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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

Gillian Sze and I will be launching chapbooks made by the withwords chapbook press on Monday, March 17th at Kafein (1429a Bishop St.), 6:30pm - 8:00pm. Just across the street from the Concordia U Library Building, between St. Catherine and de Maisonneuve.

If you don't know about withwords, you should visit their website HERE.

In Brief, withwords press is a 'discovery' chapbook press, a montreal-based branch of Toronto's LyricalMyrical Press. The editors of withwords are Sasha Manoli and Ann Ward. They make amazing chapbooks out of books that have been discarded by libraries. They re-use these discarded book materials and reconstruct them into hard cover poetry chapbooks using unique design and binding techniques. These books are really something to see, and I can't wait to see what kind of book they have made out of the poems I gave them.

The chapbook I'll be launching is called The Fruit Man and Other Poems. Artist and writer J.R. Carpenter has graciously provided unique diagramatic 'illustrations' for my poems. The images she came up with are amazingly playful in a manner that is unique to all of J.R.'s art. The idea we had was to do a kind of modern-quirky version of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), which had illustrations by her Brother D.G. Mine has illustrations by my friend, J.R. So the symmetry is already remarkable. The chapbook consists of Victorianish poems, a few bout-rimé sonnets using the rhymes of D.G. Rossetti sonnets, poems about Jekyll & Hyde, Ruskin, J.S. Mill and other kooks of the period, a little bit of nonesense verse, plus the long title poem, which is loose(ish)ly based on C. Rossetti's masterpiece, "Goblin Market". If you come to the launch and buy a chapbook you will receive two bonus poems (not in the book) that will be printed on a commemorative withwords press launch bookmark.

Gillian Sze will be launching her chapbook A Tender Invention the same night. I have never heard or read any of Gillian's work, so it will be a special treat to be introduced to her poetry.

Here's one of the posters withwords has designed for the event, integrating some of the arches from Ruskin's Stones of Venice that J.R. played around with (i.e. the lightbulb isn't in Ruskin's original text):

Performed last week at a Voix et Voies de L'Ecriture event held at McGill's Thomson House. This was an event organized to discuss and witness performance, slam, soundscape and video poetry. It was an illuminating evening, with performances ranging from harmonica-punk-slam to an historically researched declamation of a scene from Racine's Phedre. For my own performance (the only reading that was not in French) I developed a soundscape out of the various early sound recordings I have been collecting over the years, and read over/alongside the layered voices of the soundscape. The text I read was a kind of collage of two poems from The Animal Library: "Phono Kit" and "Kit Discovers Sound". I converted these poems into the first person, which had a strange effect of personalizing the observations about noise and sound and making the the whole thing--with the Victorian voices speaking around me, but not to me--rather affecting, I think. Among the sound recordings used to create the layered soundscape were: Alfred Tennyson, Canon Fleming, Henry Ainley, Lewis Waller and Rose Coghlan all reading Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (these recordings ranging from 1890 to 1906); an early and creepy 20c recording of someone (unknown to me) reciting Goethe's Das Erlkonig; Big Ben Chiming (a recording from 1890); and documentary recordings made at the site of the 1897 Diamond Jubilee, including a group of men and women singing "God Save the Queen". A nice surprise at the event: a former student of mine, Catherine Cormier-Larose, was also participating in the reading. Her performance was great.

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