April 20, 2008
Jordan Scott, Steven Collis, & Donato Mancini
Sunday, April 20th, 5:00 pm
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Avenue
$5.00 suggested donation
Originally from Coquitlam, British Columbia, Jordan Scott now lives and works in Toronto. Jordan's first book of poetry, Silt, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Craig Dworkin writes that his new book, Blert (Coach House), "is the most original poetic project I have read in years. Undertaking a 'poetics of stutter,' the book is not primarily a mimetic representation of stuttering, or the reproduction of stammered speech, but rather an investigation into how the stutter originates." In the fall of 2006, Jordan worked on the final sections of Blert while acting as the writer in residence at the International Writers' and Translators' Centre in Rhodes, Greece.
Poet and critic Stephen Collis is the author of three books of poetry, Mine (New Star), Anarchive (New Star), and The Commons (Talonbooks). He edited Companions & Horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (WCL), and is the author of Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions). A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, he teaches American literature, poetry, and creative writing at Simon Fraser University.
Donato Mancini's first book of poetry, Ligatures (New Star Books 2005) was shortlisted for a ReLit award. Just out are his second book, Æthel, from New Star, and a new chapbook published by Perro Verlag in the Hell Passport series. He has work forthcoming in the anthologies Decalogue 3 and Boredom Fighters!, and in the magazines West Coast Line, Open Letter, Rampike, and FRONT.
Mandible chatter, a gatling hopscotch:
herring clatter buccal cove, yokel coconut acoustic.
Plankton trek trachea, an ice packed hightop waltz. Walrus flop tongue.
Chomp tusk onto ice sizzle. Air sac ebb: eco racket dome slow ice
furrow, dorsal rip katabatic overflow tectonic chattermarks riprap
frazil ice. Mucous globs gumbotill until syrup sweet lymph between the
words.
Rehearse in verse. Horn spat. Rest. Speedbag glottal. Rise. Bumblebee
yodel. Again.
— Jordan Scott
POEM BEGINNING WITH THE TITLE OF A CY TWOMBLY PAINTING
Fifty days at Iliam writing
A small dictionary of debts
Recollecting recompense the structural epic
How we any of us
Depopulate scorn throwing contingency up
On the wounds ethics wears
Or take from a poem
Small candle window worn to
Speak into tongues most sequent
Wry whisper or voices valves
Look -- it shook secrets from
Our agents who wore mirth
Like a salient whim or
Chipped sugar onto larks' backs
To swoop from romantic piers
And stupid like we weren't
Ninjas swooping into politics pretending
Farce and forced open our
Ocular throats to bleat against
Gain and murder's plunder gore
Or like this painting where
Each brush stroke is borrowed
From another or coiled
In canvas culture chirps
In another tree language is
Links everything stolen is free
To form affinity frames light
And pure colorists divine ardor
As a way of being
Oneself in another's delicate skin
This is to be reiteration
Echo quote figure trope troubled
Lyric can you hear me
Now pointillism is my point
To make a mend in
Rent fabrics torn of voice
Scattered and weathered versions thereof
Every poem written as "after"
Subsumed but not bearing debts
Laughter as origin propertyless press
Thus like a fire that
Consumes all before it an
Eagle drops skies scars and
Pallas fierce drives where thickest
Making war or poems without
Fame fled to paint rages
As ages hence we are
Still standing a precipice treed
To overlook our angers destructions
Or boil our debts' oil
— Steven Collis