little girl and, from what I hear at my five-year-old’s school, is often what many grown-up (or, at least, tall-as-they’re-going-to-get) non-writers consider life must be like for those of us on the other side of the pen.
It is, of course, about as ridiculous as thinking the pen itself has organized a way to pay the bills, clean the bathroom, bake a cake for your in-laws, fix the kitchen drawer, fill out the tax forms, find a place to stick your child during next Friday’s PA day, call your mother, call an accountant because you’ve given up on filling out your own tax forms, make a grocery list so you can go to the store after your son is in bed tonight, do laundry, scribble down that one line you managed to think of before your shower ran out of hot water—assuming you still remember it, but at least you got to shower today, so stop complaining—make coffee, think about giving up, make some more coffee, make dinner, and, finally, figure out where to buy a replacement kitchen drawer, because it turns out you are either a lot stronger or a lot more frustrated than you thought you were and it is now a small heap of painted wood lying on the kitchen floor, wrenched nails poking up like a guerilla warfare trap, while you stand there still holding the antique-bronze handle and counting to ten very, very slowly.
But don’t worry; your loving and supportive spouse has called from his evening job to rescue you. Oh, no, wait. It’s not to rescue you; it’s because he needs love and support, too. His boss has refused his vacation request, a bottle fell on him from a top shelf, and (remember, now: all your friends told you not to marry a fellow writer) he’s frustrated the contract still hasn’t arrived for the anthology he was accepted for three months ago, and has he mentioned lately how hard it is to get any time to write?
Luckily, the bottle was just a Canadian merlot. It only grazed his left shoulder, but, of course, that’s the one he pulled this week when your son jumped on top of him while he was vacuuming the living room. Oh, and he’s heading to the pub after work, so he’ll be home late tonight, because—and who could blame him here—not only is he having a bad day, but you sound rather . . . angry… instead of calming and soothing like the wedding vows promised him you would be when he needed you.
You understand his decision, though; between a beer and you, you’d take the beer right now, too, if you could.
And, say, speaking of escape, exactly where the #$@% is that quiet room you were supposed to have, because the one you’re in has a phone that won’t stop ringing (how would you even know if your air ducts needed cleaning, and if they did, is there seriously no one closer than Pakistan who can make it happen?), a pot that just bubbled the perfect amount of milk onto your stovetop to require exactly 10 minutes of hard scrubbing later to remove, and a five-year-old who has decided his new career aspiration is to grow up to be in a revival of Stomp!, for which he is currently practicing on your hardwood floors with his winter boots on.
While you take a deep breath to help you process how best to deal with the chasmic distance between your lifestyle and anyone’s idea of bucolic, you realize that the cat has had another furball in a mystery location, which you are able to detect clearly by smell, if not yet at all by sight.
Oh, look, she had it on your late grandmother’s tea towel, which she somehow managed to tug off the hook, tearing it only slightly in four locations before covering it in wet, hairy vomit.
Well, at least that’s handy for clean-up.
On the upside, now that the mystery of the hidden throw-up has been solved, you may—after dinner but before your husband gets home late and you race to the grocery store to put the week’s groceries on credit before the suburban busses stop running at 10:30 p.m.—be able to submit some of the 12 poems and three short stories you’ve had rejected this week.
Maybe you should try that new magazine that three of your equally “literary” friends have recommended to you, based on the sincerity of its rejection notices (the editors say “Sorry” right in the first sentence!). Sure, the magazine is online-only, and it doesn’t pay, but one of the board members has some prestige, so it could go on to be something, assuming it’s still around right now, which you’ll need to check first.
Of course, that means you won’t be able to dust the house before your in-laws come for coffee tomorrow, but for god sakes, you baked them a cake, and their grandson is the best reader in his class, even if he does get in trouble at school for talking down to his teacher (your husband and you are starting to seriously worry that, dancing aspirations aside, he may become a writer; oh, please, please, Universe, let him become an architect or a geologist or a circus performer instead).
Say, where the hell is he, anyway? And what’s that pinging sound in the laundry room?
Ugh. Saturdays are useless.
Maybe you can write next week.
Labels: Anita Dolman, On writing
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Recent Reads: rob mclennan and Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Trace, by rob mclennan
A Little Slash at the Meadow
by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Both titles published by
above/ground press, 2013.
