I'm not sure how to cover all threads related to poetry that are going through my mind. I guess I'll go backwards from the most recent events and at some point I'll have to break this off into a new post.
Personally, the biggest news was that I pulled together a manuscript and sent it in to Brick Books for consideration. While I think the odds of them accepting it are extremely low, they might at least like parts of it enough that they encourage me to keep working on them. I found that I was simply not going to have enough "Broken Sestinas" ready in time, as there was a hard deadline of May 31. So I went back to a chapbook I pulled together probably about 20 years ago (not that I ever did anything with this!), which itself was mostly based on a chapbook that I actually did self-publish right after university(!) though it had two new sequences: one called The Palace at 4 A.M. and then there were a bunch of poems about angels, which I called A Rage of Angels. I still liked most of the Palace poems and picked the best 5 to kick off this new manuscript. Most I left more or less as is, but I did touch up The View from the Palace. I was initially only going to include Deliverance from A Rage of Angels, but at some point I realized I was going to struggle to get to 50 pages, even after typing up all the sestinas I had written this year at The Rex. I didn't want to have a third sequence lurking about in the manuscript, so I thought I would only include one or two more angel poems and scatter them a bit. While years ago I would have definitely included The Angel of the City, it doesn't hold up as well for me now, so I dropped it. A few of the angel poems made a bit more sense in a broader collection where there is a cumulative impact. In the end, I just dusted off The Angel of Porcelain and made a few changes. I thought I was still a few pages short, so I grabbed three more old poems and spruced them up. I like The Whale better now. I'll go ahead and post it soon. I also took a few lines from an incomplete poem and built a new sestina off of them.
I think in the end I wrote 10 new sestinas, almost all while at The Rex. (Perhaps ironically, I would have gotten to 12, but on one aborted visit, I learned that there was going to be a jazz vocalist, and I just didn't think I could write with a vocalist as background music. Too bad.) I then had to type up all these sestinas (and read my close to undecipherable cursive!). In most cases, I made light edits, but this is still pretty close to once and done. Not quite automatic writing, but definitely trying not to get too hung up on perfectionism, which has been a stumbling block for me before. Perhaps in six months, I'll reread the sestinas and only like a small number of them. I guess we'll see. I suspect I'll write a few more just to keep in practice. I actually just read another poet who was trying to rescue the sestina. Of course, I didn't take proper notes, so I'll have to scan a lot of recent collections to find who it was.* Anyway, I was furiously typing during lunch and work breaks on Wed. and managed to get it turned in at 5:30. (I probably had until midnight to give it one more thorough edit, but no point in tempting fate and missing the deadline!) As I said, perhaps this sustained creative push will convince me to send poems out to literary journals (the few that are left), though I think the next big push will be to revise my transportation anthology and get that ready to submit to publishers by the fall. I'm sure I'll blog about this later.
Anyway, I stopped by at Word on the Street last Sunday. I ran into Porcupine's Quill right away and turned over the unsigned P.K. Page books. Then I found Wolsak and Wynn. I asked them if Catherine Graham was going to be reading at the Trillium Awards stage, but she had been reading there last year. In the end I picked up her new collection, Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We're Dead, as well as Chris Pannell's Adventurize Your Summer! It was extremely unfortunate they didn't bring any of Pannell's back catalog (as none of his books are in the library, but it looks like a friend who lives in Hamilton may be able to borrow them from their library). Graham and Pannell should both be reading at the Tranzac Club on June 13. I suspect they'll have books for signing and maybe some older books, but I also didn't know if there would be a discount at that event, so I didn't risk it and just got the books right away. (I'm just wondering if I should have gotten a receipt for the books after all...)
It turned out that Laurie D. Graham was reading at the Trillium Awards stage from her new collection Fast Commute. It turns out that this is almost entirely about travel across the GTA. I bought her book and had her sign it after the reading. We chatted just a bit, including about my anthology project. So this was sort of a happy accident meeting her rather than Catherine Graham.
I was running a bit short of time and money but I did finally find the Brick Books booth. I spent some time looking over the 3 for $10 bundles, finally picking one with a book by Julie Bruck. (Of course it turned out that I already had two of the books in the bundle. Oh well. I probably can sell them to Circus Books.) I spent some time debating whether to get Sue Sinclair's Heaven's Thieves (I vaguely remember wanting to get that at the last Word on the Street) and Moldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick (I simply couldn't remember if I had gotten this in a previous subscription). As it turned out, I didn't have either of them. By this time, I didn't have much spare cash, so I passed on picking up John Steffler's The Grey Islands for $10, though I later arranged for it to be included when they mail out the 2nd half of the 2023 subscription package.
I was just about done but then happened across George Elliott Clarke wrapping up a reading. I bought a book (Extra Illicit Sonnets) with my last $10 and got him to sign it. So a pretty good haul overall.
I've decided I really needed to reorganize these books, so have a new poetry shelf just focusing on recent volumes from Brick Books and other recent enthusiasms, like Ralph Gustafson and P.K. Page and Don McKay. Most but not all of the signed poetry collections are on this shelf. I'd probably need another shelf like this or even two if I was to pull all my poetry into a single place, but it's a good starting point, esp. as I try to organize my thoughts around working on this anthology of transportation poetry.
And now it's time to run. More some other time when I have more time...
* I don't think it was Don McKay. It was more likely Richard Sanger or Edward Carson. Hopefully, I can track this down soon, as it's just going to bug me. I find P.K. Page's glosas in Hologram and Coal and Roses to be quite interesting, and even a bit more impressive than a well-constructed sestina, though I do find some times her rhyming words are more like near-rhymes and once in a while they just don't seem to work at all, though that is quite rare.
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