Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver BC | RECENddT EVENTS Jan 30, 10 to Jul 29, 10

Read at Saturday, July 17, 2010
to obtain the address for the seminar, email gillespie.nancy AT googlemail DOT com

My talk will reflect on what can be learned, for poetry, from how some Lacanians theorize the subject within consumer culture. The consumer culture of late, global capitalism has been theorized as a “society of commanded enjoyment” (McGowan) in which “the time of the Other doesn’t exist” (Guéguen) and the virtual subject presents itself as an object in commodity form (i.e., as a product lifestyle) (Frankenberger). Is, then, the version of revolutionary modernism Mayakovsky and Brik formulated under the rubric of a “social command” for poetry part of a long-passed “society of prohibition”? Or do we need to re-imagine, re-symbolize, re-realize the big Other for poetry. But after poetics of disgust (Ngai), what might the cause of desire look like in poetry today?

I will try to situate my talk in the fourth of the four discourses outlined in Seminar 17, “the analyst’s discourse,” by considering these questions in relation to the unnameable surplus jouissance of “that affect by which the speaking being of a discourse finds itself determined as an object” (151). A poetry pack of photocopies will be available Friday night at the reading or else by pdf request, including poems by Bernadette Mayer (“First turn to me….”), Daniel Davidson (from Product), Laurie Duggan (“Cheerio”), Laura Riding (“The Quids”), Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett (chocolate-box poem from Bean Spasms), Harryette Mullen (from S*PeRM**K*T), among others I hope to discuss on Saturday.

Read at W2 Storyeum Friday, July 16, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Ravine [Non Sequitur]

Glee bee

bumble

rumble bee

be!

Pepperfilled thimble

glee bee

bumble

rumbles be.

Glee on the edge, ravine

looks over ravine

ravine oh bee

ravine mad

glee bee

bumble

rumble bee be

bee ravine mad about ravine.

Ravine bee.

Bee ravine.

Ravine glee

bee bumble rumble

be!

Pepperfilled thimble sprinkle

bee ravine

glee!

Glee on the edge, ravine

glee on the edge, ravine glee

on the edge ravine

bee.

Read at W2 Storyeum Saturday, July 10, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Clint Burnham's most recent book is The Benjamin Sonnets. He is also currently at work on a Lacanian study of the Kootenay School of Writing, to be published in 2011 by Arsenal Pulp. Poetry has appeared in Canadian Literature and The Capilano Review, The Westwind Review, and in the Open Text anthology; criticism in Artforum and Open Letter (forthcoming); an excerpt from his 2005 novel Smoke Show was reprinted in the Visions of British Columbia: A Landscape Manual exhibition catalogue from the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Read at Spartacus Books Friday, July 09, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Son of Dim Son

I blank annual test
at my far‐out favourist
McJihad run
brokeslave’m party whip
da burn they’r females
give him hurt for what
far from politing to the
grub to the gloomy hope
I don’t flub’s forgotten me
Scotty’s refu hurrah going
masses Irish ear my
father the virgin phone
cells surrounded
by easing away
from the’s insect
Hey gender woley
sec Just
ascribbtes
in it oh
unhappy mim
you, my long
lot youth loan
problem land
show tape
play is mod
hour what what
heryers dimes’ll
spicrazyquilt’ll quit

Read at Saturday, June 19, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS the seminar will take place at Nancy Gillespie's home. please email Gillespie.nancy AT gmail DOT com to register and to get the address.

Read at Spartacus Books Friday, June 18, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Nicole Markotic specializes in Canadian Literature, Creative Writing (fiction and poetry), the prose poem, and disability studies. She is author of the poetry books connect the dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, the novella Yellow Pages, the novel Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot and the chapbooks widows & orphans, more excess (which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award), he & [he], and tracking the game. She was poetry editor for Red Deer Press for six years, has worked as a freelance editor for various poets and novelists, and has edited special issues for such literary journals as Canadian Journal of Film Studies / Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques, Open Letter, and Tessera. She is currently co-editing an anthology on film and disability.

