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Michael Cobb and Sarah Liss Discuss Anne Carson

This Wednesday, Type Books on Queen West in Toronto (AKA the last of the book stores you used to want to wander into), will host a discussion on Anne Carson and her unsurprisingly difficult to crack new book, Red Doc>. I'm still in the process of attempting to crack it, so all I can really say for now is that Geryon is back tending his herd near the ancient Greek highway overpasses, and that Carson has informed us that "Much is misnomer in our/present way of grasping the/world." Whatever present means there will I'm sure be among the many mysteries probed Wednesday, so check it out if you're not one of those Carson haters.

Kyle Buckley moderates the discussion between Michael Cobb and Sarah Liss. More info here.

"Neil Young Nation" Author to be Interviewed Saturday

Note: This is an expert from Shaun A. Hogan's suggested readings to attend in march. More to follow, but wanted to get this one out ahead. 

For all the music heads:

Kevin Chong

Saturday, March 9^th, 2013

Academy of the Impossible, 231 Wallace St.

1:30pm

The author of “Neil Young Nation”, (Greystone Books) novelist Kevin Chong will be interviewed by Sagan Yee and Rob Saffrey at Academy of the Impossible.  Making sense of Young’s strangest utterances, contrarianism, biographical roadtripping, and why Neil Young is still cooler than you or me.

All the Readings are on Tuesday

Spring is full of the end of winter, and readings and launches. At some point around these parts, it starts to feel like a festival, with so many things happening simultaneously. Seems we'll be getting a preview on that next Tuesday, March 12th. You will have choices to make.

Emerging Writers will present Andrew Battershill, Mat Laport, Sofia Mostaghimi, Jess Taylor and Michelle Winters.

Mansfield Press  will launch new books by George Bowering, Peter Norman, David W. McFadden and Priscila Uppal.

Meanwhile, Pivot will be hosting a special bonus reading featuring the Irish poets Rita Ann Higgins and Matthew Sweeney, with Damian Rogers and Paul Vermeersch.

What to do?

On the Genesis of “Poem, Phone, Farm”

by Daniel Scott Tysdal

Below is a behind-the-scenes peak at “Poem, Phone, Farm,” part II of which will be released in Issue 20 of The Puritan.  

"I woke early on Saturday, August 18^th, and began by posting a picture of a box of rusted bolts on Facebook and soliciting descriptions."

“Poem, Phone, Farm” is part of a larger poetry project, 24 Hours of Everything, which came about for two reasons.

First, I had been disappointed with how little writing I was getting done during the school year, so I decided to devise a plan that would encourage me to dedicate more time to poetry throughout the term.

Second, I read a story about some poor (probably unpaid) marketing intern whose job it was to manage a corporation’s vacuous Twitter account between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., and this got me thinking about the idea of twenty-four hour access and availability, which, when I was a kid, was a novelty (i.e., shopping on Sunday!?!), but is now the status quo. I was keen to explore the technologies and venues that enable, embody, and encourage this particular illusion of the “infinite” (infinite production, consumption, communication, etc.), particularly in terms of the strain these technologies and venues put on the finite body (both individual and communal).

Hence: 24 Hours of Everything.

The project is simple: every couple of months, I visit a relevant site (physical (ex. Nuite Blanche) or virtual (ex. the deep web)) for twenty-four hours and compose a poem, series of poems, or long poem. The restraints, to put it another way, are threefold, placed on time (twenty-four hours), space (a relevant site), and body (my ability to compose as I tire).

“Poem, Phone, Farm” marked my first stab at the project. I had initially planned to begin the piece the morning of Thursday the 16^th, but I went to bed with no idea what to write and I woke up the same way. The night of the 16^th, I was reading Paul Muldoon’s lecture on W. B. Yeats in The End of the Poem, when I was struck by two passages.

Some Great Idea: The Torontonian’s Panacea?

Edward Keenan’s Book Launch at Lee’s Palace

By Shaun A. Hogan

From The Grid

If you sauntered by Lee’s Palace around 8:30pm Thursday night, you would have happened upon a line, ten people strong, and wondered: Which band am I missing?  And you would have been surprised to learn that, in fact, you were not missing any band.  You were missing Edward Keenan’s book launch.  The Grid’s lead columnist and senior editor is known for his weekly column on city politics, which many consider a calm eye in the maelstrom of rhetoric and feverish politicking that mars the City Hall of late.  Beginning in 2006, he profiled Rob Ford when (as confirmed by successful appeal) the mayor was a councilor, determinedly parochial, steadfastly blue-collar, and witnessed his ascendance with a mixture of astonishment and journalistic joy.  But lest we confuse Keenan’s book with other Ford-centric publications, Some Great Idea: Good Neighbourhoods, Crazy Politics and the Invention of Toronto (Coach House Books), claims a broader scope.  Part “history on the run,” part Toronto-based memoir, it follows the trajectory of post-amalgamation Toronto to its eventual landing point, the Toronto of today––a city more diversely experienced than ever before, but with the solutions to its ailments more muddied by ideological strife. 

Some Brief Notes on Titivillus

By Chris Hutchinson

Chris Hutchinson’s A Brief History of the Short-Lived was reviewed in issue 19 of The Puritan. The review uses the character Titivillus, a medieval trouble maker featured in the book, as its entrance into understanding the poems. So we asked Chris to tell us what drew him to this character.

One of the stories is that medieval monks invented Titivillus, the Patron Demon of Calligraphers, to blame for their mistakes copying manuscripts. They imagined that Titivillus was forced to interfere in their work, under pressure as he was to deliver one thousand sacks full of manuscript errors each day to the devil who then recorded the names of the negligent scribes in a book to be read on Judgement Day. With the advent of the printing press Titivillus’ responsibilities increased as did this mythical minion’s reputation for causing trouble.  

Something like Titivillus haunts me today, a sort of ghost in the ghost in the machine. My little demon is lodged somewhere between my eyes and my grey matter where he likes to take possession of and flip around not only letters and numbers but spatial memories and logical relations. Some people call this dyslexia, and it can be a crazy-making affliction, especially when a sufferer is faced with an income tax form or a Tokyo subway map or a set of Wittgensteinian premises. But for a poet there may be some advantages to being possessed.

I think most creative writers pay heed to misreadings, spell-checker mix-ups and slips of the tongue or pen. Errors can be awesomely generative and, according to the Freudians, psychically revealing. Note also how stumbling onto a good metaphor has the feeling of a happy accident—falling suddenly into that strangely luminous fissure which separates the so-called tenor and vehicle. What is poetry if not a loosening of the strictures and structures of literalness and normative sense? Maybe it’s not surprising that the kind of poetry I’m drawn to tends to side-step the intellect, flirt with ‘inaccuracy’ and generally succeed by teetering on the edge its own destruction.

In my poem “Titivillus” I wanted to re-vision this fabulist pest, to imagine a version slightly distorted from what had previously been conceived—granted that throughout history his protean character has already morphed several times. As medievalist Kathy Cawsey writes: “(Titivillus) is pervasive yet elusive, appearing again and again in drama, sermons, sculpture and art, engaging and amusing in appearance yet deadly earnest in purpose” (434). So here I’d like to swerve again, thinking of yet another way to (mis)appropriate or ‘misread’ the myth: I give you Titivillus, Patron Demon of Dyslectic Poets.

The way I see it, while he may prevent some of us from becoming copy editors or Wall Street traders, perhaps this trickster of the mind’s eye can teach us something else: how to see cockeyed, think out of kilter and, as Emily Dickenson famously put it, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Maybe the truth is that language—with its slippages, ellipses, ambiguities and epistemic limitations—is itself an inherently shifty thing, and it’s only Titivillus who can give it to us straight.   

Work Cited

Cawsey , Kathy. "Titivillus and the "Kyrkchaterars": Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages." Studies in Philosophy. 102.4 (2005): 434. Print.