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poetry readings

Vancouver reading

Well Wednesday’s been and gone and so has the Vancouver reading. The Peter Kaye Room was a nice space to read, in a really stunning building (Battlestar Galactica set?? who knew?)… although the partition-weight walls mean you’d better hope you don’t have anything too entertaining going on nearby. Unfortunately for my poetry chickens, the woman who was holding forth on her backpacking trip to a large and grateful audience next door launched into her best jokes just as my reading reached its emotional apex. (I guess on the scale of distraction this is still preferable to the drunks and lunatics who occasionally press body parts to the glass or wander mid-stanza into Mocambo readings.) And when my foot got stuck to the electrical tape holding down the microphone cable, that got audience members wondering what kind of personal dance steps I was perfecting behind the podium.

But other than that I was pleased with the evening. Friendly responsive audience and a satisfactory huddle round the book table, heroically managed by my cousin Deb. Many family members there, and my family of friends (and thanks, Tom, for photo-documenting the event). Celebrity visitors included writers Leona Gom and Heidi Greco and Brian Andre and Allan Brown.

I noticed Bob Dylan features set lists from his concerts on his website so I thought why don’t poets? And here’s mine in case you want to sing along:

(from Old Habits/Crosswords)
Boston School of Cooking Cookbook
(from Cartography)
Craft
Anniversary
Making Sense
Tales
Journeys
Vegetables
At It Again
Suitcase
YEG to YVR
After the Fall
Leaf Cutter Bees
My Kitchen
(from new ms.)
Ache and Pain
London Plane
Hard Cold Realty
(from Creating the Country/Crosswords)
Another Life to Live at the Edge of the Young and Restless Days of Our Lives

On the food side of things, Ana took me round some excellent foodie places in Park Royal, including Whole Foods, a terrifyingly large and pricy American natural/organic foods supermarket chain (with branches in the UK and of course Canada). Although dazed by the lighting and swooning from all the beautiful displays, we were able to wrestle a gorgeous chunk of aged gouda into the shopping basket before we fled into the rain. Heaven on earth.

She’s lent me a promising book – Italian Food Artisans: Traditions and Recipes – which helped ease the trauma of missing the ferry back to Vancouver Island by a niggling 8 cars, followed by a tedious two hour wait for the next sailing. The joys of living on an island.

Now I’m packing my bags for a trip to Lumb Bank, followed by London – where I’ll hear Marilyn Hacker speak and attend a Troubadour reading – before swinging by the League of Poets meeting in darkest Ottawa. Expect intermittent but internationally flavoured posts for the next couple of weeks.

Mocambo and smoked salmon

Went to Mocambo last night where Tanis MacDonald and Elizabeth Bachinsky were on the bill. She’s touring the east with a pair of poets, Michael V. Smith and Jennica Harper, who also made an appearance, as did local and seldom seen poet/novelist Steve Noyes.

Meanwhile I had been meditating on how to use up some of my smoked salmon, left over from the great smoked salmon cheesecake enterprise of ’06. I settled on smoked salmon quiche, and last night’s Smoked Salmon Penne with Pepper Vodka which I made with cresta di gallo instead of penne, because I think it’s a pasta of much greater character. Right up there with my favourite, the aptly named radiatore. Here’s a low-ish fat version of that quasi-Russian pasta dish:

3 cups penne
1-1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup shallots, minced
3 tbsp white wine
1 c fish stock
6 tbsp low fat sour cream
6 oz smoked salmon, flaked or chopped
1 c cooked asparagus or sugar snap peas, in 1-2″ pieces
1-2 tbsp pepper vodka
Cook the penne until al dente, about 8 minutes. Drain and rinse and drain again.
Meanwhile, cook the shallots in olive oil until soft but not brown, about two minutes. Add the wine and bring to a boil. Add the broth, sour cream and some ground pepper; bring to the boil and then reduce, stirring constantly, until it has a thick, gravy-like consistency. Add the smoked salmon and simmer a couple of minutes. Add the vegetables and heat through. Remove from the heat, stir in pepper vodka and season to taste. Mix in the penne, heat gently and then serve.

