The Scream has begun. I missed the first night's event, but last night there was an opening for a visual poem art show and an event celebrating the catalogue poem. You can check out the visual poetry over at Type on Queen for the duration of the festival. But the catalogue event is now over, lost to time.
As soon as I saw that there was a catalogue poem event, I wondered why I hadn't been invited to participate, but soon enough I was -- Bill Kennedy, who organized the event (and is the artistic director of the Scream in general), invited me in. The event was a choir of list-readers wandering throughout the bookstore, starting with a single voice, building up to a raucous cacophony of enumeration before settling back down to that same voice -- my voice, as it turns out, reading sections from the oldest list in Western Lit, the catalogue of ships from Book 2 of the Iliad.
I also read sections from Georges Perec's catalogue of all the foods he ate in 1974, Rabelais's list of types of fools from Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Valerie Solanas's list of acceptable and unacceptable men from the SCUM Manifesto. I didn't manage to sneak in Roussel's list of 200-odd things which are similar to each other but of quite different sizes (from New Impressions of Africa) or Cole Porter's list of topmost things (from "You're The Top") or Craig Conley's list of meanings of the word "x" or any of a great number of other excellent lists I brought along. Ah well, next time! Meanwhile other people read from Chistopher Dewdney, Kenneth Goldsmith, The Joy of Cooking, the phone book, and too many other things for me to remember or list here... It was a big chaotic listy mess, and a nice way to start the Scream.
I woke up too late for me to catch today's walking tour of dead Toronto bookstores, which is probably for the best as it would only leave me heartbroken. But tonight there will be some live poetry editing and then a few people (including me) will be reading a poem each before a screening of Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps I'll see you there!
Chris Piuma
- vocatur quasi quispiam, id est, homo non significatus, velut anglice "Everyman" nominatur.
About me
- I live and go to school in Toronto, Ontario. Until recently, I lived and helped organize poetry readings in Portland, Oregon. Also, I used to edit a quasi-literary journal. This is a "poetry blog".
Upcoming readings
- Contact me if you'd like me to read for you (chrispiuma at google's mail service). It could be a thing.
Five-word twitterm
Books shaped like books
- Bell-lloc. (airfoil, 2011)
- [On January thirty-first...] (Crane's Bill Books, 2008)
- Exercises in Penmanship. (nine muses books, 2007) [a review]
Books shaped like pdfs
Journals ask me for poems sometimes
- Peep/Show #6
- Eights #1
- [James Yeary's ever-name-changing mail zine] #8
- Abandon: Edits All Over anthology #1
- würm #1
- Satellite Telephone #2
- Score #19
- Newspoetry 2000-2002
- Aught #1, #2, #9, and #14
- flim, of course
Other poety blogs
- angela rawlings
- Brian Kim Stefans
- Catherine Daly
- Charles Alexander
- Crag Hill
- Craig Conley
- Dodie Bellamy
- For Godot
- Gary Barwin
- Geof Huth
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Grand Text Auto
- Harriet [The Poetry Foundation]
- J.A. Lee
- Jenny Sampirisi
- Johannes Göransson
- Joseph Bradshaw
- Kasey Mohammad
- Lanny Quarles
- Mark Wallace
- Maryrose Larkin
- Michael Kelleher
- Nicholas Manning
- Patrick Playter Hartigan
- Pearl Pirie
- Rodney Koeneke
- Ron Silliman
- Sam Lohmann
- Sina Queyras
- Susana Gardner
- Troy Lloyd
Toronto sites
Portland sites
Labels
'Pataphysics
A.D. Melville
Aaron Tucker
advertising as poetry
Agius of Corvey
AIDS
Alexis Muirhead
Alfred Joyce Kilmer
Alixandra Bamford
alphabet
anagrams
Ange Mlinko
anticipatory plagiarism
aphorism
appropriation
Aram Saroyan
archiving
Armand Schwerner
Arthur Golding
B.L. Ullman
bad writing
Barack Obama
Barrett Watten
Bauhaus
Bill Kennedy
Bob Perelman
book reviews
books
books rec'd
bookstores
Borders
bpNichol
Buggeryville news
C.T. Funkhouser
Canada
Catherine Daly
chance
Charles O. Hartman
Charles Olson
children's literature
