M. NourbeSe Philip is UWO’s 2013 Writer-in-Residence. She is a critically acclaimed and widely anthologized poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Philip’s career has been marked by her formal experimentation and her strong commitment to social justice. In addition to her many literary honours, Philip is a former Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the City of Toronto Arts Award for poetry in 1995. Recently she has garnered praise for her interactive live performances of her newest book of poetry, Zong!, which focuses on an 18th century legal decision regarding the murder of Africans aboard a slave ship. (Bio by #Poetrylab)

See Expanded Biography


A SHORT INTERVIEW 

Interviewer is Kevin Heslop


KH: When did you begin writing poetry?

NP: I began some four decades ago.  I began as a way of exploring my life -- being female, African descended from the Caribbean but living in a foreign country.  I also used it as a way of exploring my history. 

KH: What or who have been the biggest influences on your poetry over your life?
 
NP: My childhood in Tobago has been a tremendous influence on my writing life.  In terms of writing the writers who have been seminal -- Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and St. John Perse.

KH: Can you say something about how your poetic style evolved, and what you generally try to accomplish in your work?  
 
NP: When I wrote She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks I became aware that the idea and issue of Language had chosen me and that I would spend the remainder of my writing life exploring this issue in various ways.

KH: From having heard you read, one suspects the speaking of the language, the reading of poetry aloud, adds something to the written word. If this is the case, what, or how, is that something?
 
NP: I don't know if I can answer that question but perhaps what happens is simply the embodying of the word that exists on the page.   I have always considered myself page-bound, since I didn't work in the spoken word genre, so it is in a way as much of a surprise for me to find myself working more intensively in a performative mode.



FIVE POEMS

1.

Cashew

                                       firm-fleshed
red pendulous breast
                                                              nipple
hardened into promise
                                            in seed
curled green foetus
                                                                     the cashew
hangs
            longs for the sharp white teeth of girls
                                                              their tiny perfect tongues
            licking its juice that
                                                stains the white gowns
marks them with desire
as racing 
                                                          nightdress sails
masted with slender sinewy
mahogany of limbs
lengthening into a future
                                               perfect
they hurtle 
                   toward the unfurl
                                         in girl


©M. NourbeSe Philip



2.

                                                                     big questions


                                                                                   why does a chicken always cross a road
            and b follow a when the worm turns why
                                                             don’t we tell it like it was and what
                       did you say the time
                                                                                        was when the zebra changed 
                               its stripes and is it true
                                                                          what they say who is
              they did  humpty 
                                             dumpty jump or was he
                                                                                         pushed when led to the water
           why didn’t the horse drink why
                                                                                       isn’t the earth flat and how do you close
                        a basket case when you say I am and
                                                                                    how do you say you are can
                                                    you kill three birds
           with one stone when the
                                                                      birds in the bush seduce
                                         the one in your
                                                                  hand   


©M. NourbeSe Philip
 


3.

Upon Considering the Possibilty of Friendship Between Tia and Antoinette
(In Progress)

a cheek split
in two wrongs can't
make it right
between history and 
a hair-splitting
cheek-splitting
truth

"the cheek of her
taking my dress!"

undressing the theft
the take and took 
in history

can't draw blood from
a stone
or a tear
spill the causes
of a cheek
                    white
                                   split
by the hard in stone
the me and she
in black words
on a white page
where a stone lands

on a cheek 
split by the 
                                        hurl
                                pelt
the fling in stone
in history
                               heals
not the heart
smashed ground 
in the between of past
and future
                                       grindstones
exacting a finely
powdered present
to scatter wide
                               to the winds

Friends, you say?
Only a stone’s throw away


©M. NourbeSe Philip



4.
 
Zong! # 2  
 
 
                                                                                                           the throw in  circumstance 

                                                    the weight in want 

                                                                                      in sustenance 

                     for underwriters 

                                                                                      the loss 
                     the order in destroy 
                  

                                                                                      the that fact 
                                                                                      the it was 

                                                                                      the were 

negroes 
 

                                                                                      the after rains 


                                                                   _______________________________________

                                                                       Wafor Yao Kehinde Bolade Kibibi Kamau
 

©M. NourbeSe Philip



5.
 
