(insert apology here for saying I’m adding a video without following through…)Īnd now that I’ve written this post I find that I am not able to add a video to my post. Sometimes pain and little gain…But I did it! That much I can be proud of. Thank you Vallum, for suggesting that I try this and for the digital publication. For about a minute’s poetry that will remain somewhere in the universe forever and be seen by perhaps seven people, all related to me, or who owe me favours. Here I am banning my husband from his own house and shutting an innocent little bird into the bedroom. Go through the whole miss-a-word, add-a-word, forget-a-phrase sequences until finally, it’s going well…and Ted walks in and Desirée the parrot starts to sqwawk. (recalling how, in grade three, I was a really great oral reader…)Īnd don’t I look terrified! I realize the light is wrong so move downstairs, laptop, accompanying cords, mouse and mouse pad…Try again as the parrot is asleep and Ted is out so it’s quiet. I managed to do things like that quite a few times. ![]() Or you get halfway through the poem and screw it up. What fun it is to think you’ve got it, then the video makes you look like a loon on funny drugs. The experience was not a happy one, at least I wasn’t happy with the results after trying about twenty versions. #204) on Saturday, May 4, doors 6 p.m., readings 7 p.m.The first clue: after half an hour just trying to get this image to be right side up (yes, I used the edit functions, yes I renamed it, yes I tried various other image variabilities) it’s going to stay this way now.Īt the beginning of this little project I thought that’s great, I’ll learn how to do make a video and post other poems on my blog…īackstory: A poem was accepted by Vallum for its ‘Chase’ theme, Issue 15:2, and I agreed to make a video of the poem for Vallum’s digital issue. ![]() Moritz’s Art of Surgery launch is happening at the Rocket Science Room (170 Jean-Talon W. There is, after all, always room for a little sweetness and specificity in any portrayal of sorrow. If only a species could fight back against eradication and death by getting its black belt. In particular, “Turning a Round Number” by Dave Eso playfully and sadly evokes the image of a bee learning Karate, this after the somehow valiant repetition of the word Bombus (the humble bumblebee’s genus). However, a handful of poems in the magazine managed to navigate that often-awkward zone between nowness and nostalgia with more grace and strangeness. Many of the poems in the magazine, sadly, share a similarly fumbling engagement with contemporary media and culture. The bulk of the photos feature a subject gazing adoringly or apathetically into their open palm in which a phone has been, you guessed it, removed. Similarly, the photo series that peppers the collection (“Removed” by Eric Pickersgill) has all the nuance of a teenage technophobe’s school assignment. Not exactly a bold position, and then Brezicki goes and wraps it up in a feel-good assertion about empathy transcending the digital/analogue divide. ![]() The clunky and coyly titled essay “Caught in the Web” by Colin Brezicki talks about the ironies of communicating so little in an era in which the surfeit of communication is downright blinding. Meanwhile, Vallum magazine’s issue 16:1, Connections, is naturally about our lack thereof. I love nothing better than reading about sickness and death, just not like this. Now, don’t get me wrong, give me “ the angels farting on the ceiling” any day. There are dreams throughout, all in the infuriatingly ill-defined blur of your work colleague recounting some cool nightmare already half faded on their morning commute. Instead, the poet blearily assesses his brush with medicine as though sleepy. This collection, however, never rises to the challenge of the physicality and fear you might expect of this evocative theme. Surgery is disgusting and terrifying and often impressive. Yet the desire to render his own experience monumental - and dignified - feels affected. The lucky remember little from their time anesthetized. Art of Surgery is a collection about the author’s heart surgery, so of course the images are a little vague. This was one of several images in his collection that I felt hadn’t been adequately interrogated. Does stone really have inherent dignity? Lasting power, sure, dignity I’m less sure about. In the titular poem in Moritz’s collection, I misread “without the dignity of stone” as “without the dignity of a shoe,” and arrogantly, I liked my error better. I hope they get themselves a nice grey blustery day for the occasion, as this is one mopey double feature. Moritz’s new poetry chapbook, Art of Surgery. This Saturday marks the launch both of the latest issue of Vallum magazine and of A.F.
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