...but it's changed, altered. It looks... even better! This is EXCELLENT news.
The I.V. Lounge is no more, and so is the I.V. Lounge Reading Series, but not really. The reading series and its traditions will continue in a new home, with a new name and a new host.
I'm very pleased that Carey Toane, an energetic up-and-comer on the literary scene, has taken up the torch from the previous host (and my successor) Alex Boyd. You can think of it as the same old reading series, but with a bit a of a makeover and a transfusion of new blood. It's been renamed Pivot Readings at the Press Club, incorporating the name of the new venue at 850 Dundas St. W. and the letters "iv" in the word pivot, a tip of the hat to the series' origins.
I will always feel fondly nostalgic for the ten years we had at I.V. Lounge, but I have to say I love the new location. It's a cozy bar with great atmosphere, a fantastic beer selection and a nice back patio. Even its name, The Press Club, evokes a culture of letters. Sounds perfect to me. Here's a bit of what it says on the series new website:
When the I.V. Lounge closed its doors at the end of August (*sniff*), the series was left without a home. We have moved west down Dundas to the Press Club, located in an East Berlin-style, up-and-coming strip at 850 Dundas Street West, just three short blocks west of Bathurst on the north side of the street. We are very excited about the new location with its warm, art-filled space and great drink menu served with style by owners Mikael and Andrew Hickey. The bar also features a back patio for outdoor readings on warm summer nights.
You can visit the website here, where no doubt they will soon have details about readings, writers, and dates. I can't wait.
I'd like to introduce you to a new blog by one of Canada's most talented young poets, Evie Christie. It's called Desk Space. Evie is grilling writers on their work space and writing habits.
DS When did you start writing, publish your first book (or when are you publishing your next)?
PV I can never answer the question about when I started writing. I think people who have a definite answer to that question are bullshitting a little bit, or self-mythologizing. It’s always something cute or profound or interesting. They’ll say things like they read Pushkin when they were eight and then they knew what they wanted to do with their lives, or they’ll have some story about publishing their first poem in a local paper before they could walk. When I was a kid, I wasn’t in touch with high culture at all. I read corny adventure stories, if I read anything at all, and I wrote funny (to me) rhymes and verses, but even then I was more inspired by novelty songs than by Ogden Nash or Robert Service. Mostly, I watched cartoons and the Three Stooges....
You can read the rest of the interview here, complete with a picture of my desk and my somewhat anti-social cat Milosz.
The I.V. Lounge on Dundas Street (seen here in a manipulated image created by Steve Venright for the cover the anthology The I.V. Lounge Reader) is closing its doors for good starting tomorrow. As many people know, this is the place where I started, with the help of Peter Darbyshire, the I.V. Lounge Reading Series in 1998. I ran the series for five years, and Alex Boyd has been running the series since 2003. Now, the reading series is kaput, though I guess we can be proud of a strong ten-year run.
Alex has written a farewell message on his blog, but he also lets us know that there's still one more celebration to be had at the I.V. Lounge:
...there’s one more opportunity to have a drink at the I.V. Lounge, say thanks to Kevin and chill out there, and that will be Sunday night, Aug 24 anytime after 3pm. After that, the bar is closed. It also happens to be Kevin’s birthday, so feel free to wish him a happy one, aside from wishing him luck. I suspect I’ll be there sometime after 8pm, and hope to see a few of you.
For a few memories of the old days when I ran the series, Google Books has some pages from the The I.V. Lounge Reader available to view online. The selection includes my introduction to the anthology, poems by David McGimspey, George Bowering, Jennifer LoveGrove, and A.F. Moritz, and fiction by Derek McCormack, Tamas Dobozy, and an otherwise unpublished short story by Andrew Pyper in which he coins the word "sockfarty" which is probably one of my all time favourite Canadian neologisms. You can read it all by clicking here.
This is bizarre. Brantford, Ontario, Poet Laureate John B. Lee is among those targeted by an email phishing scam that seeks to exploit the fragile egos of poets, asking them to fork over a "handling fee" of 1,555 Euros to process their nomination for the newly international Pulitzer Prize.
In fact, the Pulitzer Prize is still only open to American citizens, so Canadians needn't worry themselves about it. Lee admits he had "a sliver of hope," but quickly realized the email was bogus. So far, it doesn't seem this scam has been successful, as no one has handed over the fee. The phishing here is laughably obvious. The Pulitzer Prize wouldn't ask nominees for money, let alone in Euros. As crime goes, this one belongs in the Stupid Criminal Files.
This story was reported by the Brantford Expositor. Read about it here.
Jason Camlot, seen here reading from his latest book The Debaucher, is the Chosen One.
It seems like everyone is chosing Jason Camlot, and now he has been chosen by David Lehman for inclusion on The Best American Poetry blog.
Camlot's poem "Since I have stuck my toungue..." -- a reworking of a poem by Victor Hugo -- is the first of several poems by Camlot selected for the online companion to the popular book series.
And if you like the poem, well, there's more where that came from. You should buy his book and read the rest of it. As one fan of Camlot's poetry has written, "you go, guy."*
* Honestly. Check out the comments on Lehman's blog.
I took this picture of Stuart Ross (left) and Jason Camlot (with Stuart's camera) during a trip to Buffalo back in May. You can see my reflection in the window, and you can also see a strange little doll that could be one of the lost boys from Peter Pan. Stuart and Jason were there to promote their new books, Camlot's The Debaucher and Ross's Dead Cars in Managua, and I was just tagging along for support.
Anyway, that same Stuart Ross has been interviewed by Evie Christie for Mondo, a volunteer-run, Toronto-based, arts, culture, and humour webzine. Here's a timbit of their interview:
Evie:At the Punchy/Insomniac launch in Toronto, the crowd was vocal and enthusiastic during your reading. Afterwards I heard many people talking about the artwork - the cover as well as the photographs of the cars inside. How did you decide on your cover art, and can you give some of the back story about the cars?
Stuart: I think the crowd was also vocal because I had been threatened with a defamation suit by a couple of other poets who were there in the audience, and this was a show of support for me. I can’t believe these two had the gall to show up at my launch after they’d sent a lawyer after me to shut me up. And then this other lousy poet was there, too, who had equated me publicly with Holocaust deniers because I was, to quote his mangled miscommand of the English language, “wrapping myself around the flag of freedom of expression.” Well, sorry, chump, but it was an issue of freedom of expression. And given that most of my great uncles and aunts and cousins died in concentration camps, I took offense. And it’s just now occurred to me that this guy shares the same name as the moronic Nazi colonel in Hogan’s Heroes....
As far as I'm concerned, Selima Hill has not been allotted the full measure of public acclaim that she deserves. Perhaps she has been taken for granted -- the hard-working poet who can always be relied upon to produce engaging work, she needn't be distracted with too much praise! Or perhaps because her poetry is so inwardly potent, so complex in its evocative power and yet so crystalline, so seemingly simple in its execution, that some critics and academics have neglected to tout the excellence of her work because it doesn't flatter their own.
Readers in Canada have another reason for not knowing much about Hill's poetry. Her books are published by the marvellous Bloodaxe Books, one of the English-speaking world's best poetry publishers, but Bloodaxe books do not have a Canadian distributor (though they can be found on Amazon.ca), so they are seldom found by Canadian poetry readers who enjoy browsing in their local independent bookseller's shop.
This year, in a bold publishing move, Bloodaxe has brought out two books by Hill at the same time. One is her piercing new collection The Hat, and the other is the generous career retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems. Taken together, it is clear that a unique poetic talent has been producing a unified and dizzingly animated body of work for decades. Her early work is not eclipsed by her later work, and her later work does not suffer from creative exhaustion. Here is a sample from Gloria, a poem reprinted from her second collection My Darling Camel (1988):
Visiting the Zoo The tall giraffes can never sit. Their names are Valerie and Gwendoline. I am their tall reticulated son. This is our sand and hay. Follow our gold strip to holy Tassili, blonde swallow-tails, hares, a little milk.
You are a good girl. He will never know you are in love with someone else, not him.
Perhaps, now that readers have the opportunity to not only read her latest work, but also to catch up on the best of her output to date, she may finally come into the attention she very richly deserves. To help her along, I've gathered together a few resources from the internet for those who are interested in knowing more about this remarkable poet and her work.
Here is a review of both Gloria and The Hat from The Guardian by Fiona Sampson:
If Gloria's generous 330-odd pages demonstrate how substantial Hill's body of work is, The Hat shows this brilliant lyricist of human darkness writing more acutely than ever. So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry - not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics.
Here is an interview with Selima Hill, conducted by Bucharest University professor Lidia Vianu:
SELIMA HILL: I was born in 1945. When I was a baby I was burnt in a fire. I was rescued from my burning cot by a farmer who saw the flames. I spent six months (maybe a year, I’m not sure) in hospital. Of course, I nearly died. An of course my mother felt guilty... I was born into a family of painters. My grandparents and my parents were painters. (My ex-husband and my son are also painters. My daughter is a photographer. My youngest son is a writer.) My father was sixty when I was born. I was sent to boarding school, and then University, where I read philosophy. I then had a breakdown and spent another year in hospital (Psychiatric hospital). There is no connection between John Fowles and myself (except that I used to live in his flat – one big room overlooking the sea). I now live with my various animals in a house with a small orchard near the beach – and also near my seven grandchildren and my ex-husband and his new wife and my children and their husbands and horses...
The British Council offers sound recordings of five Selima Hill poems here.
The poems included are "Being a Wife", "My Sister's Poodle is Accused of Eating the Housekeeping Monkey", "The World's Entire Wasp Population", "Why I Left You", and "Your Girlfriend's Thigh."
And here is a video of Selima Hill reading her poem "Cow." Enjoy:
A high school student named Sarah Davis (aka hamstergirl7) made a video for my poem "The Days Dogs Die" as an assignment for her English class. She has posted it on YouTube, and (with her permission) I'd like to share it with you. Thanks, Sarah.
...but it's changed, altered. It looks... even better! This is EXCELLENT news.