It takes a unique
understanding of one’s surroundings to write Trace, -- and not just a confident
assessment of the working gears maintaining its infrastructure or social
climate. Trace, documents, among other things, the character of a city within
the city; those remnants of previous settlements cast aside or scrubbed anew.
And who better to sift through Ottawa’s former selves than rob mclennan, the
man responsible for writing Ottawa: The Unknown City? Utilizing this knowledge
to uncover layers of architectural overhauls and namesake changes, mclennan sustains
a presence in these poems as a witness and co-discoverer; part of the “we” that
walks firmly footed through changing streets. Here's [a circumstance, a western link]:
“We vocalize what
this is: human. Ninety-six foot wide concession,
road. Separating
Sparks and Besserer. The west was Wellington, the
east, Rideau. We
would have our gardens. The rope
lends lazily, descends.
Death weighs, no
mass. Possibly, our rhetorics. The heart, plus this
alone. A mass of
modern bus and antiquated streetcar. The power of
an average.
Slanting, ruin. Heritage crumbles, the fold of which inside.
Trace, nearly
obliterated. Configurations from a stain. It is one, or it is
other. I am
meaning the opposite.”
Readers with a relationship
to our nation’s capital will quickly connect with Trace, but not every poem
exists at such a particular crossroads as the above example. Perhaps the most
beautiful poem to the contrary, [entirety, the edge of sky, scrapes] exists
in the intangible: “A hush of limelight, walking. Softest, luminescent green.
Reflecting, kettle. Diverse objects, spread. Reflecting off your half-tones. A
silence, not imposed but opened. Loose bone in tightly-packed. Aground.”
Elsewhere mclennan mentions a crossing-bridge but they could just as easily be
navigating the ruins of a beach. In any case, the details are stimulating enough to reassess how this peaceful chapter fits into a city’s broader character (not to mention its modernization, a focus that mclennan
trusts to his readers' opinions).
Those of us unwilling to
geek-out over mclennan’s regional question-marks should at least take note of his
stylistic shift toward the prose-poem. Gone are the line-breaks that flowed
like tributaries in so many of mclennan’s chapbooks; in Trace, he contains his
findings to single, compact paragraphs. Both a quick compass-reading and a densely arranged inquiry on heritage and authenticity, Trace, gives us considerable pause to ponder our own
disappearing history.
“I want the poem to squeeze
your arm like the blood
pressure bag.”
The above statement may as
well stand in for Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s top objective: to compress a lot of
ideas into one crushing poem. That’s how A Little Slash at the Meadow operates,
a visceral and hyperactive slab of free-verse that oscillates between seedy and
imposing, funny and poignant.
If this review is beginning
to read like a disclaimer, it’s as much a warning of Wilkinson’s approach as it is of his
content. In other words, beware of gaping transitions that pit one stand-alone
sentiment against another, which then accumulate and challenge any persisting
narrative elements. As with any habit-forming drug, the key is to stick with the
present chaos of Wilkinson's text and avoid dwelling on the confusing patches along the
way. (Trust me, you'll want to retread later anyway.) So hang in there: A Little Slash at the Meadow is intended to be read as a
whole, in one sitting, and that’s surprisingly easy to do once you realize: the experience is
getting there.
“That strangler sure is good
at finding abandoned buildings.
Yes & very good.
I make lists & cross off
the items as I complete them.
I do this with a line &
an x both.
Am I so scared of being
alone with the selves I was?
An old acquaintance tries to
fuck me on his dining room floor.
Oh, I want that Bloodbuzz
Ohio suit.
Let us un-acquaint
ourselves.
I still like it when old
folks, rural folks smoke in their homes on tv.
Click between Dog the Bounty
Hunter & Hoarders.
Dog & Hoarders.
What is desire but some
pleasure in careening.
Depends on how you like it
to cadence.”
Even if we can safely assume
that the entire disjointed piece unfurls in the hotel room by the sea (mentioned
on page one), A Little Slash at the Meadow doesn’t separate advancements in
Wilkinson’s narrative from his incorrigible inner monologues. The collision of
these happenings often finds each ricocheting, unresolved, but occasionally they cap off
memorably:
“It’s alright you didn’t
write back,
unless you still want to?
I’m on the computer just to
see
if anything I don’t want to
go to
invited me out to turn
down.”
