2016 Battle of the Bards: Best, Maguire, Pinder and Weaver

above/ground press authors Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Pinder and Andy Weaver participate in the 2016 Battle of the Bards alongside Lara Bozabalian, Chris Chambers, Warren Clements, Michael Fraser, Marty Gervais, Susan Glickman, Maureen Hynes, James Lindsay, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Ruth Roach Pierson, Vanessa Shields, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, Blair Trewartha, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Katerina Vaughan Fretwell and Bänoo Zan!

Poetry NOW: 8th annual Battle of the Bards

Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 7:30 PM
Special Event: IFOA Weekly
Brigantine Room
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto M5J 2G8
Cost: $10/FREE supporters, students & youth 25 and under
http://ifoa.org/events/poetry-now-8th-annual-battle-of-the-bards

1 stage. 20 poets. 1 winner.

Our popular poetry competition returns in 2016 to feature readings by 20 of Canada’s upcoming and established poets. Judges Geoffrey E. Taylor (IFOA’s Director), Jen Tindall (IFOA’s Artistic Associate) and Andy McGuire (winner of 2015 IFOA Poetry Games) will select one winner, who will receive an automatic invitation to read at the 37th edition of the International Festival of Authors AND an ad for their book in NOW Magazine!

The event will be hosted by NOW’s Susan G. Cole.

Poetry NOW is presented in partnership with NOW Magazine.

above/ground press at Word on the Street: Toronto (today!)

If you wander by The League of Canadian Poets booth at Word on the Street in Toronto today, they'll be handing out (while supplies last) a stack of above/ground press "poem" broadsides! I've been digging through the archives lately, and have discovered multiple broadsheets still in print by Sarah Pinder, Natalee Caple, Nelson Ball, Gil McElroy, Ken Norris, Steven Heighton, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Wanda Praamsma, George Bowering, Joe Blades and Christine McNair, among numerous others. Why not stop by?

new from above/ground press: Poem beginning with a line by Pinder by rob mclennan

Poem beginning with a line by Pinder

rob mclennan

$3

1.

This is how a skein of ghosts appears in your inbox,

seawater spills, memory lines              lie still, sleep well,

float above the silence,

someone born and not yet

far too easy to get lost; upon this earth,

we singe and shrivel                verbal, alchemist

a bleeding sun, we absent-minded

sway like ink spots, tarnished; several times,

surrounding fidgets, green; mute,        if we could manage,

for the little sake,        your quick face, sharks

the creeping revelations, cloud                        and cluster,

forms of warmth, calendar-belief,

take; a moment to respond,

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

December 2012

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

The italicized lines are borrowed from Toronto writer Sarah Pinder [her self-portrait above]’s chapbook, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination (Toronto ON: bits of string, 2011), obviously owing a subsequent debt as well to Robert Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (1958).

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (obvious epiphanies press, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (www.ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (www.ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Poe, McKinnon, Anstee, Pirie, Brockwell, Maguire, Stewart, Butler, Barbour, macLean + Burke

Deborah Poe [who took the above photo, by the by] has some new work in the fifth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics; Barry McKinnon does as well, with his lecture from the 2nd annual VERSeFest Poetry Festival; a new series of lectures will be presented at a VERSeFest fundraiser on November 15th in Ottawa, by Cameron Anstee, Pearl Pirie and Stephen Brockwell, hosted by The Factory Reading Series; Shannon Maguire reads in Toronto on November 7 with Melannie Gayle and Katie Jordan to help Sarah Pinder launch her new Coach House Books poetry collection (you should totally go); and various authors from moons back, including Christine Stewart and Jenna Butler were part of Douglas Barbour's month-long TRUCK (they all had above/ground press chapbooks in the "Alberta Series," all of which appear online as free pdfs), as do kath macLean and Andrew Burke; and above/ground press makes the Tarpaulin Sky list of titles one can possibly review! (we choose to remain optimistic)

some author activity: Hall, Armantrout, Martin, mclennan + Pinder/Earl poems delivered to Shakespeare and Company!

How did I miss this Phil Hall poem in Forget? Otherwise, Rae Armantrout was interviewed in the new, improved Lemonhound, as well as in The Believer on, among other subjects, Emily Dickinson; James Pickersgill interviewed Camille Martin recently; and I seem to have an author page on the new filling Station website.

The photo, by the by, is of the Sarah Pinder and Amanda Earl poem broadsides I dropped off a week ago at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, while Christine and I were on our honeymoon!

"poem" broadside #310: West End, by Sarah Pinder

West End

Towards the jetty of industry, streaking
heat, striated with gauzed air,
I sat there in the front,
wishing an occasional flame   
through the pixellated evening pinks of August,
little men in baseball whites
whirring to my right side.

We were passing, we were
being passed, we were at a light,
but your voice was so loud we were moving,
for sure.

A green pocket, the feathered wives
on woven chairs, unfolded.
One woman bent away, lost in her ankles
while someone else flapped into applause.

West End
by Sarah Pinder
above/ground press broadside #310

Sarah Pinder lives in Toronto. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Expozine Small Press Awards and included in the anthology She’s Shameless, and journals like Room, Canadian Woman Studies and invisible city. A zine-maker of over a decade, you can find her work in Montreal’s Distroboto art vending machines, as well as a mailbox near you. Her first collection, Cutting Room, is forthcoming with Coach House Books in Fall 2012. http://bitsofstring.wordpress.com