Edric Mesmer reviews Lary Timewell’s tones employed as loss (2013)

Edric Mesmer was good enough to review Lary Timewell’s tones employed as loss (2013) in the new issue of YELLOW FIELD (#nine; spring 2014). Thanks, Edric! This is the second review of Timewell’s chapbook, after Rebecca Anne Banks reviewed such over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. You can pick up a copy of the new issue through: yellowedenwaldfield [at] yahoo [dot] com or by writing to 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apt. 802, Buffalo, New York 14209. For those who haven’t been able to pick up an issue yet, I reprint such here:

tones employed as loss

Lary Timewell

above/ground

2013

Of poetry concerned with the nature of poetry, add to that list this title. Unthrough as we should be with Modernism, Timewell is well traveled in the space-time canonicity, “setting / The Way-Back Machine to conjure / / to conjure-up the serious business / of fiscal harps and apotheoses” ([19]). Canonical titles are satirized via pop culture slipups [i.e. Pound’s Cannelloni], and soon we breeze by geographical allusion via Stein and Tolkas’s address. If “the answer is here, but the message turns / out to be a grocery list” ([15]), how now the medium? We may be in a state of serial thought—defied if not also reified by an illusory fixity of the digital—nowhere better exemplified than by Timewell’s loudly mutable slices of poetry defined, from “an echo losing insistence” to “living in the lap of lechery” to “kinetic seed.”

some author activity: Brockwell, McElroy, mclennan, Martin, Higdon, Betts, Cain + Poe,

Stephen Brockwell facilitates a TREE Seed Workshop on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 from 6:45 to 7:45pm on French Canadian Poetry; Gil McElroy, rob mclennan, Camille Martin and Hailey Higdon (among others) have new work in the first issue of Touch the Donkey; Gregory Betts writes on M. NourbeSe Philip over at Jacket 2, "Not against expression"; Stephen Cain responds as part of the "At the desk" series at Open Book: Ontario, as does rob mclennan; and Deborah Poe and Megan Burns posted a reading of part of their Poetry Month collaboration-in-progress over on SoundCloud.

Cam Gordon reviews Aaron Tucker's Punchlines (2013) in Broken Pencil #63

Cam Gordon reviews Aaron Tucker's Punchlines (2013) in Broken Pencil #63. Thanks, Cam! A relatively positive review, I'm still a bit baffled in how the reviewer, through misunderstanding what is happening (which is completely fine) somehow comes to the conclusion that the poems within therefore are meant to make no sense and have no purpose other than nonsense. Note how the reviewer, mid-review, also starts referring to Tucker as "Taylor" for some reason (I corrected this and a couple of other typos in the original review in square brackets).

This is actually the second review of Adams' book, after Ryan Pratt discussed such over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, a review that puts far more effort into attempting to understand Tucker's work on its own terms.

Poetry in the purest sense, Punchlines collects a dozen or so works by young Aaron Tucker of (somewhere) Ontario and binds them into a tidy, no-frills package. I suppose the central theme i "poetry as the punchline" since each piece is titled with a joke-y moniker. For example, there is "Did you hear about the elephant on the crash diet?," "What did the cowboy say when he found his dog was missing?" and the post-millen[n]ial favourite "What did the Twitter say to the Facebook?" The titles' correlation with the prose is entirely indirect in the obvious sense. Accordingly, the most engaging element of this collection is its attempt to make the connection between title and words. The reader's task is to look for clues to Tucker's M.O. for naming these poems as he did. The challenge is he may have a reason, or he may not. And that's OK, because while a lot of these poems are massively abstract, Taylor [Tucker] harvests his words in an unexplanably easy fashion. Accordingly, the reader is never left with the impression of an artist who is being wilfully obscure in an attempt to be -- well, wilful. Taylor [Tucker] simply is matching up and manoeuvering the language in a good-natured manner, using a play-on-words here and a bit of misplaced punctuation there. The ultimate reward may be the fact that there isn't any sense to be made -- and that's oddly satisfying as Punchlines is clearly making zero effort to be something it's not. Seriously.

National Poetry Month: mclennan, hastain, Pirie, Barwin, Martin + Betts,

In case you missed it, Amanda Earl's National Poetry Month featured a number of new poems by above/ground press authors, including rob mclennan, j/j hastain, Pearl Pirie, Gary Barwin, Camille Martin, Gregory Betts, Karen Massey and Gil McElroy, as well as a number of other incredible works by poets (predominantly working with visuals) from around the world.

new from above/ground press: ARRHYTHMIA, by Janice Tokar

ARRHYTHMIA
Janice Tokar
$4

i.


The forest breathes north
for a thousand miles

a slow, deep exhale
of patient resuscitation

We fill our lungs
saturate each pulse

April 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

“Tonight / we watch a saucy moon / jig in the crater's pool.” Janice Tokar’s spare, pulsing poems beat with the irregular rhythms of life, death, love and loss, searching for balance in a world where everything always seems slower or faster than it feels.
    -- Jason Heroux, 2012 Tree Press Chapbook Contest judge

Janice Tokar’s poetry has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, the Bywords Quarterly Journal, The Peter F. Yacht Club, ottawater and Experiment-O.  An earlier manuscript of Arrhythmia placed second in the 2012 Tree Press Chapbook Contest.  Originally from Manitoba, Janice resides and works in Ottawa.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

derek beaulieu named new Calgary poet laureate!

As announced today, above/ground press author, Calgary poet, editor, teacher and critic derek beaulieu has been named Calgary Poet Laureate for 2014-2016. Congratulations, derek! Very very well deserved. 