Fall

the year turns
curls
                            around itself
a leaf whose time has come
                                                     to fall
                                                                 towards earth
and itself
                  its own beginning
and the racoon  whose soft curled pelt
mocks the memory of birth
is its own tombstone
on the wet black road.   
 

©M. NourbeSe Philip



THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: December 4th, the first Wednesday of the month, as with most of our events. 

LIVE MUSIC, live music will begin at least by 6:30. There is also an intermission also with live music.

THE FEATURED POET: M. NourbeSe Philip will begin reading shortly after 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, there is about 1.5 hours of open mic, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). NOTE: WE WILL NOT BE SELECTING NAMES AT RANDOM, BUT, AS IS TRADITIONAL AT MOST POETRY OPEN MICS, POETS WILL WRITE THEIR NAMES IN A SPOT OF THEIR CHOOSING ON A LIST AT THE DOOR. They will also be asked for their email addresses and whether or not we can photograph and videotape them reading.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt.

EBOOK ANTHOLOGY: Our annual ebook is an anthology of the poets who have read during the year, including both the featured poets, with one or two poems by each, and the open mic readers, with from one to a few, depending on length, from each of those who wish to participate, no matter how many times they read. The ebook will then be available on Amazon at the end of the season, at a few dollars each, used to help offset expenses. If anyone gives us more than several poems, we will select from them. All poems that are included must have been read at the events during the season. The ebook will include a short biography (up to seven lines) of each poet. This must be included with the poems. We may also add a photo of the poet reading at the event. This hasn’t been decided yet. To keep transcription errors from creeping into the poems, the preferred way to get them to us is by email. Those who don’t use email can give us a copy at the events. A cautionary note: Some poets may not want certain poems to be included in the ebook because it would make them unacceptable for later publication in certain poetry journals. Erik Martinez Richards will edit and publish the anthology. His email address is erikf1944@hotmail.com
 

London poet, novelist and retired psychotherapist Susan Downe will be the featured poet at the Nov. 6th London Open Mic Poetry Night. 

Susan Downe has been published in many poetry journals and anthologies. She has had two previous books of poetry published, her first being centred around her father’s death and how her mother dealt with it, and the second, ‘Little Horse’ (Brick Books, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Gerald Lampert Award and is still in print, having to do with her experience with breast cancer. Also she has just launched  ‘Juanita Wildrose: My True Life’, a slightly fictionalized account of her mother`s life, which includes mixes poetry with the prose, some of which she will read Nov. 6th.

Susan Downe is a mother of four, stepmother of four, grandmother of eight, and “apprentice to two large gardens”.

Six Poems by Susan Downe.
Downe reading from ‘Little Horse’: a Brick Books podcast. 


INTERVIEW, PART 1 (posted earlier)

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

Burfield:   Could you tell us about the book you're launching Oct. 23rd at Landon Library?

Downe:     Juanita Wildrose: My True Life (published by Pedlar Press, 2013) is pretty much what the title says, the worldly and soul life of a young girl and woman.  Her life interweaves and intersects with those of her Maryland forebears at the time of the Civil War in the U.S.  Scenes are set in contemporary Ontario, early 20th Century United States, and the Civil War years in the U.S.

Burfield:    When and why did you start writing poetry?

Downe:     Whenever I was heartbroken in high school, I wrote a poem. Sometimes I would ‘answer’ a poet I read in school or in the New Yorker. More recently (1992), retired from my practice of psychotherapy, I travelled to Mexico to paint, and accidentally met a painter/poet named Jim Tobin, who challenged me to write five poems by Friday (it was Wednesday), I did, and my fate was sealed. 

Burfield:    What have been the biggest influences on your poetry throughout your life?

Downe:     I like what P.K.Page has to say on the matter. She speaks of affinities rather than influences. She cites an ornithologist’s experiment, in which he raised birds in solitary. Each grew and produced a sound sort of like the usual sound of, for instance, a cardinal flying free. Then each was put in an environment with other species; that bird’s song grew into its full range. In hearing many voices, we develop our own. I have savoured many voices: early on, Maxine Kumin, Galway Kinnel, Sufi poet Rumi, Jane Kenyon. 