Read at W2 Storyeum Saturday, June 12, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Meredith Quartermain's most recent book, Nightmarker (NeWest), explores the city as animal behavior, museum and dream of modernity. Nightmarker was a finalist for the 2009 Vancouver Book Award. Another recent book, entitled Matter (BookThug), playfully riffs on Darwin’s Origin of Species and Roget’s Thesaurus. Vancouver Walking won the 2006 BC Book Award for Poetry. Recipes from the Red Planet will be published by BookThug in October 2010.

Matter 19: receiving form become a substance

become a marsh that’s not an island
a gulf or lake that’s not a plain or weary prairie –
matter divided into out and in,
that proper called in ponds
for mill-race

propel the blood to propagate
species work idea-urge
park, lawn, plat the land,
harbour the water-roads in tanks and sumps
descending with surgery from Specific Fluids

roots radical and plumes flowering
unwind velocity in widths and layers
matter has not returned to tundra

imagine a perceptual mobile
of small rigidities and links
to a common desert,
a common found impossible, a quaggy wild
around Man’s islands of sense
imagine these aisles to eyelets archipelago –
to inlets, friths, mouths, lagoons’ capillary tubes
of ingenuity, magnetic, electric
with liquid, moss and slush.

And shush. Here’s skin for water beetles
scamper on liquid windsocks minuet, the more it’s stretched
the more it’s mercury news pulling repelling
a kind of laughter, and quicksilver grass.

Read at W2 Storyeum Sunday, June 06, 2010
CHARLES OLSON CENTENARY CONFERENCE CLOSING PARTY

One hundred years after his birth, and fifty years after The New American Poetry anthology transformed the landscape of contemporary poetry, Charles Olson, arguably one of the most influential figures in twentieth century literature, remains a puzzlingly marginalized figure. As Ben Friedlander writes in Olson’s Collected Prose, it is “as if the unread Olson were the necessary ¾ submerged berg making possible the ¼ ice floe.” In the spirit of bringing Olson back into the polis—and delving into the “¾ submerged” portion of this “maximal” figure—the Charles Olson Centenary Conference seeks new readings of Olson’s poetry and poetics.

This poetry reading is the closing party for the Charles Olson Centenary Conference.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
guests not registered nor participating in the conference are encouraged to attend

full conference schedule may be found here:
http://olsonconference.com/

The long poem Drafts, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, begun in 1986, is collected in several book-length installments from Wesleyan and Salt Publishing, most recently in Pitch: Drafts 77-95 from Salt Publishing, 2010. Other books are Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnumbered: Précis (2004), all from Salt Publishing, as well as in Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan U.P., 2001). The Collage Poems of Drafts is forthcoming from Salt in 2010. She has written a number of critical books, among them Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (2006), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990/2006), Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (2001).

“You will have,” I was told or said, “to share
the guest room, as a crowd of people
is already there,” and I lay her down to rest with them.
“There are dancers and readers and those who
would not be satisfied, and there you will go to school,
a clandestine girls’ school, and with you are
people you once knew and some are dead.
Attend them through the many tales and songs
that each might offer others or invent.
The room is small, so work it out.
They will wait for you as you for them
with yes and no, with back and forth,
the here and there, the then and now,
their modes of folding and their modes of caring.”

from Draft 98: Canzone

Steven Farmer is a southern California native transplanted to the San Francisco bay area in the early '80's, where the seeds of his antipoetry sprouted in the Newtonic (Huey) soil of north Oakland. Educated/uneducated at UCSD and later at Sonoma State U (MA English under David Bromige), he also spent a few years in Seattle in the early '90s, where he opened a restaurant's kitchen ops (Coastal Kitchen), and first encountered the KSW scene during a weekend jaunt to Vancouver. He's worked in the IT industry for the last 10 years, at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Thrilled to be back for a brief visit, he's bringing his new book Glowball (theenk Books, NY, 2010). Other books include Coracle, Tone Ward, World of Shields, Standing Water, and Medieval, with criticism and book reviews appearing in Crayon, Third Factory/Notes to Poetry, Poetics Journal and elsewhere. Recent work appearing soon on Carlos Soto Roman's Elective Affinities website.

