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Who is the debaucher?
He is not a bad man.
He is, I'm sure, pure
with wild intention.

Come celebrate the launch of The Debaucher, my third collection of poetry. In blurb lingo:

This book walks an oscillating lyrical tightrope between realms of cosmopolitan sophistication and ribald hilarity. In these surprising poems high art and low art gather together, sometimes on the battlefield, sometimes at lover’s leap. Here “The Song of Roland” is re-imagined as a set of cartoon panels, debauchery is praised as a virtue, and a pair of cannibals dines on a poet. Through it all, Camlot’s poetry always maintains an evocative connection to the tender absurdities of our daily lives. He makes us laugh, nervously, at ourselves.

I'll be doing a few readings and launches in May and June for my new book.

MAY 21: I'll launch the book in TORONTO in a joint Punchy/Insomniac Launch, reading with Stuart Ross and Catherine Graham. TIME: 7:00 PM. VENUE: Dora Keogh Traditional Irish Pub, 141 Danforth Ave.

MAY 23: I'll be reading in BUFFALO with Stuart Ross, David McGimpsey and Andrea Strudensky. TIME: 7:30 PM. VENUE: Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street.

MAY 27: I'll be doing a solo launch and reading of my book in MONTREAL at the legendary Word Bookstore. TIME: 7:30 PM. VENUE: The Word Bookstore, 489 Milton Street.

JUNE 6: I’ll be reading in TORONTO again, at the I.V. LOUNGE with Alex Porco and Dominico Capilongo. TIME: 7:00 PM. VENUE: I.V. Lounge, 326 Dundas Street West.

It has been a busy month, and will continue to be a busy one, well into the next one. On the first night (April 30th) of Blue Met this year, I read along with David McGimpsey, Susan Gillis, Endre Farkas, Caroline Marie Souaid and Josh Auerbach at the Soirée de Poesie I; and then, on the final afternoon, David and I launched the first two titles in the new imprint we are editing.
Here's the officialese dirt on the new imprint we call PUNCHY:

Punchy Writers Series is a new poetry & fiction imprint of DC Books edited by Jason Camlot and David McGimpsey. Punchy is committed to publishing formally engaging and thematically fun literature. Readers who pick up a book from the Punchy Writers Series will know that they are in for a challenging and pleasurable ride. If it's excellent and compelling, strange and fun, Punchy will get behind it. Punchy Writers Series fits nicely within the historical mission of DC Books to embody "a tradition of literary innovation, dissent against convention, and artistic facilitation that is second to none." Send queries to punchywriters@gmail.com

The first two awesome PUNCHY titles in the series are:

DEAD CARS IN MANAGUA
By Stuart Ross

Stuart Ross's sixth poetry collection is both an experimental departure for Ross and an offering of some of his most accurate surrealistic observations to date. Dead Cars in Managua gathers into one volume three discrete poetry projects—an absurdist Baedeker of image-driven prose poems about Managua accompanied by his original photos, a formally various sequence of personal, narrative poems about the claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals, and a selection of cubist and abstract poems where Ross shows his experimental New York School cards like never before. All of the poems in this book are touched by Ross's unique ability to dissolve our common-sense understanding of the world, and then distill a more potent truth from the remains of sense and reason.

SQUISHY
By Arjun Basu

Arjun Basu's fiction collection is a wry and provocative book which exloses the realities beneath social conventions. Squishy asks: Do you still love me? Do you want fries with that? Do I look fat? Life is full of small moments that define us, tangents that lead us to unexpected places, bad decisions and no decisions with repercussions you couldn't possibly predict. This is the world of Squishy—an aspiring actress fast approaching her best-before date, a world weary travel writer, a disgraced ballplayer suffering the lingering effects of a wardrobe malfunction—all characters aware of life's promise and impossibility, tempted by something just beyond, something surely delicious.

Merendree: Out of the city, into rural Belgium. We wound our way through cobblestone roads and cowfields to an art gallery for the visual poetry exhibit Woord en Beeld, including work by Helen White (Krikri hostess extradordinaire) and Maja Jantar (an incredible and unclassifiable artist working in polypoetry and multimedia theatre, among other grand things). The range of work in the two-storey exhibit was impressive, and it was eye-opening to see Belgium's visual poetry scene. An excellent post-festival adventure!!

~

Wenduine: He took us to the place of his childhood, stretches of sand and flat ocean and horizon and the Flemish sky with its suspended turbulence.

~

Bruges: Rain. Green. Clean. Any tourist's medieval wet dream.

~

Ghent: We sat in the tetrahedron and, though talk was small, our past lives commingled and the subtext instinctively traced a cellular map. Longevity itudinal ing. Oh, big words. Big, big words big as Belgian hail. The sun was skyward and then it hailed and then it hailed again, the tetrahedron filled with din, our talk diminished, except. What happened next has yet to happen.

