Dream

Last night I had a very vivid dream that my family and I were going to move to Calgary Alberta. Why Calgary I have no idea, I don't really have a reason to move there, nor do I feel as though I would be particularly welcome there either. It's true that's Alberta is the province of my birth, so who knows, maybe subconsciously I want to go "home" again.

Occasionally

Discovering some old poems in a box has caused me to think about the occasional poem, so I'm going to abandon all fears of 'the confessional' and 'hip intelligence' and write a whole bunch. One a day to be precise. Is that occasional enough for you?

Last Lexiconjury

Well another era has come and gone. There were a few featured readers the other night who admitted that it was their first and last time at the Lexiconjury. It reminds me of when I was a 'featured reader' at my first and last Cafe May reading. When was that, like 1995? I remember I read "Whitman in Black" by Ted Berrigan (which I had to write out myself from memory not having brought a cover text. I think I got it wrong). And for my own poem I read something called "New Year's Poem" which was one of those 'letter poems' I was writing at the time in the style of Berrigan or O'Hara about sitting around my apartment late at night with a head cold. A fun evening, one of my earliest public readings in Toronto, where I met (read witnessed) people like Bill Kennedy, Christian Bok, John Barlow, Nancy Dembowski, Peter McPhee, Alana Wilcox, Matthew Remski, R.M. Vaughn, Michael Holmes, Darren Wershler-Henry, and others (I'm sorry if you were there and your name isn't here).

I've decided that 'endings' are a way to eschew meaningfulness on something that might not necessarily bear the same meaningfulness otherwise. What if the Cafe May reading series was still going on? It would probably be as meaningful as the Art Bar. If Lexiconjury kept going it's fate would be the same. Maybe Lex was the reincarnation of Cafe May, but was disguised by calling it 'Lexiconjury' rather than 'Cafe May' and had certain new technological features such as a listserve to help define/promote it. But let's admit that even if there were some similarities, they were two different series representing two different scenes. Super. Glad we figured that out.

One of the main differences, perhaps, is the varying degree to which entertainment infused the literary cultures the two series represented. A conversation with Margaret at the end of the night caused me to consider the difference between Angela's and Katherine's 'performance' of a Gertrude Stein text and Bill Kennedy's (who was a regular at the Cafe May and hosted that final event too if I remember correctly) 'reading' of Dewdney's "Grid Erectile" and a poem from Williams' Paterson. In the current state of culture, or perhaps it might be considered the 'new' state of culture, the notion of entertainment is a strong one. Gizmos, gadgets, television, the internet, movies, music at every turn. How can we not be entertained? This is not to say that the Cafe May was not entertainment- or pop culture-free. The night I was there I remember Michael Holmes' cover text being the lyrics to a Forgotten Rebels song, and I know that some of the early computer interface (read now as internet poetics, and read internet as pure eye candy) poetry was present there too in the form of Wershler-Henry, who performed his Translating Translating Apollinaire into Klingon translation, and Bok who performed some of his work. And I think there was some spoken word present too, which I have always interpreted as a way of making really uninteresting poems 'sound' entertaining.

Has thought become entertainment? Is poetry entertaining? It is a very curious thing to consider. If I don't want to 'perform' my texts (I know, I know, I know about the idea that all public appearances are 'performed') will I recede into the background? Anyway, this isn't about me. I don't want to go on record saying that the Lexiconjury was totally amazing and I don't want to go on record saying that the Lexiconjury was total crap. I'd rather go on record as saying that it was, as Mark has said, as close to a third place as I've ever found. Whatever it was, good or bad, smart, hip or superficial, the troubling thing is that it did something -- one could join in or react against it both from within or from the outside. It was there. And now it is gone, and I wonder how long it will be before people are telling me that there needs to be somewhere like Lexiconjury again the same way that I kept hearing that there needs to be somewhere like Cafe May again a few years after it had ended. And I wonder what the next third place will be for people to gather around.

One thing's for certain, you could buy some pretty fucking cool books at the Lexiconjury, heh? Isn't it fitting that at the last Lex someone stole Apollinaire's shelves?

Some Thoughts

The following is in response to some discussion going on here

"You write:
"I have no doubt now that there is an obvious problem with regard to sexism in the Toronto poetry scene"

This is the whole point;" (GB)

I'm not sure if this is the whole point. There is also a fragmentation in "the community" (I'm using quotes because it is an un-definable entity) based on an imagined polarization: insider vs outsider art. As you say: "this is a centre-less community." This I think is very true, but I also think there are a number of people who don't imagine it this way at all based on any number of criteria, be it geography or public recognition or other things that have occurred historically in the literary scene.

The notion of insider vs outsider in the Toronto arts “community,” which is not unlike the imaginary battle between the schools of the schooled and the unschooled that has been going on for like 100 years in Canada and has created such things as ‘street-cred’ vs ‘professionalism’ has, at least for me, a very specific origin. I know that even though this individual has been putting the idea out there for quite some time it has always been interpreted and used incorrectly by everyone who has tried to talk about or define it and the originator has never bothered to try to correct anyone for whatever reasons. I do know that this person has continually stated that the whole thing doesn’t exist. But this has constantly been ignored and some people have made both subjective and objective positions for themselves and others somewhere on that imaginary line between the imaginary poles of the inside and the outside of something (“the community”) that in reality has no such positions in which to stand.

“Community” is indeed a centreless entity, just as it is perhaps a genderless entity. And yet it can have the appearance of having a center (or a gender). No one has discussed this aspect of the recent state of affairs, (at least not publicly, and I must admit that I owe some of this thinking to a certain someone I chatted with yesterday) and it seems to me that just as the “silence” with regard to sexism in the “community” has led to the recent gender wars and the sudden desire to speak out on the subject, “silence” with regard to the existence of an “outside” of something that has no outside has lead to a certain amount of resentment and anger on the part of those who feel they persist there. This, combined with an overall inability on the part of the members of this “community” to separate a person who makes art from the art that they make, has led to a lot of hurtful statements and confusion, and has forced those who feel they persist “on the outside” to feel even further ostracized. One of the inherent problems of the open letter is that even though it does state affirming and positive things, the list of names attached to it (not to mention the list of names not attached to it) also causes the letter to confirm that there are indeed “sides” in “the community” which is supposed the be centre-less and/or polar-less. How to deconstruct this foible of a centreless entity that maintains polarization through individual interpretation (and perhaps even through cultural expectations) is something that (like sexism) also needs to be addressed with regard to "this community."