lapsus linguae

E-Poetry Festival – Barcelona 2009

Next week I will present in absentia at the 5th edition of the E-Poetry Festival, which will take place in Barcelona May 24th-27, 2009. Artistic and academic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the the University of Barcelona, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) and the Caixaforum, providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new poetry and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

The event is organized by UOC’s research group Hermeneia, with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Univ. Paris VIII). Keynote speakers will include Roberto Simanowski (Brown University) and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8).

E-Poetry is an international biennial conference and festival of digital poetry. It is the most significant digital literary gathering in the field, bringing together an impressive roster of Electronic Literature’s most influential practitioners from around the world. Authors and researchers will present the latest research and the newest, most important works of electronic literature will be presented. Presenting at E-Poetry will bring my work to the attention of an influential international audience of critics, academics, practitioners and the public.

For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.e-poetry2009.com/

in absentia is a web-based project that uses fiction, digital images, historical maps HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. The result is an interactive non-linear narrative map of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End. In recent years many long-time low-income immigrant and elderly neighbours have been forced out of their homes by economic decisions made in their absence. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. My building was sold during the production of in absentia. Faced with imminent eviction I began to write as if I was no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. The Mile End depicted in in absentia is a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The sterile and slightly sinister “developer’s-eye-view” of the neighbourhood offered by Google Maps satellite imaging has been populated with stories, interrupted with silhouette voids, intimate traces of the sudden disappearances of characters (fictional or otherwise) from the places (real or imagined) where they once lived.

At E-Poetry I will present the piece by giving a brief contextual overview of the work and then read aloud from a number of the stories contained in the work.
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The Fruit Man and Other Poems

Next month the Montreal chapbook press WithWords will publish The Fruit Man and Other Poems, by Jason Camlot, illustrated by me, J. R. Carpenter. Not only do Jason and I have the same initials (JC), as you can see, our names (Camlot and Carpenter) are quite close alphabetically. If we had gone to grade school together I would have sat behind Jason in class. If I had gone to grad school, Jason might have been one of my professors. But neither of these is the case. I’m not quite sure how we actually met, but I do know that before we ever met our poems appeared sequentially in a number of alphabetically ordered anthologies including: 100 Poets Against the War (Salt) and Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X (DC Books), both edited by Todd Swift.

When Jason first asked me to consider illustrating The Fruit Man and Other Poems, I was a little worried that he might have me confused with an illustrator. My background is in Fine Arts, and I vaguely remember studying Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students’ League of New York way back in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch, but I hadn’t done any drawing for a very long time. In my “mini-books” I use many small single images to punctuate the text rather than illustrate it (in so far as illustrations tend toward the emblematic, whereas my use of images tends toward the diagrammatic). But for The Fruit Man I’d have to come up with something more original. Drawing is not exactly like riding a bike. As my friend Camilo, who draws everyday, said before embarking on a round of etchings recently: I am rusty as old german submarines in the deep underwaters of the atlantic.

Another thing to consider: Jason is a Victorianist – that’s a pretty daunting era in book illustration. Think Beardsly’s Salome. Not to mention all that Art Nouveau stuff. But I agreed to illustrate The Fruit Man and Other Poems anyway, because I love the poems. Anyone who knows me will immediately know why when they read them. They are filled with small things: thimbles and pocket combs, mice and china cups. They reference big systems of thinking: the list, the collection, the cabinet of curiosities, phrenology, “the new technology in underclothes,” and Ruskin. I have a real soft spot for Ruskin. The title piece is a long poem modelled on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (which was illustrated by D.G. Rossetti back in the day). Here is an excerpt from “The Fruit Man” followed by my cover illustration:

When I asked the foreman if he’s seen
a fruit man selling apples, green,
like the one in my hand,
he brought me to his cabinet
of cardboard drawers
stuffed with buttons and safety pins,
butcher’s paper, razor blades,
and numberless scraps of animal skin.
In a pantry for needles,
behind a sewing machine,
the foreman kept his apples,
green, like the one in my hand,
brought weekly to him
by the same Fruit Man.

Jason Camlot, The Fruit Man

J. R. Carpenter, cover image: The Fruit Man and Other Poems, by Jason Camlot
The Fruit Man and Other Poems cover illustration by J. R. Carpenter

The Fruit Man and Other Poems will launch in March. Check back here in a week or two for dates. Or try the WithWords Press website: http://www.withwordspress.com/
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Let’s Pretend We Met last Week

Last week we launched Nathaniel G. Moore’s new book of poetry – Let’s Pretend We Never Met – at the Casa del Popolo, “we” being Nathaniel G. himself, Angela Hibbs, Mary Williamson, me, J. R. Carpenter, and some of our closest friends. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to write about this event before it happened, for PR purposes, but things didn’t work out that way. It was a lovely evening thanks to the many sweet friends who showed up minimal prompting.

