Buggeryville

The Agora is a very new website, with spit and polish still being applied; it will offer reviews of poetry, as well as broadsides and other publications. We like reviews, right? We bemoan the lack of reviews in our culture, we complain that the book review sections of our newspapers are shutting down, we wish for ever more discourse about emerging work? So much work, not enough thinking about the work, is that the cry? Well, let's get to work, then.

The editor, Aaron Tucker, asked me if I'd contribute some reviews, so I agreed to. The first one is about Joseph Bradshaw's This Ocean, or Oppen Series. It is part of my ongoing process of building a bridge between Portland and Toronto. Enjoy it, and check out the rest of the site.

I dipped into another of The Scream's events, this time to see a revival of the Lexiconjury Reading Series. This gimmick this time: Have three "younger" poets read, and pair each with an "older" poet who will do some sort of collaboration with them. Each collaboration was done differently -- Steve Venright transformed and enlimericked Alixandra Bamford's poems, Sharron Harris illustrated Natalie Zina Walschots's series of poems about supervillians, and Paul Dutton joined Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl in that way that sound poets do. Norðdahl is of the "fast and articulate" school of sound poets, along the lines of Christian Bök (whom he read a poem dedicated to, an Icelandic monovocalic piece in which the only vowel was ö), and was a treat, and he and Dutton performed together quite well, in that way that sound poets do.

During the first break, Jay MillAr (who I guess went to the mARK oWEns school of capitalization) set up his mobile bookshop, which had a terrific collection of poetry books, and oof I just wasn't in a position to throw down a few hundred on poetry books. Not just yet. But I was agog at the selection. It included books by Kaia and Kasey, which again made me a touch homesick.

Afterwards there was an "Open Michelle", and I decided to stop being a total wallflower and read. The rules were that you had to read a cover poem and one of your own. I mostly took my time saying "hi" and explaining who the hell I was, lurking at these readings. Eventually I read Joseph Bradshaw's "'You,' by George Oppen" (from his new book This Ocean, and maybe more on that later) and then "for Gale Czerski".

The open mic was generally pretty great, and it was good to hear the variety of poetries that people are working on. And to actually meet and say hello to people this time. And this post has been far more LiveJournal-y than I want Buggeryville posts to be, so I'll leave it at that.

Thursday night: Kenneth Goldsmith, Michael Maranda, and others on a panel about copyright and appropriation. Should be a treat!