adelebarclay

[adelebarclay]

New book.

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Always happy to provide paradigm-shifting info about class-oriented pronunciations of Toronto streets.

Class-orientated pronunciations of “Spadina”

Betty goes to Spadina in a plunging neckline-ah But for blackmarket codeine-ah Veronica goes to Spadina

–David McGimpsey

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Daniel Zomparelli: This collection is addressed to all of my past, present and future lovers.

Dina Del Bucchia: If I thought that more than 10 people would use a Tinder poetry app I would totally find a smarter person than me to make one

I talked to the formidable Dina & Daniel about love poetry, critiquing the things you like, poetic compatibility. There are a lot of endearing swears in this one. I'm very pleased to publish this interview for The Rusty Toque.

http://www.therustytoque.com/rusty-talk/dina-del-bucchia-daniel-zomparelli-poets

#rustytoque #canlit #cantlit #danielzomparelli #dinadelbucchia #poetry #romcom #romcoms #interview

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The Rusty Toque Best of 2015: Adèle Barclay on What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

2013 was a turning point for my writing—mostly due to me befriending some brilliant and generous American poets. I bummed their strong cigarettes and MFA reading lists. As I blazed through their recommended poets, I felt my poetry grow wider, taller, louder. The one poet whose writing I couldn’t track down, however, was Frank Stanford, a swampy Southern symbolist who penned the 15,000-line opus The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. He’s a cult figure amongst poets, but his small-press, out-of-print collections are notoriously difficult to find in the used bookstores of American poetry hubs, let alone in Canada.

Finally in spring 2015, Copper Canyon Press released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. The 747-page tome compiles published collections, unpublished manuscripts, uncollected poems and prose, and selected excerpts from the infamous epic poem. It’s startling how prolific Stanford was during his short life—he published 11 collections and only lived to 29. The collected brings into focus how consistently good his poetry was. While the length of the collected necessarily illustrates dips and turns in his style, his early poems are eerily on par with his later ones.

Despite what sounds like Ron Swanson-esque posture when describing Stanford—his rebuff of the city, bloody vignettes and penchant for fishing—the poetry is not stereotypical machismo. Stanford undermines that kind of swagger, plumbing surreal, muddy depths, always opting for a strange internal twist of the guts rather than an outward show of bravado:

                                   This bed I thought was my past                                    Is really a monk in a garden                                    He’s dressed in white                                    Holding a gourd of water                                    Because I have forgotten Tangle Eye                                    And Dylan Thomas                                    The swarthy goose                                    And the moon in the pennyroyal                                    With its gut full of shiners                                    And the skeleton keys to my room                                    And the snapshots of my land                                                         – “The Visitors of Night”

Oddly, I see Frank Stanford as the inverse twin of Frank O’Hara, wrapped up in the rural instead of the urban, but fervently attached to the local. His stride is a little more drawn out as he takes you down to the river instead of dodging traffic en route to the museum. Yet in both cases there’s a hyperactive attunement to atmosphere and an understanding of how mood is at the mercy of real and made-up things. Stanford writes about death and the moon, knowing full well that mythology is bequeathed and pliable. And this thrust results in litanies of metaphors and similes that rise and falter but ultimately spill over into something terrifying, beautiful, familiar, and unexpected:

                                   and she was like a colt                                    and she was water held in my hands                                    and she was the canoe I worked through the river                                    and she was the flash at two-thirty in the morning of the suicidal knife                                    and she was a fire of pine cones who ran like a deer                                    and she was a butterfly that lit on the float of my pole                                    and she was the night herself                                                      – from The Battlefields Where The Moon Says I Love You

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Puritan, The Pinch, Poetry Is Dead, Matrix, The Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Her debut collection of poetry was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in 2016. She is the Interviews Editor for The Rusty Toque. 

#poetry #frank stanford #copper canyon #copper canyon press #bestof2015

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Notes for the paper I’m trying to write.

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I have a poem out in this fall’s issue of The Puritan. Very pleased about the company. This poem is for Ontario. 

http://puritan-magazine.com/emily-of-new-moon/

#poetry #poem #lm montgomery #emilyofnewmoon #kingston #norval #ontario #alicemunro #thepuritan

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“the popularity of The Argonauts speaks to Nelson’s gift as a writer and thinker—she brings the theoretical references into relief, showing exactly where and how they relate with urgency to emotional and political realities. She doesn’t namedrop; she boils Wittgenstein down to ‘Words are good enough’ (3) in order to explain the reason why she writes.” My review of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

http://plenitudemagazine.ca/nelsons-the-argonauts-a-powerful-exploratory-vessel/

#maggienelson #theargonauts #graywolfpress #autotheory #criticaltheory #queer #queerness #prose #reviews

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Impressionism to Punk

“Just as taxidermy represents a colonial desire for mastery over nature, preserved clothing items accepted into the museum tantalizingly present a fallacy of their histories as finite.” @themediares

http://www.themediares.com/pages/artifacts/impressionism-to-punk.html

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#hbdzizek @themediares

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by Lovemme

I don’t love myself. It’s not that I haven’t tried or that I don’t want to, but it’s due to the fact that people don’t love brown trans femmes like me. How can I love myself when the only time I see myself is in tragedy? When trans women of color are being murdered on their way to...

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Alyssa McLeod for TMR: on Stephen Marche, the idiotic male, and the female gaze of contempt

“But people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Marche’s apparent self-contradiction points to the circular nature of the so-called “gender debate,” one that branches across the myths and treatises of the past to the blogs and social media platforms of today. And really, not much has changed. The relationship between men and women is still defined by our mutual inability to grasp one another. Like objects in a funhouse mirror, we withdraw from each other’s gaze even as we approach one another, diverging from our pre-established gender expectations. “

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The 2011 Fence Books Edition of Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines arrived today. The book is tiny and bright white in contrast to the clumsy grandness and ivory of the Mal-O-Mar edition from 2007 that I bought for myself in the summer of 2010. The addition of the lion image is regal.

Anticipation: the release of her opus Mercury this month. 

http://arianareines.tumblr.com/

#ariana reines #coeur de lion #poetry #poet ladies #bibliography

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gilliansees:

“The 8th instalment of Branch magazine is live. It is the final issue for the year. Starting at the beginning of each issue always seems so daunting, but here we are 2 years later, still going. Hope you like it.” -Roberutsu

Latest issue of Branch explores how various artists incarnate and adapt the theme Style + Form. "Materials," my poem, appears alongside a slew of talented established and emerging artists. Nicely done, Branch.

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gilliansees:

Coming Friday. www.branchmagazine.com

This teaser is over a week old... but still sexy.

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Tonight I am reading at Café Soufflé with Jeffrey Macking and Branka Petrovic.  8 p.m. at Marianne & St. Urbain. 

This is my first non-school-affiliated Montreal reading.  I am ecstatic and thankful to Larissa for setting this up.

Last Sunday I played piano in a seniors home.  The experience was welcome because it forced me to exist outside of myself and just play and do something for other people. There were these incredible high school pianists. It was humbling and lovely to witness.  Also, the person who organized it all is not trying to get into Med school--she already did get in and she turned McGill down.

I think the last time I played classical piano music in public, it was in a seniors home in Georgetown because at my final piano recital I opted to play one of my own pieces and sing instead of playing the repertoire and my mom wept the whole time because she was sad and because I was planning on leaving. 

Last Sunday I played "Chanson triste" by Kalinnikov.  I was melodramatic and used a lot of rubato and extreme dynamics.  Russian composers understand sadness.  Though uncontroversial, I find that kind of clichéd statement comforting.  Next time I will play Debussy who is less sad and less conventionally beautiful and more dreamy and strange. He was the first to break the rule of parallels and moving in perfect fifths, something that until the 20th century came around, was despicable and unheard of.