~

Partyafterparty: We made a spectacular feast, ate chocolate, and made zen gardens in red-wine salt. We improvised Jelle's klankpoezie score. Kristof, Helen, Jelle, and Maja read aloud numerous poems by Canadians, a cacophonous familiarity. Maja and I improvised on a Flemish grammar book (video below). Querida watched.

~

And so: how to return to Ghent? There's so much begs doing.

“I see that it’s important that we surrender ourselves and expose ourselves to things that we don’t necessarily understand, that through innocent, impassioned excitement we can’t help share.” – Lisa Gerrard

“To make the familiar strange, but also to use the materials of the familiar to make something highly recognizable and personal.” – Amina

“What matters isn’t what you could do but what you really did.” – Björk

I started this blog soon after my last poetry collection, Attention All Typewriters, came out, and named the blog after that book. Well, now the next one is at the print shop. The Toronto launch will take place May 21st, a reading for the book in Buffalo on May 23rd, and the Montreal launch at The Word bookstore will be on May 27th. Details on all that, and on the book, to follow. Enough, for now, to look at the cover:

But I've been on the picket line at Con U, and busy being generally happy. ECW Press has accepted my novel, Stripmalling, for publication and they are going to produce a beautiful hardcover edition with Evan Munday's art on the cover. I made a mockup. But Evan's final will be waayyyyy nicer.

Also, the winner of this year's Robert Kroetsch award is Geoffery Hlibchuk's Varations on Holderlin. Elizabeth Bachinsky was the judge. Snare Books will publish this book along with Pasha Malla's All our grandfathers are ghosts. and Mike Spry's Jack in the fall.

Finally, come say hi at Blue Metropolis:

I will be hosting the SOIRÉE DE POÉSIE
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30 2008 @ 9:00 PM
Readings by prominent Montreal poets.
Joshua Auerbach
Jason Camlot
Endre Farkas
Susan Gillis
David McGimpsey
Carolyn Marie Souaid

Quebec Writers' Federation

and I will be part of a panel discussion on literary publishing
FRIDAY, MAY 02 2008 @ 8:30 PM
FROM MANUSCRIPT TO BOOK: THE PUBLISHERS HAVE THEIR SAY
So how does that manuscript you're been working on finally get published? This is your chance to find out at our publishers` event, back by popular demand. - Hosted by Carolyn Marie Souaid. Duration: 1:15

Robert J. Sawyer
Kim McArthur
Patricia Aldana
Jon Paul Fiorentino

I love Colin Smith. And I love Colin's writing.
Please find a way to get his new book.
You will not regret it.

Matrix PresentsIssue 80: The Gallows Humour IssueMatrix magazine is now accepting submissions for its Gallows Humour dossier. We are looking for your darkest, most absurd and sardonic, witty, acerbic, ironic and sarcastic unpublished writing. Edited by Mike Spry. Poetry: (3-5 poems). Fiction: (3500 words max.). Deadline: April 11th, 2008.Electronic Submissions Preferred: [...]

It's Chinese New Year's Eve, and fine time to turn over a new leaf! I've fallen behind on this impossible (for me) task of writing on every movie we see, so instead of trying to battle the rising flood, I'm instead resorting to lists, with occasional commentary. So here is a list of all the movies we've watched since last October, rated completely unobjectively from one to ten.

The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal - 7
The Weather Underground - 8
The Notorious Bettie Page - 7 (Gretchen Mol is great as Bettie Page, even if the film seemed a bit underdeveloped)
Under Fire - 5
Kaspar Hauser - 10 (one of Herzog's best works)
My Best Fiend - 10 (just for the gossip on Kinski)
Wheel of Time - 9
Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004 - 7
Best of Youth - 9
The Machinist - 4 (I was too disturbed by Christian Bale's extreme weightloss for this role, and too concerned for his health to suspend disbelief. Couldn't he have just tried acting?)
The 40 Year Old Virgin - FF (Fast Forward)
White Diamond - 10
Cobra Verde - 9
Spiderman 3 - 4 (It would have been alright until Spidey started in on a dance number)
Chuck and Buck - 8
Atlantic City - 5
A Bizarre Love Triangle - 6
Little Dieter Needs to Fly - 9
Wes Craven's New Nightmare - 4
The Host (Gwoemul) - 9
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster - FF
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (about my 99th viewing) - 10

Happy Year of the Earth Rat!

The latest Matrix is at press now, with poems by Stuart Ross, fiction by Sarah Steinberg, and a special section, the New Underground, with writing by some of the best emerging writers (glad to see an excerpt of Jenny Sampirisi’s forthcoming novel, Iswas, included there). In this issue, there’s also my piece on writing spaces [...]

