another call and 2 readings
Posted by Daniela Elza on Mar 03 2010 | Comment now »
quarrtsiluni online literary journal has another call for submissions: New Classic. Yes, since it is that time of the year full of spring energy, if you are not wiriting you must be sending stuff out.
Tomorrow I am reading at Twisted Poets Literary Salon from the 4poets book.
I am going to read some of the poems that I have caught myself skipping over. Once I realized that, I started thinking: What is it that makes one read some poems more than others? To eliminate the element of habit, or complacency I will try to balance this out by focusing on a different set this time. (If there are requests however, I will honour those first.) I will be featuring along with Christi Kramer. In the spirit of Pandora’s Collective, she and I have been writing a bit together to prompts, as well as collaborated on a poem. So we will read our new babies, as well. Yes. As fresh and raw as they are.
Time: 7-9pm.
Location: Cambie Bakery and Cafe, 312 Cambie Street (North of Hastings), Vancouver B.C.
In the spirit of Vancouver all poets are welcome. Come and read, there is an open mike section.
Also, March 15th, 2010, I will be reading at a Fundraiser for Pandora’s Collective and The Vancouver Artists Collective.
Click here to see the poster enlarged:
Pandoras_Fundraiser
Time: 6 pm – 12am
Location: The Cottage Bistro
4468 Main Street @ 29th Avenue
Tickets: $20 at the door includes entertainment, a burger with fries and beer. After costs, all proceeds go directly Pandora’s Collective and The Vancouver Artists Collective.
Come and support and have some fun. Here you can see the schedule and the line up.
tchestita Baba Marta
Posted by Daniela Elza on Mar 01 2010 | Comment now »
Last night, with Canada winning gold at the hockey game the city was thrown into a celebration I could hear coming from all directions. People cheering, drumming, cars honking, even just going to the grocery store you are greeted with I love you. The energy is contagious.
Happy March 1st, to all, especially to my family and friends in Bulgaria where they celebrate Baba Marta on the first of March. To my parents, and to my super aunt Maria, who at 85 is filled with such admirable young spirit, travels the world, criss crossing the globe. Baba Marta is a celebration to welcome spring. People exchange all sorts of elaborate weaves and designs made of white and red thread to wish good health and happiness.
Today it is quiet. The cherry blossoms are becoming more and more noticeable as they emerge all over the city from their winter slumber.
Making time to read and write today. And work on submissions. Vallum has The Vallum Award for Poetry contest which has the same deadline as their call for the themed issue: Renegades. The New Quarterly has a call for The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and also The Edna Staebler Personal Essay contest. All good stuff. If you are into such things, have a look. Send something out today. Write something, plant new words. Make an occasion of it.
fi(reworks
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 25 2010 | Comment now »
With the second week of the Olympics coming to a close we have had fireworks every night of the past two weeks. Just across the water here. Pretty much above our heads. At first it was really cool to be sitting or lying in bed and watching them go off sometime between 10:40pm and 11pm. After a few days my daughter stopped watching. My son (who is supposed to be going to bed at 9:30) started looking and acting more and more tired. Usual things got to be more of a chore during the day, until we decided he has to go back to his normal bed time. For a few days we managed it, but tonight he was up and running to my room when he heard them and even I was too tired to send him back to bed. I mean they are loud.
Then again, fireworks are a kind of celebration.Tonight I thought differently about this predicament. How’s this for a positive spin: Every night, for the last two weeks, I have been invited to celebrate. The reminder is hard to ignore. It is loud and persistent. I have to pay attention, one way or the other.
When I thought about it this way, the energy changed. Even when the Olympic show(er) is over, I could perhaps remember to celebrate something at the end of each day, even if it is something very small. Why not? Like today I printed my manuscript for the second time, and it is all ready to go tomorrow, for the second time.
Ok, the fireworks are done, and I can go to sleep. I will try to figure out the positive twist on the loud music some other time.
a new kind of knowing
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 22 2010 | Comment now »
In his article The Future of Poverty Vinay Gupta says:
“The world is too big for us to fit inside of our heads. Too much area, too much landmass, too many people, too many kinds of things, too much detail and complexity in how those things work. There is no possibility of a human overview which is correct, comprehensive, clear and actionable. We just cannot really grasp the world as it is.
