Toronto Poetry Vendors: collect 'em all ...

Toronto Poetry Vendors: "(in)dispensable poetry"

The site maisonnueve reports that two Canadian poets have found a way -- finally -- to bring poetry to the people in a familiar and user-friendly method: the vending machine. For a toonie ($2 Canadian) the buyer receives a previously unpublished poem printed on bright-colored stock about the size of a pack of gum, sealed with a Toronto Poetry Vendor sticker. To sweeten the deal, each poem comes with a piece of Dubble Bubble gum. This should be comforting news for all consumers and their sweet tooth, with the potential for all kinds of imaginative applications: point-of-sale in doctor's offices, grocery stores, and banks.

Or not -- the machines are currently located mostly in Toronto coffeeshops and bookstores -- but the idea of finding poem-packets next to the candy and soda machines in the office break room or school lunch room in some alternate universe is worth at least a fleeting happy thought.

Rebecca Rosenblum calls the brightly-colored packages from the poetry-vending machine "baseball cards for the litsy set": The neat thing is that the poems are just stacked in there, and so when you turn the crank, you just get the next one in the queue, no picking and choosing. So after this afternoon’s lovely launch (excellent readings, excellent cookies), everyone in the audience bought a poem, and then milled around asking each other, “Who’d you get?” “Who’d you get?”

The latest edition of Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV) was released on June 30. Here's an excerpt from the post at maisonnueve:

Inspired by the Distriboto machines she’d seen in Montreal, Toronto poet Carey Toanedreamed up the idea of a machine that would dispense poems. When fellow poet and fiction writer Elisabeth de Mariaffi got on board, they found themselves sourcing Wrigley’s Excel gum machines on Craigslist and 3 months later, in April 2010, launched Canada’s first mechanical poetry journal, Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV).

“The idea came out of the renaissance in handmade, DIY self-publishing in Toronto and the larger lit community, with all the beautiful hand-bound chapbooks and letter press books just begging to be handled and cracked open and enjoyed for their tactile qualities as much as for their content. I covet these things,” Toane says.

... The Fall 2010 issue, launched last month, includes poets Jeff Latosik, Michael Lista, Angela Hibbs and Nancy Jo Cullen, among others. The poems are printed on brightly coloured paper measuring the same dimension as a Wrigley’s brand package of Excel gum. “I’ve come to associate poets with a particular colour,” de Mariaffi says.

... The machines have names: Polar Ice is currently located at Toronto’s Type Books; Cinnamon is at a café called Ezra’s Pound, and Spearmint is located at Zoot’s Café. A travelling machine called Snacks — a former cigarette dispenser — is used for such events as the Brooklyn Book Fair in Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto’s Canzine fair. For three dollars, Snacks also delivers a poetry 2-pack wrapped in bright ribbon.

... Each broadside is weighted with a piece of Dubble Bubble because it helps with the mechanics of dispensing the product through the machine. Toane and de Mariaffi see the TPV as a way of broadening poetry’s exposure. “We wanted a way to showcase Toronto talent in a format that the average café patron would find intriguing but not intimidating. Books and reading and poetry can come across as stuffy and serious and not so much fun, which is a shame.”

For updates on the Toronto Poetry Vendors machines and launches, go here.

(Photo of TPV packet from maisonnueve; Carey Toane photo from Rebecca Rosenblum's blog Rose Coloured.)

Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writers

The Guardian UK has an article with the advice of 28 authors on how to write. Surprisingly little was self-serving or snotty -- most contributors seemed genuine in their desire to advise other writers on the ephemeral qualities of what it is they do.

Suggestions ranged from the elaborate to zen-like (the advice of Helen Simpson: The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it"). Many of the replies, of course, describe the nuts-and-bolts of writing; the rules, such as they are, are as individual as the writers themselves.

Here are the ten suggestions of Elmore Leonard, which seem well-thought, and well intentioned; they are excerpted from Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing (William Morrow, 2007). He begins, as many good writers do, by breaking his own rule of ten with an un-numbered admonition: Using adverbs is a mortal sin.

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. ...

2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword ... There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. ...I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

(photo of Elmore Leonard by Laurie Roberts.)

