Sunday Poem

GIBBERISH

is a skill I learned at camp. Our neighbours went
to another kind of church, something more effusive.
One summer I went with Scott to his church's
camp. We were told to open our mouths and speak
as the spirit moved so that the devil wouldn't
understand. I made up sounds. garbled with
belief. Decades later I read from the devil
himself: James Joyce's jigsaw of bluddlefilth, Finnegans
Wake, intoned as the spirit moved me through
accents and volumes and felt as if a geyser had opened from
my chest. I got a cheque for my performance.
Confidence powered me through an evening of drinks
with strangers and poets. Sometimes words
mean nothing and everything. Open your mouth and see.

From Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press, 2015) by Kevin Spenst.  

The Reason Artists Jump Out the Window

Kevin Spenst interviews Signal Editions poet Linda Besner on the subject of revision.

The thing about revision for me is that it’s at this stage that you struggle most mightily to make a poem into something it’s not. And then you have to decide what else it is, and whether you can still feel—if not the same way about it, then feel something for it. I just finished Salvatore Scibona’s novel The End, and there’s a line in it I loved: "Disappointment was the result of an idea’s attempt to miscegenate with the visible world." The poem in my mind and the poem on the page are never quite the same poem, and it’s always painful to accept that.

Read the rest here. Linda's debut, The Id Kid, is ready to drop next month.