Michael Bogue wants to extrapolate my question of Boston & scenes to the context(s) of smaller metropolitan areas in a different nation altogether. It’s as interesting as it is contentious.

 

Mr. Silliman:

 

I had originally written this to be a "comment" but it rambled on way to long. Does anyone use comment features on weblogs much?

 

So what do you call those cities where there probably isn't even 150 readings every twenty years?

 

I live in a small, very conservative Canadian city of about 360 000, and if you don't particularly get along with the local self-proclaimed poets - and I don't - yr rather out of luck.

 

Your comment on sound poetry is right on the mark. Canadians seem to prefer someone standing on the stage reading the alphabet in an earnest manner, than the lone poet in a cork lined room who may only be writing for an audience of one, burning with the intensity of his own inwardness.

 

If there is an open poetry reading in a city this size - it tends to go something like this: Six or eight poets show up. One of them has brought an "audience" with them - they get up and read first - they leave. There are bars they need to go to. Half your "audience" is gone. After the reading - most people go home without introducing themselves in any genuine way.

 

Ever since our City Hall pretty much decided to abandon the city core - and you can see the same thing at work in every Canadian city about this size - "the center cannot hold" and the huge box stores slouching towards Bethlehem - or "Chapters."

 

No core means the "best minds of our generation" are destroyed by economic planning madness - and simply move... elsewhere. West usually - Vancouver.

 

Suffice it to say - a depressing situation. A "scene" so small that you don't have to have the loss of one institution - there are none - but simply one or two people who don't get along to split the already dismally small audience in half.

 

So - what are the advantages to a poet living in a city this small - but still large enough to be considered a center of some culture - tho more so in the 60s than now? I'm thinking of Christopher Dewdney's great archival and localist work as well as Greg Curnoe - whose paintings often incorporate text and certainly fall under the rubric of intermedia poetry.

 

One of the finest poets I have met lives in this city- Scott Carlson - but he refuses to publish his work in any conventional way. He simply puts out small broadsides covering the front and back of a sheet of paper and photocopies them at a a local career center.

 

His performance style, suffice it to say, is the polar opposite of "school of quietude" type.

Apparently he used to get nosebleeds when he performed he would be so loud. Imagine a street corner preacher who listens to too much heavy metal and spends his days dreaming up bizarre Blakean cosmologies and you will have some of the picture. I've tried to get him to do some recordings and let me put his work on the internet - but he is as leery as the internet as I am enthusiastic for its possibilities.

 

He is, in short, an original. Something you rarely find anywhere. In a large city - even Toronto - someone of his caliber would no doubt pack rooms. In London, Ontario he mostly just gets strange looks. The overwhelming concern with anyone in London is "Do you go to Western?" and if you do not attend that fine University - you are "out".

 

In a city of a few million - would such a person just be another crackpot or would they find their audience? Probably both...

 

Tho I have met many poets in this city - they are rarely of the non "school-of-quietude" type - an appellation I would rename "school of solitude" - and are typically very conservative. The first time I took some of my early writing experiments to the local writer-in-residence I was informed "he usually threw things like that out."

 

It's a comment I treasure to this day.

 

In fact the only person who gave me any sort of encouragement was Karen Mac Cormack, a fine editor/poet and a great person to boot.

 

Of course, they had to bring her in from Toronto.

 

I may go and take some work to the new "poet laureate" of Canada - an institution I was always glad we didnt have – George Bowering. This interview doesnt give me much hope.

 

His "slam" against poetry slams seems more reactionary than well thought out. I only ever once hosted a "poetry slam" and it succeeded in bringing out people who would otherwise never come to such an event, and if the poetry was no better than your typical open mic, it was no worse either.

 

In conclusion, to my point, and I do have one - is that I believe there needs to be a far greater support of poetry in smaller metropolitan areas. There will never be a "London School of Poetry", or a Flint Michigan school, for that matter. The odds against a young poet sticking with poetry as a discipline are much greater simply because there is less support. I'm not talking about grants - I'm no great fan of grants, you can't bite the hand that feeds you. Simply the social networks that can operate as a spur, having a healthy mix of different levels of ability and methods.

 

I have grown to see the center of my city going from a vital center of economy and culture to a largely burned out husk where every third building is empty - and most of the ones that are not are businesses I call "parasites of the poor" - pawn shops, dollar stores, quick-loans ie legal loan sharks etc. , the rest being Government run Temples in the Church of Social Concern - and it has removed much of the sense of purpose from the arts community as a whole, but the poetry scene in particular.

 

So my question is before me on how to survive and thrive in a more-indifferent-than average city, without losing my marbles or my way.

 

I certainly envy those poets who, by living in the large city, have the social resources to receive varied feedback on their works - whatever the means - and to me it seems just one more example of the hegemony of separation that keeps, poets from audience, audience from publisher and publisher from poets.

 

 

namaste

 

michael bogue

 

 

"Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature."

- Rainer Maria Rilke