"WikiLeaks" (Micah Sifry): Julien Assange, cranky corporate manager

Some books you hate, some books you love. Do you know why?

Beyond the simplicity of "I know what I like" there is the active principle of thought and consideration. And that's what makes Amazon's book reviews so utterly fascinating. Moby Dick? Snow Crash? Eat Pray Love? C'mon, reading reviews at Amazon is a guilty pleasure for many readers with lit'ry inclinations. Or for fanboys. Or for moms looking for love with gilded foil covers. Takes all kinds to make the publishing business survive, same as it ever was.

Add a gloss of contemporary topic with strong opinions, publish a book, and stand back while partisan readers have at it. One star or five? Some books preach at the choir, other books screech at them. Personally, I find Sean Hannity's books (for one) funny, entertaining -- and a slab of unfried bacon thrown in a hungry pen of pit bulls: his fans gobble up the morsels of incorrect and grossly-distorted facts and spin them back out on social media sites. And 2012 promises to bring the heat.

But politics is such an easy target for choosing sides. How about the more complex topic of national security? WikiLeaks .... now there's a topic. Judging by America's national media Julien Assange is the best security boogeyman to come along since Osama bin Laden. And yet ...

What, exactly, has WikiLeaks put in jeopardy?

Julien would make an excellent CNN host, a counterweight to Anderson Cooper. Give him the 8 pm Monday-through-Friday slot and people would .... tune out after a day. His (admirable) dead-on earnestness would be a ratings killer and the entire security-threat of his WikiLeaks activity would be neutralized within a month. Even if WikiLeaks documents disclosed that Barack Obama was a cross-dressing paramour of Sarah Palin, who would care? Except Sean Hannity, of course.

Julien Assange, dashing scary foreigner

But still, as a dashing Robin Hood figure of the information age, Assange makes good copy in a way that poor Bradley Manning, who provided the State Department documents to WikiLeaks, does not. That's the difference between swashbuckling on your own and being on the U.S. Army payroll.

Even reviews of books about WikiLeaks can only bring half-hearted condemnation from most quarters. National security as threatened by a man in a bespoke suit seems less dangerous, apparently, than Michael Moore with a CAT hat and a bullhorn. Here's a three-star Amazon review that, in total, sums up the general attitude toward that slim fellow being hounded around the globe for disclosing the facts: Berlisconi likes to party. Sarkozy, ditto.

Nothing by WikiLeaks about Rupert Murdoch yet, darn it. (We're waiting, WikiLeaks.) Here's the Amazon three-star, by mirasreview, of WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, by Micah Sifry. The reviewer lives in McLaean, Virgina -- the home base of the CIA, no less.

"Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency" is an introduction to the transparency or information activist movement by Micah Sifry, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) and the Sunlight Foundation, with a forward by PdF's co-founder Andrew Rasiej. It is not a treatise on Wikileaks but an overview of the political successes, failures, and the author's hopes for the new transparency and connectivity afforded by the internet.

There is a teaser regarding Sifry's first encounter with Julian Assange in Chapter 1, but Wikileaks is not discussed again until Chapter 7. Then Chapter 8 is dedicated entirely to Sifry's opinion of the organization.

Sifry is a transparency activist in the cause of "open source politics" or "collaborative government" specifically. Democracy-with-a-small-d. He views the emerging role of the citizen as an "active player" rather than a "passive consumer" of political information, enabled by the internet, and he cites some impressive examples of crowd-sourced projects that have had political impact. He goes on to criticize the Obama administration in the US and the Cameron administration in the UK for spewing empty rhetoric about transparency, though there are individual politicians in both countries who have embraced two-way communication with their constituents.

It's important to understand that Micah Sifry views transparency, whistleblowing, and the like as a means to collaborative government, not to anything else. This explains the narrow scope of this book, his comments about Wikileaks, and a certain naïveté. ...