To cope in the past we have applied three fundamental approaches beyond ignoring the complexity and size of the planet. The first is division of labor: we divided up reality into subjects and geographies and each tried to master a subset of the whole. A lizards-of-north-eastern-Sumatra expert and a set theorist each catalogue their corner. The second approach is the recorded word: we write down that there are small green lizards with latin scientific name, note their habits and habitats. Within our scientific and technical limitations, this is what we could do, and we did it.
The final approach is the destructive one: we counted things and called it knowledge.
What does 1.8 million species mean? If you try and name as many kinds of birds, plants and animals as you know, perhaps your list would be 200 or 300 items. If you were a specialist, perhaps a few thousands. 1.8 million species is so many it would take thousands of people just to remember all the names. A recitation of the list read aloud would take a year. Six point five billion humans. Just to read their names would take a thousand years.
But still these unimaginable numbers substitute for real knowledge.”
Read the rest of the article here about his vision of how the power of human intelligence, social media, and co-opepration, leveraged by world wide connectivity, can help with solving problems we face. This approach I also find very poetic. The glue is the specific, the detail, the vibrancy and diversity of the world and the human condition. And how that can inspire us to act.
micro cosmos
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 19 2010 | Comment now »
Dorothee Lang, the editor of the BluePrintReview, has another great theme for the upcoming issue Micro Cosmos, the small and the large aspects of life, and the way they connect:
- personal life and the global world
- atoms and evolution
- the butterfly and the tropical storm
- subcultures and society
- and if someone wants to give metafiction a try:
- words / stories and reality
- also: a moment and the future
- etc.
The call for submissions is up. The issue is dedicated to flash fiction: short stories, micro stories, flash stories.
I braved myself and submitted three micro stories. And am happy to say one of them will appear in this issue. So I guess this will be a first. Which makes me remember beginnings. A place where I would like to find myself as often as possible. Nothing like feeling at the beginning of an adventure. I do not include in this any amount of time spent in anticipation. I mean, the first step and on.
Hope you too will consider submitting something. If you have nothing. Go write something in a flash. Like today. I am not joking. You still have time. Submissions are accepted till March 10th, and you can email them, you do not have to leave time for it to get all the way to Germany. The journal also has a blog and contributors notes, books, activities. No page is a dead end. There is always somewhere else to go. I like to think of the BluePrintReview as the journal with many doors.
“the new poetry”
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 13 2010 | 3 Comments »
Read an article on poetry from almost a century ago, titled: Is there a national spirit in “The New Poetry” of America? by Amy Lowell.
You can find it in The CraftsmanVolume xxx,number 4, from July 1916.
It feels spooky and ghostly to be reading about poetry from so long ago in something as fleeting as a monthly publication. I wonder what the circulation of The Craftsman was?
Here are three quotes/thoughts that caught my attention, questions that have been rolling around in the surf of the poetic field, and hopefully each poet contemplates anew, thoughts that want to roll around in my head till they are as smooth as pebbles:
“Until recently the higher forms of art have been compressed in the bonds of theory. This, and that and other, were to be done, and different things were emphatically not to be done; and for the simple reason that our English cousins, expressing themselves, have never done them. That we were no longer like these same cousins in our lives and our thoughts was not taken into consideration. ”
“The New Poetry” is often understood to mean “free verse”… The whole New Movement in poetry is a matter of substance rather than of form. Form is merely an adjunct, but because form is more easily noticed than content, it is principally on the question of form that people have been moved to argue.” (p.342)
“The New Poet sees a world in which he is passionately interested, but in which he is only one of many factors. To portray that world as he sees it is his concern.
… It is a passionate desire for truth, and a dispassionate attitude toward whatever his search for truth may bring him. He records, he does not moralize. He holds no brief for or against, he merely portrays.