It’s one thing to throw
clever curveballs at your readership (and suffice it to say – sticking with the
baseball metaphors here – not all of these ones cross the plate) but another
thing entirely to maintain a good measure of quality impulsiveness throughout a chapbook. And it’s because Joshua Marie Wilkinson keeps his
audience at a playful distance that when he connects, A Little Slash at the
Meadow proves well worth the trip.
“A tree limb hanging almost
into your soup, budding
orangey & casting a
sunlight spider’s
thread to your face. It’s
morning –
your blouse is open a bit
saying look here, look off
look, look off.”
Labels: above/ground press, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, review, rob mclennan, Ryan Pratt
Saturday, May 04, 2013
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Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Recent Reads: Helen Hajnoczky and Sonnet L’Abbé
The Double Bind Dictionary by Helen Hajnoczky
Influence (“poem” broadside #316) by Sonnet L'Abbe
Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.
Instantaneous
– that’s how I’d best describe Helen Hajnoczky’s style. Cascading imperatives
grounded by physical surroundings that, upon each poem’s spiral, complete a curious
mental image. Just try to resist her commanding flow and read them slowly; it
feels unnatural. These are poems to get caught up in and they suit the chapbook
format well, considering they’re part of a more sprawling body of work Hajnoczky
is calling Magyarazni, in which poems are written for words chosen from the
Hungarian alphabet.
In The
Double Bind Dictionary’s more intimate table of contents, Hajnoczky has
selected poems derived from words that feature multi-character Hungarian letters:
cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, and zs. A title like “Gyogyul” may signal a
bumpy path (my online research suggests a translation of “recovery”) but it
needn’t shed light on the poem that follows:
“grip
rum and hack.
gargle
with salt water.
you’ll
go from groaning
to
glowing
it’s
hard to see but
levitate
– leave ash and
wipe
your fingers
you
hold fever in your hands.
a
warm towel around your neck
you’ll
feel better after
you’re
wrapped in sour wine
and
water, soup swells
and
boils but
your
throat will heal
do
you feel better now?
oh
well, honey,
have
some tea.
someone’s
always
there
for you
when
you’re sick.
now
go to sleep.”
Hajnoczky’s
work offers a direct study in cadence, in no small part giving a poem like
“Gyogyul” its effortless readability, but that isn’t to say The Double Bind
Dictionary leaves nothing to digest. Rogue thoughts tend to poke out like
sticks in spokes. Amid calling out ways to become a “more malleable Hungarian”
in “Cserkeszek”, Hajnoczky drops this little gem:
“wonder
how well you know friends
who
you cannot express yourself to –
who
you cannot understand.”
And later in
“Zsibbad”:
“you
preserve what you picked out
canned
it, keep the jars up on the
shelf,
guard it carefully
for
special occasions
though
you won’t take it down
though
you forget what it
tastes
like, wouldn’t recognize
the
flavour
if
you dipped in a spoon –
stale
now, anyway.”
These
stanzas burst out of Hajnoczky’s greater linguistic muse and attach themselves
to the reader’s psyche, often requiring a slower, contemplative re-read. It’s
an intensely quotable chapbook for that reason, not to mention a promising
precursor to her Magyarazni project.
When I first
moved to Ottawa and researched its literary scene, every article about above/ground
press mentioned its prolific means of publishing new and newer work. Broadsides,
which founder rob mclennan designed as single-sheet, folded handouts, surely play
a role in above/ground’s fertile masterplan but, more importantly, they showcase
creative talents in single, brief glimpses.
With
Influence, Sonnet L'Abbe filters visual poetry’s pensiveness down to its core
delight: eliciting a response. In this case (and for this reader, although I’d venture
to conclude that many winter-sick poetry lovers feel the same), that response
is of longing. But “leaves of grass”, stretched and enunciated so broodingly
from the roots up, twists zen-like thanks to L’Abbe’s aesthetic choice, with
each curve of letters encouraging the phrase like a calming mantra. More,
please.
Labels: above/ground press, Helen Hajnoczky, review, Ryan Pratt, Sonnet L’Abbé
Saturday, April 13, 2013
The Poets' Pathway Springtime Party
INVITATION
INVITATION
The Poets’ Pathway asks you
to
a Springtime Get-together
With wine, nibblies, chat and bonhomie
(For lo the winter is gone) :(
Between 2 and 5 pm
Sunday, April 14
649 Brierwood Avenue (Off Dovercourt)
Chris, Jane and Ben
The Poets’ Pathway
Sunday, April 07, 2013
Recent Reads: Jordan Abel and Abby Paige
Scientia by Jordan Abel
Other Brief Discourses by Abby Paige
Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.
