micro.blog
I have a micro.blog account that I use for short notes on every day thoughts and occurrences. You can find it here: carleton.micro.blog.
If you are interested in signing up for a micro.blog account, you can get one here.
I have a micro.blog account that I use for short notes on every day thoughts and occurrences. You can find it here: carleton.micro.blog.
If you are interested in signing up for a micro.blog account, you can get one here.
The Toronto Public Library and the poet laureate of Toronto, George Elliott Clarke, have created the Toronto Poetry Map. It’s a fun and interesting way to explore Toronto through poetry. I have a few poems listed in the areas of the Junction and High Park, and one even in the Annex. This is just the beginning of the project, which was launched in celebration of National Poetry Month. If you look through the map and discover your favourite Toronto poem is missing, you are encouraged to send in a suggestion.
There is an article (PDF) on my creative endeavours in this month’s issue of The Westside’s Story, a monthly online newsletter serving West Toronto neighbourhoods. I was interviewed by Jodi Crawford, the publisher and editor of the newsletter, at Pascal’s café last month, and Jessica Kosmack dropped by my place to take a photograph. It turned out to be a really nice experience for me, and I hope you will check out the article and subscribe to The Westside’s Story.
I posted three new book cover designs onto my Cargo portfolio site, booktypography.ca. The Things I Heard About You, For Your Safety Please Hold On, and Cycling with the Dragon are the titles of the new poetry books that will be published by Nightwood Editions in the Fall of 2014.
I have an unexpected reading to give in Niagara Falls with poet Niki Koulouris, whose first book, The sea with no one in it, was published last fall by Porcupine’s Quill. If you are in the area, please join Niki and me for an evening of savoury and sweet poetry.
The Poetry Jam
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
8:00 p.m.
(with Niki Koulouris)
Savoury and Sweet Restaurant
3770 Bridgewater Street
Niagara Falls, Ontario L2G 6H3
“One has a right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.”
Well, 2012 was a good year despite the fact that I did not complete writing any poems. I spent most of the year reading books and doing research for writing projects that I will shortly begin to work on. I have several smaller poetry sequences I want to tackle, as well as the next full-length book of poetry, which I have been planning in my mind for several years, but could not work on until I finished writing my first book. So, I am excited to begin work on this new book, as well as the smaller sequences, but still have some further research to do before I can truly start writing. The next full collection will be a book of sonnets and I hope to begin working on poems for it in late spring or summer.
This fall though I started working on a few new poems that are not related to any specific project. It is always a good feeling to be writing poetry, especially after such a long break. I suspect I will be working on singular poems, such as these, while also working on the poetry sequences that I previously mentioned. I find it helpful to be able to jump back and forth from a sequence of poems to a singular poem in order to keep up the energy in each piece of writing. I find the same thing is necessary when working in poetic forms. If I am exclusively working in stricter forms, as I will be with the book of sonnets, I find it necessary to write alternately in less strict forms, such as free verse, so that the lines in the stricter forms do not become stilted. This also helps to tighten the technique of the free verse poems that one is working on. It is mutually beneficial to both forms of poetry.
I had a great time reading at the St. Thomas Poetry Series in November, and enjoyed sharing the stage with John Reibetanz and Don Martin. As always, David Kent was a wonderful host, and Richard Greene gave me a very kind introduction. This reading was one of the highlights of the year for me and my sincere hope is to read at the series again once my next book is published.
On a personal note, my health has improved in 2012, after a very difficult 2010 and 2011. I was able to begin practicing T’ai Chi again in the spring and that has helped me immensely. I hope my health will continue to improve throughout 2013 as I have several exciting projects and plans that I want to be able to pursue, including restarting Junction Books, my independent chapbook press. And speaking of exciting projects, I almost forgot to mention that my poem sequence, “Junction Elegies,” which is the final section of my book, will be used for the libretto of an intermedia chamber opera by contemporary composer Emilie Cecilia Lebel. I am very honoured that Emilie wanted to use my poems in her work, and I am very excited to hear the opera once she has completed it.
Well, I guess that is all I have to say for the moment. I hope to write a little more frequently in this blog, but as I have stated before, my ambivalence toward it is an obstacle. But I will try. I wish you all the best for the coming year. Cheers!
