Tag Archives: Visible Verse

Racing & romping

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Lately, all I’m doing! Currently, I’m racing to meet the Visible Verse festival deadline, lots more programming to wrap up in the next two days.

On Thursday I’m heading to Victoria to participate in ROMP Independent Dance Festival where I will be reading Whore In The Eddy as a dancer improvises “to the sound, syllables, and multiple meanings. Each dancer is only given the first and last line of the written work before stepping onto the stage – to create an electric collaborative laboratory between improvised dance and the spoken word.” I’m excited!

My life in verse, or rather, OUR life in verse

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Thus far, and including my poetry inside a bomb. See below.

I have several comrades in verse with whom I like to commiserate. We delight in bashing the already fractured literary scene, or scenes, belittling ourselves and our vocation—beating detractors to the punch—while bearing in mind it’s a shared passion and we’re damn good. Sadly, a way with words won’t  necessarily pay the rent. Despite the reality of the situation, my real and virtual friends keep composing the stuff. I’m currently enjoying Miranda Pearson’s Harbour and Clara Blackwood’s Subway Medusa, having recently completed Michael O’ Keefe’s eloquently and variously tragic or comic Swimming From Under My Father.

Other lunatic poetical friends go so far as to take it on the road! Coming to a (U.S.) town near you . . . My pal S.A. Griffin has cleverly devised THE POETRY BOMB Tour Of Words 2010 and according to my commemorative t-shirt, will be leaving Alburquerque, NM to play Austin, TX tomorrow. With all the years I lived in Los Angeles, S.A. is the only actor I befriended. Hmmm. Well, acting is his profession and like the aforementioned maniacs, verse, his obsession. This isn’t the first time S.A. has hit the road. He and the Carma Bums (Doug Knott, Michael Mollet, Mike Bruner, Scott Wannberg) toured relentlessly some of the most undomesticated, unsurpassed performance poetry I’ve been privileged to see.

Lately I’ve been working with my son on his Distance Ed classes, tutoring him in his poetry unit, using verse from my own collections to illustrate simile and metaphor. He detests it, naturally, but we’ve managed to write haiku and free verse and he knows the difference between a couplet, a quatrain and a stanza. I tried to persuade him there’s a close relation between song and verse, appeal to his passion for music but he’s not biting.

I’m spending less time on Facebook (the honeymoon may be over) and more at my own website which is getting spammed regularly, through this blog and WordPress I suspect. Our videopoems-Bushwhack and How To Remain are nearing the final stage of production as I prepare to go to Salt Spring Island to work intensively with my collaborateur Roderick Shoolbraid. Three Blocks West of Wonderland book launch parties are in the works. We better rehearse our AURAL Heather act as we are planning to perform at said launches. Yikes! With all this behind me soon, I intend to spend the remainder of 2010 focused on writing, though I will be working hard on our Visible Verse 10 year anniversary festival and celebration coming up in November. No rest for the wicked, or the poet, apparently.

A life roiling with verse, visible and otherwise

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Let there be confusion and terror, bleached bones in the closet, crows soaring into the chimney. Here I sit, sweating in the dead of winter, mind and guts roiling. My new collection, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, is out, I’m feeling fabulous and working hard at workin’ it. That’s actually the cover of Gabrielle Everall’s remarkable verse novel Dona Juanita and the love of boys but there is so much life within this one life! My life. Such as it is. Still, precious.

This frenzied phase began about a month ago, in Gibsons of all places. Brian Palmu kindly invited me to read my poetry along with my dear friend Peter Trower. I had reassured Pete that I would go up there to help clear out the 40-year long residence he was vacating. Small house, big job. So, I thought I would kill the proverbial two birds with one stone, keep my promise and do the reading.

Pete grovelled, grateful for my well-honed organizational skills. I walked in, opened cupboards and drawers, asking, “What’s this? You keeping it? Giving it away?” Then I made piles, one for the Salvation Army, one for Stuff To Keep and one for The Dump. This town still has a town dump! Bear Watching we called it in Salmo, cheap entertainment, featuring the best in local talent. Voila! The packing took a while, we had to retrieve boxes and tape, but the work was accomplished with a minimum of fuss.

The next day, Brian and his girlfriend Verna graciously hosted Pete and I Continue reading →

Recovering, from the big three

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Blowing, wet blustery day, autumn here big time weather wise, as I drag my butt around, feeling tired, achy and sore from the tetanus shot but starting to be able to use my foot again so that is good. Someone said, “Well the nail in the foot was the third bad thing that has happened” so I am hoping she is right and I have earned a reprieve somehow and things will level out soon. To reiterate, #1 was my sister’s death, # 2 was Peter’s murder. Guess I needed some physical pain to match the emotional pain of loss and grief and do things really happen in threes or is that a lot of hooey?

When it rains it pours and it’s pouring in my life but it’s my own fault as I keep on taking on more. So many projects but I know I have to work in more than one media because if I didn’t as I said at the Word On The Street festival during my reading, I would go nuts. If I was relying only on print, which moves at a glacial pace, I would be so frustrated! I am working with video and music and at least I have some control over those kinds of projects. Still, that means I have a lot of irons in the fire as they say, in addition to raising my son with special needs. On that front though, I am feeling encouraged because I think we may have finally found a service provider, an RDI (Relationship Development Intervention) specialist that we can work with to help Junior. We had attended the RDI symposium with Steve Gutstein last year but there were no practitioners available in the Lower Mainland. I hope it works out. I have learned through trial and error that a lot of this stuff winds up being pretty ineffectual, that many of the experts are talking through their asses when it comes to the child, your child, with his or her unique, individual profile and needs. It’s hard not to be bitter about the fact too that he was misdiagnosed as having a “moderate to severe language disorder” when in fact he was Aspergers all along. That diagnose did not come until he was ten. I knew something was not quite right with his development from the age of two but I am no expert.

Peter still enters my thoughts often as I take care of business, cronies of ours emerging to ask if I’ve heard the news. Yes, and where have you been? Up until this point most seemed determined to remain in the past but I suppose their curiosity is getting the best of them and now they want to know what I know which isn’t much. I do know that the investigation will remain closed, whether the police or the DA’s office believes Bruce’s story or not. Still, it is not over and I am interested in seeing what develops in the near future.

Swamped lately for in addition to aforementioned projects, I am embroiled in my curating work for Pacific Cinémathèque and SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse, the annual screening event of poetry video and film that I host each year, culling 27 works from 65 submissions from around the world Continue reading →