Last spring I attended a talk on contemporary poetry styles given by rob mclennan and Pearl
Pirie. In my full account of that Ottawa Independent Writers event, I mentioned an instance when some of the group’s most vocal members took
exception to the merits of visual poetry. For the purposes of that review, I referred to the incident as little
more than a hiccup amidst the flow of discourse. In the heat of it, however, that hiccup
persisted for over twenty minutes. Several attendees brashly refused to see
substance in visual poetry while the two guest-speakers defended the form as yet another approach to language and expression.
Keep in mind:
nobody had been close enough to read the text in question. The chapbook hadn’t even left
the guest-speakers’ table. Nevertheless that flash example of chaotic and
non-linear displays resulted in a prolonged back-and-forth, as if unearthing insecurities in the writers’ own private works. That thought-provoking debate
springs to mind when I read Jordan Abel’s Scientia because, aside from the fact
that I’m also a tad intimidated by visual poetry, I think naysayers would gain some
insight via Abel’s sharp approach.
Scientia’s lead
poem reads like a testing of organic matter, the accumulation and reductions
that eventually balance in the creation of life:
“All
colour terms are reduced, cut short, not the usual
length.
Acephalous: without a head. Those muscid ad-
ditions
that give the glandular structure that branching
apex.
Abrupt or hidden. Rubbed or scraped. The third
abductor
extending past the honeycomb of the op-
tic
tract. The tapering surface made white like a siphon.”
As pointed and
sensory as schoolbook directives, Abel’s language unfurls on the adjoining
page, exploring its subject in wide-open parameters without losing the text’s
core meaning. Such is the twofold approach of Scientia, a study of insect anatomy
and miniscule advances that help to shape a greater understanding alongside Abel’s visual accompaniments.
Of these eight poems
fully immersed in the working gears of insect species and their visual re-interpretations
(in which insect outlines blot the swarm of off-shooting words), neither
approach feels the dominant one. Instead they’re co-dependent on a singular
focus that succeeds in drawing the reader to parallel the base
instincts of these complex creatures against our own. With particularly
stunning presentation by above/ground press, Scientia’s findings can behave like
Rorschach tests just as convincingly as they look the part.
Very few
experiences inspire me, both as a writer and overall life-enthusiast, to the
degree that discovering a new city does. Whether I’m grabbing life by the horns
or trying to flee from its expectations, a new city promises that clean slate
the restless crave and the committed can only dream about. Abby Paige’s Other
Brief Discourses, a sequence of poems centered on a trip to Quebec,
instinctively reminds me of the raw drifter muses I’d pore onto pages during countless
Greyhound bus trips.
But Paige finds a
unique lens beyond the escapist reverie: ‘translating’ Samuel Champlain de Brouage’s encounters in New
France “during the early years of the new millennium”. In this fantasy memoir,
the explorer wrestles to integrate himself amidst post-millennial Montreal’s “pox
of pavement”, the outer banks of the Saint Lawrence River and citizens who illustrate
modern life as secular and money-driven (compared to the late 1500s, of course). Excerpt from "VII.
The metro":
“and he
is gone in the earthquake of sound
that
rushes past, sucking air from
the
station like a succubus – and people
in the
belly of the snake! A blur of
faces,
hundreds,
two kissing. The doors gasp
open, we
step over the threshold
and in.
Inside the beast, we swim through the inside
of the
earth as the dead swim, treading soil
like
water, ghosts breathing without gills.”
Although fully
aware he has lost four centuries, Paige’s Champlain rarely engages old-world
wonderment as much as in the above excerpt. In fact many observations feel
symptomatic of a far less lengthy absence; the sprouting big-box outlets in
Montreal, the zoned-out travelers and junkies at the bus station. This
is as much Paige’s poetic retelling as it is a fictional what-if tale and
Other Brief Discourses thrives on the duality of its yearning protagonist(s).
By its very
premise, this sequence of poems is charming. (A poem chronicling Champlain’s
irritation while waiting at the American border keeps springing to mind.) Paige
doesn’t settle for situational, fish-out-of-water commentary though, instead
touching on shades of nostalgia and belonging that gather additional traction for her narrative. From
cramped, urban tunnels and hostel quarters to Champlain’s soiled, waterway haunts;
through the flurry of morning commuters to downtown’s late-night pub-crawls;
Other Brief Discourses strikes a natural ebb and flow that frees the reader
from feeling stuck in one place for too long.
