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David J. Paul -- Our June 5th, End-of-Season, Featured Poet

5/31/2013

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 The first season of London Open Mic Poetry Night comes to a close on June 5th, 2013. David J. Paul will be the featured poet.

David has two chapbooks: Locomotive and Tender (Jamie Hamilton’s Pikadilly  Press, 1977) and Spilling the Beans (Clarke Leverette’s Killaly Press, 1979). His one full-length book, Trapped Moonlight, was published in 2005 by Sheila Martindale and South Western Ontario Poetry.

On the fifth of June, David hopes to read more than a baker’s dozen’s worth of poems about dogs, birds, news events, writers and desire—a little Eros and Thanatos at Mykonos.

(The interviewer is D`vorah Elias, who was our featured poet on Feb. 6th, 2013.)

DE:      How old were you when you first started writing poetry and what was the impetus for that?

DJP:      My first poem, a short descriptive piece about the dented metal garbage cans that I put out in front of my parents’ house in Kitchener, was written when I was 17. I must have felt some kinship with them; I saw character in them; I gave them names.

DE:      What poets have influenced you the most over the course of your writing career? Do you have any favourites?

DJP:      Raymond Souster’s Ten Elephants on Yonge Street was discovered in the Kitchener Public Library. I loved that book. I have a copy of it now. Other influences would be Earle Birney, the haiku poets, William Carlos Williams, the concrete poets, the Imagists, Christopher Reid and Craig Raine, and many Canadians, Al Purdy and Don McKay foremost among them.

DE:      Your first love seems to have been science. What led you to move more into English literature as a professional pursuit?

DJP:      I started out in Natural Sciences at  Western, but after struggling with Physics and Chemistry, I chose English as my major. Ironically, it was my lowest mark. I was happier with the study of language because I’d written a journal through most of my high school years. Blame that on my English grandmothers who used to send me Lett’s Schoolboy Diaries every Christmas.

DE:      Have you travelled much during your lifetime? If so, have any of those different journeys influenced your poetry? Is there any particular type of imagery that comes back to you again and again and is used in
your poems?

DJP:      I love England. I was born there and I have been over there nine times. When I’m in England, ideas for poems come to me. Poems are my inner photographs. As far as imagery is concerned, I do recall a fixation with the railway and the loneliness inherent in the sound of the locomotive’s horn. There might be some animal imagery in my poetry, but other than that vague perception, someone else is going to have to point out the imagery I use.

DE:      What have been the biggest influences on your poetry through the course of your life?

DJP:      Graduate school at the University of Waterloo, the reading of poetry (I have hundreds of books of poetry) and a certain unnamed London poetry group that I used to be a member of.

DE:      How do you think your poetry has evolved during your writing career and what has especially influenced that evolution?

DJP:      I don’t know if I’ve had a writing career. I write because I have to, because I want to, because it’s a record of my thought. It calls me and I answer. My poetry has grown in length from the short lyric to the longer lyric which is more focused on rhythm and shape. The concrete possibilities of a poem interest me. Upsetting items in the newspaper can sometimes generate poems: the bombings in London, England; the earthquakes in Turkey and Haiti; the senseless shooting of Jane Creba in Toronto. Then there are other subjects: birds, dogs, nature, desire, love and death.

DE:      I know that you worked as a teacher for many years. How did your students influence your creative writing? I also know that you love your dog and many poems feature your dog. Can you tell me a little bit more about that special relationship?

DJP:      I taught high school English for thirty years and I’d sit down in a spare student desk and write my journal along with my students. I loved that—but they had to be quiet. And sometimes I’d write a poem about an incident in the school, a bad class or a particular student who was a misfit, a survivor—a weed.

Bev and I have looked after two black Labrador retrievers. The first one, Bronte, was big and stoic; the second one, Jackie, is smaller and more energetic. Jackie gets me out of the house, into the neighbourhood and down into the river valley where she sniffs around and eats grass--dog salad. I look for birds or I write a poem in my head. The challenge there is to remember what I said to myself and to write the lines down on paper soon after we arrive home.

DE:      What is the future for you in terms of poetry?

DJP:      I just want to keep on writing poems. Ambition and organization are not strong with me and so I do not send poems out to litmags anymore. Of course, I wish I did, but wishes are not actions. Idea: a book containing 100 poems?

DE:      I have a question about your poem: Someone Went Before. Obviously this poem was inspired by a walk in the snow but would you please share a little bit more about its inspiration? I think it's a lovely poem. I'm wondering how you came to write it, though.

DJP:     I wrote the poem “Someone Went Before” many years ago, a result of realizing I owed someone for helping me make my way across a schoolyard of deep snow. But I also realized I owed thousands of unknown people for all the things I have. We all do. The expression “a self-made man” always makes me laugh—as if such a man had no mother, no culture, no language and no luck. I thought of other titles for the poem, “Inheritance” and “Democracy”, but I wanted to keep the title closer to the original experience. Someone had gone before--and maybe there’s a little elegy in that as well.  

