February 21st, 2009

Sometimes

Sometimes, I become so upset at my teetering stacks of books and papers (commented one recent guest, “You’re busy!” me: “Or should be!”), email queue and general failure of productivity, that I resolve to scale back on all frolic, forthwith. Which is of course the signal for an eruption of amazing frolicking opportunities amongst my friends and acquaintances. Thus, last night spent on the announcement of the Descant Winston/Collins poetry prize (congrats to all the long- and short-listers, and to Descant for the amazing bash) and later on guitar harmonies and silliness (I sure know the words to a lot of bad songs). And then today, between the yoga and the photo shoot and writing this very important blog post, I had amazing things planned, workwise…which didn’t quite happen. And in a few hours, I have to go out for Mexican food!! How do these things happen?

Something, obviously, has to scale back. Don’t worry, it probably won’t be this blog; does a junkie ever get too busy to shoot up? I fear it’s sleep.

Wake up
The house is on fire
And the cat’s caught in the drier
RR

January 25th, 2009

An Homage / Rebecca is 2009

Last summer, I heard poet/graphic novelist/playwright/performer Mariko Tamaki read a couple times. Everything she put to the microphone was amazing, especially segments from her collaborative (with Jillian Tamaki) graphic novel Skim (not everyone can read aloud from a graphic novel and make it vivid). At the Scream in High Park another wonderful piece she read was a poem of her collected Facebook status lines (I have looked *all over* for a link; I think it’s not online; please correct me if I’m wrong). Like most “found” poetry, I’m sure the artist put a lot of energy into making this piece work rhythmically and tonally, not to mention how poetic you have to be just have high-quality Facebook status lines most of the time when it’s so easy to just write “…is glad it’s the weekend.”

So I make no claim to artistry nor high-quality status, but I find Ms. Tamaki’s idea too irresistible not to try my own version. Perhaps it’s the lure of seeing my name over and over like that, or reliving happy memories of the past few weeks, or how it provides a tidy summary of my state of mind immediately before and since the change of year. But anyway, I give you

Derivative Facebook Poem: Rebecca is 2009

Rebecca wants to put up the new calendars now!
Rebecca listens to the Fleet Foxes.
Rebecca has changed her mind, is no longer ready for 2009.
Rebecca faces facts: 2009 is coming. Rebecca wishes you all kinds of joy with it!
Rebecca is experiencing the future.
Rebecca is experiencing contact-lens issues that make her seem a tragic tearful figure. Don’t believe the rumours!
Rebecca is nostalgic for the good old days, when this apartment had heat.
Rebecca has heat–hooray!
Rebecca mopes for no reason
Rebecca appreciates being indoors.
Rebecca is despondent after failing to locate Germany on a map.
Rebecca is fairly efficient, for a Saturday.
Rebecca is warm now, but anticipating cold
Rebecca is headache grey.
Rebecca is liscious.
Rebecca gets a lot of phone calls before 9am these days.
Rebecca thought this morning’s sunrise was especially nice.
Rebecca is CEO of herself.
Rebecca will soon have eaten all available candy.
Rebecca is flexible.
Rebecca thinks back on high school and wonders, was *anybody* cool then?

RR

January 21st, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews *Unisex Love Poems* by Angela Szczepaniak

The plucky heroine of Angela Szczepaniak’s dizzying novel in poems is referred to as a “gingerpear confection” as she dangles suspended on a tightrope and “encounters the world inverted.” The expression is an apt description of the whole collection: sharp and sweet and worth savouring, though hard to read slowly.

I was scared to read this book. A wonderful front cover illlustration by Jeff Szuc did not sufficiently distract me from the jacket copy, which promises “[a]n autopsy of language,” terrifying to those of us who didn’t know language was dead and didn’t even send a bundt cake.

The wonderful lightness and elegance of Szczepaniak’s work might be better likened to surgery than autopsy–at times gory, at times clinical, but all with the goal (in my opinion) of ressucitation. Yes, these poems work with language as an object, dead if you like, a thing with physical properties like a serif or a ligature in print, a stammer or an accent when voiced. And at *the same time* these poems play with words to tell a decidedly alive and lively set of stories, about a lonely guy named slug who breaks out in a horrible rash and sets about investigating his apartment building to find the cause. In his search, he meets Butterfingers, a lonely girl with a history of sad relationships and a stammer.

