a Beautiful Outlaw Press launch with readings by:
Mark Goldstein (Toronto)
+ Phil Hall (Perth)
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Wednesday, October 15, 2014;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Black Squirrel Books
1073 Bank Street (directly across from The Mayfair)
Beautiful Outlaw Press is pleased to announce its publication of two new works:
Essay on Legend, by Phil Hall, and
Blacktoll, by Mark Goldstein.
By its title,
Essay on Legend echoes Alexander Pope's 18th century poem
Essay on Criticism. It is concerned with the insidiousness of story-telling, narrative, anecdote (forms of legend). The thinnest tip of legend is metaphor – the tiny lie of how each word is not itself. Like the Japanese poets, Issa, Basho ... Hall has had some fun renaming himself: he tells the bogus legend of that old poet, Otty. (Basho was the tree outside Basho's door / I live at Otty Lake.) Al Purdy & Louis Zukofsky make appearances, too. As Hall’s essay-poem tracks A to Z., it speaks also of guns & dogs & revision.
Blacktoll is Goldstein’s transtranslation of Paul Celan’s
Schwarzmaut, a work Celan wrote sometime after January 30, 1967 – the date on which he first tried to kill himself. It is a continuation of Goldstein’s transtranslational experiments first begun in
After Rilke (BookThug 2008) and continued in
Tracelanguage (BookThug 2010). Where
Tracelanguage exemplifies a “shared breath” that seeks to break with tired translational orthodoxies,
Blacktoll attempts to embrace both old and new methodologies as singular.
With 52 copies of
Essay on Legend and 85 copies of
Blacktoll available, both titles are issued as limited hand-bound editions.
Mark Goldstein is the author of three books of poetry published by the award-winning BookThug:
Form of Forms (2012);
Tracelanguage (2010); and
After Rilke (2008). His poetry and criticism have appeared in periodicals including
The Capilano Review,
Open Letter,
Matrix Magazine and
Jacket2.
He has taught transtranslation workshops at the Toronto New School of Writing and SUNY Albany. Goldstein has also lectured on translation in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Prior to writing and translation, Goldstein was a founding member of indie rock band By Divine Right. He played drums, toured and recorded with Leslie Feist and Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning. He now divides his time between Toronto, Vancouver, and Los Angeles.
Phil Hall won the 2011 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in English, for
Killdeer, published by BookThug.
He also won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for
Killdeer. This book of essay-poems also won an Alcuin Design Award, was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, & will soon be published in a French translation from Éditions Pris de parole.
Hall’s most recent publications are:
The Small Nouns Crying Faith (BookThug, 2013), and
Notes on Gethsemani (Nomados, 2014). Recently, he has worked in the Wired Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
This fall he is Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa. He is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He lives near Perth, Ontario.
He is also the author of two chapbooks through above/ground press:
Veralum (2011), and, with Australian poet Andrew Burke, the collaborative
Shikibu Shuffle (2012).
