ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Some interesting discussion yesterday about the different ways of reading: for academic purpose vs for writing. Erin and John talked about their ways of preparing during the writing of a poetry project, reading widely and employing techniques of serendipity, or delving and re-delving into more challenging works in order to find directions of thought from them.

Between our excellent meals we have been trying to walk off a pirogy here, a cookie there. One popular destination is Prairie Cherries, where the proprietors sell organic cherry products from their orchard. The variety they grow is a cross between the sturdy prairie classic, the Mongolian Cherry, which is short and hardy but a bit on the tart side; and the pie cherry for sweetness, a variety developed by the University of Saskatchewan.

On our after-dinner tick-catching stroll, we saw another prairie fruit in bloom everywhere: Saskatoon blossoms everywhere.

We met a Red Wing Blackbird.

And a wee Warbler.

A beaver dam…

…and a beaver.

A white horse….

…a black horse.

A deer on a hillside.

And lots of what Gary described as prairie wool. It’s like walking on a down quilt. Would’ve lain down to look at the stars but for the ticks.

In the self-serving-don’t-mess-with-my-lifestyle department, a recent Pew poll says that over half of Americans surveyed don’t feel humans are responsible for global warming.

In the interesting angle department, Raj Patel draws some interesting conclusions from a recent Lancet article and the ensuing media headlining.

And in the bee-keeping department, here’s a cool manual on bee-keeping produced by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity.

Such fun with words we’re having. We started off doing translation exercises, similar to this “Homophonic Translation” routine, which we did using a latin text. Last night it occurred to me that I might be able to find a way into revision work by using an online translation tool, so I’ve been blasting a few pieces apart by translating them into Japanese, Greek, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, French, Italian and Spanish — and back again, sometimes more than once. It’s been a fun way to take apart a dull line or sentence and see what might enliven it. Or perhaps start me off in a new poem or image.

Here are the opening lines of an old poem of mine I chose at random:

The path of disaster is so often
just beyond the window we’ve turned
away from for that critical
moment

and the translated version (via Japanese and Greek)(with a few tweaks to make the syntax work, more or less):

Such a certain street of destruction
a precise and often window
that exceeds our regard
with empty importance
turns because this

So, a different world and a different meaning, and a lot of nonsense, but maybe something in there presents an opening for new directions and energy.

According to the note I received from my MP today, Bill C-517, which proposed mandatory labelling of genetically modified foods in Canada, did not pass second reading on May 7th 2008. I suppose this gives us a fair sense of which interests are running our country, and the public interest is not being considered. Now would be the time to write to your MPs and tell them to try again. I don’t think they heard us the first time. Or the second.

This feels like about my fourth springtime this year; where I am today, the Qu’Appelle Valley is starting to green.

Last night being chef’s night off, we went to Regina, to the Mediterranean Bistro where the 4-cheese tortellini looked somewhat better than it tasted (seriously overwhelmed by smoked salmon and dill, and using pretty ordinary tortellini; the asparagus was the best thing in it..)

I couldn’t see much to choose from if you have issues about industrial food: a lot of chicken on the menu with nothing to defends its origins. Maybe next time I’ll try the bouillabaisse, which had a pretty nice fennel broth to commend it… setting aside for one evening my many questions about the origins of the prawns.

This morning I picked up a couple of books of poetry from the Sage Hill library, and found a (now deceased) female American Dog Tick (Dermacentor variabilis)

hanging onto a corner of Worn Thresholds, by Julie Berry.

One of my co-colloquiists brought along the latest issue of Poets & Writers, in which is a topical article for all of us here, called Putting Your Poetry into Order. And an even more irresistible (to me) feature: Through the Eyes of the Editors, in which three literary magazine editors speak to us.

Stephanie Fiorelli discusses a fairly new magazine she co-founded, Avery, going for three years; unusually for a literary journal, it’s independent, non-profit and publishing nothing but short stories. She and her fellow editors also maintain a blog to open up some of what goes on to produce such a publication.

Essayist and poet David Hamilton, who’s been editing the Iowa Review for thirty years, talks about general changes and the impact of university-isation of literary journals over the years: escalating numbers of submissions (10,000 poems received each year of which 120-150 can be published); ‘go-team’ competitive sensibilities between academic-run journals.

Most interesting to me was the piece by poet Stephen Corey, who edits the Georgia Review (and who co-edited an anthology I highly recommend, Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry) who said a number of thoughtful things. He estimates having received something like 200,000 poems, 50,000 short stories and 15-20,000 essays during his 25 year involvement with the magazine. He goes on to say

“that these statistics are misleading and unnecessarily intimidating, because the bulk of what we receive is not very good at all. The competitive pool is very small, and across the past 25 years I have not seen any appreciable increase in its relative size, despite burgeoning creative writing programs, spell-check and rudimentary grammar-check software, summertime writers conferences, private writing mentors, and online writing workshops.”

He says the number of non-fiction submissions has massively increased,

“except that most of the pieces we receive are not essays anymore, but autobiographical narratives and reminiscences that read more like sentimental journal entries than thoughtful and rigorous considerations of experiences”

And that although the number of poems submitted hasn’t changed much, the number of short stories has dropped, but perhaps this is because

“I think the publishing industry has worked over-time of late to eradicate the short story form, and I think some of the writing programs may have been helping too. Story cycles, linked stories, novels-in-stories – all these au courant designations are attempted end-arounds in the pro-novel, anti-short story game of book marketing.”

His advice to writers is in tune with the overall tone of our time: to slow down.

“Any person who writes one great poem or story or essay per year for twenty years will take his or her place on the short list of the finest writers of all time. Slow down. Read voluminously, year after year, both for pleasure and to be reminded of all that you must not do, and all that you must exceed, in order to make your own special, indelible mark… Never to be forgotten once read – isn’t that what we must seek?”