On bad writing:

Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

- Ariana Reines

some good advice

from Nada Gordon:

You don’t need to have
anything to say: you only need
the desire to say it. That desire
will inhere in your selections
and your combinations. It’s only
those two things, finally: word
following word following word.
There is no innate value
to any approach or technique.
Beware those who preach
a gospel: they are marketing.
Beware appeals to authority:
they also are a part of marketing.
Respect only those whose value is
unequivocally clear to you: do not
adopt the values of others. You need
not like what you respect or value.
Your “tradition” should be at least
slightly different from the traditions
of others. Obsession is good. Follow
your obsessions. Don’t worry about
being “healthy.” Poetry is not about
being “healthy” although on some
miraculous occasions it might actually
heal. It won’t heal The State. Don’t think
it will heal The State.

Excerpts from the Real World

is the Robert Kroetsch book I've returned to the most over the past few years:

"This is a poem I didn't write. And not because I wasn't writing. And not because it isn't a poem. I'm beside myself, purely as a way to anticipate the past. Endings have stems and blossoms."

the hardest

thing to accept is other people's limitations.

i so so so relate

from rob mclennan's blog:

In an interview conducted by Kai Fierle-Hedrick in The Chicago Review (51:4/52:1, spring 2006), Lisa Robertson said:

The prose poem has always seduced me—I find that the grammar of the sentence truly is glamorous to me. With the sentence it’s more of a losing myself in the balance of phrasing, in the geometry of making that balance fresh each time. I do find each sentence is exciting, even erotic. I always loved parsing sentences in grade school. I don’t do that now—though it would be fun to begin again. I relate to prose thoroughly at the level of the sentence, not at all at the level of narrative. I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.

Just to be clear:

2 Where in this Act anything or any matter

(a) is described, characterized or referred to as reasonable or unreasonable, or

(b) is required or directed to be carried out or otherwise dealt with reasonably or in a reasonable manner,

the standard to be applied under this Act in determining whether the thing or matter is reasonable or unreasonable, or has been carried out or otherwise dealt with reasonably or in a reasonable manner, is what a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances.

- Personal Information Privacy Act, S.A 2003, c. P-6.5

amazing

via Harriet

two propositions

Language fills a fertile field of some fallow and some abundant overflowing frantic growth. We want to tend its garden, prune and reap. But language is seeded in our bodies, splits our cells and springs of us. We can no more cut language’s shoots than slice ourselves.

*

Words mutate in DNA. Words coil and slither. Metastasize. Words clump tumerous. Every body carries benign crops of words dark-packed, words waiting, considering space.

"an immediate and visceral effect on fish"

via @christianbok

note to self:

If I ever do go to New York, I should visit the statue of Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park.

(via Silliman's Blog)

what he said

"And when I say that I like poetry I don’t understand I don’t necessarily mean dadaist odes or jumbles of Zaum – it can seem like perfectly normal text at a first glance. But it’ll contain something that’s a little off. Something jilted or tilted or tainted. A shade of imbalance.

What this boils down to is a dimension of understanding or feeling (or whatever) which I can only recognize as religious – a belief or faith which prompts the reader (or writer) to jump the gap to join the poem on the other side."

-Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, So is the Wasteland

maudlin

"Rather than employ the normative sentence for communicative or representational ends, Stein inhabits the sentence as a compositional field in which the mechanisms of language and of the sentence itself are subject to minute examination and are thus revitalized as immediate and originary acts."

Apparently I wrote that, and about a hundred pages of sentences like that, almost 10 years ago. I barely remember any of the writing, can't even recognize my style in it, stilted and constrained as it is by fear. I like to revisit it every now and then, when it pops up on my vanity google searches, although each time it's more distant from me, less plausible somehow. What I do remember are the sprawling days on the 10th floor of the library, reading through the entire Gertrude Stein section, which took up several shelves, of which I read or at least skimmed every single book. As a research strategy, it was utterly absurd, but what a pleasurable use of time, and how fortunate to feel that I had time, what felt like endless time, to devote to such a methodical approach. How privileged to indulge in such futility. If I have any regret, it's that I did my Master's when I was way too young to appreciate how lucky I was and way too insecure to enjoy it as much as I could have.