This past Friday, Raymond Souster passed away. I became friends with Ray over the last dozen years of his life. I used to visit him at his home in Baby Point and we would discuss poetry or jazz or baseball, the things he loved. We’d also discuss the West Toronto neighbourhoods we called home. He appreciated that I wrote about the Junction in my poems, just as he wrote about Toronto in his many books. By the time I got to know Ray, his eye-sight was going, but that didn’t stop him from writing. He wrote every day in workbooks and for a while I would type up his manuscripts in my computer so he had a good copy to send to his publishers. He also encouraged me to keep working on my own poetry, and was always very supportive of me as a poet. I was very pleased that Ray was able to see my first book published. When I visited him on his birthday this past January, he bought several copies of my book to give out to his friends. I will always remember Raymond Souster as a kind and benevolent person, a true gentleman. Rest in peace, Ray, and thanks for the long chats and the cups of tea and coffee at your kitchen table.
Unlimited Variations on the Avro Lancaster
for Raymond Souster
That evening in your kitchen you talked of the Hogtown
jazz joints you’d once frequented. The portable radio
propped in the counter’s corner sputtered out all the old
war standards, and now and then you’d pipe up about
this certain piece being performed, the instrument
featured and the player for whom you held such
admiration. For my part, I couldn’t add much, just
ask questions and note down the names of musicians
I should listen to, their Vanguard Records I might
find now on CD. This is how I recall that spring night,
with Duke Ellington crowding the elbow room of your
kitchen table all the way back from the 1960s
stage at Massey Hall, and Bobby Hackett hunched over
in the doorway blowing his horn – a song you’d requested
he play once long ago in the Town Tavern at Queen
and Yonge. Earlier, as I read through your Selected Poems,
I’d glimpsed that past world, caught hold of
Old Toronto between the lines, as it had been
back when streetcars seemed red rockets hurtling across
a gridded universe. And there in the radio’s tinny wake,
the electric kettle counterpoint, a low timpani murmur
in the background, I watched as you picked up a postcard
of a Lancaster bomber from amongst your papers,
a picture that reminded you of an American poet,
a bombardier during the war, who’d returned to the village
in Italy where he’d flown, wept on a stranger’s steps
with his wife, as you did then while telling his account.
The water’s boil soon added its breathy, high-pitched
whistle to the evening’s arrangements and you went
to tend to the tea, while I was left steeped in thoughts
of my best friend’s grandfather who flew in the war –
a tail-gunner in a Lanc who’d kicked out the scratched
Perspex panels of his turret just to see the Messerschmitts
better; and my own grandfather who’d commanded a tank
from Normandy to Apeldoorn, and survived the ordeal,
though he left his final battle wounded, a time bomb inside
him that went off seventeen years later. These things seeped
into the mind as you placed teapot and cups on the table,
sat again with me in the kitchen’s warmth, your bungalow
grown quiet, the radio off and the earth waking up around us.
I will be reading at the St. Thomas Poetry Series next month, organized by David Kent, and I am very excited about the opportunity to do so. I first happened across the St. Thomas Poetry Series in 1996, when my English professor at the University of Toronto, John Reibetanz, launched a book in the series. That publication, Near Finisterre, is still one of my favourite books, for both the poetry and the wonderfully designed and printed book itself, and I am very pleased that John will also be reading at the event next month. I have attended book launches and readings at St. Thomas’s Church whenever possible over the years, and have enjoyed reading all of the publications that I have collected from the poetry series, especially Richard Greene’s Crossing the Straights and Leif Vaage’s Schooled in Salt. Please join me on November 14th at this wonderful poetry series. Cheers.
* * * *
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012
8:00 p.m.
The St. Thomas Poetry Series
St. Thomas’s Church
The Parish Hall
383 Huron Street, Toronto, ON
Please join us for poetry readings by
Carleton Wilson, author of The Material Sublime,
D.S. Martin, author of Poiema,
and John Reibetanz, reading from Common Prayer,
a pamphlet by Jeremy Clarke.
Reception to follow. This is a free event.
This event is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts
and the League of Canadian Poets.
The Material Sublime was reviewed by Abby Paige in Arc Poetry Magazine.
This is the first review I have read of the book (I think there is another one out there, but I haven’t read it). If my work does get reviewed, and it is available online, I will post to it without comment on the particulars of the review itself. And I will post a review whether it is positive, negative, or indifferent. There will obviously be different opinions on any writer’s work, and a negative review, though not especially pleasant, is only one person’s response to your book. The exact same can be said for positive reviews also. As a writer, my goal with respect to reviews, or any critical work on my writing, is to take the middle path, and not put too much weight on either the positive or the negative. I know the weaknesses in my book more intimately than any reviewer ever could. And I probably understand the strengths better too. So the middle path seems most profitable in dealing with this aspect of publishing a book that I am not altogether comfortable with.