That old launch of mine


So.. the launch was a lovely elegant affair in a lovely elegant building, adorned with fantastic art and incredible furniture.

Note the throne they seated me on and the special little signing mat, and the height of the table which meant supplicants practically had to kneel for audience.

Here you see the back of Pam Porter, winner of this year’s GG for Children’s Literature, whose own poetry collection is due out any second now from Coteau and will doubtless sparkle brightly with a light all its own.

And here’s a gaggle of gastronomes nibbling on that ever present smoked salmon cheesecake. More photos another time, perhaps, once I’ve seen more of them.

I caught the cooking section of CBC’s North By Northwest this weekend; apparently Ricardo Larrivee is Quebec’s answer to Jamie Oliver (and way prettier, IMHO). He was by some curious coincidence making a vegetarian lasagne with eggplant caviar — which latter substance was one of the items I made for the launch. I wonder if I can use leftovers in a lasagne?

Flax, linseed and poetry in Chicago

When did linseed become flax? I often get startled looks when I call those little beggars in the Red River Cereal linseed, but I sure wouldn’t dare call the oil version by that name, because we know linseed oil as a furniture polish, traditional oil for cricket bats, and paint solvent, not as the trendy and expensive wonder-supplement we call flax seed oil.

The source of all this is a plant whose full and proper name is Linum usitatissimum, as we might have guessed by the names of other of its products, linoleum and linen for example. It is also grown as an ornamental plant in gardens, its sky blue flowers opening only in the morning. Other uses include dye, paper, medicines, poultices, fishing nets and soap, as well as a handy plug for drains (wrap it up first though eh?). If you’re not keen on sardines or cold water/oily fish, ground flax seed or flax seed oil are particularly good sources of Omega-3. It’s not something I’ve seen used as a central ingredient in cooking – its flavour is pretty nondescript – but you can add it for nutritional and/or decorative reasons to a number of baked goods, soups, grains etc.

I was leafing through my new copy of PN Review which includes a review of the University of Chicago’s recent exhibition The Making of Modern Poetry. The show’s over now, and on the wrong side of this continent, but I liked the reported response by John Ashbery to an acceptance by a literary magazine of his poem Europe, exclaining it was “the best news since the Treaty of Utrecht“.

In my wanderings on the U of Chicago site looking for information on the exhibition, I encountered Poem Present, where you can, if you have QuickTime or an MP3 player, hear and view past readings, including a reading and lecture by Robert Creeley who visited the university the year before he died. What a wonderful world.

Black Moss in Spice City

It was a Black Moss kind of night last night. Heard Paul Vasey and Marty Gervais at Mocambo, and had a chance to wave my new book around. Paul had just recovered from laryngitis and a wicked cold but he read well from his novel Last Labour of the Heart, published by Marty’s Black Moss Press of Windsor, whence hails our new favourite CBC morning show host. Marty showed off his design and photography skills with his letterpress book Taking My Blood, and read from his new collection Wait for Me, also published by Black Moss.

A couple of nice ‘n spicy lunches with ladies this week. We were going to attempt a novelty lunch at the Provincial legislature restaurant, but we were a little late since they close it to the public at 11:30 when the house is in session, and there were a couple of bus tours downstairs taking up space, so we wandered off in search of something else.

Our sure-footed local expert Aurelie took us by the noses and led us to Santiago’s, a bright happy Thai, Mexican and tapas place; lively in the evenings and fills up for lunch. It’s only a block or so from the legislature, tucked away on Belleville. We got to perch up above the crowd in a booth, while the spring daylight streamed in through the conservatory-like front of the restaurant.The menu includes tapas items which actually seemed large enough for main courses: Thai red curry with shredded squash looked and was confirmed to be amazing; chicken quesadilla is said to be a reliably good standby; and my beef burger with jalapeno relish was very good indeed.

