Sometimes I feel as though there’s something insidious creeping into my aesthetics, bias influencing my reaction to poems more than reasonable evaluation. I want to resist choosing sides. If there is a compelling argument for why formalist, lyric poetry is still relevant, then I want to know what it is. I want to be convinced.

So I started off reading this review with an open mind. After a brief stroll through Starnino’s caustic introduction, and a minor remonstrance for the apparently forgivable sin of spell-check-induced typos, the reviewer sets out his criterion for a good poem: the “interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources.” Ok, I agree with that. But when the reviewer gives examples from the anthology, he starts to lose me.

It is almost painful
to touch, but you can’t help
yourself. It’s so familiar.
The dents. The twisted symmetry.
You can see how hard it has tried.

I have a lazy intellect, so I have to rely on writing workshop questions, like Why is this a poem? What do the line breaks do that the same words in a paragraph couldn’t do? Where is the prosody?

His body divorced him slowly,
like a flock of birds leaving
a wire, one set of wings at a time –
still in sight, but past retrieving.

I like this image, but why is the form so controlled? If the body is falling apart, why isn’t the language falling apart too? Why aren’t the words more birdlike, or winglike, or why don’t they sound… I don’t know, interesting?

Hovelled in darkness two nights then,

bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.

Two similes in two lines? Is an interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources? Really?

And finally, this gem:

The bony babes in Gap who lazily
Stroll with Starbucks cups at U of T,
Photoshopped or bio-engineered,
See me dreamy-eyed and think I’m weird.

Which the reviewer justifies thusly:

As with Larkin, it’s the self-deprecation, and the wit, that keep the misogyny bearable in these poems, though no doubt more for some readers than for others.

I must be one of those other readers, because I don't think misogyny is ever bearable. Dear reviewer: Replace “misogyny” with “racism” or “homophobia” and maybe you’ll understand what an asshole sounds like.

If witty formalism and self-deprecating lyricism are meant to make misogyny palatable, that's a pretty strong argument against them. And I still haven't heard a compelling argument in their favour. So, I remain unconvinced.

My plan to take over the world is in motion. Walking to work two days a week (40 minutes each way, up and down a super-steep hill), pilates twice a week and yoga once a week. Soon, the cloning.

...when frog pond plop
is forged at my feet

a block and a half
from words to wet frog...

One day in Japan a few years ago, I was reading either bp nichol's versions of basho or maybe some of derek's poems that eventually went into frogments from the frag pool. In any case, I went out with frog pond plop in my head, for a walk along the narrow roads surrounded by rice fields. The rice was low, so the fields were like swamps, about two feet of warm, sludgy water. There were dozens of different types of frogs in all sizes that would jump in and out of the water and across the road. Each type of frog had a different tone of ribbit. Some were high and quick, while some were quite disturbingly low and loud. I'd walked about a block when there was a small movement at my feet. In the three seconds it took my brain to register what I was seeing, I saw a frog, I saw a pond, I saw a plop. I've never felt a more satisfying convergence of words and world.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and fascinating book. It took over 70 years to complete the dictionary, and thousands of contributors. Many of the people involved were insane. It was like a Victorian rallying cause for the pedantic, the meticulous, the martyred; the British.

It's a charming narrative, only slightly marred by passages like this:

...the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

So, ever look up the word "hubris"?

If you want to feel attractive, attend a Canada Revenue Agency sponsored presentation on tax regulations for charities. I did, and I got all sorts of attention ranging from significant looks to awkward conversations of the "how you doing" variety punctuated with nervous laughter and self-conscious gestures. Who are these men? What grimy offices do they burrow out of and what is it in my demeanour that encourages them? I have to admit I really enjoyed learning about tax and charities, and I guess that spells geek. Most things I do spell geek. Still though, these charity geeks seem to be a notch or two below your cooler geeks, the indie rock geeks, the poetry geeks.

I finally had time to read all of Shift & Switch and: wow. It's such an exciting book. It's so much the opposite of what anthologies are usually: a sort of gathering up and condensing. Most anthologies present writing so definitively. All you need to know is there, summed up and distilled.