All this because poetry is a performance and the techniques and nerves I gained from piano carry over.  I am thinking about sincerity and how that is performed and if it is made any less sincere once rendered through text and voice?  And it seems too silly, too precious to even ask that.  And this is why I think some people didn't like Black Swan because it was painfully sincere in its hyperbolic execution and I don't think we know how to handle a performance not being ironic because the potential for embarrassment is greater and more is at stake.  Maybe this is why women and gay men tended to respond and relate to it more--I don't know--because living in these situations we contain abject feelings and experiences and use them as pillars to construct a veneer that is invested in beauty. And we smile knowing that beauty is really made out of eating dirt.

I have butterflies, I always do, but performance is about getting them to fly in formation.  This is what performance competitions teach you.  Fortunately, with poetry, flaws, trembling hands and deviating from the course are acceptable, where as they are downfall for a pianist.

#piano #poetry #performance #Montreal

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Anti-Valentine’s Day Hit List Happy corporate heteronormativity day! There are a range of emotions one can experience in this universe that are not acknowledged or validated by fascism and capitalism. Currently I love—sans predicate. Well, wasn’t that just poetic. We used to make V Day/Anti-V Day song lists for the Feb. 14th-ish issue of the Journal.  I actually stole the idea from Charlotte Martin, who kicks off this list as to honour her influence.   She sent out her top V-Day picks on her listserv some time in the early 2000s (to all eight of her adoring fans) and introduced me to The Cure and My Bloody Valentine—for this I am grateful. So here goes 2011 (heaven): A combination of tracks packed with melancholy, wrath, humour, and self-love. 1.    "I’m Normal Please Date Me" – Charlotte Martin A live number from Martin’s early days playing small clubs in L.A., “I’m Normal Please Date Me” was on a bootlegged cassette tape I had someone send me in the mail when I was fourteen and obsessed with piano ladies (well, I still am).  The song recounts the naïve opera-singer-turned-pop-rocker’s navigation of the seedy L.A. dating scene and subsequent accumulation of rejection slips.  The hilarious thing being that the bright-eyed young Martin—formerly Miss Teen Illinois—was (still is) a gorgeous and freakishly talented vocalist and pianist, not to mention her incredible capacity for kindness.  I showed her a poem of mine once and she cried, hugged me and said I had a gift from God.  She also sent me Bear comics, a book of poetry, and a doll’s head (writing this has just unearthed all these memories of my very lonely and bored teenaged self).  I’m around the age she was when she wrote this song and I can only now sincerely appreciate the number. 2.    "Fuck And Run" – Liz Phair The whole album, Exile In Guyville (1993), is a key soundtrack to life.  The Pitchfork review of the fifteenth-anniversary release noted how revolutionary this album must have been for young women in an age before the Internet and Dan Savage existed to teach us about sex.  Point taken.  This song used to make me blush (not as much as “Flower”!) when I listened to it on my discman in high school.  The proclamation that this fuck-and-run business is an eternal cycle (“even when I was twelve”) was shocking then but makes a lot of sense from my slightly more jaded perspective. 3.    "Song for the Dumped" – Ben Folds Five Unsurprisingly, this list is gonna be mostly a progesterone-and-estrogen fest.  Ben Folds is all the testosterone I need and this music video is piano porn.  Folds not only nails the rock trills and runs with precision but smashes out that special brand of anger only classically trained nerds with a deeply rooted history of rejection possess by making use of all tools within proximity such as a piano stool, elbows and a bass player.  The night before my grade eight Royal Conservatory piano exam I went to see Folds and Rufus Wainwright in concert instead of practicing.  For such a reason I can rock out in spirit but not in technique. 4.    "Faster" – Rachael Yamagata Like Ryan Adams, Yamagata writes sad-sack songs, professing to constantly be in the midst of a break-up.  While her slower, piano ballads are chilling in their melancholy, I love that she picks it up in this one and allows her ultra-sultry smoke-and-whiskey voice to growl.  I can't find the studio version, but this live acoustic rendition is still pretty bad ass.  5.    "Dancing On My Own" – Robyn See my previous post.  Needed to throw in some self-loving songs.  Anyway, I rarely dance on my own because I’ve got good friends. 6.    "Golden Age" – Beck On Sea Change (2002) Beck somehow renders heartbreak into a magnanimous and exquisite soundscape.  And for the opening track Beck manages to declare, “With your hand on the wheel / Let the golden age begin” ushering in an era and aura of agency, vitality and the hint of hope—despite all the shit.  This is good waking-up-in-the-morning music.  7.    "Talula" – Tori Amos Boys for Pele (1996) is a notorious break-up album (aw, it can hold hands with Sea Change).  Amos wrote BfP after splitting with her boyfriend/producer of eight years.  Vigourously Amos spawned eighteen tracks and armed herself with a harpsichord and obscure blood-and-guts lyrics to prove she had the serious agenda of sacrificing her lover’s (metaphorical) body to the volcano.  A high point, Talula is about that moment when you recognize that the woman in you can feel and how that sweet and sickening affirmation of a pulse, of realized interiority, trumps any pain. 8.    "Good Woman" – Cat Power Every woman I know who listens to this song just weeps. The dichotomous categories of good/bad and woman/man that get set up in this song need more nuance and the weeping, though sincere and cathartic (Oh, we’ve all been there), stems from a facile tendency to pander to an easy and self-pitying narrative. The old saviour complex girls from both happy and broken families can’t help but love to re-enact. I think Cat Power is aware of the trappings of this well-worn story and by working out of a bluesy tradition is working through these bequeathed distinctions, clichés, excuses, and lies that shimmer with a touch of truth. 

