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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.

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:

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.

As a continuation of our exploration of the idea of Anglo-Quebec poetry as both a sociological phenomenon, and as an aesthetic field of literary activity, Todd Swift and I have edited a feature of 27 Anglo-Quebec Poets for the Australian-based Jacket Magazine. The selection of poetry (while by no means exhaustive) is extremely varied, interesting and exciting, and includes the work of (among others) Leonard Cohen, Erin Moure, Peter Van Toorn, Robyn Sarah, David McGimpsey, Carmine Starnino, D.G. Jones, Mary Di Michele, and some great poets who have recently passed away, such as Robert Allen, Ruth Taylor and artie gold. A digital reproduction of artie gold's chapbook 5 Jockey Poems (published in a run of 200 copies by The Word bookstore in 1977) is just one of the many treasures you will discover within this rich selection of materials.

Please have a look at Jacket Magazine, Issue 34

Rob died a year ago, on November 3rd, 2006. He is greatly missed.

Join us for the final event of the A.M. Klein International Conference (18 - 20 October)

A.M. KLEIN TODAY: A POETRY READING
Saturday, October 20th, 7pm,
Concordia University, Hall Building, Room H-765 (7th Floor)
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd.West, Montreal, Canada.
Admission Free.

In celebration of the ongoing and living significance of A.M. Klein's art, contemporary Montreal poets and translators read selections from their own work and the works of Klein.

Readings by:

Marie Frankland
David McGimpsey
Robyn Sarah
David Solway
Carmine Starnino

Hosted by:

Jason Camlot

Contact Info
Phone: 514.848.2424 x8760
Email: cjs@alcor.concordia.ca

A poem of mine has been posted as this week's Parliamentary Poem of the Week.

John Steffler is the present Parliamentary Poet.

The poem to appear on the parliament web site is entitled, "Lost Days". It is a bout-rimé sonnet that takes all of its end rhymes from a D.G. Rossetti poem of the same title. It's from a series of such poems I've been writing. The Rossetti brothers used to play the bout-rimé game with each other, so D.G.'s poems seem a fair source from which to draw the end rhymes for my own poems. "Lost Days" gives my sonnet account of the Victorian period. Sort of like a sonnet Coles Notes for Victorian Lit students.

You can read the poem HERE.

This year's issue of Court Green, published from Columbia College in Chicago, arrived in the mail today, complete with fridge magnets in the shape and colors of the psychadelic flowers that adorn its lovely cover:

There is a very long and impressive bout rimé dossier in which 50+ poets have written sonnets, each of us using the same end rhymes. I also have a few other poems in the issue.

It's a really neat journal edited by Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio, and David Trinidad (who is responsible for the list of end rhymes, I think).

Check out Court Green.

The online and sometimes print literature and art journal Pindeldyboz has just released a new poetry anthology. It's edited by Mark Yakich and has poetry by Matthew Zapruder, Matthea Harvey and lots of other people. There's a poem of mine in it, too.

It looks like this:

Check out Pindeldyboz here.

Visit Puggy Hammer at Myspace. Listen to a tune. Become a friend.

Just click HERE to make Puggy's space Yourspace.

Avril's a friend. Why not you?

Puggy Hammer MySpace URL:
http://www.myspace.com/puggyhammer

It has been sent to the printer, and will be out in time to be launched at the Blue Metropolis Festival at the end of April. With many thanks owed to many people.

I will be participating in three events at The Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival this year.

First

Soirée de poésie I

Thursday, April 5, 8:15–9:45 p.m. I'll be reading in Boston at the American Culture Association, with Boston Poet Aaron Fogel, plus Alessandro Porco and David McGimpsey. The reading takes place in the The Fairfield Room at the BOSTON MARRIOTT COPLEY PLACE, 110 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA, (617) 578-0025.

According to the ACA website, If you were an astronaut working on the International Space Station, The Boston Marriott Copley Place would be located where the red dot is: