Set list

For those of you who like to read along, I'll be reading the following poems at tomorrow's bilingual edition of the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Series:

From Hump:

Seven months: ultrasound introductions

Eight months: the gathering

A year in: clippings

*

From Our boy:

The aches of a candy butcher, ca. 1860

A stick of phosphorus

*

Primipara

Primipare

This will be the first time I read from Our boy, my manuscript of poems about Thomas Alva Edison. Which I sometimes also call Edisonia.

I'm strangely elated to try on the poems in public. And nervous, especially knowing I'll be reading alongside Bertrand Nayet and Dennis Cooley. Who are both extraordinarily kind...but even so.

I'm also v. excited to hear poet/translator Charles Leblanc read his translation of my poem Primipara.

Which might just be the last pregnancy and mothering poem I write for a little bit...and the only one that probably merits an apology.

(Writer and Aqua co-worker Jay Diaz and his wife Annette are the parents of twin girls. I saw Annette on the playground late in her pregnancy...and then wrote this poem. A few days later, she made twins and I made this poem.)

I'll also be giving out more of the broadsheets Julia Michaud of Instant Noodles created from three poems (Fall back: fallen, Seven months: the navel gaze, and Pre-conception)in Hump.

Yay! Fun!

Primipare

Par Ariel Gordon
Traduction de Charles Leblanc

« [Une femme] qui accouche pour la première fois, qui a un petit, un enfant vivant… » Le Petit Robert

Si j’avais eu des jumeaux, j’en aurais mangé un.

Si j’avais eu des jumeaux, j’aurais arboré
un sourire béat. « Merci, mais non. »
Et j’en aurais retourné bien sagement au moins un.

Si j’avais eu des jumeaux, je les aurais glissés
sous mes bras comme des ballons de football
ou de petites grenades parfaites
qui ciblent mes seins : fuck.

Si j’avais eu des jumeaux, je n’aurais rien dit.

* * *

Thursday, January 27/11 7pm
Aqua Books

Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Series
Poet Bertrand Nayet, with Ariel Gordon and Dennis Cooley

Once a year, Aqua Books parts the Red River and brings together three great Manitoba poets from both official languages.

Join us as our chosen three collaborate with top translators Mark Stout and Charles Leblanc, to bring you never-before-seen (or heard) works in French and English.

LANGUAGE WARNING: You might actually like it both ways.

Hands on: David Jón Fuller, take two

Hands on: David Jón Fuller

* * *

I told David he had to figure out a pose for his hands portrait.

So he took me someplace dark. And raised his hands.

Which is fitting if you know David at all and/or have read or heard him read from his manuscript, Bark at the Moon.

Which is a novel set in Winnipeg in the 1980s...and features preppy vampires and headbanging werewolves who attend Flipside and prom.

* * *

David Jón Fuller, the Aqua Books Emerging Writer-in-Residence for January, was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As an actor he has been in multiple held-over plays at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, and performed with two orchestras, including excerpts from Shakespeare for the world-renowned Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra before an audience of 1,600. In addition to writing hundreds of newspaper articles, he has had fiction published online in The Harrow and in the bestselling chapbook anthology Ten Best Pages. He’s been the editor of North America’s oldest surviving ethnic newspaper, Lögbgerg-Heimskringla, and currently works as a copy editor for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Paris at night, 1899

So I mostly forgot that winning the John Hirsch Award for most Promising Manitoba Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards last spring meant that I will be a featured reader at Prairie Fire's annual Speaking Volumes dinner.

Which this year is slated for Saturday May 7.

For those of you not familiar with this Winnipeg lit classic, it's a benefit that "supports Prairie Fire's student practicum program through which they hire students for hands-on internships."

But here's my favourite part: "The evening starts with cocktails and voyageur-style hatchet throwing. Dinner will be followed by readings by our special guests."

So, basically, diners will be drunk and full of hand-to-hand adrenalin before they hear me read. Which should help.

As long as I am not ALSO drunk and full of hand-to-hand adrenalin...

It also means that my work will be featured in the spring issue of Prairie Fire.

I'm excited to see which sparkly writer will be the other featured reader. Last year, for instance, it was Michael Van Rooy (Hirsch winner) and Joan Thomas (the aforementioned sparkly writer).

I'm also excited to see some of my beloved Edisonia in print, but also nervous, as it still feels like unruly (scary) mess to me.

Which brings me to the image I'm using with this post, which is of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Thomas Edison had a massive display at the Exposition and met up there with his errant eldest daughter Dot. Which figures into the poems, don't you know...

(For more images from the Exposition Universelle, see the Brooklyn Museum's on-line archive...)

Fun! And EEEEEEEEK!

Panoramic living room

* * *

So, after almost a year of compartmentalizing my writing life into launching and touring and talking about Hump, I've been mostly just reading of late.

Said reading has included many examples of science-y bio-lit, Lyon's The Golden Mean and Caple's The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg) are the most recent, and even a few (dearly beloved) random reads.

The latter is pure pleasure. The former is research and pleasure co-mingled.

And in the interest of trying to sneak back into my (sadly neglected) ms. on American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, I've even decided that I will write an alphabet for each of the three characters that make up the ms.

Dot gets a silent alphabet, that I know. But I'm still thinking on how to shape the other two. Which I suppose is the part of the pleasure of doing it...

The exercize comes courtesy of Lisa Pasold via Perry Grosshans, who longtime readers will recognize as a member of the Wolseley Writing Group with me.

Thanks to M for the pano. And the (goddamn) support!

Round three!

Books are containers for ideas and flourishes of language. But they're also objects, which can be lost or found or damaged.

(My favourite form of book-damage is when books are dropped in the bath and go all wavey, the pages suddenly not able to contain both ideas AND water...)

I think it's strange and funny how The Sentimentalists in particular keeps drifting in and out of my life.

First, I was supposed to advocate for Joanna Skibsrud's debut at a local Giller Gala from one of the Gaspereau originals. The press told the bookstore hosting the event that it would "very definitely be there tomorrow" on several different occasions.

The bookstore dutifully told me that the book would "very definitely be there tomorrow" on several different occasions.

I read the book in PDF format the day before/the day of the gala. And so made several bad jokes in a row instead of offering any kind of trenchant analysis of the book.

When I was next at Aqua Books, which passes for my place of work, I got an email from a writer who'd adjudicated a prize that The Sentimentalists had been entered in.

Saying that it had been donated to the store along with the rest of the masses of books she didn't want to keep MONTHS ago.

And so had been on the shelf this whole time.

Also, since she hadn't actually meant to donate that one, could she have it back?

Then, this past week, my sister emailed me and mentioned, off-handedly, that she had taken up active reading again (she has a toddler, get it?) and had bought The Sentimentalists at Costco and was almost done and did I want it...

This being the new Douglas & McIntyre edition, of course. And I recognized an opportunity.

You see, several months ago, I came to the conclusion that all my/our books would not fit in the much-reduced space we had for bookshelves in our new-ish house, and culled several boxes' worth.

This was surprisingly painless. Especially given the fact that I had previously gritted my teeth at the prospect of getting rid of books AT ALL. (I'm a writer! Writers are meant to have heaps of books!)

We'd gotten rid of most of the culls, but one box had come to rest at the top of the stairs and hadn't moved for a few weeks. So I hauled it downstairs onto the (screened) front porch, where it got snowed on a little bit. (Ahem.)

And then, the next day, traded my sister an ENTIRE box of Can-lit classics for a single copy of The Sentimentalists. Except I didn't tell her we were trading. I just hauled the box into her entryway and plunked it down.

Strangely, I didn't want to rifle through and see what I was gifting her with. Doubles of beloved books, probably. Books I'd bought but never read and now seemed dubious about reading, most likely.

So now The Sentimentalists sits on a little table outside my bedroom. Where water glasses go before they get taken downstairs. Where books I've read or am dubious about reading go before making their way upstairs to my office or into the pile next to my bed...or, I suppose, into a new box of culls.

I haven't decided if I'm going to re-read The Sentimentalists. But I like the journey I've taken and not-taken with this book, so I think I'll keep it.