Burfield:    Can you say something about how your poetic style has evolved, and what you generally try to accomplish in your?  

Downe:     I have learned something about omitting extraneous words, inserting enriching words. Poems are longer. 

Burfield:    Are there any themes you return to again and again?

Downe:     Love and Death and bees in the backyard. 

PART 2

Burfield:     ‘Juanita Wildrose: My True Life’ is a slightly fictionalized account of your mother`s life, based on memorabilia and stories your mother told you. How did you weave your own poetry into it? Did your mother write poetry?   

Downe:      My mother would never say that she wrote poetry, and she enjoyed rhyming. *See attached copy (reproduced immediately below this interview), which refers to a birthday note she sent to her mother. It was doubtless accompanied by dried plant material. 

Burfield:     In ‘We Move the Beauty Around, Dig’ (see poem 4), at the end of the poem, which honours a dying hundred-year-old chestnut tree by planting ferns with wide-waving arms around it, you refer to William Blake’s Glad Day, a Blake painting of a man representing humanity dancing with his arms wide. Even though I didn’t know anything about Blake or his paintings until I did a Google search, just the term Glad Day seemed to be enough. Did this poem start with the painting, or the chestnut tree, or someone’s death? Or all three?

Downe:     This poem begins with the cutting-down of a well-loved tree and our subsequent desire to honor her. The image of Glad Day came spontaneously upon seeing the waving of the ostrich ferns. Others have said "William Blake's" was not needed, but I went ahead with it anyway, didactically, I admit. 

Burfield:     Many of your poems are full of imagery from nature, which, on the face of it, seems surprising for someone who has practiced psychotherapy a good share of her life. Can you say something about how nature is related to our humanity, at least in terms of poetry?

Downe:     The chestnut tree flowers, the earth peoples. Say thanks to every tree you see, and inhale. That's where your oxygen comes from, and we give back carbon dioxide. 

Burfield:     How has your lifelong career in psychotherapy effected your poetry? Or is it difficult to tell?

Downe:     People's lives are poetry, or attempts, however desperate or misguided, to do so. 

Burfield:    I have read the short poem ‘Could We Know’ (see poem 3) at least ten times and am fascinated by it, by the wisdom in it and the power the words you used give it. I Keep coming back to the last line of the middle stanza. The stanza reads, 'Don’t be ashamed/Take pity on us all/for mercy draws courage to it’.   Could you expand on that?

Downe:     This poem appears in my Little Horse, Brick Books, 2004, and therein I give full credit to Tim Lilburn and his essay, Two Books About Love, Fiddlehead, Spring, 1999, for these words.  Those words resonated in me then, and do so now. I can only sense their validity, I think, and, in retrospect, affirm them. I think of a certain law, that the greater of two energies will draw a lesser to it, in this case mercy being (could we know?) a greater energy than courage. To be proven by experiences. 

Burfield:     When I read ‘Via Negativa’ (see poem 6), the poem had such an impact on me I was walking around with it in me all day and the next, and hadn’t even gotten back to the title yet, which I hadn’t understood. When I did, it brought the idea of ‘God’ into the poem, something that hadn’t occurred to me at all the first time around. Now I want to know more about your spiritual/religious feelings in relation to nature and humanity.

Downe:     Now we enter the realm of the inarticulate. To be most brief, I can say that god, or God, is immanent in our full humanity, or could I say, Humanity. Read Christian Wiman, for example, Wendell Berry, others who find beauty and ultimate truth in dailiness. 

Burfield:    What can we expect from you in the future?

Downe:     Most of my poems begin with a lift in my head and chest, and an intense focus; these events take place in response to a sight, the cast of the light, a sudden feeling of aha!, this last not necessarily in response to a fully-ripened thought. I am not able to predict when these happen, but most often they arise when I am past the 20-minute mark of a walk outdoors, but sometimes in response to something I am reading. 


