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