Read Four Poems by David J. Paul

(Interviewer D’vorah Elias was the featured poet at London Open Mic Poetry Night’s Feb. 6th, 2013 event. 
See Interview with D’vorah Elias
See Seven Poems by D’vorah Elias
 
The Event

WHERE: Mykonos Restaurant terrace, 572 Adelaide St. N., London. Cover is by donation. Overflow parking available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

LIVE MUSIC: will open the event at 6:30, featuring local musician/vocalist Dennis Siren.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, there will be about 1.5 hours of open mic, ending at 9:00 pm. Each poet  has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry - but time yourself at home). Names are selected at random.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of
which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books. Donations are our only source of income.

Second Season: begins Sept. 4th, featuring Frank Beltrano, and continues Oct. 2nd with Jan Figurski. (In June I will start organizing further into the second season, after a short break to catch my breath.)


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Frank Davey's big jump from editing to blogging

5/1/2013

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The recent launch of 'Frank Davey Blog', hosted by London Open Mic Poetry Night, comes just before he closes the door, this fall, on his very long-running and highly influential poetics journal 'Open Letter'.   Consequently, the blog will not be just a minor writing outlet for this Canadian literary icon, but represents a major shift in direction from editor/publisher to  blog writer. 

What does this change mean to Davey, and what could it mean to the Canadian poetry scene? In an email interview for London Open Mic Poetry Night, we pressed for hints. 

The interviewer is Stan Burfield, organizer of London Open Mic Poetry NIght.

BURFIELD:     Your long editorship of the influential poetics journal ‘Open Letter’, which you began in 1965, is coming to a close with the final issue, the Fall 2013 issue entitled ‘THE SPIRIT OF TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AVANT-GARDE WRITING,’ on the mystical in Canadian avant-garde writing, to be published this coming November. Is it possible to give in a short answer some sense of the accomplishments of ‘Open Letter’ in its entirety, and its effects on Canadian literature?

FD:      Open Letter began from my desire to rekindle a dialogue about poetics among some of the earlyTish editors -- myself, Bowering, Dawson, and Wah. When I arrived in Toronto in 1970 I joined with Victor Coleman of Coach House Press to make the journal also serve the needs of emerging experimental/research writers such as Coleman, Matt Cohen, David McFadden, Daphne Marlatt, and Gwendolyn MacEwen to have their work discussed and reviewed. Shortly after that bpNichol and Steve McCaffery joined the editorial board dialogues, and Barbara Godard began contributing translations of poetry and essays by young avant-garde Quebec writers such as Nicole Brossard and Victor-Levy Beaulieu, work that then had an impact on earlier Open Letter participants Wah and Bowering. So at this point Open Letter was succeeding in giving high-profile attention to new innovative writers whose work might  have otherwise been seen as marginal and ignorable, and in enabling contact between writers who might not have otherwise known of each other. 

Its difficult to measure or demonstrate "effects" more than this. Most of these writers are now perceived as historically significant (whether positively or otherwise) within Canadian lit-- and how much that's due to anything Open Letter did is of course very much debatable. It's their writing that has engaged readers. What Open Letter did most was make it easier for that writing to find the readers. I know, this isn't the Open Letter story "in its entirety," but it gives some idea.

BURFIELD:     Is your new blog, which you just launched (April 29th, 2013) intended to be your main day-to-day prose outlet in the future?

FD:      That's hard to know -- I was thinking of it as more week-to-week than day-to-day, and also planning to continue to write much longer pieces for print publication. I've completed 3 requested or 'commissioned' essays recently. I hadn't contributed a great deal of my own writing to Open Letter in recent years -- no more than one essay a year. It wasn't my prose outlet. And a blog is more a place in which to consider and propose and initiate discussion, it seems to me, than it is to do one's "main" work. I was thinking of it as closer to the kinds of dialogue the early years of Open Letter aspired to than to the polished work that it usually presented in its later years. 

BURFIELD:     You have described its content as being ‘wide-ranging’. At the moment do you have an idea of what kind of content we can expect to see in general? And how wide do you expect it might range?

FD:      I don't close myself off to possibilities -- Open Letter wasn't "open" just to have a neat name. & of course what I see right now as "wide" others might see as narrow -- & I might learn that they are right. So, at least wider than London, wider than Canada, but unlikely to be wider than language. 

BURFIELD:     In shifting from the editorship of the journal ‘Open Letter’ to being a blogger, do you expect to spend more time writing than before? Will there be any other shift in direction, that you can forecast?

FD:      Well yes, the blog shift may not be the only one I'm making, so as you hint, it's hard to answer either question. Blogging is different mode of engagement than editing a three-times a year journal -- more flexible, agile, prospective, potentially more passionate. But there's a lot of failed or inactive literature blogs on the internet I notice, and a lot that have become predictable, some that have become like literary institutions. I find that instructive -- but instructive to what end, I don't know. Maybe the blog itself as a medium will become obsolete, or more likely unfashionable, in a few years, or a few months. And at age 73 I don't necessarily face the possibility of having to carry a blog on for a decade or more, so the pressure's off, eh? I can take risks -- not that I mightn't have taken some anyway. 

-Frank Davey Blog
-Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
-Shorter bio/interview
-Biography, online


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