Posted in collage, interview, poetry, visual art
MEL NICHOLS, AMY WRIGHT,
AND CAMILLE MARTIN
7:30 PM Thursday, October 27
Bridge Street Books
(5 blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro, next to Four Seasons in Georgetown at the end of M Street)
Washington, DC
Hosted by Rod Smith
RAE ARMANTROUT AND CAMILLE MARTIN
4:00 – 6:00 PM, Saturday, Octoer 29
Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (just north of Houston)
NYC
$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Trisha Low and Kaegan Sparks
Rae Armantrout’s most recent poetry collections are Money Shot (Weslyan, 2011) and Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), which received the Pulitzer Prize. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.
Camille Martin is the author of Sonnets (Shearsman, 2010) and Codes of Public Sleep (BookThug, 2007). Recent projects include “Looms,” a collection of layered narratives, and “The Evangeline Papers,” a poetic sequence based on her Acadian/Cajun heritage and archaeological digs at an 18th century village in Nova Scotia.
Mel Nichols is the author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (National Poetry Series finalist, Edge 2009), Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha 2008), and Day Poems (Edge 2005). She teaches at George Mason University and curates the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series in Washington, DC.
Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal, as well as the author of two chapbooks, Farm (Finishing Line Press: 2010) and There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man (Apostrophe Books: 2009). Her prose and poetry appears in Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Southern Appalachia.
Photo: Camille Martin
Photo credit: Max Middle
Photo credit: Pearl Pirie
Photo credit: Erin Foley
Thanks to Max Middle and Erin Foley, intrepid and community-creating curators;
Zorras Multimedia Troupe for putting on a spectacular show in Ottawa;
Dean and Francoise Steadman, who graciously hosted me in Ottawa;
Charles and Amanda Earl, who gave me a terrific tour of Ottawa and made me want to pack up and move there immediately;
rob mclennan for bringing If Leaf, Then Arpeggio, my Above/Ground chapbook hot off the press, to the reading;
Christine McNair and rob mclennan, who invited me to have dinner with them in their fantastic new digs in an old Victorian house in Ottawa;
Bruce Kauffman for interviewing me on CFRC-FM in Kingston;
and to those wonderful souls who attended the readings, made me feel welcome, and even bought some books.
Posted in interview, photography, poetry, poetry reading, travel
Tagged AB Reading Series, Above/Ground Press, Amanda Earl, Bruce Kauffman, Camille Martin, CFRC-FM, Charles Earl, Christine McNair, Dean Steadman, Erin Foley, Francoise Steadman, If Leaf, Max Middle, Pearl Pirie, rob mclennan, sonnets, Then Arpeggio, Thrive Reading Series, Zorras Multimedia Troupe
I’ll be there . . . you come, too!
In good weather, Jiri and I love to take the ferry to the Toronto Islands, not only for the pleasure of bicycling along the wide, car-free trails, but for the ferry ride itself.
On the ceiling of the lower deck stretch long rows of orange life jackets. Walking along the length of the boat, I filmed a long shot of them, which I later inverted and overlaid with water imagery.
At first, the the thought of such a juxtaposition creating the illusion of underwater life jackets seemed obvious or literal, but as I began putting the images together, the resulting little film felt to me like a meditation on impermanence, a theme that I also explore in some of my poetry.
The strange thing, though, is that such meditations on the deathless rhythms of change, far from being depressing, give me a kind of — at first, I wrote “pleasure,” but it’s more like an aura of peace. Thich Nhat Hanh expresses the feeling beautifully in this epigrammatic passage:
We should not complain about impermanence,
because without impermanence, nothing is possible.
Posted in experimental film
Tagged Camille Martin, ferry, film, Neely Bruce, The Time Curve Preludes, Thich Nhat Hanh, Toronto Islands, William Duckworth
Photo: Amanda Roth
The September 23 Grey Borders Reading began on a surreal note as the poets were ushered onto the stage by Shelby, a young woman playing bagpipes. She happened to be at the Niagara Artists Centre before the reading, preparing for the next day’s annual parade through downtown St. Catharines to celebrate grapes and wine, without which the history of surrealism just wouldn’t have been the same.
And the surreality of the evening, fueled by wine and spiraling into the weirdness that poetry fiends crave, intensified with the poets’ readings: Shannon Maguire, Aisha Sasha John, Zorras, and yours untruly.