That slug’s rash is made up of h’s, in several fonts, and that Butterfingers’s stammer stands in for punctuation and gradually begins to confuse meanings, is just part of the magic and tragedy of these characters. The linguistic high-wire act goes on right above the emotional lives of the characters.

As you might have gathered, a book that gets it’s initial plot push from a rash is not a buoyant one. While terribly funny, and I think ultimately quite romantic, *Unisex Love Poems* takes a grim view of the rites of love. There are two competing advice tomes running through the book, one for “Nice girls” who seek to avoid getting groped and secure matrimony, and one for their paramours, who seek to turn “your pretty poppy into a spirited spark plug.” Both use the same peppy euphemistic language and even similar flower metaphors, and both use metaphors of trapping the opposite sex into doing your desires.

Also on the advice front are some remarkable recipes for preparing the various internal organs (and two for tongue!) Nothing will make you rethink the common metaphor like a recipe for for “Stuffed Coeur” that advises one to “trim visible fat and functions” and that “the industrious and devoted honeydrop will use strands of her own hair to sew cavities.”

The recipes and accompanying diagrams gave me a tough time, as much as I was enjoying the jokes. And I was so sad for poor slug, whose wife is after his accent in his divorce case and who seeks companionship in a spider behind his fridge. But I was cheered up by slug’s lawyers, spitz and spatz, fairies because they are three and a half inches tall…or because of their “companionable” as well as legal relationship.

Also, typographic cartoons! Also, slug’s fieldnotes on all the living things he finds in his apartment. This book is less than 200 pages long, but it’s full to bursting. It’s best to be honest and admit that I’m *sure* I missed things too subtle and complex to be gotten in a quick and devouring read. But I’m quite happy to reread sometime soon.

About halfway through reading *Unisex Love Poems, I dropped the book in a dish of ice-cream while sitting in a cafe. As I began to clean it off with the only implement available, my tongue, it did occur to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a better book to lick.

I was lost but I was kind
RR

July 25th, 2008

Blog stars

I wonder why everybody being extra-interesting on Wednesday? And yet they so were:

“It all comes down to the slippery definition of “friendship,” a definition that is rendered ambiguous by the Internet’s systemic blurring of the divide between the personal and the private. A person can be, in Niedzviecki’s definition, “disengaged” by virtue of a computer monitor, yet still feel a personal connection with an online figure, whether that person be someone met in a chat room, through the comments section of a blog, or via an online gaming community.”
–from With Friends Like These by Steven @ That Shakespeherian Rag

“I can be a morbid person. Especially around this grocery store, where people with canes but young bodies, and hunchbacks, and disappointed and wild eyes, inevitably attract my attention for reasons I’ve never been fully able to understand. So when I saw this bride, I was already on edge in a way. My first thought was, Oh my God, she is going to jump off the roof.”
–from “Bride on a Pawnshop Roof” by Lauren

“Poets, I’d supposed, knowing better than the rest of us the careful constructs upon which ideas are built, of “just words” after all, and how those words and those ideas can’t be bent and twisted into anything, and that anything is everything, and that nothing can be sure. The difference of a line break, a comma; how fragile is simply everything, including life itself.”
–from “Of Poetry and War Crimes” by Kerry @ Pickle Me This

Maybe Wednesdays are better than I thought!

What will become of us / oblivion
RR

July 14th, 2008

Stories and Poems

“Look, there are more people playing ‘Grand Theft Auto’ this very second than will ever buy whatever book you’re talking about. No one cares, dude.”

“That’s no reason to ….”

“Hey! Loser! In about ten years nobody will be reading books! It’s over! Deal with it!”

–Michael Carbert, writing in “The Urquhart Disaster”, Maisonneuve Magazine

I admire the folks at Maisonneuve for, among many other things, continuing to care about stories and books in the face of mounting distractions and dissausion. So I take it as high praise indeed that they’ll be publishing my story, “Massacre Day,” in their next issue. I’m very excited, and will certainly let you know when it’s on the newsstands.

Other people working hard for the cause of words, this time poetry, are all the poets and volunteers at The Scream in High Park, culminating tonight in what, we hope, will be beautiful weather, out in the park. But really, I’m going rain or shine: Claudia Dey! Dani Couture! And a whack more talented folks!

Finally, this is neither story nor poem, but it made me laugh a lot–“My Airline” by David Owen: “You may no longer hum or do any form of beadwork.”

You’re all ladidah/but I know who you really are
RR