First Week on the Job: What Small and Large Scale Literary Events Have to Offer

Aisha Sasha JohnPublicity Agent Tracy Kyncl reports on two literary events from last week in Toronto.One role of The Puritan’s new Publicity Agents is to attend literary events across the city, and as far as fresh crops of staffers go, we have it pretty good. This past week I decided it would be fun to structure my logophilia-laden social calendar around a comparison of scale. I started off small at the Art Bar Poetry Series at Q Space on Tuesday, August 6th to get a sense of what regular literary offerings felt—and sounded—like in Toronto.It immediately became clear to me that the atmosphere of Art Bar was intimate, friendly, and kind of sexy in the way an awkward first date gets interesting once you both discover the eccentric eating habits you have in common. Which is to say, the audience at Q Space did not limit itself to one age bracket or demographic. One of the poets even brought her children, who seemed to enjoy themselves immensely (to my great surprise).  Art Bar is a place for like-minded lovers of poetry without the intimidating sense of intellectual overload one may expect, and this relaxed attitude certainly stems from the poets that read at the event. Puritan alumna Aisha Sasha John kicked off the night with pieces from her latest manuscript, THOU. The Puritan published excerpts from The Shining Material in Issue XIV: Summer 2011, and her new work appears to continue the exploration of the self while investigating the relationships between the body, being, and writing. Perhaps what struck me most was her incredible performance. Aisha is, after all, a dancer as well as a poet. She began her set by pouring out libations for her ancestors, and during a pause between poems, she urged, “Put your hands up if you love poetry!” When the timid remained unmoved, she joked, “There are people here who don’t love poetry. I don’t know why they’re here.”

Mark TruscottAisha set the tone for the evening and created an ambiance of poetical indulgence intermingled with humour and levity. Coach House Books poet Mark Truscott continued the spirit with his delightfully short poems about daily minutiae and grammar jokes. Dawna Rae Hicks rounded off the night with her beautiful pieces about regret, memory, loss, and sexuality. Don’t forget that the Art Bar Poetry Series leaves room for an open mic at the end of the evening. So, all of you aspiring poets out there, check out the event at Q Space next week—featuring Rona Shaffran, David Day, and Emi Morimoto—and make yourself heard!Now onto bigger (but not necessarily better) things. Thursday, August 8th saw the much anticipated event P.P.S: Do You Copy? at the Power Plant, which entailed a series of four readings in dialogue with the magnificent exhibition Postscript:Writing After Conceptual Art. Since I am no art major, I was slightly intimidated en route to the event, expecting a cacophony of high-art jargon and elusive descriptors. Nevertheless, as E Martin Nolan anticipated in his blog post, Coach House poet Margaret Christakosdazzled as host of the event, starting off the night with a brilliant, witty introduction to put any practiced public speaker to shame. She flagged the pillars of the event as “polyvocality,” “contextual situatedness,” and “conceptuality,” and the four readers (M. NourbeSe Philip was unfortunately absent) investigated what conceptual writing has so far explored and what the future may hold for the experimental mode.

Jenny SampirisiJenny Sampirisi, whose work we published in Issue IX: Winter 2010, read a long piece in a long hallway, and the physical set-up of the first reading was so powerful as to be borderline eerie. We were ensconced in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, a transcription of every word the artist uttered in a week, while Sampirisi read a quotation-based poem gleaned from John Cage’s Art Is Either a Complaint or do Something Else and Mac Wellman’s notions of the “here” in theatre, which Sampirisi borrowed to explore what goes into the “hear hole.” She layered the piece over an audio clip of her muffled notes that she recorded while walking through the gallery. Sampirisi noted later that she was struck by the fact that she could not hear her own notes over the ecstatic volume of the exhibition and took that as the by-line for her piece. Not only is Sampirisi an excellent, well-paced reader, but her work was impressive, considering the voice as not a mere diaphanous hiccough but an extension of the body and evidence of self-presence. She perceived the exhibition as a theatrical milieu, where visitors–by virtue of the space’s loud conceptual art works and the organization of pieces in exciting proportions and combinations– participated as actors, performing through presence and not through action.Adam Seelig performed afterwards in a different space, intermingling quotations from Don Quixote, Aisha Sasha John, George Oppen, and Octavio Paz in combination with his own wickedly funny poems. He structured his set around the work of Jen Bervin, which provided a visual backdrop to his reading, and the work of Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry at the opposite end of the room. His main concerns were the hyperspecificity of language and how focusing on particular elements, such as punctuation-in-excess, creates new echelons of meaning and play.

Sonja GreckolSonja Greckol brought the night back into the realm of the personal and read a touching book-length work (that I cannot wait to pick up as soon as it is finished) comprised of newspaper clippings published on her birthday (February 1st) over several decades. Focusing on publications her family read, top of the charts pop songs, Governor General’s Award winners, and the scientific language of the post-WWII atomic era, Greckol recombined the seemingly emotionless diatribe of mass-media into a powerful and at times scathing critique of politics, focusing especially on the preponderance of First Nations abuses.The final act, Puritan alum Gary Barwin, began on a high note to a fit of giggles from the audience. His first piece eliminated all the words from a Shakespeare sonnet, spitting out commas, inverted commas, question marks, and periods with vehement intensity. His next poem truly brought the spirit of the conceptual art from the 1960s into the present day, as he held up a hilarious sign (which only received laughs from the under sixty group) that read: “HAZ SMARTPHONE?” followed by another sign with a URL. As the audio clip played on audience members’ cellphones, Barwin repeated “delete this line” and demonstrated the possibility of creating poetry collectively through technology and shared space. Each of his pieces was markedly unique, ranging from a playful riff on a children’s storybook to a verbatim recital of computer code. The latter, which changed all the vowels in our nation’s national anthem into “o’s” was then delivered in escalating crescendos by Barwin’s strong, booming, and unafraid voice. If you have never seen Barwin perform, then please, for the love of poetry, go as soon as possible.After P.P.S: Do You Copy? and Art Bar, I saw more similarities between the two events than differences. Large or small, literature fiends in Toronto seem to go where the words take them (Aisha was at both events), whether it’s to sip on the house white in a chaotic-cute coffee shop or stroll in a respectful silence through a temperature-controlled gallery by the lake. Either way, these two outings were a perfect way to start off my stint at The Puritan.

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