The first person to thank is Nathaniel, for writing a new book – a new book is always such a good excuse for a reading and a reading is always such a good excuse for hanging out with friends and drinking. A far as I know Nathaniel and I have never pretended that we never met. We’re both Rome junkies. Let’s Pretend We Never Met riffs on the poems and life of Catullus, a Roman poet of the first century BC. Catullus was the first to write about his personal life in the tawdry way we all do nowadays. Nathaniel drags the lusty lovelorn mourning Catullus kicking and screaming, leering and heavy petting into the twenty-first century – or at least into the nineteen-eighties – into a grimly-lit rec-room reality-TV sort of post-pubescent angst. Which sounds awful, but it totally works. Let’s Pretend is a weirdly compelling book – or maybe it’s a concept album? Anyway, pound-for-pound it’s a page-turner.

Another person to thank is Angela Hibbs. Her book is smaller and redder and there’s a girl on the front instead of a guy. Passport is a collection “escape from Newfoundland poems.” I don’t think Ms Hibbs would mind them characterized in this way. They’ve got enough perspective in them to indicate to the reader that the author did indeed escape, but at the same time enough razor-burn rawness to them to indicate that it was a narrow escape, an all-around close call. I would also like to thank Angela for wearing short-shorts, thigh-high stockings and high-heeled cowboy boots.

Third up was Mary Williamson who read a story not presently in a book but bound to be one day. I’d only just met Angela and Mary three nights previous. On that occasion Angela was wearing a blond wig and a gold lame gown and Mary was wearing a redhead wig and a baby blue ball gown and then a red brocaded and fringed flapper number which she kept hiking up to dance flapper-type dances. Given the flapper theme it was all one could do to refrain from yelling: Nice gams! At the reading Mary was reading a story from a boy’s point of view so she was wearing a boy’s cap, undershirt, and jeans found in the garbage. Nathaniel was wearing pants found in the garbage too. Or maybe his were from a yard sale. Mine were.

I was wearing a pair of super skinny jeans bought up the street at a yard sale for three bucks. It’s hard not to buy three-dollar jeans. It’s also hard to sit down in them, these ones anyway. These are my standing up jeans, I kept saying to reading attendees lest they think me pacing nervously. I read some Rome related stuff: Notes On Arrival, a short prose poem culled from the How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome web project; A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, a new piece written especially for this reading, and Roads Out of Rome, another piece that began as part of Broken Things and was then expanded and adapted and eventually made its way into Geist last winter.

Highlights of the evening included – in no particular order: when, in my reading of A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, I skipped ahead 1200 years and paused and said – I’m skipping ahead here – and everybody laughed (phew); when friends showed up even though it was summer and Tuesday and a poetry reading no less, and when the afore-mentioned Angela Hibbs showed up in short-shorts.

Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
J. R. Carpenter, How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
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POETS FOR RED CROSS: 9/11 FIVE YEARS ON

Nearly 90 poets from around the world have contributed to Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on, an anthology of poems reflecting on direct and indirect consequences of 9/11. These poems aim for more than pious hand-wringing. The anthology is free to download, but readers are requested to donate to the Red Cross.

nthposition, the London-based website behind the anthology, has listed Babylon Burning on iTunes as a PDF in hopes of maximising the money raised . Poetry editor Todd Swift notes: “Auden said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, but we think it can, and we’d like to prove it.”

Contributors to Babylon Burning are: Ros Barber, Jim Bennett, Rachel Bentham, Charles Bernstein, bill bissett, Yvonne Blomer, Stephanie Bolster, Jenna Butler, Jason Camlot, J R Carpenter, Jared Carter, Patrick Chapman, Sampurna Chattarji, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Chivers, Alfred Corn, Tim Cumming, Margot Douaihy, Ken Edwards, Adam Elgar, Elaine Feinstein, Peter Finch, Philip Fried, Leah Fritz, Richard Garcia, Sandra M Gilbert, Nathan Hamilton, Richard Harrison, Kevin Higgins, Will Holloway, Bob Holman, Paul Hoover, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Chris Jones, Jill Jones, Kavita Joshi, Jonathan Kaplansky, Wednesday Kennedy, Sonnet L’Abbé, Kasandra Larsen, Tony Lewis-Jones, Dave Lordan, Alexis Lykiard, Jeffrey Mackie, Mike Marqusee, Chris McCabe, Nigel McLoughlin, Pauline Michel, Peter Middleton, Adrian Mitchell, John Mole, David Morley, George Murray, Alistair Noon, D Nurkse, John Oughton, Ruth Padel, Richard Peabody, Tom Phillips, David Prater, Lisa Pasold, Victoria Ramsay, Harold Rhenisch, Noel Rooney, Joe Ross, Myra Schneider, Robert Sheppard, Zaid Shlah, Henry Shukman, Penelope Shuttle, John Siddique, Goran Simic, Hal Sirowitz, Heather Grace Stewart, Andrew Steinmetz, John Stiles, William E Stobb, jordan stone, Sean Street, Todd Swift, Joel Tan, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Terrill, Helên Thomas, Vincent Tinguely, Rodrigo Toscano, John Tranter and John Welch. All gave their work for free.