Over the years, above/ground press has been fortunate enough to produce eight publications by beaulieu (with his work appearing in a handful of other items), including three above/ground press "poem" broadsides (“IV.08/13/97 (“her fear of the silence after she spoke”),” #70, “portrait 4,” #101 and “wild rose country,” #285), an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS (“calcite gours 1-19,” issue no. 38), the interview chapbook ECONOMIES OF SCALE: rob mclennan interviews derek beaulieu on NO PRESS / derek beaulieu interviews rob mclennan on above/ground press (2012) and single-author chapbooks “A? any questions? (1998), [Dear Fred] (2004) and HOW TO EDIT, Chapter A. (ALBERTA SERIES #8; 2008). As the press release (found online at artrubicon: visual arts magazine) writes:

derek beaulieu Named Calgary Poet Laureate

Local poet will serve as an artistic ambassador for Calgary from 2014-2016

(Calgary AB) – Calgary Arts Development and the Calgary Poet Laureate Selection Committee are pleased to announce the appointment of derek beaulieu as the 2014-16 Calgary Poet Laureate. The position was formally announced in Council Chambers at Calgary City Hall this morning, with outgoing laureate Kris Demeanor speaking about his experience as Poet Laureate. Demeanor also presented his legacy anthology, The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual, to city councillors, and youth poet Emily Xu, who contributed to the volume, performed some of her poetry.

To celebrate beaulieu’s appointment, his concrete poem “Prose of the Trans-Canada” will be projected onto the Calgary Tower during the evenings of April 28 and 29. The 20-metre projection was adapted into an “illuminated light sculpture” by Wordfest in 2011.

A longtime resident of Calgary, beaulieu is the author of eight books of poetry, three volumes of fiction and one volume of literary criticism. For 17 years he has been developing poetic communities; he has mentored and promoted young and established writers as publisher/editor of housepress and No Press, and as a former editor of Calgarian magazines filling Station, dANDelion and Speechless. beaulieu has taught students from grade school to the post-graduate level and has won awards for his current teaching at the Alberta College of Art + Design. In 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press published Please, no more poetry, please: the poetry of derek beaulieu. He has performed and discussed poetry in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, the UK and across North America. beaulieu’s poetry is internationally renowned as challenging, generative and dedicated to conversation.

As Calgary Poet Laureate, beaulieu will serve as an artistic ambassador for the citizens of Calgary from 2014-2016. A $10,000 honorarium is paid per year for the position, funded by six Calgary Poet Laureate Ambassadors (The Calgary Foundation, the Calgary Chamber, First Calgary Financial, FirstEnergy Capital, Transcanada and one anonymous donor).

“Calgary is world-renowned for having a thriving literary community and history. I am proud to be the the 2014-2016 Poet Laureate and to represent our city locally, nationally and internationally,” says derek beaulieu. “Poetry is the active, thoughtful engagement of language to describe and respond to our experience — I look forward to working with Calgary’s literary communities to share that engagement.”

“The enthusiasm we’ve seen for the Calgary Poet Laureate has been astonishing, from the support of Calgary’s private sector to the widespread interest in the capacity for poetry to inspire and build community,“ says Patti Pon, President & CEO of Calgary Arts Development. “On behalf of Calgary Arts Development and the citizens of Calgary, I would like to thank Kris for his service to the city during his time as Calgary Poet Laureate, and welcome derek beaulieu to the role. I look forward to witnessing how derek’s artistry will enrich our civic landscape over the next two years.”

A celebration to welcome the new Poet Laureate called “Parting Words/Starting Words” will be held at 7:00pm on April 29 at TELUS Spark (220 St. George’s Dr. NE). The event will feature presentations from both outgoing Poet Laureate Kris Demeanor as well as **derek beaulieu, as well as other performers that will highlight the diversity within Calgary’s poetic community. Tickets are free and be reserved at YYCPoet.Eventbrite.com.

Photos are available at gallery.calgaryartsdevelopment.com (please note photo credits).

About the Calgary Poet Laureate
On July 26, 2011, City Council approved a motion to establish a Calgary Poet Laureate position, funded by six Calgary Poet Laureate Ambassadors (The Calgary Foundation, the Calgary Chamber, First Calgary Financial, FirstEnergy Capital, Transcanada and one anonymous donor). Calgary Arts Development administers the program in conjunction with a volunteer Selection Committee, which appoints each Calgary Poet Laureate for a two-year term. The Calgary Poet Laureate is intended to be an artistic ambassador for Calgary, presenting at civic events and producing literary work that reflects our city and its citizens.

About Calgary Arts Development
Calgary Arts Development plays a leadership role to promote, foster and direct investments that develop the capacity of Calgary’s arts sector to achieve public and artistic impact. As the city’s designated arts development authority, we are a central hub that learns about, promotes, connects, advocates for, and leads strategic initiatives in the arts to animate Calgary as a vibrant cultural centre. Calgary Arts Development allocates municipal funding for the arts provided by The City of Calgary through granting programs that support operations and innovation for more than 190 arts organizations in Calgary.

Further Information
Cadence Mandybura
Communications Liaison, Calgary Arts Development
Phone: 403.264.5330 ext. 201 (office); 403.585.5390
Email: cadence.mandybura@calgaryartsdevelopment.com

some author activity: Armantrout, Schapira, Smith, Brockwell, Earl, Hancock, mclennan + hastain,

Some early recordings of Rae Armantrout reading are now posted up at PennSound; Newport Life Magazine features a selection of poems for poetry month, including new work by Kate Schapira and Jessica Smith, among others; Stephen Brockwell has a couple of new poems up at Maple Tree Literary Supplement; and Jessica Smith, Amanda Earl, Brecken Hancock, rob mclennan, j/j hastain all have new work up in the ninth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics.