Over 100 people

...attended the Hagios Press spring launch at The Delta Bessborough last Thursday. Or so I hear. I didn't do the counting, but it looked like over 100 to me. It was one of the best and most moving launches I've been to in some time. Gary Hyland read from his new poetry book Hands Reaching in Water. Joanne Weber read from her first collection of poetry The Pear Orchard. Several contributors, including friend and fellow blogger Paula Jane Remlinger, read from
Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets, edited by Barbara Klar and Paul Wilson. Hats off to every one. Wilson, now co-publisher with Hagios Press, was one of the new Saskatchewan poets in Heading Out: The New Saskatchewan Poets, published by Coteau Books back in 1986. It was edited by Anne Szumigalski and Don Kerr. Don Kerr was at the Hagios launch on Thursday, sitting right in front of me. I saw other contributors to Heading Out, all long established writers I admire, sitting in the crowd. How cool. I wonder which poets in Fast Forward will take on the task of editing and launching the next anthology? That's a ways down the road, I know. But I do know, just going by what I saw on Thursday, that many of the poets in Heading Out and Fast Forward will be there to hear.

Prairie Fire must be thrilled

...with Mandy Malazdrewich's photographs in "Home Place: The Poets of Winnipeg" in the latest issue (Vol. 28 No. 1). They're fantastic. Forty poets, forty photographs. I haven't read any of the poems yet, but I've had a good look at the faces. Ariel Gordon, a friend and fellow blogger, looking radiant in her gorgeous office. The stunning photos of Mariianne Mays and Lindsey Wiebe, poets I met a couple years back. The playful photo of David Streit, arms crossed, having a staring contest with a cat. The whites of his eyes, the white cat. Amazing. Then there's the one of Ken Kowal, perhaps the best photograph of the lot. Or the one that best marks Malazdrewich as an artist.

You can judge poets

...by their cupcakes. It takes a lot of practice, and practice I did. I'm now an expert.


These fantastic cupcakes were made by the fantastic Sylvia Legris.

People like me are a nuisance

...in grocery stores. I rarely go shopping, and whenever I do step into a grocery store I'm immediately drawn to the displays, taking note of other shoppers and how they interact with the products. I get in the way of carts. I run into the twisters of twist ties. I run into bags of buns. Anyhow, on the way home today we stopped at the Safeway in Prince Albert to pick up some road food. Lo and behold, when I walked in I saw the word poetry in lights on my right. Poetry! And poetry in bloom, no less! I wasn't prepared for that. Nor was the staff of the poetry in bloom department prepared for me. "Why is this called poetry in bloom," I asked. The staff looked at me and said "I don't know." "Is there any poetry here?" I asked. No, she replied. "No one has ever asked me that before." So I walked around the poetry in bloom department, looking for poetry. I found no shortage of blooms. Roses. Tulips. Potted mums. How-to plant books. You name it. I even found the word bloom on a pot, but no poetry. Mind you, I neglected to check the backside of the pot. Maybe the poetry is there.

There's something to be said

...about "The Art of Disclosure" over on rockstarpoet:

This blog will be very quiet

...this month. Have a great April! I'll post again in early May.

Update:
April 2 - Ok. I posted today, but likely will not post again until May. In the meantime I'll be practising my pronunciation of "kuchen" and "kaffee."

Update:
April 2 - By the way, last night I read "How we learned to stop having fun" and lingered over several sentences, including this one: "Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person - potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures." The bit about Nietzsche and the "horror of individual existence" caught my attention as well. Until I read this article I hadn't really thought about the suppression of festivities.

Update:
April 4 - I have to share this. Todd Swift, talking about reaching the next generation of readers and writers, says this: "Combining more innovative and fresh models with the more traditional approaches of old would no more disrupt the Tradition than Eliot's work did - in fact, as Eliot himself argued, each new work simply realigns the whole canon, in new, vital ways." Nice.