Here is my Movie Mythos column from Matrix #79:

Joe and I aren't up on many current films. That is to say, we know what new films are coming up and we read the reviews; we have high or low expectations of them. We don't, however, see very many of them (ah, the sacrifices of parenthood). So it gives us a lot to look forward to when the films come out on DVD. Because this is our dominant mode of movie-watching, and because of our internet movie-rental service, we might end up watching Wernor Herzog one night and Wes Craven the next, as we just did. We are not movie snobs; we like Wernor and Wes both, though you can't compare apples to oranges, as the saying goes. Now, aside from Wernor Herzog, who always astounds in one way or another, when was it that I last thought, wow, that's really good? Sure, there's lots of better-than-mediocre stuff, but I think that Hollywood mainstream is pretty much kaput. As for "independant cinema," well, now it's just Hollywood-lite. It's been clear for quite a while that, for example, the Sundance Festival has become a Hollywood genre unto itself, showing a certain type of small, quiet, well-observed drama, or a quirky kind of darkish comedy that in fact is completely status quo.

Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years – seeing that in writing, I think, am I obsessive-compulsive that I keep lists like this? But no, I decide finally that it's in the interest of a scientific survey. Plus, Joe sometimes forgets if he's seen a movie or not. Ahem… back to it. Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years, I realize that the freshest, most surprising, sink-into kinds of films that I've seen were practically all from Asia, especially South Korea and Thailand. I wonder, is it simply because I'm not used to seeing Asians in North American movies so much, and so I like the reflection of seeing people who look like me, somewhat? I enjoy not having to read subtitles of Cantonese films, but do so anyways for fun. But no, I think it's just because so many of them are darned good. A couple of years ago, one of our national newspapers ran a front page headline that started with a few words of Chinese, then “if you can't read this, you're in trouble.” I was shocked at the overtones: “the Yellow Peril” is coming, folks! But now I realize, it's true. Asian films are superior and they will take over the world.

Here, my list of top ten Asian film rentals (I've tried to stay “underground” and not include the perhaps more well-known directors such as Wong Kar-Wai or Ang Lee, or anything too genre, which warrants a whole other list!):

The Quiet Family; A Tale of Two Sisters by Ji-woon Kim – Perhaps these might be classified as Asian horror, though The Quiet Family is more comedic than horrific.
The Host by Joon-ho Bong (2006) – Okay, as a monster movie and as South Korea's biggest box-office hit of all time, this one is not exactly “underground,” but let's face it, most of the time, “foreign” is “underground.”
Oldboy; J.S.A. (Joint Security Area) by Park Chan-wook – The hyperviolence of Park Chan-wook's films is often way over the top and at times, just too much, but in Oldboy, it works with the intensity of the plot to become a poetic crescendo of psychological gore and mayhem. J.S.A. is an earlier film that explored political tensions on the border of North and South Korea with the same kind of unabashed and soap-operatic style.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring; 3-Iron by Kim Ki-Duk – I can't say I like Kim Ki-Duk's earlier works such as Bad Guy quite as much. They seem to be obsessed with violence and misogyny, albeit in an interesting way, but nevertheless, difficult to watch. But Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… is a pure revelation about a Buddhist Monk and his disciple, and 3-Iron was likewise a lyrical, near-silent Zen-like story about a young man breaking into people's houses and doing their laundry. Extraordinary films.
Saving My Hubby (Be Strong, Geum-sun) by Nam-seob Hyeon – I'm cheating a bit with this one, since it isn't available as a rental yet. I saw it at a film festival a few years ago and have been keeping an eye out for it ever since. Billed as a Korean Run, Lola, Run but way cuter and funnier.
The Eye by Danny and Oxide Pang – Alright, another genre film, but this Thai ghost story about a blind woman receiving a cornea transplant is also Buddhist in nature!
Last Life in the Universe by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang – Another near-silent film about a Japanese man who meets a Thai girl, neither of who speak the other's language. Breath-takingly beautiful (shot by Chris Doyle), meditative yet darkly funny and with a yakuza subplot and a bodycount.

REDUX: Here in Vangroovy, winter’s set in, which means rain. The current issue of the McGill News has a great review of Delible. Rita Wong and Robert Majzels have thoughtful responses up on rob mclennan’s ‘12 or 20.’ (I’m sure I should get why they’re called ‘12 or 20,’ but don’t.) Can’t wait to read [...]

It's done. My novel is done!! My dream publisher is looking at it and if they accept it, then my life is complete.

Here are some panels from the novel. Illustrated and improvised by the brilliant Evan Munday.

Click here