I knew before I read "Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency" that Micah Sifry was a supporter of Wikileaks but a critic of Julian Assange. Now I understand why. Sifry offers the usual criticisms of Assange's "autocratic" management style. Ironically, Sifry's own comments make a strong case against a more democratic structure for Wikileaks. Julian Assange has been very successful at uniting an ideologically diverse group of people to work toward a common goal --without agreeing on what that goal is -- a feat for which he does not get enough credit. It only occasionally backfires, as in Daniel Domscheit-Berg's acrimonious split from the organization.

Micah Sifry

Sifry says that "it's far from clear that Assange is just interested in exposing oppressive and unethical behavior." I should hope not. Exposing corruption is well and good, but it doesn't scale, and it's hardly revolutionary. I'm bewildered by people like Sifry who think Wikileaks should adopt their values rather than Assange's. It makes me grateful for Assange's iron grip on strategy. But that isn't why I give this book a mediocre rating. It is, at times, little more than a list of transparency's successes and failures, without analysis. It's superficial and simplistic. It might serve adequately as an introduction to one version of information activism, but I suspect the book is preaching to the choir.

Woah, that is indeed scary stuff for national security: a condemnation of, basically, a typically uptight corporate manager. If Assange would make WikiLeaks public, give the organization an initial public offering, and let that mysterious free hand of capitalism work its wonder, there would go its threat to national security. It's time to move on and investigate real threats to American safety -- like Sean Hannity's publishing contract.

Selections from "Mermaid Gravy," Julie Wells

Selections from "Mermaid Gravy"

(Julie Wells)

III.

Monogrammed towels are not in your

future. I see answers and questions.

I see beauties stripping off dresses to reveal hot patient skin

too sweet for you. I see women in your future

women who cannot change oil, but can afford

for you to, daily. I see hairs rolling on your bed

breaking words into bars, notes, chords. I see you

stepping in, becoming the song you should.

I see your voice pretend help is for the unfit only.

I see your essential voice in the background: help.

I see escape creep into your neck as she sleeps. I see speed

in your synapses as she lies in your bed. I see Heaven devouring

you.

I see riches dehydrating even your tongue. I see

pink shirts in your closet. I see tapas filling you

with indecision. I see your unsteady stick house.

I see you jumping in sheets and I see Sugar waiting for you

to finish. I see monogrammed towels in her eyes. You see.

You see answers and questions. I see beauties

stripping off dresses to reveal hot skin.

IX.

I cannot see my face. Shallow eyes shave

morning fuzz. Silence questions its existence:

long air, insulation, shredded art. Language

is an atom tossed from the hand of absence,

a glass balloon hoping for teeth, shrieking at the pain

of losing nothing, trapping itself in cans.

Language questions the subconscious duet

we all hide. Language questions

our paradoxical feminine masculinity,

and let me tell you how not perfect the answer.

Let me tell you how radioactive.

Let me tell you how you’ll breathe.

XVIII.

Try to hold on

to our origami rose.

Allow letters

to close shops.

Roll on the grass.

Attend carbon turns.

See beauty in the lie of yes

as my dyslexic tongue

says no. Attach

by a thin thread.

Hold our alphabet.

Disclaim Twenty-third Street

sidewalks. Disrobe your pyramid

of skin. Let me tell you.

Be a duet of amber and wood.

Layer ribbons on top.

XXIII.

It’s about the paradoxical femininity

of tough leather. It’s about a scream

an answer to stillness and shallow eyes.

It’s about causal art: filled with ghosts and steam,

breathing pink air, tossed from the hand of language,

sharp chunks of gold. It’s about your mouth

made of pennies and garnets, spilling words and smoke

and carbon and burning echoes. It’s about the shriek

of glass falling from your fingers and the pain

of losing something you’ll never own. It’s about leaning

closer. It’s about telling. It’s about a definition

which is not equivalent to a set of points.

Athens poets and wordsmiths gather tonight at Flicker Bar around 8 p.m. to bid goodbye to Julie Wells, editor of Proetry magazine and a dynamic force in the Athens spoken-word community. She is moving her considerable talent to points north, and what is Athens' loss is certainly Jersey's gain. Those of us who were honored to hear Julie read at the monthly Word of Mouth events at The Globe know she is a writer of unique gifts and untiring energy. Best of times lay ahead for Julie and Michael (himself no slouch at turning a phrase -- we'll miss his words and his headgear too!), who it is hoped won't forget that the road out of Athens also just as surely leads back.

These selections from "Mermaid Gravy" appeared online at Proetry and at the Word of Mouth website.

Debt and taxes: "The Character of Presidents," by E.L. Doctorow

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."

(President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009)

"Giving our all to a difficult task': The thirty months of Obama's historic presidency have seen the country change not dramatically enough for some Democrats, and -- from Republican detractors -- raising the idea of his outright llegitimacy to hold the Presidential office and upping partisan rhetoric to new levels of Marxist-socialist scaremongering.

In his calm demeanor, his refusal to be riled, and his seeming deliberate pace, Obama confounds both parties. In other words, by being "presidential," politicians and the public have found in Barack Obama a confusing cypher. Perhaps in this hyperkinetic age America has come to expect change to happen overnight, and its leaders to be superheroes. But the president is not the FDR many of his supporters hoped he would be, and the change he brought is, paradoxically, too much for some.

Writing in The Nation during the election year of 1992, author E.L. Doctorow mused at length about the idea of Presidential character during the campaign. Now, in the middle of the current budget standoff, increasingly a frustrating, partisan battle, Doctorow's words seem worth repeating.

... The President we get is the country we get. With each new President the country is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kind of lawlessness that governs our lives and invokes our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. One four-year term may find us at reasonable peace with one another, working things out, and the next, trampling on each other for scraps of bread.

That a President is inevitably put forward and elected by forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of faith, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer. ...

Who would not wish for someone, first of all, who realizes that once elected, he cannot be the President merely of the constituency that empowered him but, if he would fill the defining role of the office, a President on behalf of everyone? That is a simple grade-school concept, and, given the relation in America of money to politics, cannot be anything more than that.

But the President who has the courage to live by that would immediately lead a reformist movement to erase the advantages big money accords to itself by its political contributions and its lobbying. This would presume a morally intelligent President as well as a courageous one.

I would wish for a developed historical sense in the President, one that could understand and honestly acknowledge that the political philosophy of what we lovingly call the free market has in the past justified slavery, child labor, the gunning down of strikers by state militias, and so forth. I would want a presidential temperament keen with a love of justice and with the capacity to recognize the honor of humble and troubled people. And the character of mind to understand that even the borders of the nation are too small for the presidential service -- that willy-nilly and ipso facto (idea that) we're planetary blunderers now.

The true President would have the strength to widen the range of current political discourse, and would love and revere language as the best means we have to close in on reality. That implies a sensibility attuned to the immense moral consequence of every human life. Perhaps a sense of tragedy that would not let him sleep the night through. Also, I should think he would be someone who really likes kids, who laughs to be around them, and who is ready to die for them -- but who would never resort to the political expediency of saying so.

... the raising of the idea of character in the public mind may finally be a great service to the electorate that we imagine by contrast ... what the character of a true American President should be."

In the current stalemate of political will, both sides appear to be playing politics as if compromise is something for the other side. "The President we get is the country we get:" If the President hasn't the style to shape the country's political will in the way of an F.D.R., most of his supporters would be happy with at least an echo of Harry S Truman: "give 'em hell, Barack."

Yet in this continued recession and need for solutions, neither party is making points with the electorate that they are there to serve. The bipartisan "Gang of Six" say they have agreed on a plan which contains a stopgap measure raising the debt limit but also, because of the continued delay, cannot be completed and voted on by August 2. This will require a timetable that pushes a final vote down the road, and the country will go through this entire tent show again in a Presidential election year.

The ultimate irony is that the plan is largely made up of elements modeled "on the recommendations last year of a bipartisan fiscal commission established by Mr. Obama," as theNew York Times reported today.

The entire process has been an embarrassment to the representatives of both parties as they play a needless game of tag-you're-it. With no real recovery in sight (only another election cycle on the horizon that ensures the current rhetoric will only become hotter) Obama will need to demonstrate that he truly can be, in Doctorow's phrase, "a morally intelligent President as well as a courageous one."

(E.L. Doctorow, "The Character of Presidents," was originally published in 1992 and reprinted in The Best of the Nation, 2000)