Christian Bök
Clark Coolidge
Coach House Press
communities
complexity
conceptual poetics
constraint writing
Crag Hill
Craig Conley
criticism
Curtis Faville
Dan Raphael
Dante Alighieri
Darby Conley
Dave Pollard
David Abel
David Foster Wallace
David Markson
David Melnick
derek beaulieu
dictionaries
Donato Mancini
Donatus
Doug Nufer
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Eileen Joy
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
elaboration
Elliot Spitzer
Emily Dickinson
Emmett Williams
Ennius
Ennodius
erasure
Eric Prenowitz
Erik Satie
Ernst Robert Curtius
etymologies
Exercises in Penmanship
Ezra Pound
feminism
flarf
flim
footnotes
Franco Moretti
François Rabelais
Frank O'Hara
Fred Wah
Frederic Jameson
furniture text
Garrison Keillor
Gary Barwin
Gary Snyder
Gary Sullivan
Geof Huth
George Lakoff
George Oppen
Georges Perec
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gertrude Stein
Gil Ott
Google
Guy Davenport
Hank Lazer
Hannah Weiner
Hebrew
Heinrich Heine
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Homer
homophonic translation
Hugh Kenner
Hugh Primas
hypertext
infinity
informalism
introductions
Issue 1
J.W.D. Dougherty
Jack Spicer
Jackson Mac Low
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Derrida
James Wright
Jason Christie
Jay MillAr
Jeanne Heuving
Jen Bervin
Jennifer Bartlett
Jerome
Jesse Huisken
Jesse Seldess
Jim Carpenter
Joan Retallack
Johannes Göransson
John Ashbery
John Cage
John Dryden
John Oswald
JonArno Lawson
Jordan Scott
Joseph Addison
Joseph Bradshaw
Joseph Noble
journals
Juliana Spahr
K. Silem Mohammad
Karl Marx
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karri Kokko
Katherine Parrish
Ken Clinger
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kurt Schwitters
Larry Eigner
Latin
Leo Daedalus
Lindsay Hill
linkdump
Lisa Radon
lists
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lyn Hejinian
Lynn Behrendt
lyrics
Lytle Shaw
Lytton Smith
M. NourbeSe Philip
Maggie Helwig
Mahmoud Darwish
mail art
manifesto
Marcel Duchamp
Marcus Boon
marginalia
Marjorie Perloff
Mark Nowak
mARK oWEns
Mark Truscott
Mark Wallace
Mary Norbert Körte
Maryrose Larkin
me
medieval
Michael Kelleher
Michael Maranda
Michael Schiavo
Michel Foucault
Monica de la Torre
Morton Feldman
music
my poetry
N+7
Natalie Zina Walschots
Neo-Benshi
New York City
newspoem
Nicholas Manning
Nick Montfort
Nick Piombino
Nico Vassilakis
Ogden Nash
Olivier Messiaen
Orson Welles
Oulipo
Ovid
Pål Waaktaar
palindrome
Parasitic Ventures Press
parts of speech
Paul Dutton
Paul Zumthor
pdfs
Peanuts
Pearl Pirie
Performance Works Northwest
Philip Whalen
Plato
poem
poetics
poetics as ethics
poetics as politics
Poetry Foundation
polyglot
populism
Portland
procedures
Pseudo-Cicero
Pseudo-Piuma
publishing
punctuation
puns
purpose of poetry
queer
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Roussel
reading
rhyme
rhyme time
Richard Foreman
Rob Read
Robert Bly
Robert Dewhurst
Robert Mittenthal
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Wilson
Rodney Koeneke
Ron Silliman
Rubba Ducky
Rudy Clay
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Sam Lohmann
Santa Claus
Sarah Mangold
Sarah Palin
scrabble
second language
Sesame Street
Sharron Harris
Sigmund Freud
Sina Queyras
Slavoj Žižek
Sonja Ahlers
Spare Room
spoken vs read
Stan Rogal
Stephanie Young
Stephen Cain
Stephen Collis
Stephen McLaughlin
Stephen Ratcliffe
Steve McCaffery
Steve Venright
survey
Susan Polis Schutz
Tears for Fears
Ted Berrigan
The Agora
the Scream
The Simpsons
Theodor Adorno
theory
Thomas A. Clark
three nice poety things
Tina Darragh
Toronto
translation
U.S.
ukulele
Valerie Solanas
Vergil
Virginia Woolf
Walt Whitman
Walter Benjamin
William Shakespeare
William Stafford
William Wordsworth
wisdom from the mountain tops
writing exercises
würm
Another to add to your list: Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," wherein he enumerates the ways that his cat Jeffrey worships God.
That was, in fact, on my long list -- it was included in this anthology of literary lists that I was drawing upon, and it is an interesting and crazy poem. (I haven't read the whole thing, though, just various excerpts.)