"Is the word "glow" now permanently ominous? What is the future of aesthetic enchantment in the society of the spectacle? In a book where poems become exploding dandelion heads of the spreadsheet and situation room, Steve Farmer radically estranges us from our present as if it were the future’s past. Glowball est a praeclarus quod perago libri." -- Sianne Ngai.

Jason Christie is the author of Canada Post (Snare 2005) and i-ROBOT (Tesseract/Edge 2006). He also co edited Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury 2005). He has recently completed a series of prose poems set in a forest that deal with group dynamics and language. At present he is working on a long poem called The Actor that responds to the pressure of social media.

*

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Define: puce
Define: chartreuse
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Method not found.
Fulltime actor needed.

{J1H320724 = FAULTY}
Mush.Please do not
Contact the original
Poster of this ad.
Start 1:42
You work for me now

Netwerk Connection, Wizard
Actor says: invite me
To your text festival.

- from "The Actor"

The perfervidly anti-capitalist, godless, internationalist son of well-known language-artist maestro David Daniels, Chris Daniels was born in NYC in 1956. He has lived and worked in San Francisco Bay Area since 1980. His books include translations of The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa and The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa, vol. 2 (both published by Shearsman Books; vol. 1 of Campos is forthcoming); On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids by Josely Vianna Baptista (Manifest Press); and an ongoing, fascicular anthology of Lusophone poetry, self-published and distributed as exceedingly modest chapbooks.

ANTIPHON TO SLAVE OWNERS

Brain-dead Surplus! usurping Personifications!
Afloat in Capital’s Nirvana — malign
Anarchic Void —, you featureless Emanations
Of the most pathetic Fallacy — your Anodyne! —
Counsel Immigration or Emigration,
Those rusty Nails pounded into poor
Hands and Feet when Exploitation hoar
Past-ripens — fruit of your caitiff Desperation!

If the Abode is Hallucination, the Nails are real:
One day we’ll castrate you proud, pampered Apis
Bulls and lead your sacred Kine and feckless Veal
Off to Slaughter.
We shall answer your Bellow — the demagogic
Self-Defense you spiel —
With sad Laughter,
For though your mighty Towers touch the Stars,
These glorious Achievements have e’er been ours!

+*+*+

David Abel is a poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist, as well as an editor, bookseller, and curator/organizer, who moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1997, after tenures in New York City and Albuquerque (where he established the Bridge Bookshop and Passages Bookshop & Gallery, respectively). In Portland, he collaborates with many artists and organizations on literary, music, film, theater, and intermedia projects. He is a founding member of the Spare Room reading series ( www.flim.com/spareroom ), now in its ninth year, and the author of various chapbooks and artist’s books, most recently Commonly (airfoil), Thirty-Two Echoes for mARKO Whens (Envelope), While You Were In (disposable books), and Twenty (Crane’s Bill Books).

from "Sweep"

1440

The overwhelming majority of ordinary Zimbabweans
The Duke of Connaught’s Own Drill Hall
Everything we know about whisky in a thimble
In the post-cadential twilight
Of the closing of the functional field
The old Heather was better

The old heather
Was better

Did you mean faun ?
Did you mean officer ?

1493

My other
bumper sticker
is in Telugu

Didn’t you
get my
text?

Read at W2 Storyeum Sunday, May 09, 2010
Christian will give a talk about his ongoing project The Xenotext Experiment.

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. The Utne Reader has recently included Bök in its list of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Bök teaches English at the University of Calgary.

The Xenotext Experiment is an artistic exercise being undertaken by the poet who is proposing to create an example of “living poetry.” Bök plans to generate a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon he hopes to use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space). He is composing this poem in such a way that, when translated into the gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets “expressed” by the organism, which, in response to the inserted, genetic material, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein—a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text. He is, in effect, striving to engineer a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also a useable machine for writing a poem—a poem that can literally survive forever….

Chris Nealon will give a talk from his forthcoming book The Matter of Capital, on poetry and spectacle in late-late-Capitalism. The talk will be followed with a participatory group discussion moderated by Donato Mancini and Roger Farr.