*In her book, ‘Juanita Wildrose: My True Life’ (just published by Brick Books), Susan tells the slightly fictionalized story of her mother's life (her name being Juanita Wildrose Downe). Susan says all three generations of women were very into gardening, her grandmother out of necessity, growing plants for food. Her mother wrote this poem in honor of her mother's ninety-second birthday. The words you see in brackets were, in the original hand-written version, written just below the words they refer to. Susan says the final version of the poem would probably have been written large enough that pressed flowers could be glued in the appropriate spaces. The three women loved plants so much that Susan remembers seeing her mother walking outside with her grandmother, who took forever getting only a few yards because she had to discuss each plant they passed.  Juanita`s poem to her mother is as follows:

Remembrance of things past (forget-me-not)
brings phlox of ways to state
the laurels we present you
on this most important date (?) - (meaning not sure if she can attach a real date)

In primrose days you taught (cherry) us
of prudence (ash), perseverence (dogwood);
with strength (fennel), with honesty (honesty), and love (honeysuckle or strawberry)
you make us your ad herents. (grape leaves entwined with tendrils)

Discretion (maidenhair) is your virtue (mint),
Fidelity (veronica) your balsam. (touch-me-not or impatiens)
I know one shouldn't envy,  (cranehill) (or, as Susan told me, 'Bloody Cranehill': SB)
But you're really quite a mom!

Your fer-n child must take her cue (Susan says 'fer-n' is a contraction of 'foreign': adopted)
anchusa rhyme to close; ('And choose a' is not a plant. 'Anchusa' is.)
Huzzas!!! for birthday ninety-two,
with love, Nita (space for wild rose) wild-rose.


(A personal note: It was unusually hard to get this email interview going. The problem partly turned out to be that Susan doesn’t have a computer and writes with an electric typewriter! I finally read my email to her over the phone, and the next day she brought the interview answers to me by car (for Part 1). Then, a few days later, I drove to her book launch, and handed her the next five questions, then, later again, drove to her house and dug an envelope with the answers to Part 2 out of the mail box where she had left them when she had to leave town to promote her book. Her old-fashioned ways (normal just a few years ago) were definitely having a pleasant effect on me. If I could have, I would have done all the driving back and forth with a horse and buggy. Because, really, why rush? .... In just our few minutes together and on the phone, Susan’s influence on me has been ... well, for lack of better words, she makes me smile: She is a very relaxed, empathetic and easily sociable woman, and all that feels just right for the mother and grandmother of a large family. SB)


THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: November 6th, the first Wednesday of the month, as with most of our events. 

LIVE MUSIC, courtesy of Celtic harpist and vocalist Jennifer White and percussionist Robert McMaster, will begin at least by 6:30. There is also an intermission with live music and (usually) more at the end of the event. This month we have a surprise, to be announced soon.

THE FEATURED POET: Susan Downe will begin reading shortly after 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, there is about 1.5 hours of open mic, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). NOTE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE WILL NOT BE SELECTING NAMES AT RANDOM, BUT, AS IS TRADITIONAL AT MOST POETRY OPEN MICS, POETS WILL WRITE THEIR NAMES IN A SPOT OF THEIR CHOOSING ON A LIST AT THE DOOR. They will also be asked for their email addresses and whether or not we can photograph and videotape them reading.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt.

EBOOK ANTHOLOGY: Our annual ebook is an anthology of the poets who have read during the year, including both the featured poets, with one or two poems by each, and the open mic readers, with from one to a few, depending on length, from each of those who wish to participate, no matter how many times they read. The ebook will then be available on Amazon at the end of the season, at a few dollars each, used to help offset expenses. If anyone gives us more than several poems, we will select from them. All poems that are included must have been read at the events during the season. The ebook will include a short biography (up to seven lines) of each poet. This must be included with the poems. We may also add a photo of the poet reading at the event. This hasn’t been decided yet. To keep transcription errors from creeping into the poems, the preferred way to get them to us is by email. Those who don’t use email can give us a copy at the events. A cautionary note: Some poets may not want certain poems to be included in the ebook because it would make them unacceptable for later publication in certain poetry journals. Erik Martinez Richards will edit and publish the anthology. His email address is erikf1944@hotmail.com

Ottawa-born Figurski has a degree in English literature in 1975 from Carleton University and a Masters from Western. He has recently retired after 30 years practice as a professional librarian. 

Jan’s poetry has been called “witty and wise” (George Johnston), “energetic and striking” (Carol Off), and “very moving” (Gay Allison). He has published three collections and his poems have been published in numerous literary journals. He has also put in two years editing a poetry journal and has edited books by James Reaney Sr. and Thomas Nashe.

In addition to his poetry, Jan is a musician. He has played in a number of London bands and his work has been recorded on 6 CDs.


This email interview is by Stan Burfield, organizer of London Open Mic Poetry Night.

Frank Beltrano has recited poems from as long ago as grade one. In high school, he wrote for the local paper, the Sault Daily Star, as a teen writer. In university, he believed that he was a short story writer who would eventually write novels. But, after moving to London eight years ago, he has instead focused on poetry. The first poem he sent out, "The Days of Angry," won an honourable mention in a literary contest and was published in Toward the Light in the summer of 2007. Since then, he has been published in a number of collections and literary journals and has read publicly across Ontario and in he United States.
 

 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.)

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

Sonia Halpern will be the featured poet at the May 1st London Open Mic Poetry NIght at Mykonos Restaurant,  starting at 6:30.

Born in Hamilton, Ms Halpern attended UWO and Queen’s in Kingston. She is an art historian who has taught at Western since 1990. Sonia teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research and in the Department of Visual Arts, and has won three major teaching awards at Western, including the recent 2012 Arts & Humanities Teaching Excellence Award. She has also been voted one of Western’s most “Popular Profs” by the Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities for five consecutive years (2000-2005). Sonia is very active in the London community as a published author, local theatrical actor, and musical composer. Her book, The Life and Times of Transition Girl (South Western Ontario Poetry, 2005), is her first published collection of poetry, and has been dubbed “Dorothy Parker meets ‘Sex and the City.’”

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

Burfield:     Why did you start writing poems that January morning in 2002? What caused that initial impulse? Did you have a relative who wrote poems?

Tom Cull will be a featured poet at London Open Mic Poetry Night’s special April 24th event in celebration of National Poetry Month. He will read along with celebrated Canadian poet Frank Davey, followed by Q&A and an open mic, at Landon Library in London’s Wortley Village, beginning at 6:30.

Tom Cull was born and raised in rural Southwestern Ontario. He is on the board of Poetry London and is a co-facilitator of their poetry workshop. Tom holds a PhD in English Literature from York University and is an adjunct professor at the Centre for American Studies at Western University. Tom created and runs Thames River Rally, a volunteer group that meets monthly to clean up garbage in and along the Thames River. His first book of poetry, What the Badger Said, will be published by Baseline Press in September 2013.

The interviewer is Stan Burfield, organizer of London Open Mic Poetry Night. 
   
Burfield:    When and why did you begin writing poetry?

Strathroy resident Frank Davey grew up in BC and studied at UBC where in 1961 he co-founded with George Bowering and Fred Wah the influential and contentious poetry newsletter TISH. His first volume of poetry, in 1962, was described as ‘the act of the moment’ rather than poetry as the commonplace attempt 'to express  feelings.' In 1965 he launched the avant-garde poetry and criticism journal Open Letter, and, with the assistance of bpNichol, developed it into what many still see as Canada's most important forum for discussion and examination of innovative and experimental ideas and texts. 

Davey obtained his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1968. With the encouragement of George Woodcock, he began writing literary criticism, a body of work from the 1970s to the ‘90s which would be described as 'the most individual and influential ever written in Canada.' 

A native of Penticton, BC, Ms Thorpe is the  Development Co-ordinator for Poetry London. Before settling on English Literature as a field of study, she studied biology, mathematics and computer science. Her two books, A Rind of Sun (Serengeti Press, 2008) and Tendered Arms (Manifold Books, 2011) are co-authored with James Wood, whose drawings ``complete`` selected poems. 

Her poems ``are addressed to `those who feel in each bright stream, the pull of an underground river`. Willing readers are drawn from personal crossroads into subtly strange lands where skies may be truly falling but the play of imagination endures. Each poem tells its own tale.`` 

See Eight Poems by Christine Thorpe.

(The interviewer is D'vorah Elias, our featured poet on Feb. 6th, 2013.
Interview with D'vorah Elias   ......     Seven Poems by D'vorah Elias)


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