Also once I found a Harry Potter montage set to this song. I can't find it any more.  Oh, Hermione--such a good woman. 9.    "I Hear Noises" – Tegan and Sara Even though the song opens with driving, upbeat guitars, the trajectory quickly plummets once Tegan begins singing: “Every morning I wake up disappointed / disappointed by the feeling of waking up next to you.”  These are probably the harshest lines ever sung.  I think the song is an example of why being single is better than being in one of those rabid Old Yeller relationships that needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot. 10.    "Blue" – Joni Mitchell “Songs are like tattoos.”  Beautiful. 11.    "Be a Man" – Hole This song was for that football movie Any Given Sunday.  While “Be a Man” appears to be about masculinity, the music video becomes an example of abject femininity at its finest: over the course of the shoot, Love winds up rolling around naked in mud screaming her face off.  What a mess.  I’m a fan. 12.    "Bachelorette" – Bjork Not to be confused with Tori Amos’s song of the same name (a B-side from "Spark" of the incredible From the Choirgirl Hotel), Bjork’s single lady is a goddess of the world, providing sustenance and poetry. The accordion outro on the studio version makes me feel like I’m in Monmartre sipping solitude and espresso comme Amélie.  13.    "Skinny Love" – Bon Iver My life got 3% better once I made a piano version of this song. 14.    "This Women’s Work" – Kate Bush Also check out Maxwell’s cover and wicked falsetto.  Another ode to women’s unacknowledged labour. 15.     "Pictures of You" – The Cure Robert Smith was a clairvoyant.  I really feel like this song’s contains renewed meaning in the twenty-first century. This one goes out to anyone who has any exes on facebook. Honourable mentions go to: Miss Piggy’s cover of Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away," "Leftovers" by PS I Love You ft Diamond Rings that was just released today, the guy upstairs who plays Mumford and Sons covers on acoustic guitar, Vasili Sergeievich Kalinnikov’s “Chanson triste” for piano, and any Veruca Salt song in which Nina Gordon and Louise Post still sing and play together before their break-up. 

#Anti-V Day #anti-love #female rock #lists #sexuality #narrative #humour #wrath #self-love #melancholy

[adelebarclay]

Dedicated to Prof. Scott Straker.

lolauthorz:

John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer.

#humour #academia #literature #anxiety of influence