The Matter of Capital argues that the workings of capitalism have been a central concern for avant-garde and experimental poetry in English from the interwar years down to today, and that this concern is worked out in a kind of content – a “matter” – that formalist readings of this poetry have consistently overlooked. The book focuses on how, confronted with the capitalist capture of aesthetic experience, twentieth-century poetry makes recourse to its own history as a textual form, and to its long intimacy with rhetoric, to generate models for protecting poetry from the punctual catastrophes and incremental crises capital creates. This allows me to suggest that to historicize poetry is partly to track its own attempts to determine what kind of textuality, and what kind of rhetoric, poetry is. It also allows me to re-think Marxist accounts of what it means to historicize literature – a project that, since Fredric Jameson, has largely relied on readings of the novel, and on a notion of texts as inert objects to be reactivated by critics. The book’s chapters focus on Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden; on John Ashbery; on Jack Spicer and the Language movement; and on two contemporary poets, Kevin Davies and Claudia Rankine.

Hannah Calder was born in England, and grew up there and in British Columbia. She completed two English degrees at SFU: a BA in 1998 and an MA in 2004. She has lived and worked in the US, South Korea and Spain. Currently, she works part time as a translator, but spends most of her time taking care of her four month old daughter, Lola. Her first poetic novel is More House (New Star 2009). She is in the planning stages for a second novel, inspired by the art of schizophrenic patients in early 20th century Germany.

Chris Nealon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Emotion Before Stonewall (Duke UP, 2001), and two books of poems: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), and Plummet (Edge Books, 2009). He is currently completing a book of criticism called The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Spectacle in the American Century.

***

Poem (I know prose ... )

I know prose is a mighty instrument but still I feel that plein-air lyric need to
capture horses moving

Surplus of capital / economy tanks / you get called a faggot more

On red seats all around me children learn distraction and heckle each other in
aff ordable new media

“Th is cold world we’re in is full of fresh champagne”

Un snack sólo para mí

When I was a child I thought, In Homeric fashion I will speak to each of you in
turn while laying you low

Now I stick to fragments transmissible, perdurable and the
crossword beauty you can make from them

To all the young Apollos: I’m aiming for the intersection of your swagger and
your ashes

Not that I don’t get it: looking eagerly off ends the lords of scarcity

But check those dactyls, fabulous
It’s just too hard to live as though there weren’t some other kind of surplus

To the masters of prose: Greetings!

I will die before I worship your god

- Chris Nealon, from Plummet

***

Trip. Get up. Trip. Get up. I grab my sister’s hand. I am her safety net. With me she looks like she is wearing a veil, is hidden from all eyes. Occasionally I peek under the net and grin at her. We run our hands over the wobbling privet hedge, through the scent of nostalgia, of pre-summer, of evenings free to run in the lanes with our dog. Free too. Shitting in people’s gardens. Springing up against my screeching at the fragile hips of old women. I control that animal. I hold her jaw together with my strong hand. Whip her with a negligible willow strand. She jumps again. Free. Happy.

The place he wants me to start at is a good one. There’s nothing here to cry about, except perhaps the crow that is pecking at my sister’s net, trying to get at her eyes, to take away our pleasure. I throw a rock at it. It caws off, back to the nests of when I was only seven years old and always afraid. But not now. Now, here, outside the butcher’s. Here I am free and safe and fiercely protective. The bad omens are always one step ahead of me. I chase them. They fly, laughing, under the hedge, up the tree, over the tops of the houses, and off, out of my life. Good.

The doctor is not convinced. ‘Dig! Dig deeper.’

But my time is up.

There will be a story, greased evenly from start to finish, made of words that have been selected like tomatoes — small, hard, sweet, and a little tight. It has never been my worry that I will not be able to tell a good story or walk a straight line.

- Hannah Calder, from More House

Read at 3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts Saturday, April 17, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: This reading and critical workshop are part of an ongoing series that will run for the equivalent of one academic year, with one writer a month presenting a reading one evening and participating in a workshop, which will address the theme, the following day. Past and upcoming dates appear on the series page.

The critical workshops will address the questions raised in the series abstract. Writers will talk about their own work and other works in relation to these questions. Participants are invited to read the texts listed at the end of the abstract and bring their own work or questions to add to the dialogue.

A further description of Lacan’s four discourses will be available for those attending the workshop. If you have any further questions about the theme or reading material, feel free to contact Nancy by email: Gillespie.nancy@googlemail.com.

***Pre-registration for workshop is required for our numbers and so we can send you materials ahead of time. Please e-mail gillespie.nancy@googlemail.com***

This series is organized by Nancy Gillespie and Nikki Reimer. Nancy completed her PhD on Lacanian subjectivity and feminist poetics at the University of Sussex UK in 2008. She has been a colleague of the London Society of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis for six years, and is pursuing her analysis training with WAP in Paris, as well as returning to her own poetics as a new member of KSW. Nikki Reimer is a poet and has been a member of KSW since 2005-6 and January 2009 to present.

Nancy Gillespie will join Jeff Derksen for this presentation.

Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing, and worked as an editor of Writing magazine. His work has been anthologized in East of Main and Verse: Postmodern Poetry and Language Writing.

As an editor, Derksen also organized “Disgust and Overdetermination: a poetics issue,” for Open Letter and “Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment” for West Coast Line. Derksen’s poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism and text have been published in Europe and North America.

Formerly a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, he currently works in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He collaborates on visual art and research projects (focusing on urban issues) with the research collective Urban Subjects.

Derksen’s Down Time won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award at the BC Book Prizes. A selection from Dwell—“Host Nation, Host Society”—was nominated for inclusion in The Gertrude Stein Anthology of Innovative North American Poetry: 1993.

Read at 3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts Friday, April 16, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

from The Vestiges

“I found a flaw

in the model

of how the world works”
(Greenspan)

Thought that cities
were the keg

that would reveal
what relations

what public histories
lay under
the paving stones

(which were arbitrary
for throwing

“of what gets empowered
and
what
gets
contained”

the city digs itself out
as others dig
themselves in

another
use for nature

music, acoustic

that late sixties
ringing

“Where Evil Grows”

will it bring, will it
occupy
the libraries

an access
to a language

“only the image of a voice:”

through a soft coup

reduced to admiring his ruthlessness

so present
as to decompress

“shattered”
students shake blankets
from the library windows

taped up for the teargas canisters
to come

“Spent a week in a dusty library
Waiting for some words to jump at me”

“You do, you do…”

Read at 3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts Saturday, April 10, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Roger Farr is the author of SURPLUS (Line Books, 2006), a co-author of the collaborative research project N 49 19. 47 - W 123 8.11 (Recomposition, 2008), and editor of the sporadically published journal PARSER: New Poetry and Poetics. Sections from two forthcoming books, MEANS and IKMQ, have or will appear in Canadian Literature, Dandelion, Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (New Star, 2010), Matrix, The Poetic Front, Politics is Not a Banana, PRECIPICe, and West Coast Line. Recent critical writing on autonomous social movements, tactical media, childhood, and/or the avant-garde appears in Anarchist Studies, The Postanarchism Reader (Pluto, 2010), Rad Dad, and Social Anarchism. In Fall 2010, Autonomedia will publish an English translation of Alice Becker-Ho’s The Essence of Jargon, on the language of the dangerous classes; his critical introduction to this book will form the basis for his talk at the Social Bond series.

Read at 3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts Friday, April 09, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

This reading and critical workshop are part of an ongoing series that will run for the equivalent of one academic year, with one writer a month presenting a reading one evening and participating in a workshop, which will address the theme below, the following day. Watch the main page of the KSW website for upcoming dates.

The critical workshops will address the questions raised in the abstract below. Writers will talk about their own work and other works in relation to these questions. Participants are invited to read the texts listed at the end of the abstract and bring their own work or questions to add to the dialogue.

The theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject. These discourses consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is concerned with the limitation of the master's discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst's discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that appear to simply question the master and the university, and as a consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests that the Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social change. Can poetics operate like the analyst's discourse to create a different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these other discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider how we engage with and disseminate them?   