Labels: Abby Paige, above/ground press, Jordan Abel, review, Ryan Pratt
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Ottawa Public Library Poetry Workshops: Richardson, Ridley, O'Meara + Brockwell
Poetry Workshop with Peter Richardson
Nepean Centrepointe Library 101 Centrepointe
Saturday Apr 06, 2013 (1:30 pm - 4:30 pm )
In a supportive, small-group environment, we'll look at technical aspects of the craft as they relate to your poetry. Participants will be encouraged to provide constructive feedback. Once you've registered, submit up to four pages of poems, two weeks in advance, (as well as any questions) to peter.richardson@videotron.ca. If you don't have email, drop off your poems labelled Poetry Workshop Spring 2013 NC at the Nepean Centrepointe Library by March 22. Peter Richardson: Widely published, he is the author of three poetry collections with Vehicule Press, including Sympathy for the Couriers which won the A.M. Klein award. A fourth collection, Bit Parts for Fools, is slated for publication late this autumn or early in 2014 with Goose Lane Editions.
---------------------------------
The Poetry Garage with Sandra Ridley
Rosemount Library 18 Rosemount Ave
Saturday Apr 13, 2013 (2:00 pm - 4:00 pm )
A two-hour session on fine-tuning the mechanics and dynamics of your poems. Your work will be read and discussed in a supportive small-group environment, facilitated by Sandra Ridley (winner of the 2009 Alfred G. Bailey Prize and 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing, a finalist for the 2011 Ottawa Book Award, and shortlisted for the 2012 Archibald Lampman and ReLit Awards). All participants will be encouraged to provide constructive feedback. Once registered, submit three poems, up to a maximum of five pages, in advance; material to be workshopped will be selected by the facilitator. Material and contact info can be emailed to sandraridley@bell.net or dropped off labelled Poetry Workshop Spring 2013 RO at the Rosemount Library by April 5th.
--------------------------------------
Poetry Workshop with David O'Meara
Carlingwood Public Library 281 Woodroffe Ave
Saturday Apr 20, 2013 (2:00 pm - 4:00 pm )
A two hour tear-down and refurbishment of your poem, this workshop will focus on structure and methods of narration. Be prepared to re-design (possibly jackhammer) your verse, discuss changes, and rebuild! Registered participants are asked to send three poems (up to five pages), two weeks in advance, to David O`Meara (dvdomeara@gmail.com) or drop them off at the Carlingwood Library labelled Poetry Workshop Spring 2013 CA by April 5th. David O'Meara is the author of three books of poetry, a play, and is the Artistic Director of VERSeFest (http://www.versefest.ca/news/), Canada's International Poetry Festival. His new collection, A Pretty Sight, will be published in fall 2013 by Coach House Press.
-----------------------------------
Poetry Workshop with Stephen Brockwell
Alta Vista Library 2516 Alta Vista Library
Saturday Apr 27, 2013 (1:00 pm - 4:00 pm )
This poetry workshop will help poets invest more verbal energy into their poems. A single poem chosen from 3 submissions (up to five pages) from each participant will be workshopped to improve musical energy with a sharp focus on voice, tone, rhythm, syntax and line. Participants will be encouraged to share their work on a free social networking website prior to the workshop. Participants will be able to comment on each other's work in an encouraging environment moderated by the workshop leader Stephen Brockwell. The initial online collaboration will set the tone for an intense but positive three hour face-to-face workshop at Alta Vista Library. Please email your poems to sbrockwell@yahoo.com, or drop them off at the Alta Vista Library labelled Poetry Workshop Spring 2013 AL by April 12th. A list of suggested readings from previous workshops will be provided for reference. Stephen Brockwell is the Author of The Real Made Up (ECW) and his book Fruitfly Geographic (ECW) won the Archibald Lampman award. An installment of the work in progress, Excerpts from Improbable Books, was recently reviewed by Mark Frutkin here: http://www.ottawapoetry.blogspot.ca/2013/01/mark-frutkin-review-of-four-chapbooks.html.
Labels: David O'Meara, Ottawa Public Library, Peter Richardson, sandra ridley, Stephen Brockwell, workshop
