abby paige.writer.actor

Buying a 3-month membership to Ancestry.com might be the closest I’ve ever come to going on a bender. There is something about genealogy that I find positively addictive. Each ancestral coupling leads backwards to another and another, like cells dividing. Recovering the path between us and our ancestors is like reading a mystery novel, and a real page-turner at that. Who did what to whom? When? And what’s going to happen next?

Gail Scott’s last novel, The Obituary, isn’t really about genealogy, but it enacts a similar search. Genealogy is, after all, the creation of a narrative, and for Scott, all narratives are lyrical, fragmentary, corrupted, and incomplete. My complete review is on Rover now.

After immigrating from Vermont to Quebec, I undertook the project (one that I now realize will be life-long) of reading Quebec and Montreal writers in an effort to pierce the border between US and Canadian lit, and become more locally literate.

D.G. Jones is among those writers who have given me a sense of place and purpose as I’ve begun to write in a new country. He is one of many Quebec writers who have sought (in his words) “a more intimate commerce” between Canada’s two official languages and has refused “to accept the terms of the confrontation” between them. His collected poems, The Stream Exposed with All Its Stones, is out now, and my review is up on Rover today.

Wired Magazine recently published a cover story called The Web Is Dead. The premise is that, over the past few years, we’ve begun to favor “semiclosed platforms” over the “wide-open Web,” that virtual space we were all going to democratize through the magic of HTML. The internet still seems like such a new technology, it’s sort of strange to wax nostalgic about its good old days, but lately I have been contemplating the creative possibilities we cut ourselves off from as we adopt more apps and platforms “that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

An interesting counterpoint to the Wired article is the new on-line poetry journal, Spiral Orb. Now in its second issue, the project seems like an optimistic throw-back to the early days of hypertext. In lieu of a table of contents, each issue opens with a poem made up of “composted” lines from the poems included in that issue, from which the reader can navigate to the contributors’ poems. Those are, in turn, linked to one another. It reminds me of what we thought the Web would be: a creative, chaotic space where new voices emerge and startling connections are made between disparate ideas. Maybe the Web is still alive and kicking?

Can you find the poem of mine included in their current issue?

Like the rest of us, words have baggage. Through eons of usage, they take on new meanings and often bring only a shade of their origins into modern parlance. If you’ve never given etymology (the origins of words) much thought, Howard Richler’s “Strange Bedfellows: The Secret Lives of Words” may give you an interesting sense of the strange evolutions that have led to the language we use every day. I review the book today on Rover‘s website.

Since the internet encourages scanning over true reading, it is more true than ever that we often take words for granted. This is a difficult environment in which to be a writer, but it is also, in a sense, a call to arms. I admire any poet who struggles to rock the reader out of a complacent relationship with words. I don’t always enjoy the work that results, but perhaps enjoyment isn’t the primary aim of such a poem.

In her clever collection, (made), poet Cara Benson writes in defense of the weary word. She plays with how poems look, how narrative is built, and how words sound, putting the reader on alert and demanding closer reading. The results are mixed, but perhaps that could be a hallmark of innovation? Check out my review on Rover for further musings.

I like to think that I invented a poetic form that I call The Diatribe, a poem, usually free verse (who has time for meter when they’re really pissed off?), that rants self-righteously and directly against one or more objects of scorn. Once in a while, though, I run across a poem that proves that others have already stumbled onto this form themselves: Amy Gerstler’s “Fuck You Poem #45″ is a fun example that comes to mind.

While such poems are cathartic to write, they are difficult to control, as anger most always is, and to be good, they require an unusual lack of vanity on the part of the writer. That’s why I was so impressed with Sharon McCartney’s rage-fueled collection, “For and Against.” Read my full review on Rover. And let me know if you can think of other diatribe poems.

Poetry anthologies can be tough reading. They sometimes seem motivated by an indulgent, overly simple impulse, as though someone read a really great poem about, say, gardening, and instead of thinking, I wish I could read a whole book of really great poems, thought, I wish I could read a whole book of poems about gardens.

Magic can happen in an anthology, though. Of course it helps when the editors choose exceptionally strong work. And when the work is well-chosen, and perhaps the theme isn’t too didactic, the poems can begin to speak to each other in a mysterious way, setting each other off and influencing the reader to baffling effect. I found this to be the case with “Penned,” an anthology of poems about the zoo that was published recently by Signal Editions here in Montreal. To read more, check out my review on Rover.

On Monday, May 17, carte blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, will launch its eleventh issue. I’m honoured to contribute a poem to the issue and to read at the party celebrating its official launch!

carte blanche issue 11 readings and more
May 17, 7:00pm
Kaza Maza
4629 du Parc, Montreal

The evening will feature live music by Sigh Twombly; an interview with William Weintraub; fiction from Mark Paterson and Sarah Gilbert; poetry from Leslie Pasquin and me, and lots more! And if you’re not in Montreal, you can just check out Issue 11 when it goes on-line that same day.

All poetry is at some level about what words keep us from saying. It tries to leap the chasm between the world that is and the world that is effable. But what if the spaces between words and utterances are also speaking? In her new collection, R’s Boat, Lisa Robertson spreads her lines across the page, giving the work less coherence, but more breadth. The whiteness of her pages seems to suggest that silence has expressive potential. My review of R’s Boat is included on The Rover this week.

I always get excited when Montreal’s Erín Moure releases a new collection of poems, but it’s an excitement very different from what I feel about other poets’ work. Most of us probably look forward to a new book by a favourite writer like a visit from a friend who lives far away. We anticipate long evenings on the couch together, sharing wild stories about the time that has intervened since our last visit, strengthening our bond. Moure isn’t so cozy. You can’t be sure what you’re going to get. It’s exciting when she releases a new book because the experience of reading it is impossible to anticipate.

Happily, her latest collection, “O Resplandor,” is like a reunion with a mysterious, intriguing, beloved but strange friend who you haven’t even met yet. I offer my review on Rover.