Humiliation

Linda Leith sums up the recent fracas over late Quebec novelist Nelly Arcan's "humiliating" TV interview in 2007.

Gift Horse

It took seven years, a bit of arm-twisting and a near-death experience for Mark Callanan to finish his second book of poems, but I'm happy to announce the wait is finally over. Gift Horse is being launched at The Ship Pub (265 Duckworth Street) in St. John's, NL on October 11 at 8.00 pm. Joining him is Amanda Jernigan, who will be reading from her (also long-anticipated) debut Groundworks with George Murray hosting the event. Sounds like an amazing evening. Breaks my heart that I have to miss it. Mark's new poems are such grim, sharp-cut little things. It's certainly one of the strongest collections I've published in my time at Signal.

Sunday Poem

MOVING IN

The first time in, we passed right through
to end up on the outside of the other side
of town. "The fog's so thick, it's like pea soup,"
was said. All I saw beyond the taillights
of the car before us were the tollgates
then the girders and the bridge that hung
like an island where the horizon belonged,
but now was all washed up and out and away.

For two whole days Saint John did not exist,
and each time in or out of town we missed
an exit: nothing in that place
was seen until you saw it face to face.

But then, a home's not real unless it's half
imagined. We make each move not knowing if
what's coming through the fog is threat or gift.

From Postscript (2004) by Geoffrey Cook.

Copyfight

David Orr raises the alarm about copyright laws threatening American poetry criticism.

"The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?"

(And when you're done reading this, be sure to check out Orr's Paris Review blog, Lost in the Archives, as well his excellent book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.)

Sunday Poem

ADHAM OVERHAULS AN OLD CAPRICE

Bald Adham used a threaded damper puller
To coax the hub from the end of the crankshaft.
He took out the pulley retaining bolts
And then withdrew the breather pipes from the rocker covers.
He pondered the hairpin clip
At the bell crank, then carefully
Removed that too. He swabbed the mating
Surfaces of the cylinder head and rubbed them clean
With loving swipes of rag and growled-out prayer.

“My little hubayrati, my sweet sand grouse,”
He crooned, “You’ve grown old like me.”
He diagnosed his body as he diagnosed
The engine of an old Caprice. He knew
His timing chains were clanking on overtime,
His dowel-pin-chamfer was a catastrophe,
And even his camshaft sprocket, once his pride,
Wobbled when he floored the pedal now.
He remembered with a blush beneath his grease
The days when his steering knackle and his
Stabilizer bar required
No pry tool for their maintenance.
Now, left to overhaul this elderly V-8,
He plunged his surgical fingers, gloved in sludge,
Into the torque-stunned heart of the engine block.
“My dove,” he crooned,” “My antelope” as he
Dotingly installed
New valve-cover grommets that the Infidel
Had docked at Jeddah just two weeks before
“Beloved,” he hummed, “when your lugnuts gleam again
We’ll tame the turnpikes and outrun our rust...”

The engine shivered. Adham felt
The whomping heart fire beneath his fingertips.
He sensed how purringly his own
Combustion chamber filled again
With the gleam of fuel.
Bald Adham kissed his grease gun and oil filter wrench
And he praised the lord who pricks the dead to life.

From Araby (2000) by Eric Ormsby.

Mary Harman Interview

Marius Kociejowski talks shop with Montreal painter Mary Harman:

In order to start something new, I mustn’t have anything else on the go. I have to have a couple of weeks of clear space … no doctor’s appointments, no guests coming … absolutely no commitments. Usually I will load up the paints, a couple of canvases, and go out to the cabin. I can’t have anyone around at all. I don’t want anyone looking at that canvas especially in the first few days. I have freedom to do anything I want to do, no matter how stupid it is. If someone says “That’s interesting” that kills it or anyone seeing it is a killer. It has to be absolutely between me and me, absolute space.

More here.

Quarc Issue

I picked up my issue of Quarc today (basically because Katia Grubisic told me to). Not sure I can do a better job than Melissa over at The Literary Type in describing the unique features of this science-themed Arc/TNQ double header ("the most epic issue in the history of literary magazines.") So I'll leave you to read her post to get the skinny. I'd simply like to point out a couple of goodies available on the website: an interview between Matthew Tierney and Perimeter Institute physicist Lee Smolin, as well as wicked videos of fidgety microbes taken by "amateur microscopist" Bruce Taylor (who has a superb poem in the issue). Be sure to visit Bruce's YouTube channel for more. I've posted one of my favourites. They're worth a view for the charming soundtrack alone.