…Because the artist speaks no moral, it does not mean that non exists. Lives carry their own moral with them. The world of “The New Poetry” is like the world of reality, the morals are there, but it is for us the readers, to pronounce them.” (p.343)
While you are there you can also read five more poems, namely Broadway’s Canyon by John Gould Fletcher, The Vanishing Red by Robert Frost, The Laughters by Louis Untermeyer, Cool Tombs by Carl Sandberg, Winter’s Turning by Amy Lowell, amongst pieces on the art of garden making, American girl education, new Hopi architecture, an all-cement chicken house. Not a bad deal for only 25 cents an issue, $3 subscription for the year.
If we were to speak of the new poetry today, what will that be? Or if we were to consider these thoughts today, how would we as poets, respond?
from refrain to decline
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 11 2010 | 2 Comments »
Vancouver’s own Poet Laureate, Brad Cran, speaks up as to why he has declined to participate in the Olympic Celebrations. (via Rob Taylor’s blog) This gives me some pride to live in Vancouver at this moment.
Here is a bit of what he says:
While the Cultural Olympiad is surely impressive: of the 193 events listed on the VANOC website only 6 of them are labelled literary events and only two of them actually are literary events that include local writers: The Vancouver International Writers Festival’s Spoken World and Candahar, a recreation of a Belfast pub that will host readings and performances as curated by Michael Turner, and may turn out to be one of the most inspired creations of the Olympiad.
There are Canadian writers involved in a few of the other 193 listed events but when it comes to the celebration stages our writers are not just neglected, they are totally ignored. As Poet Laureate I was offered time on one of the celebration stages where I would be allowed to read poems that corresponded to themes as provided to me by an Olympic bureaucrat. One of the themes was “equality” but since VANOC had blown the chance of making these Olympics the first gender inclusive Olympics in history by including a female ski jumping event I didn’t think they would appreciate a reading of the one Olympic poem I had written on equality: “In Praise of Female Athletes Who Were Told No: For the 14 female ski jumpers petitioning to be included in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.”
In fact a reading of this poem would violate a clause in the contracts that Vancouver artists signed in order to participate in the Cultural Olympiad:
“The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell and/or other sponsors associated with VANOC.”
You can read the whole post here.
Hmm. What if all the negative comments were in the form of refrains? Would that comply with this clause?
I wish all the best to the athletes in the games. Like artists they work hard at their craft. And deserve the best in presenting it.
Perhaps VANOC will do some accounting after the games. Will clue us all in on their game.
And what is Stephen Harper up to? Heard he is in town. Glad to see that the latest book that Yann Martel has sent Harper is a poetry book Eunoia, by Christian Bök. This is book # 74. One can only hope he is busy reading. Martel may be on to something. In The Life of Pi he says:
“The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena, but the small clearing of each heart.”
—Yann Martel (The Life of Pi)
Still, it does require a responsive, participating, engaged, and willing student.
good ideas have lonely childhoods
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 10 2010 | Comment now »
Yes, that is what Hugh MacLeod says in his Ignore Everybody And 39 Other Keys to Creativity book.
Are we not between two forces that pull on us in different directions? Stuck in this tension between doing what is usual, safe, follows in an already trodden path. And doing something different, new, weird, strange, (well, within reason:-)) that as humans we tend to appreciate/value, yet have the hardest time accepting.
What creatures of habit we are. Each day I walk a path to get to where I am going. Even on such a superficial and insignificant level I get frustrated when something happens and I have to alter my path, take a different route. Or if I have to change the way I do a task, due to one (un)reason or another.
What to say of much bigger things like questioning our inherited beliefs, changing the way we live our life, the way we walk on this earth. We have countless examples of war and devastation that have resulted from such challenges be they religious, idealogical, philosophical, scientific etc. Are we more likely to fight or are we more likely to question ourselves? Questioning is a kind of examining, a kind of facing, and contemplating. Now, take that down to the very small scale of a relationship. Or even smaller. Between you and yourself.
So how would you know if something is a good idea at its inception, conception? According to MacLeod you won’t, and you don’t, and neither would anyone else around you. This is the chapter with which his book begins. And here is what he says on page 1.
“You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it is created. neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is for a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is.
There is a reason feelings scare us—becuase what they tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things.”
The gut feeling (I would hope) is not completely disengaged from the mind. Are there degrees of gutsiness? Could we also consider the benefits of being connected that way? A strong gut feeling seems to me to be based on a compilation of a whole lot of information. If you are a writer, it incorporates all you “know” of writerly things, and that would include some of the things you know, you do not know you know. So we cannot ignore this gut feeling, this hunch, since to me it seems like it is a more complex decision making process than just some logical line of thought in the head. Perhaps we can question if such a line of thought exisits?
In fact, I am even willing to question if we ever make decisions strictly with our head. Are we really rational about our decisions? Or are we making decisions based on our gut feeling (which is so fleeting and instantaneous that we cannot catch that is where the decision is made) and then we come up with the likely stories that would justify our decisions as we move it up into our heads? And the story can change.
Think about it. Listen carefully. Where do you make your decisions? Then listen carefully how your mind makes you believe you were rational about them.
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PS Thanks to all who care to comment, on or off the blog.
writing: a way: of being:
Posted by Daniela Elza on Feb 06 2010 | Comment now »
As many of you know I have been hard at work on the recently completed manuscript. Jumped right into writing again for another deadline, and this week when I launched into the collaboration on a paper between poetry and philosophy my mind told me: That’s it. I cannot focus, I cannot switch gears, I cannot, I cannot… I cannot…. That combined with the few rejections that came in close together and I could see glum and gloom on the horizon. But I do not have time for glum and gloom. So I had to come up with a better story. It hit me the other day, I have not given myself a break. I have not followed my own advice. And that is: when empty, fill up. So I gave myself permission to do that. Hope you will too.
I read: Ignore Everybody: and 39 other keys to creativity by Hugh MacLeod. From cover to cover, took about two and a half hours. Reminded myself (again) why I write. That the essence of it is not in getting published, (although that is part of the game we have to play, and a nice side effect). Play being the key word here, but playing your own game first.
Concurrently, I got a link from a friend who pointed to What does it mean to be a writer? a post on Planting words …how does my garden grow blog. Fiona Robyn says: “[Poems] are like glittering sloughed-off skins, they are a result of a particular way of living in the world.”
Yes, writing is its own reward. Writing is the beneficial side effect of being in the world a certain way. I call that the poetic consciousness, but I am sure there are many names we could give it.
And the skin idea is beautiful since we change in this process: shed poems, novels, photographs, painting, dances, songs, etc.
If writing becomes a translation of this way of being, then perhaps we can also look at the act of writing as a way of being.
So what is in it for the reader? What does the reader respond to? The answer to this question could be voluminous (as its latin origin suggests: having many coils). Also vo(luminous as shedding light.
Here is my two cents for now, which came to me while participating in a discussion on Rob Taylor’s blog (by the way this blog is full of passages that whet my appetite to think about the nature of this paradox we call writing/reading). Ironically enough the post is called dissolve the barrier of skin and bone and separateness.
I thought how as a writer I try to translate as adequately and accurately as language (and my abilities with it) afford me, form my/the world into the word. Committing that first act of translation (as Robert Bringhurst might say).
But what do all these words amount to in the reader/listener?
I see the concrete experience of the writer as a beam of light which through the act of writing gets refracted in language. But where to? And into what spectrums? The variables here get too numerous to be able to apply science to them or precision. The reader is not a rigid, flat surface. We respond to the words as we know them, even more importantly, we respond to the humanity behind the words. The surface is fluid. And the surface is always in motion.
And as a writer I continue to benefit from this refraction. ie. exploring the many different angles and beams. I become the surface on which my words start playing. Some of these refractions were not present at the initial writing.
So it is as “precise” as we can get it at the moment of writing, and yet, we ourselves as writers begin to interprete it. In other words we become readers :-) of our own writing.
If this is difficult to see, think of the analogy of where you read someone’s words again over time, and they speak to you differently than they spoke to you a decade ago. What has changed? Not the words, right? You are a different surface, in a different moment in time, reflecting differently.
So the reader does at least half of the work. We need to give a lot of credit to the reader. They are like a translator, courageous enough to launch on their own act of translating. And we know that can be its own piece of art. And as unique. Which is a wink in the direction of the reader who turns critic.