Shift & Switch, on the other hand, is all possibility. So much of the writing seems in process, in flight. Some of the poems may be finished, but I'm sure a lot of the selections will be revised into bigger projects, or smaller, or just different.

Writing is always changing, writing is always renewing.

I don't mean that the book reads like a draft, because it doesn't: it's well-edited, well-designed and well-written. The poems are good, but not perfected. They're present, and vital. That's why it's exciting: it's like a promise of more and more writing to come.

The conundrum: If I live another sixty years and if I stay able and if I read a book every two days, that's still only 10,000-odd books and that can’t be enough; how can I ever begin to know? And without knowing, how can I ever begin?

I've discovered a brilliant lunacy in the regulations that govern non-profit societies in Alberta:

10(1) The name of a society may contain only the following:
(a) letters of the alphabet of the English language;
(b) Arabic numerals;
(c) the following punctuation or other marks:
(i) !
(ii) “
(iii) #
(iv) $
(v) %
(vi) &
(vii) ‘
(viii) ( )
(ix) *
(x) +
(xi) ,
(xii) .
(xiii) -
(xiv) /
(xv) :
(xvi) ;
(xvii) >
(xviii) \
(xxii) Ç
(xxiii) ?
(xxiv) @

Each punctuation mark has its own sub-section! Brilliant. And I love how it takes five letters and two punctuation marks to point out that a name can indeed contain a question mark [(xxiii) ? ]. But don't interpret this expansive attitude toward punctuation too liberally.
(3) No society may have a name that consists primarily of a combination of punctuation marks or other marks.

Also no name may contain
(b) a number or word that might lead to the inference that the name is a number name, unless the name is a number name.
Is a frustrated poet drafting regulations for the Alberta legislature? I like to think so.

I have a tendency to focus on the negative. Over the past three days, I drank and packed and drove, and the only detail that stands out as worthy of recording is the dead bear I saw on the Transcanada. It was on the other side of the road, so we only caught a glimpse as we drove by, but it looked like a smallish probably not quite adult black bear. There was a guy standing next to it who looked like a park ranger or animal control type person, and another guy (the one who must have hit it) standing next to a camper.
I guess it's fortunate that a camper and not a smaller car hit the bear, or there might have been dead people too. I guess it's also better that the bear was actually dead rather than badly injured. But man, what a horrible thing. I've run into bears in the woods a couple of times, and that is a terrifying experience, but it's much, much better to see bears alive than roadkilled.

When I was writing my MA thesis, I remember thinking that it was the most difficult thing I would ever have to do, and if I could finish it, I could accomplish anything. Now I'm trying to write a 25-page research paper in two and a half days after writing three exams in the past week and a half, and I don't think anything could ever have been harder than this. If I were more organized and had any kind of time management skills, it probably wouldn't be so bad, but sadly I'm an imbecile and my decade in university has taught me nothing. Remember, kids, stay the fuck out of school. It's bad for your health.

You'd think that spending my time in two different cities would mean I get to attend twice the number of readings, or at least slightly more. Wrong. I get to miss all the readings. Everything is going down in Calgary between now and April 30. Everything is starting in Vancouver on April 30. Where will I be on April 30? Heading east on Highway 1.

I'm particularly upset about missing the Nod magazine launch, featuring derek beaulieu, jason christie, angela rawlings and jon paul fiorentino.

As I was contemplating the irony of my plan to spend the summer in Calgary to save money depending on my having enough money to get to Calgary, which I don’t, my GST cheque arrived, bumping me up to flat-broke from in-the-hole. I love unanticipated government cheques. What I don’t love is relying on unanticipated government cheques at this stage in my life. Actually what I really don’t love is trying to distract myself from my inefficient studying habits by writing blog posts that end up not being witty, or even interesting. That and gerund-ridden sentences. Ugh.