 A further description of Lacan’s four discourses will be available for workshop registrants.

Camille Martin, a Toronto poet and collage artist, is the author of Sonnets (Shearsman, 2010) and Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto: BookThug, 2007), in addition to several earlier chapbooks. Her work has been widely published in journals in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She has received numerous grants to further her writing, most recently from the Ontario Arts Council for work on a long poem based on her Acadian/Cajun heritage. She earned an MFA in Poetry at the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D. in English at Louisiana State University. Currently she teaches writing and literature at Ryerson University. She maintains a website at http://www.camillemartin.ca and a blog on literature and the arts at http://www.rogueembryo.wordpress.com.

Ray Hsu teaches creative writing at UBC. He has published over a hundred poems in over thirty-five literary journals internationally, including Action, Yes, Drunken Boat, and SOFTBLOW. While completing his PhD in English Literature, he taught for three years in a nearby prison, where he founded the award-winning Prison Writing Workshop. He is the author of Anthropy, which won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert award. His second book, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions.

Read at 3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts Saturday, March 20, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: Thematic Abstract

The theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject. These discourses consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is concerned with the limitation of the master's discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst's discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that appear to simply question the master and the university, and as a consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests that the Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social change. Can poetics operate like the analyst's discourse to create a different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these other discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider how we engage with and disseminate them?

- Nancy Gillespie

A further description of Lacan’s four discourses will be available for workshop registrants.

Read at 3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts Friday, March 19, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics is a reading and seminar series organised around Lacan's Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The series will run for the equivalent of one academic year, with one writer a month presenting a reading one evening and running a workshop/seminar, which will address the controlling themes, the following day.

This series will continue periodically through Summer 2010.

The critical workshops will address the questions raised in the abstract below. Writers will talk about their own work and other works in relation to these questions. Participants are invited to read the texts listed at the end of the abstract and bring their own work or questions to add to the dialogue.

Series organized by Nancy Gillespie and Nikki Reimer, with Nancy acting as the point person. Nancy completed her PhD on Lacanian subjectivity and poetics at the University of Sussex UK in 2008. She has been a colleague of the London Society of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis for six years, and will soon be pursuing her Lacanian training analysis in Paris.

Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure (Coach House 2010) is a polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conﬂict in Israel/Palestine ﬁrmly in its crosshairs. The collection samples a variety of source texts – Lone Soldier Foundation copy, ancient Hebrew texts, comments from internet trolls and (among others) an account of the first Israeli in space. It's an unsentimental look at one of the most complex ongoing conflicts of the past century. Zolf is the author of three previous poetry collections. Human Resources (2007) won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Masque (2004) was shortlisted for the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the title long poem from Her absence, this wanderer (1999) was a finalist in the CBC Literary Competition. She was the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine and has edited several books of poetry.

Read at W2 Perel Gallery Friday, March 12, 2010
launch party for the new issue of W: W2010

W2010 features poetry and fiction by Jonathon Wilcke, Nikki Reimer, Tony Power, Tomasz Michalak, Donato Mancini, Heather McDonald, Tiziana La Melia, Reg Johanson, Scott Inniss, Ray Hsu, Emily Fedoruk, Kim Duff, Cris Costa, Stephen Collis, Edward Byrne, Michael Barnholden, Anne Ahmad and Sonnet L'Abbé. Edited by Anne Ahmad, Stephen Collis, Kim Duff, Emily Fedoruk, Donato Mancini, Tomasz Michalak, and Tony Power.

W2010 is published both in a limited edition print run, and as a free pdf downloadable from the KSW website. The pdf will be available online on March 12.