Download Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on: http://www.nthposition.com/babylonburning911.php
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Searching for Volcanoes

Search for my poem Searching for Volcanoes, recently published in Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X, edited by Todd Swift (Montréal: DC Books, 2005).

Future Welcome comes 50 years after 1955. In his introduction to the anthology editor Todd Swift notes: “1955 saw: the opening of Disneyland; the publication of Lolita; ultra-high frequency waves produced at M.I.T.; Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment; the introduction of the first fluoride toothpaste, Crest; the International Air Pollution Congress (held in New York City); the debut of Scrabble; B-52s put into service; Ray Kroc’s acquisition of McDonald’s; Elvis’s TV debut; Salk’s polio vaccine; a time bomb on United DC-6 flight; Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations”; Eisenhower’s upholding of the right to use nuclear weapons in defence; US Congress ordering all American coins to read “In God We Trust”; the deaths of James Dean, Wallace Stevens and Albert Einstein; and the birth of Bill Gates.”

Where are we now? Certainly not where we thought we’d be. Swift writes: “I wanted poems and prose both of our moment, and yet imbued with the same sense of retro-kitsch that popularly defines the 50s–works about the future, robots, space travel, technology, and sci-fi terror.”

Searching for Volcanoes tells the not-quite-sci-fi-terror tale of trying to do Internet research on a dial-up connection. It’s hard to believe that the Internet didn’t exist in 1955 and yet, in 2005, a 56k connection is utterly antiquated. Volcanoes are a good analogy. As my brilliant friend Norman T. White pointed out to me: “Funny thing about erupting lava – it’s brand new, but it’s also ancient.”

Here’s an excerpt from searching for Volcanoes:

56k
takes forever to fill
collapsed craters
with blue-screen-blue
caldera lakes.

Line by line
the sky downloads:
progressive jpeg descends
a strafe of cloud dithers,
geological time passes –
falls toward mountain…

Future Welcome includes new writing from David Wevill, Sina Queyras, Raymond Hsu, Robert Minhinnick, Annie Freud, bill bissett, Patrick Chapman, Meredith Quartermain, Jason Camlot, Liane Strauss, Todd Colby, Jennifer K. Dick, John Hartley Williams, Louise Bak, Hal Sirowitz, Adeena Karasick, Mike Marqusee, Kavita Joshi, Stan Rogal, Tammy Armstrong, Richard Peabody, Jenna Butler, Ali Riley, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David Prater, J. R. Carpenter, David McGimpsey–plus many more.

For more information on or to order Future Welcome vist DC Books

For more information on editior Todd Swift visit his web sites: http://www.toddswift.com/ and http://toddswift.blogspot.com/
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History Through Poetry

March 3, 2003 marked launch of the anthology 100 Poets Against The War (edited by Todd Swift, Salt Publishing: Cambridge, UK & Applecross, Australia).

The project began with a call for submissions, on January 20, 2003, for poets to contribute to a downloadable electronic chapbook, which was published online on January 27, 2003 to coincide with Hans Blix’s report to the UN on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I immediately wrote and contributed a poem called “A Verse to War”. I felt compelled to participate for a few reasons: My father was a Vietnam War draft evader, so I was lucky enough to be born in Canada. My grandfather witnessed the levelling of Manila as a Technical Sergeant in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the Nazis made short work of what little of our family was left in Hungary. Both my grandparents watched the World Trade Center collapse from their bedroom window. The smoke stank up their apartment for days.

