Third reiteration of Chump

Chumps shore up the overflow blot water the river rimmed.

Chumps in interlocking patentless plastic. Stock chump in dollar stores, trade chump at boothed auditorium fairs, pissy underground shops.

Chump bleatingly, strange longing fumble squawk.

Limpid pooling drool at the lip of chump, grim masses foster chump. Blotted chump oils paper casts lurid patterns.

if you're after getting honey
then you don't go killing all the bees

The first page of a poetry series I'm working on. Right now it's called "again and again".

Enunciation of the fervor. A blip in the cosmos. Drip of syrup tipples from fork edge. Times fodder. Food loosens, grips down the gullet. Shot a pierce. An arrow pierces air and finds comfort. Lines betray. Try deep breathing into belly. Spill over your thighs and sink. Meet three folds of body. What thrills through which body when words like circumspect slot into their places. Putting letters through their paces. Letting.

Is it normal to notice language this much?: A co-worker was telling me about how her Dalmation attacked the neighbour's Chow and I said "Isn't it like, five times the size?" And then I didn't hear anything else she told me because all I could think about was all the "i" sounds in that sentence, all the words that go letter-i-letter-e, the progression of "s" throughout the sentence, the odd rhythm (iambic mixed with spondaic, I think). And of course I've had that sentence in my head all day...

The question is, am I obsessively noticing that stuff, or do I say the things I say according to some need to align words in poetic ways? Oh no, that sentence rhymed too (sort of).

Ugh. I think this might be the cause of some major failures to communicate. I think I sometimes say what sounds best (poetically) instead of what I mean.

Oh well, communicating is one of the least interesting things there is to do with language anyway.

Still under the thrall of Saturday night's movie, The Visitor, which is refreshingly complex, quiet, slow-paced, but still engaging, romantic, clever, and deeply yet subtly critical of the perennial dangers of fear, complacency, bureaucracy.

It left me wondering what I can do.

The immediate answer is nothing, as I'm not American so can't vote or otherwise affect American immigration policy. The slightly less direct answer is to work in immigration law, which I've considered before, but I honestly don't think that's an area of law in which my strengths lie. The oblique but most significant answer is to be more engaged with politics, policy, law - to understand who represents us and what decisions they are making and how those decisions affect us, at all levels, from municipal to federal to international.

Canadians always have recourse to the comforting yet deceptive notion that we're not doing as badly as they are - our immigration policies are never quite as Draconian, our detention policies are never quite as constitutionally unsound, our social policies never as regressive, our criminal justice system never as cruel. But is any of that even true?

We currently have a prime minister who openly models his governance after the Bush administration, with one major difference: he's intelligent. He's competent. He doesn't want open debate, and for the most part, we're not demanding it. The foundations of democracy are eroding or at least being obfuscated, and we're not complaining.

My thinking in this area is always muddled, nihilist, conspiracy-theorist; I tend to overstate things. But I'm tired of being afraid of what governments can do, I'm tired of the false dichotomy of powerful against good.

The unfortunate result of reading in Vancouver and seeing so many Vancouver writers in Calgary is that I want to go back... I miss the beach, I miss the old buildings, I miss the humidity, I miss the trees, the uneven sidewalks, the density, the little produce stores, the electric buses, the hills....
Of course when I'm in Vancouver, I miss the sky, the light, the smell of snow, the smell of Chinooks, some strange unnameable quality of Calgary that I can't quite put my finger on...
I will never be content.
Merely form ill fitting into form...

Happy: Finally bought a bookshelf and was finally able to rescue a box of books from storage. Earlier this year I sorted some of my books by genre, so I grabbed one of the poetry boxes and am now surrounded by many books I sort of forgot I owned, such as Erica Hunt's Local History, Nathalie Stephens' somewhere running, Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack, Susan Holbrook's misled, Dionne Brand's No Language is Neutral, Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K, Steve McCaffrey's Seven Pages Missing and on and on...

Even happier: The bookshelf is one of those big square IKEA ones that can probably fit another two boxes' worth of books at least...

Why is poetry always a feast or famine? There were many enticing events over the last couple of weeks, but I couldn't make it to all of them. Partly because they coincided with the first few weeks of my new job and the last few, agonizingly drawn out, weeks of the bar course. Now that I'm all settled in, homework-free, and refreshed from sleeping for most of yesterday, there are no events on the horizon...

Anyway, starting three weeks ago: My fellow LINEbooks author Kim Minkus launched her book 9 Freight at Pages with a lovely reading. Here's a measure of success: although the audience was small, I'm pretty sure everyone there bought at least one of her books. As should you.

Then two weeks ago, the Old School reading persevered through a number of setbacks, including Calgary's ridiculous week-long callback to winter weather. Again the audience was small but very receptive. Jill Hartman, Emily Cargan, Brea Burton and Julia Williams all read brilliantly and made me feel all envious and anxious and I need to write new stuff!!

Thursdays have been bad days for me, because I usually stay up late Wednesday nights finishing my bar course assignments, and so I missed the Spoken Word Festival event the Thursday before last featuring David Bateman, Hiromi Goto, Jordan Scott, Karen Hines, and Ivan E. Coyote. I regret not seeing all of them, but particularly Ivan E. Coyote, who I saw at the Spoken Word Festival about four or five years ago and thought was incredible. Even though I was living in Vancouver for three years after that, I never managed to see any of her performances for one reason or another, but I've since read all of her books. Her writing is quite different from most of the authors I read, but it's wonderfully original, straightforward and profound.

Last weekend, I made it out to Vancouver for my reading with Julia Williams at the Kootenay School of Writing, sadly one of the last events at Spartacus Books, which has to relocate due to rent issues. Spartacus has been a great place for readings, very spacious, comfortable and welcoming. The reading went really, really well. Julia read a mix of poetry and fiction, interspersed with sardonic commentary. I've always admired her ability to extemporize wit. I read for longer than I usually do, but it was great, especially when the audience started interrupting me to ask questions and getting me to repeat one poem and generally to explain myself. That's the best response you can get from a poetry audience, I think - just the sense that what you're reading is making people think. Hopefully, the audio recording will be up at the KSW site soon.

Last Tuesday, Jordan Scott launched his latest book blert at Pages with his usual mesmerizing and haunting performance. I haven't read blert yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Again because of the curse of Thursdays, I missed derek beaulieu's launch of his new book Chains at the Uppercase Gallery, but I plan to visit the exhibition of his visual poems sometime over the next month.

Friday was the final event of the Spoken Word Festival, featuring Sachiko Murakami, Steve Collis, Colin Browne, Weyman Chan, and Fred Wah, at the Art Gallery of Calgary. I'm running out of positive adjectives and don't want to repeat myself too much. But what the hell: lovely, brilliant, wonderful, fascinating, etc. Colin Browne and Fred Wah in particular can teach everyone a thing or two about how to perform poetry.

And that's all, for now... Actually, I won't mind a lull in events too much, I have a lot of reading to catch up on.

Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on something that needs no advocate but itself.... Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than notoreity. Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become of us if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe reasoning from either extreme.

- Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Letter to a Young Contributor," 1862; quoted in My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe