Pause - Response Tanka by Naomi Beth Wakan and David Bateman

Two very distinct voices, Naomi Beth Wakan and David Bateman have created a beautiful new blog of response tanka. Not only is it finely crafted, it is free.  You can find it here . . . Pause

the honesty, my token

flower – profuse in seeding.

I too aim

for its transparency so that

you can see right through me

                                                          Naomi

seeing in the dark

all the lightness we have shared

ink woman, diva

we unite in othered woods

infirm against firm earth 

                                                         David    

Says David "When I approach haiku, and response tanka, I approach them through a phrase from a Wallace Steven’s poem - “uttered word by word.” These forms graciously offer me the opportunity to deposit my emotions into a very measured, and for me, liberating form. Writing response tanka can be an act of reclamation and self-preservation. The literal translation of kokoro, a healthy heart, contributes literally and figuratively to my personal sense of an idea of order in the midst of a chaotic world."

Naomi asks "What on earth could a rather domesticated, unsophisticated woman living on a small, very rural island have in common with a transvestite, city-smart man twenty-five years younger?  How could they have enough in common to cause them to write back and forth for several months sharing their momentary thoughts in the form of tanka?  Even here the gap between them is large, as he sticks, for the most part, to the 5,7,5,7,7, syllable count of traditional Japanese tanka form, while she adopts the short, long, short, long, long lengths of line that many non-Japanese tanka writers have adopted."

You'll find the answer to Naomi's question if you read some of them.

                                                        

                                                                                                     

Robert Martens' Poltergeist shortlisted for 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award

cover painting: Chiu Ming Chiang

Lipstick Press is proud to congratulate Robert Martens on being shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  

Meet the Presses collective took over the administration of this annual award, originally launched in 1996.  Named for the late poet bpNichol, the prize is awarded to the author of the best poetry chapbook published in the previous year.

The finalists are chosen by contest judges, Bill Kennedy and Maggie Helwig, and the winner will be announced at the Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market, on November 17, 2012, noon to 4:30 p.m., at the Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Street, in Toronto.


The finalists for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award are:
Spencer Gordon, Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast!, Ferno House (Toronto)
Adrienne Gruber, Mimic, Leaf Press (Lantzville, B.C.)
Liz Howard, (skullambient), Ferno House (Toronto)
Robert Martens, Poltergeist, Lipstick Press (Gabriola, B.C.)
Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin, let lie, above/ground press (Ottawa)
Hugh Thomas, Opening the Dictionary, above/ground press (Ottawa)

Review of Disease and Desire in current issue of PRRB

Yes, Kim Clark has been very busy of late, publishing, travelling and reading.  Now a review in The Pacific Rim Review of Books written by Linda Crosfield. And there are still copies available at Lipstick Press.

Kim Clark reads at Renaissance October 14

Reading at Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts - August 19

Kim Clark

author of Disease and Desire 

(published earlier this year) 

will be part of 

the New Voices reading 

at 2:30pm, on Sunday, August 19

along with Robyn Michele Levy

moderated by 

Host of CBC's North By Northwest

Sheryl MacKay. 

Visit the Festival's page for more information. It's a big event.

Happy birthday to Elsie Neufeld

Author of Grief Blading Up (sold out) has agreed to do Seven of the Proust to help us celebrate her birthday.


1.What is your idea of happiness?

Those moments when everything seems lined up, and “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” even when they are not.  This could be a moment or day long feeling, but when it’s there, it’s there! And it’s all there is; and you meld with it, unbidden.  Could be sharing a laugh with a friend; an Oceanside walk; pulling weeds; catching the scent of a Mock Orange shrub; a finch singing outside the window; hearing the scratch-scrabble sound of a squirrel ascending the cedar; a look in the eyes of another; a candle’s flare…. 


2.What is your favourite virtue?

Kindness – hands down!!  It astonishes me when I am the recipient of a stranger’s kindness. For example, in a grocery store recently, my arms were overfilled with items, and a woman came up to me and said, “I think you need a cart.” She pushed hers towards me, and retrieved another for herself. Sometimes kindness is returned immediately, and also surprising!  I was having coffee in a café, when a woman in a wheelchair entered. She was buying her elderly mother a coffee, but how would she convey two cups from the café counter to the seat where her mother sat?  I offered to do so.  When they left, the woman in wheelchair pressed a toonie into my hand and said “to pay for your coffee.”  She insisted.  How will the madness of this world heal if we are not kind to one another – our beloved ones, and the strangers we meet along the way? 


3.What is your biggest weakness?

I have so many!  Sloth; lack of discipline; procrastination; over-thinking.  Writing this, I think they are the flip side of my “strengths”! 


4.Who are your favourite poets?

Too many to list!  Wendell Berry; Jane Kenyon; Mary Oliver; Jane Hirschfield; Denise Levertov; and Mennonite poets Patrick Friesen, Di Brandt, Sarah Klassen; David Waltner-Toews – because they were the first poems I read that were written by “my people.” 


5.Who are your favourite heroes and heroines in history?

From the Bible: The woman at the well, “who was seeking.”  Job: because he knew suffering, and abandonment.  All those who have a mental illness and those who love them as they are. 


6. What do you most dislike?

Self-righteousness.  Arrogance.  Judgement.  One measure for “worth and meaning.” 


7. What is your motto?

Listen with all your senses.  Be open to astonishment; then write about it. 

Al Rempel (The Picket Fence Diaries) has a birthday today

Al has agreed to participate in Seven of the Proust Questionnaire to help us celebrate his birthday.


1.What is your idea of happiness?

To be content with what I have and with where I am; to love and to be loved.


2.What is your favourite virtue?

Loyalty and integrity is number one. The ability to see the good in someone else. Warmth and openness and  a non-judgemental nature. The ability to ignore the question that is posed and to answer the one hiding behind. [Actually Al there are three favourites here but because they are all good virtues they are included]


3.What is your biggest weakness?

I’m an avoider of conflicts – which often backfires.


4.Who are your favourite poets?

I try to read as much poetry as I can – about half an hour a day – both online and in print, and poetry that goes beyond what I ‘get’ or what is similar to mine or what I like. I wouldn’t say I have any favourites though. Eliot, Blake, & Hopkins were early influences. Emily Carr (not the BC painter) and Gillian Jerome both gave me permission – through their work – to try new things with my own writing. I try to learn from everything I read.


5.Who are your favourite heroes and heroines in history?

I’d be happy to do away with this notion when it involves putting people on a pedestal, idolizing them, and ignoring their humanity. There are people who do many good things in this world without notice; there are people who do a great thing when called on, when the ‘time is ripe’. I really can’t distinguish between one and the other.


6. What do you most dislike?

Entropy gets me down. Especially if it involves an expensive broken mechanical part. People with large egos or who are hateful and negative. When a driver won’t signal before turning in front of me.


7. What is your motto?

I often find myself saying to no one in particular: “One thing at a time”. It makes me feel like I have some control of the situation.

Jack Layton: Art and Action

For those who participated on this site's poems for Jack Layton last year, you might be interested in Penn Kemp's upcoming project. Penn is writing a book of anecdotes about Jack Layton and his involvement with arts and culture.

The working title is Jack Layton: Art and Action.

She is looking for stories, from a paragraph to a page or two, on encounters with Jack in the many arts and cultures that intrigued him. Each contributor will receive a copy. She is also seeking pieces on how Jack has continued to influence our lives and our activism; how his spirit has stayed with people since his death last August. Jack inspired her personally to move from performance poet to poet activist. Like throughout his long municipal and federal political life, Jack welcomed and encouraged everyone to become an activist to effect change. Now the time has certainly come!
 Email Penn Kemp for more information: penn@pennkemp.ca.

Please visit Quattro Books website for more information.

The Poet's Quest for God

Call for Submissions
The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Spirituality
Edited by Dr. Oliver V. Brennan and Dr. Todd Swift
For Publication by Eyewear Publishing 2013-14
Deadline for submission: August 1, 2012

Eyewear Publishing is planning to publish an anthology of new, mostly previously-unpublished poems, written in English, concerned with spiritual issues in this secular age, by persons of any faith, or none. Submissions will be welcomed via email as word documents, containing no more than three poems, and including contact details and a brief 100 word biographical note about the author.

One of the characteristics of our contemporary culture which is generally described as post-modern is the human search for the spiritual. The advent of post-modernity has been accompanied by the dawn of a new spiritual awakening. Many spiritual writers say that desire is our fundamental dis-ease and is always stronger than satisfaction. This desire lies at the centre of our lives, in the deep recesses of the soul. This unquenchable fire residing in all of us manifests itself at key points in the human life cycle. Spirituality is ultimately what we do about that desire. When Plato said that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond and that beyond is trying to draw it back to itself, he is laying out the broad outlines for a spirituality. Augustine made this explicitly Christian in his universally known phrase: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You’.

This new emphasis on and openness to the spiritual dimension of human existence which is characteristic of contemporary lived culture is accompanied by a new emergence of atheism - ‘The Rage against God’ – as well as a sometimes-aggressive secularism. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are the two best-known exemplars of this in Western Europe. Perhaps the best response to this rage against belief in a Divine Power at work in the universe is a poetic one. In reply to people such as his brother Christopher and Dawkins, Peter Hitchens believes that passions as strong as theirs are more likely to be countered by ‘the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time’.

Hence we invite poets from around the world who can empathise with the new search for the spiritual to write about their belief, search or struggle with their quest for God (or a God), whether their image of God is what one young person described as ‘a creative energy that exists all around us, a life force’, the female image of God of the Old Testament, or the Abba (Father) image which lay at the core of the spirituality of Jesus of Nazareth, or indeed, some heretofore unimagined apprehension of the divine. The purpose of this collection is to awaken debate, create an imaginative discourse and generally open a space for religious poetic practices in the contemporary world, while at the same time refusing to delimit the horizon of the possible.

As poetry, and poets, have a long, rich, and no doubt complicated tradition of writing to, and about God (one needs only to think of Dante, Milton, Donne and Dickinson) and other issues surrounding faith, belief, and transcendence, the editors believe there should be no shortage of inspiring, inquiring, intriguing and imaginative poems available for readers at this challenging time in human history.

For more information, or to submit, contact Dr Swift at T.Swift@kingston.ac.uk or at Facebook.

Happy Birthday Kim Clark

Kim says "I'll be on CHLY radio [today] Tuesday, 2-4 with Pam Edgar. It's MS Awareness month so we'll be talking about MS in life, in fiction, and in poetry. Should be fun. :-) "

To help us celebrate her birthday Kim has answered Seven of the Proust Questionnaire.

1.What is your idea of happiness?

So many small things! A pretty little day with good company (like my kids ♥♥♥♥). Laughter. A flicker in the grass. A heron flying over. Being eye-to-eye with a hummingbird. Red wine. Laughter. Fall leaves. First blossoms. Good sex. Laughter. Blueberries. Making someone smile. Smoky cheese. Hickory sticks. Did I mention laughter?

2.What is your favourite virtue?

An open mind.


3.What is your biggest weakness?

Procrastination and cheese. One usually leads to the other.


4.Who are your favourite poets?

I don’t like to pick favourites but I will say George Bowering taught me the most about rhythm and rhyme and imagining the audience naked. At the moment I’m reading crawlspace by John Pass. Excellent!

5.Who are your favourite heroes and heroines in history?

Nobody historically famous. My mum. I wonder often what she’d think of my writing.

6. What do you most dislike?

Static plastic toilet seats and arrogance.

7. What is your motto?

Honestly? Buck up or fuck up.

Kim's latest collection of poetry, Disease and Desire, is now available for purchase via lipstickpress@shaw.ca, or by attending the launch, May 26th from 4pm to 6pm at The Roxy.

 

Launch - Disease and Desire by Kim Clark

May 26th, 4pm - 6pm at The Roxy (560 North Road, Gabriola). 

Kim Clark will be reading from and signing her new chapbook "Disease and Desire". Refreshments will be served and books available at $10 each.

About the book:

Disease and Desire is a manuscript of the body's domain and the spirit's will to fight the disease's abduction of the body, revealed through the first poem:

The Abduction
My body held poetry for ransom,
sinistral threat—
first with a little finger
[accidental pizzicato], next
my left foot.
The price was high, mind had to pay up
to make room for the lyric line.
The bootie crossed the blood-brain barrier,
[nothing to do with fair trade]
—poetic packets of plasma data
on the back of stealthy protein
hugged the perimeter,
stole through the interior
over the border—
words worth their weight
in myelin.

About Kim Clark

Disease and desire, mothering and the mundane propel Kim's ongoing journey between poetry and prose. Her debut fiction collection, Attemptations (Caitlin Press), was launched in 2011 and one of its novellas has been optioned for a 90 minute feature film. Kim’s work can be found in Body Breakdowns (Anvil Press), the Malahat Review, and e-zines and other publications in Canada and the U.S.. She lives in Cedar on Vancouver Island.