ABOUT THE NEW W:

"W2010 announces a new formation—both for the magazine and the Kootenay School of Writing. KSW, the more venerable of the two, is 25 years old this fall; W is ten. A new collective structure is in place for the School: a cluster of semi-autonomous yet intersecting “pods” (or “cells” if you prefer a more radical conception), each with its own projects or “areas of influence” (readings / pedagogy / publication, etc). W2010 begins a new conception of the magazine as an annual: this first issue gathers work from the present collective (or perhaps we should now say collectives) written this year; future annual issues will be announced with a themed call, for which work will be gathered and published on-line over the course of the year (see below for the call for the next issue). We hope work will be written dialogically as an issue accumulates: an initial selection of material will be posted, and then responses / extensions / contestations /emendations, etc, as they come; at the close of a year/issue, a print run of at least a “selection” of the year’s material will ideally then be issued.

The work in W2010 might surprise some familiar with the magazine and the School. For starters, there is some fiction here. We are doing our cultural work at a time of unprecedented pressures, as the “long neoliberal moment” (to borrow Jeff Derksen’s phrase) grinds on, responding to the current market crisis not by a return to some sort of neo-Keynsean economics, but rather, with bailouts for the rich and amped up privatizations. Meanwhile the public sphere—already just a pool of faint light beneath one last sputtering streetlamp—seems set to finally wink out altogether. In Vancouver, this has a lot to do with the Olympics, its hundreds of new security cameras, its 1 billion dollar security budget, and its “safe assembly areas” (outside of which we can imagine the majority of the city as an “unsafe assembly zone”). Beside this we have the provincial government’s concerted efforts to privatize, expropriate, expel, and otherwise suppress a still-vital cultural sector. In such an environment, we feel it is essential to broaden and strengthen affinities, working towards something of a cultural front to face “a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse” (The Coming Insurrection 7). From deep in the collapse, we reach out." - Stephen Collis

Read at W2 Perel Gallery Sunday, March 07, 2010
to show, to give, to make it be there

Michael Turner is a Vancouver-based writer of fiction, criticism and song. His books include Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer's Poem and 8x10. As a collaborator, he has written scripts with Stan Douglas, co-authored public artworks with Geoffrey Farmer and composed with Andrea Young. Over the years, Turner has instigated in a numerous curatorial projects, including the Reading Railroad reading series, the Malcolm Lowry Room, film programmes at the Pacific Cinematheque, and most recently, the exhibition "to show, to give, to make it be there": Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver, 1954-1969 at SFU Gallery (Burnaby), which he will discuss on March 7th. Turner is this year's Ellen and Warren Tallman SFU Writer-in-Residence.

Michael Turner will be giving a curatorial talk and slide presentation about the show "to show, to give, to make it be there" of Vancouver art in the 1960s. If we can get the mimeograph machine working, the talk will conclude with a hands-on broadside editioning of a new poem by Maxine Gadd.

Michael Barnholden presents a talk and slideshow based on his new book Circumstances Alter Photographs: Captain James Peters' Reports from the War of 1885.

Circumstances publishes for the first time together the works of James Peters, who took the world's first combat photographs during the North-West Rebellion and took the first photograph of Louis Riel as a prisoner of the Canadian Army on May 26, 1885. Circumstances Alter Photographs presents 82 photographs documenting events from the Battle of Fish Creek through the Battle of Batoche to the pursuit of Native leaders ending at Loon Lake. A forgotten view on a key event in Canadian history, the book also presents Peters' war correspondence and an all-new essay by Michael Barnholden situating the photographs as art and document.

Michael Barnholden lives and works in the Asthma Flats neighbourhood of Vancouver. Publishes LINEbooks, edits West Coast Line, teaches at Emily Carr U. Recent books include Circumstances Alter Photographs (Talonbooks 2009), Gabriel Dumont Speaks (new translation Talonbooks 2009), Street Stories: 100 Years of Homelessness (Anvil 2007), Reading the Riot Act: A Brief History of Riots in Vancouver (Anvil 2005), Works (Tsunami 1999) and Writing Class: The KSW Anthology (New Star 1995.)

Read at Rhizome Café Thursday, February 25, 2010
Co-produced with the ON EDGE series

* the poetics of space: feminist writers in dialogue

Read at The Candahar Bar Monday, February 22, 2010
Co-Produced with The Candahar Bar.