I can’t remember the exact date that the 100 Poets anthology launched in Montréal, but I do remember that I had been in New York for the two weeks previous attending to my grandmother’s funeral and the distribution of her last effects, mostly books. When she was a child, my grandmother had some of her poems published in the Yiddish newspapers of New York’s Lower East Side. She graduated with a Master’s Degree in English Literature from Hunter College, but wound up teaching junior high school science in Queens for thirty years. She never wanted me to be a writer. Or rather, she never believed that I would become a writer. Which is to say, she never thought I’d make it as a writer. In the last face-to-face conversation I had with her before she died she said: “If it doesn’t work out, I won’t say ‘I told you so’. But if it does work out – well, then I’ll say, ‘My granddaughter, the novelist!’”

I witnessed both pro and anti war protests in progress in many of the small towns that the Greyhound passed through as I traveled home from New York to Montréal the day before reading at the 100 Poets book launch. Two of the more popular placard slogans still stand out in my head: “America is worth fighting for,” and “Another Veteran Against the War.” I couldn’t help thinking: My grandmother would have hated this.

I can’t remember if I ever sent my grandmother a copy of one of the three free downloadable and printable 100 Poets Against the War PDF chapbooks that Todd Swift and Val Stevenson assembled and published on Nthposition.com. If I did it wouldn’t have impressed her much. Her own mother had never bought a single paper that published her Yiddish poems and until I was anthologized in the Rinehart Reader my grandmother wasn’t likely to make a fuss.

Today, approximately two and a half years after the 100 Poets anthology launched in cities around the world, I stumbled across an online article that would have made my grandmother the schoolteacher sit up and take notice.

On a web site called: “Rethinking Schools Online” I found that in their Spring 2003 edition they had published a special collection of resources for teachers called: “Teaching About the War“. In her lesson plan, “Entering History Through Poetry“, Linda Christensen suggested using 100 Poets Against the War as a teaching aide. She wrote: “Opening a topic as volatile as war by getting students to talk about their fears and questions can help teachers understand the extent of student knowledge as well as their positions. … Students should feel comfortable entering a classroom conversation; otherwise, we’re not wrestling with issues; we’re pinning them down and force-feeding them. J. R. Carpenter’s poem “A verse to war” provides an opening for discussion.

Carpenter uses the repeating line “I am afraid,” then lists her fears. I asked students to look at the structure of the poem — the repeating line followed by a list. Then we generated potential lines and students wrote poems using this structure. Abigail, a sophomore in Anderson’s class, wrote about her brother: “I am afraid/of my brother leaving/to serve this country./I am afraid/I will never get the chance/to hug him again…/I am afraid of war.” Ashley, Abigail’s classmate, invented her own line and tied the war to the budget cuts: “I do not know/of war/of suffering/of fear./I do not know how my life will be altered…/I do not know/of destruction/of cold-blooded murder…/I do not know my future/of dreams unbroken/of non-potential/ of miseducation….”

Even though worse than my worst fears have come true for Iraq – and for America, for the two are now inextricably linked – and even though the above article was published over two years ago and I only found out about it today, it moves me immensely to hear that a poem that I wrote “provided an opening for discussion,” and that the 100 Poets project was put to use in this way. This, my grandmother would have loved.

A Verse to War

I am afraid
(of what will happen
of the rhetoric
of the silence
of not knowing).
I am afraid I don’t know what to contribute.

I am afraid
(of destruction
of waiting
of doing nothing
of adding fuel to the flames).
I am afraid I don’t have any answers.

I am afraid
(of trivializing
of propagandizing
of margins
of error).
I am afraid it is but a meagre thing to add –
a verse adverse to war.

Thank you to Todd Swift, Val Stevenson, Salt Publishing and to Vince Tinguely who first sent me the call for submissions. 100 Poets Against the War is still available for download or for purchase online. FOr more information please visit: Nthposition.com/100poets.php
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Saint-Urbain Street Heat

A new poem, “Saint-Urbain Street Heat”, appears in the August edition of Nth Position.

Some of you who have never been to Montréal in the summer don’t believe how hot it gets here. Those you who live here, well, you know. Set on the same block as Saint-Urbain’s Horsemen but more like Balconville only shorter and poetry and contemporary and completely different really, “Saint-Urbain Street Heat” will leave you sweating in your undershirts. Here’s an excerpt:

Alters of clutter,
hanging gardens of sound –
the back balconies buckle
under the weight of
high summer
Saint-Urbain Street heat.

All the kitchen
back doors stand open –
sticky arms flung open –
imploring, a heat-rashed prayer:

Deliver us unto
the many gods
of Mile End.

Read the rest of “Saint-Urbain Street heat” on NthPostion.com

Nth Position is a free online magazine/ezine based in Europe with politics & opinion, travel writing, fiction & poetry, reviews & interviews, and some high weirdness from around the world. Read, subscribe, submit: nthposition.com
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