Today I have read that the family is a crisis the justice system is failing that the federation is fragile but bound in doctrines that the dust kicked up is falling in fanciful curlicues across shafts of light. I would like to be wounded by words but itch more like touched nerves or sweat glands.

Today I have bathed in light only I haven't today I stood in spring rain to smoke today I have lazed and sternly scolded my habits and affected nothing. Today I have not resisted closure and not resisted angst. For these my art is not an art but typing "I don't understand this censure."

I like this provision. It's elegant, concise and confusing. Just what law should be.

2. (1) Subject to subsection (2), persons related by consanguinity, affinity or adoption are not prohibited from marrying each other by reason only of their relationship.
(2) No person shall marry another person if they are related (a) lineally by consanguinity or adoption; (b) as brother and sister by consanguinity, whether by the whole blood or by the half-blood; or (c) as brother and sister by adoption.
Marriage (Prohibited Degrees) Act, 1990, c. 46

Sometimes I wish judges wouldn't try so hard.

The friendly face of Caillou, with his round cheeks and expression of wide-eyed surprise, has delighted countless young children and won over their parents and grandparents. Today, this charming little character, a creation that sprang from the imagination and from the art of form and colour, is moving out of the world where he welcomes his new baby sister, or gets ready for kindergarten.

Unintentionally, no doubt, he is now making a contribution to the development of commercial arbitration law in the field of intellectual property. What has happened is that the people who consider themselves to be his mothers are engaged in battle for him. The respondent claims exclusive maternity. The appellants believe it was a joint effort. The manner in which their dispute is to be resolved has itself become the subject of a major disagreement, and this is what is now before this Court.
Desputeaux v. Editions Chouette (1987) Inc., Supreme Court of Canada

Dear Self: When you have to choose an article to summarize and present to your seminar class, don’t choose the one with “ontology” in the title just because it’s “weird” and “academic” and reinforces the vague image you have of yourself as intellectual and radical in some undefined but oh-so-slightly kinky way. You do not understand what ontology is. No matter how many times you google “ontology definition” and repeat to yourself “ah yes, being in the world, yes, being, of course” you cannot speak intelligently about ontology as it relates to conceptions of property. You have not read any of the philosophers the article references. In fact you can’t even read the article without becoming infuriated by its stylistic vagaries and imprecisions; perhaps you thought you were reading literary theory? You’re not. That’s how philosophers write. I hope you remember this next time you have to summarize an article, or you’ll end up at 2:00 in the morning cobbling together mangled bits of syntax oversaturated with abstract nouns that you don’t even understand, squinting through your tears and headache and wondering how the fuck you’re going to pull this presentation off… and it would be kind of pathetic to do that twice.

My reading for school hasn't turned up anything ridiculous or absurd lately. I can think of two explanations: either all my course material is thought-prokoving, stimulating and relevant; or I've been brainwashed into absorbing the law without contempt.

I think it's the former. Here's a neat quote from Copyright.

It is wise in any state to encourage letters, and the painful researches of learned men.
Millar v. Taylor, 1769

Introverts of the world, Unite!

Oh hell yeah!

I would totally start a revolution, but I don't want to have to like, talk to anybody about it, you know?

Maybe I'll write a paper about whether introversion is an analogous ground of discrimination under the s.15 Charter guarantee of equality. Although I probably won't. But I have definitely felt oppressed whenever I look at job listings that all require "an outgoing personality." As though talking a lot about nothing makes you a good employee. What-ever.

February has been a bust. Nothing seems to lend itself to writing about here. Nothing seems to lend itself to writing anywhere, nevermind reading. I've watched bad TV. My life has become a loop of coughing and making tea. I've had a cold so bad I quit drinking coffee. I expect these sentences to lay something bare that they don't. I wanted to read something funny, so I got two British novels from the library and I read them through one after the other and they weren't funny at all. Things aren't what they're supposed to be.

It raises an important question relating to the conduct of trials and, because of its importance, what I am about to say may undergo some substantial editing when I see what I have said, but my decision will not be different.
McEachern CJBC, Rahmatian v. HFH Video Biz Inc. BC 1991