131.
a new act
begins
in the rushed click
after math

132.
Fatal lies, tight and bright
this becoming of things
that refuse us

and of my mind
the metal
veers forward

133.
o from what powre
this art to kill

this is a
a war to kill
hating, hate
rinsed of life

134.
art transcends
of mind taught
metal minds

135.
Still Shatner
smiles
into the future

136.
What powre is
science art giving?

No beast.
No centre.
No blood.

[from The Others Raisd in Me, 150 re-writes of Shakespeare's sonnet #150]

Gregory Betts is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher originally from Vancouver and Toronto. He is the author of If Language (2005), Haikube (2006), and The Others Raisd in Me (2009) as well as numerous chapbooks and various bits of ephemera. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, the United States, and four other countries. He has edited editions of poetry by W.W. E. Ross, Raymond Knister and Lawren Harris and, most recently, a critical edition of selected stories, essays and manifestos by Bertram Brooker, Canada's first avant-gardist. He is the co-editor of PRECIPICe literary magazine, and curates the Grey Borders Reading Series. He lives in St. Catharines where he teaches Canadian and Avant-Garde literature at Brock University. For more, see http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/betts/

George Bowering was the founding Poet Laureate of Canada and the author many books such as the novel Burning Water and long poem Kerrisdale Elegies. He’s also the author of Fulgencio. *** "What a necessary poem this is, as USAmericans look for a new President and Cubans without Castro try to keep what they have so hard-won. The grotesque dead hand of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and the deadening grasp of the United Fruit Company, tyrannies of the past right here right now, wrong now, wrong always, implacably here always, the raw sugar of greed lurking beneath the poem’s flat matter-of-fact absurdity, grim comedy’s helpless outrage skittering over monstrous abuse of capital power. Compelling writing, the links between poetry and the political here inescapable. Bowering at his best." - Peter Quartermain

Larissa Lai is the author of Automaton Biographies, the acclaimed novels Salt Fish Girl and When Fox is A Thousand, and also Eggs in the Basement. *** "Procedure-in-a-round, Eggs in the Basement ticks the metronome of everyday diction through looped words and known notions. Text, repeated, collides and colludes meaning, lyric echoic, fierce. Disjunctive narrative swallows its own tail and births eggs into itself. Dim the light and consume immediately". - a.rawlings *** "Eggs in the Basement is a brilliant instance of the contrapuntal improvisation that can occur between writing and thinking. In this long poem Larissa Lai develops these linguistic clefts with such acute awareness and intelligence that each poetic shift triggers a new and surprising message, relentless in an absorption of the cascade of signals at the threshold of potential meaning". - Jeff Derksen

Aaron Peck is the author of the novel The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, and several chapbooks, and also Crepuscule on Mission Street. *** "With all the seductive charm of well-told gossip, this unfolding conversation draws us deep into the mysteries of the current day — money, art, fakery, friendship — even as it skates across the great separating distances of living, a jet plane making serial hops in the course of a long circuitous day. This is magical, compact writing that nevertheless exudes the marvelous, deluded spaciousness and ease of the North American west coast". - Matthew Stadler

Jacqueline Turner is the author of Into the fold, Careful, and Seven Into Even, and also Nomados’s most recent and 33rd publication, The Ends of the Earth. *** "Jacqueline Turner’s work has long impressed with its fine wit and crisp sound textures. She has now gone to the ends of the earth. There, on the furthest extremity, midst the debris of a shipwrecked contemporary world, she writes mash notes to the social heart of language where you/we will either sink or swim—together and alone. “Tantalizing by degrees of omission,” these tiny apertures in the possible lead us towards the minimal light. You/we will fall in love with what is found there, or else lose our way home again". - Steve Collis *** "Turner’s The Ends of the Earth imagines natural erosions and erasures as acceptable and probable at the same time as it refutes a culture of catastrophism and a poetics of evacuation, wherein the subject atomizes away from the densities of daily experience. In this both poignant and wry meditation on the social, addresses are made to requisite shifts of grammar, both in terms of relational enunciations that must be honed and the subject’s fervent readiness for lived and imagined translocations." - Margaret Christakos.