Birthday songs

Changes -- David Bowie
Birthday -- The Sugarcubes
Hold on Hope -- Guided by Voices
This Night Has Opened My Eyes -- The Smiths
Cosmic Dancer -- T. Rex
Milkshake N' Honey -- Sleater Kinney

and, of course,

Fairytale of New York -- The Pogues

A type of fly injects its eggs into a particular species of ant, and the eggs become maggots that burrow through the ant's flesh to its head and through eating tissue hollow out the head. The ant, meanwhile, lives. An ant carries on with a hollowed-out head. Innovation in art is a delicate refusal.

The English language is mine, and not mine. The English language is the shifting ground, the complex mess and soup and great wave over and around. The English language exists solely for my pleasure and my pleasure rests in its complexity. My pleasure grounds the English idioms. My pleasure starts with sound. My pleasure is all of a tongue. And words curling up my throat a growling purring hum. The English words work up through my body. And I take pleasure in resolve as well. A sharp snap in the sentence. A tight turn. Small details, small particular lettered sound. Pattern. Rhyme and rhythm and repeated phrases. Parcels.

The English language languid and honing. The more it bites the more it swallows the more it spits and curves. The English language is nothing if not expanding. Sopping up. All explicit and pinned. The English language has a scientific turn of mind, it pins all specimens right to the quiver, right in the heart. The English language takes aim. The English language is never fraudulent, the English language is always becoming, the English language is always at home. The English language flaunts its history. The English language is an arrogant slag.

check it out check it out check it out

West Coast Line kindly published some of my CHUMP poems in their brand new issue #46. It's not up on the website yet, so you'll have to go find it and look at it because the cover art is A-mazing!

Thanks, West Coast Line!

Here’s a new way to avoid studying. I’ve been updating my curriculum vitae and also my acknowledgments. Back when I was psyched about publishing my as yet unpublishable manuscript, I wrote an acknowledgments page, which was obviously a bit premature, but seemed like an important part of the process. Sucks that it’s not a matter of public record, but hey! I have a blog; anything can be public. So, if you were to read to the end of a book of Natalie Simpson poems, here’s what you would find:

I am indebted to the editors of the magazines that have published versions of some of these poems: West Coast Line, Queen Street Quarterly, dANDelion, filling Station, endnote, phu on line, (orange), in grave ink, sudden magazine; to derek beaulieu’s housepress, ryan fitzpatrick’s MODL press, rob mclennan’s above/ground press, and to No Press for publishing some of these poems as chapbooks; to Jon Paul Fiorentino and Robert Kroetsch for publishing “Sentencing” in their Post Prairie anthology and to derek beaulieu, Jason Christie and Angela Rawlings for publishing several poems in their anthology Shift & Switch. I am also grateful to the many event organizers who have allowed me to read to enthusiastic audiences and with distinguished colleagues: the Markin-Flanagan Program, the Alley Alley Home Free Fred Wah symposium organizers, the Bodies and Texts Symposium committee, the 2001 Free Exchange commitee, Jason Christie’s YARD series, past and current editorial collectives of filling Station and dANDelion magazines, the Word on the Street, the Spoken Word Festival, and of course and always the phu collective.

I think it’s really important to acknowledge readings as well as publishings, because getting to do readings is kind of the point of being published. Also, publication can be a somewhat hollow accomplishment, but giving a good reading and seeing how the audience reacts to your work is the best thing in the world. I love that moment of connection, when you feel that you control the energy in the room through nothing more than your voice and your words; it’s a tremendous sense of power and of vulnerability.

Acknowledgments are actually pretty hard to write. I think the best acknowledgments page I’ve read was in Julia Williams’ The Sink House. She strikes the perfect balance between sincerity and dignity; it’s very sweet without gushing. Mine are accurate but somehow incomplete. I should add a thank to you to everyone in the Calgary writing community generally, and maybe more specific thank yous. Hmm, I’ll have to spend more time on this. Screw my civil litigation exam.

Discussing some minutiae involving the difference between a trust and a power:

A layman and, I suspect, also a logician would find it hard to understand what difference there is.
In Re Baden’s Deed Trusts, England, 1972

So that leaves a lawyer to understand the difference? Here’s the secret they don’t want you to know: law does not follow logic. Law does not follow common sense. Law employs its own method of reasoning to protect the status quo.

I guess that explains why I can get an incredibly high score on the LSAT (which measures logical and analytical ability and reading comprehension) but only average grades in law school. Either that or I procrastinate too much then do half-assed work. What’s the logical explanation? What’s the reasonable explanation?

I’m so glad someone found my blog through a search on Barthes and the sentence. Those are two of my favourite things. Sometimes I almost forget that I have a Master’s degree in English, because I rarely mention it, but I do, and my thesis was on the sentence as a unit of poetry in Gertrude Stein’s writing. I talked about Saussure, Jacobson, Barthes, Silliman, and a whole bunch of other linguists, theorists and poets. I still love thinking about sentences. Just the word is exciting. Not all my poetry is about sentences, but all my poetry is sentences. I know a lot of poets get down into words and their randomness or down into letters or even further down in specks and grunts, but I can’t get away from the sentence. I don’t think Barthes has the last word on sentences, but he does have a few things to say, mainly about the authority of the sentence. I think if the sentence is the system, I’d rather mess around inside it than turn away from it.

All of which is why I was so happy to get to write an essay about Saussure, Jacobson and Barthes for my philosophy of law class. I didn’t talk about sentences at all, only more abstractly about language, texts, thought, and law, but still it felt like a return to concerns I’d somewhat abandoned because of what? I don’t know. A sense of failure? Absurdity? Shame?

Least sexy allusion to sex ever:

... these decisions have sometimes turned upon narrow differences in wording, which seem to be the progeny by miscegenation of early technical rules relating to the form of the execution of deeds...

Also, wtf does it mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

Holy crap I'm in a bad mood. My email hasn't worked for the past couple of days, which really shouldn't be such a problem, but it makes me feel like I'm missing a limb. I have my first exam tomorrow, and while that should adrenalinalize me to study like crazy, instead it just bores me. I keep falling asleep.