The Jane Day Reader: WACky

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

WACky

I got my mail held while on vacation, and was looking forward to the big stack of letters and magazines as much as I was my bed...

Especially as I knew that news of my application to the Winnipeg Arts Council for funds to create a libretto for a chamber opera by David Raphael Scott would be in it.

Of course, because I sent M to get the mail held instead of doing it myself, the mail only re-started today instead of being there when we woke up yesterday.

(Did I mention that our flight from Las Vegas arrived at 5:30 am? And that Aa only fell asleep a half hour out of Winnipeg, after two and a half hours of speechifying in a declarative voice?)

In any event, the mail was my only consolation after a day that included a feverish baby, a chilly office, and a novel that ended too soon (I finished Pearl Luke's Burning Ground at lunch; I enjoyed it but wished it was bit more...well, fleshy. As in a third longer. But at least I got to read something that I didn't have to analyze, which in itself was nifty...).

The heap was wrapped in about a dozen thick rubber bands, some of which had snapped in the cold. But there it was, my letter from WAC.

Foolish me, I'd been patiently waiting - even when I went to pick up my supplementary materials, the score from my last collaboration with David Raphael Scott, at lunch today, I didn't ask WAC staff if the list was out - when I could have gotten the news last week from the WAC website, if I'd thought to check!

Oh well. At least I was among the happy 36 per cent that got their funding wishes fulfilled...

It hardly needs saying, but: Yay!

(Also very exciting, and opened second, was a wonderful WONDERFUL letter from Prince George poet Gillian Wigmore...)

5 comments:

Polly said...: YAY! Congratulamatations!

Spend it wisely and well. And please let us know when the piece is being performed!; 4:23 am, February 14, 2008
Brenda Schmidt said...: Yay! Congratulations, A!; 10:08 am, February 14, 2008
Ariel Gordon said...: Thanks, B&P.

I'm looking forward to the project getting into high gear, which is an appropriate image, given that the chamber opera's focus is the relationship between Thomas Edison and his daughter Dot.; 2:43 pm, February 14, 2008
Anonymous said...: Congrats! I can hardly wait for the outcome!; 9:22 pm, February 14, 2008
BionicPerry said...: Congrats as well. No doubt you would have got it, actually (I'm an opto that way).
Very cool also to read your vacation stuff, and lovely pictures as usual. I expect a nature album with poetry very soon (don't keep me waiting!!); 7:50 am, February 15, 2008

Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)