I’ve walked past The Reef a zillion times, as it’s next door to the Yates Street parkade where I often park when visiting Ferris’ Oyster Bar directly opposite. I discovered the room is deceptively deep inside and equipped with several comfy booths, each with their own mechanical fish tanks which grind a little strangely in your ear as you read the menu. I’d never had roti, and wondered what it was like, so had one filled with Jerk Chicken, a dark spicy mixture that soaked nicely into the flatbread wrapper. (So the answer is, it’s like spicy stuff in a flat bread, and it works!) It came with a fairly bland coleslaw – which was ok given the spice in the roti. I allowed myself to be talked into a noontime Mojito which went a little too well with everything else. We had some plantain chips to start with and enjoyed dabbling them lightly in the spicy Caribbean hot sauce.

Back home, in milder mood, I made a rhubarb custard pie the other night… yum… My recipe also called for a tablespoon of orange peel and a quarter tsp of cloves. You can cover it with a lattice if you like, but it is fine as a single crust.

Words on the Water and after

So: the Words on the Water writers festival (check out the virtual tour of Campbell River!) was a good old time. We arrived, on a day of brilliant sunshine, at 8:30 sharp and purchased $40 worth of tickets for all the day’s readings, of which there were eight, in four sessions. We heard that the Friday night gala had been a success, and were offered a few newly added (thank you fire department) seats for the Saturday night literary cabaret. But in the end we decided against staying for the evening as well, since all the readers were the same as for the daytime sessions, and we felt in our bones – and a few other places – that sitting through the first 8 hours of readings was probably enough.

Evelyn Lau kicked things off with some poems from her new collection, Treble. She talked about the autobiography of writing: even when she’s writing fiction, she said, she’s in the story. She came across well and was warmly received by the audience; though she had some serious zing in some of her poem endings I opted to spend my cash instead on another gorgeous Gaspereau poetry collection by Jan Zwicky, Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences. As she’d been asked, she talked a bit about philosophy, music and poetry and how these come together for her; and she quoted Don Paterson, in an introduction to his translations of Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who’d observed that Spanish is a guitar, while English is a piano.

We had a break then, with treats supplied by Save-on-Foods, the official festival sponsor. Although I’d raised an eyebrow when I saw the supermarket was also selling the books, after a day feeding on their goodies (including a very nice lunch buffet) I came round. But it would have been nice to see a local independent bookseller, if there is such a thing in Campbell River, reap a little of the benefit of the event, which saw about 150 people attend the day’s readings.

We heard some prose then, from Claudia Casper, and some poems – read in his characteristic moaning growl- by poet, typographer and bringer of tales from the Haida, Robert Bringhurst. One of his suggestions was that all Canadian children should be required to learn at least one indigenous language so that they may read, in their original words, stories in which humans are not the most important elements.

And stood in a long long queue for lunch, after which we had more prose, from Annabel Lyon who talked about music, prose and law school, and read a bleak little tale she’d gleaned from a murder trial she’d once watched; and some new and hilarious writing from our favourite storyteller David Carpenter.

Another break and we sped toward the finish with poetry: first, Gregory Scofield demonstrated that had he chosen another path he could easily charm the words from the trees as a singer. Then Patrick Lane wrapped things up with a reading from his memoir and a few newer poems. He remarked on once being stunned to discover that a metaphor he was teaching about a wren was lost on a group of first year university students, only a couple of whom were aware that a wren was a bird.

We enjoyed a sunny afternoon drive back to Courtenay, where we stopped in to enjoy a bit of gin and some patatas bravas and some spicy squid in garlic yogurt at the Union Street Grill and Grotto before pressing on to Fanny Bay to put our feet up and rest our weary heads. In the morning we scooted back down the island, pausing to make a side trip to Thetis Island for lunch, and then on to Victoria in the sprinkling rain.