Same goes for poetry

Modern Art by Craig Damrauer

Squares

The other night in my Art Appreciation class, we compared De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue with Dada artist Jean Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, with class members choosing sides for a bit of a debate on the merits of the two works.




I went with the Arp, for a number of reasons. On a first-impressions, visceral, visual level, I find the Mondrian off-putting, while the Arp is soothing, calming. It just occured to me that there's something quilt-like about the Arp, although I didn't notice that during the class. We did, however, discuss how the Mondrian looks like a shower curtain, or basically any other home accessory sold by IKEA, which I guess sort of complicates its reception for a contemporary audience. The Mondrian style has been so thoroughly co-opted and replicated by designers, particularly since the 1980s, that it's difficult to conceive of it as new or challenging.

Other facets of the Arp that our side approved of are its organicness, its warmth, its balance, its muted colours, its naturalism. And of course the humour and irony of the title in contrast with those qualities. The composition of the painting has nothing to do with chance, and chance has nothing to do with law.

We determined that the Mondrian represents reason and logic, while the Arp represents emotion and intuition. From there, it's not too much of a leap to assert that the Mondrian has patriarchal overtones, making the Arp a de facto matriarchal image. That's a troublingly essentialist conclusion, but it tied into thoughts I've had over the past week since a conversation at my book club about the end of patriarchy's usefulness to the world and the urgent need for a revisioning of all our institutions in some matriarchal form. Now when I look at the Mondrian, all I can see are the failures and horrors of the age of reason and its limping demise. How's that for overloading a simple image?

echo echo

Grateful to Pearl Pirie for this reading of my chapbook echo localial (the most in-depth review of any of my writing anyone has done to date). Also a bit mollified by her conclusion, that the poem presents an overwhelmingly negative world view. Ugh. That's not the kind of poetry I want to write. I always thought echo localial had some levity in it, a bit of humour, irreverence, even some sensuality. But I can see that to a more objective reader than me, maybe what comes through most persistently is all the negative emotion. Although I didn't put out the chapbook until a bit later, I wrote the text during my first year of law school, a time when I was (quite obliviously) in a state of constant crisis. In retrospect, I'm just glad I survived. Glad I wrote a poem at all.

little nothings

"I am past thirty. I fear the nights.
I hunch the sheet with my knees.
I bury my face in the pillow, shamefully weeping,
that I have squandered my life on little nothings
and in the morning will squander it again.

If only you had known, my critics,
whose goodness is so innocently under question,
how tender thundering condemnations seem
compared with my own scolding,
you would be relieved, if late at night
you found your conscience tormenting you unjustly.
When leafing through all my verse
I find this: by squandering myself so rashly
I have soiled the pages with so much rot...
but I could not burn it; it is scattered over the world."

-- from “I Journeyed through Russia” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

the poem resists

"The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well."

- Jennifer Moxley, Fragments of a Broken Poetics

missing the point

Overheard at the Glenbow museum this weekend, in the Historical Artwork collection: [father to his preteen son] "You can see some of these paintings in books, they're very expensive."

the language art

"I think of poetry as the field of potential writing, as a supergenre that is striated by subgenres but is also hyperabsorptive—it can sop up an infinite range of linguistic styles and forms. It’s more interesting to me to think of the lyric poem (or pastoral poem, urban poem, found poem, disjunctive poem, epic poem, constraint poem) as a genre, in the most debased and self-conscious sense, like thrillers or detective fiction, than to think of poetry as an intrinsically high art form. Creating such debased genre poems—that’s fodder for whatever activity I’m involved in, but that activity operates within the supergenre, the pluriverses, of poetry, consciously reflecting poetry’s very long and dubious history. Poetry as a supergenre, rather than as a subgenre, can be understood, as David Antin likes to say, as the language art. It’s the verbal art, the research-and-development arm of language. Yet, despite its history, the possibility of poetry still remains a surprise, because, in a way, the fact of poetry as art remains unknown."

- Charles Bernstein

Because there really is some

Whaddya know? The Calgary Herald has done something useful: starting this blog called Art in Calgary by Nancy Tousley. Today's post is about the upcoming Painter as Printmaker exhibit at the Glenbow Museum. Very much looking forward to that.