Afterward, we spilled into the night and settled in a pub lined with giant vats of pumpkin beer, spinning ever more exquisite corpses.
The idea of travelling nauseates me.
I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen.
I’ve already seen what I have yet to see.
. . .
Landscapes are repetitions. On a simple train ride
I uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention
to the landscape and my inattention to the book
that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life
makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of
movement aggravates it.
Only landscapes that don’t exist and books I’ll
never read aren’t tedious. Life, for me, is a
drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This
I keep free, so that I can be sad there.
I also brought along my new video camera, which became an extension of my fascination with the constantly-shifting scenery from train windows. There’s something infinitely expansive about the poetic, otherworldly, and metaphorical possibilities of the view from a train window. Visually, views within and outside trains are multi-layered. The view outside is a palimpsest of successive layers moving at different speeds depending on their distance: the blur of rails and gravel, the telephone poles flowing by and their wires complexly crisscrossing against the sky, the foreground (slagheaps, warehouses, rows of trucks or crops, houses, other trains), and the horizon (greenery, water). Then there’s the window itself, which might be streaked with rain but which always reflects a ghostly veneer of the interior scene: the ceiling lights, the young woman reading a book opposite me, the frames of windows on the other side of the train.
And there’s a difference between watching the scenery rush toward you and watching it get sucked away from you, and that difference translates into contrasting psychological states, at least for me. Since our cognitive metaphors shape our experience of time (the future approaches us and the past recedes into the distance), the head-on perspective creates the optimism of moving into the future and the other, the melancholy of watching the present frittering away from you and your ability to change it.
I think what I love so much about train travel is its artifice, its literary qualities. And it’s the metaphorical and philosophical dimensions of travel where Pessoa and I find common ground. A passage I found myself returning to during my trip:
Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no
landscape but what we are. We possess nothing,
for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have
nothing because we are nothing. What hand
will I reach out, and to what universe? The
universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
Like Borges and his insistent refrain that “There is no whole self,” Pessoa set about dissolving the notion of a unitary Cartesian identity. And like the ephemeral scenery from a train, the self relentlessly renews itself and enters the present with continually shifting points of reference.
The video below is a short film I made from scenes between Toronto and St. Catharines. As I edited the film I found that I was creating a somewhat artificial narrative of the trip: the departure, the stops along the way, the rain followed by blue skies. The film doesn’t have an arrival; it ends with a long view of puffy clouds. And the final scene reminds me of a passage in The Book of Disquiet describing Soares’ business trip:
The train slows down, we’re at Cais do Sodré.
I’ve arrived at Lisbon, but not at a conclusion.
Posted in experimental film, poetry, poetry reading, travel
Tagged A Short History of Decay, Bernardo Soares, Blaise Cendrars, Camille Martin, cognitive metaphors, Descartes, Emil Cioran, Fernando Pessoa, films, Grey Borders Reading Series, Nicolas Hoare Books, poems, poetry, Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France, St. Catharines, The Book of Disquiet, trains
Camille Martin
"They Will Take My Island," Arshile Gorky (1944)
Paul Vermeersch recently asked me to participate in his ongoing “They Will Take My Island” poetic project, in which he asks poets to respond to the eponymous 1944 painting by Arshile Gorky. I enthusiastically accepted the challenge, and immediately the question of the identity of “them” and “me” arose.
In an age in which questions of political and economic power seem more urgent than ever, probably the meaning that will most readily surface in people’s minds is of a powerful “they” taking something away from “me,” perhaps the sovereign island of individuality, the ability to determine the course of one’s life, free of coercion from the nefarious powers-that-be. In any case, that was the meaning that first came to my mind. And several of the poems powerfully develop that political facet of the title.
But what is fascinating about all of the poetic responses to Paul’s prompt is the sheer variety of approaches to those open-ended pronouns, as well as to the syntax of the sentence itself. As I sketched, drafted, and edited the poem, I developed the title to reflect my own philosophical, aesthetic, and cognitive concerns. And writing it was satisfying in unexpected ways.
So thank you, Paul, for the invitation to participate in a project that has brought me much pleasure, in both the writing of my poem and the enjoyment of reading the other poets’ responses to the title.
Posted in poetry, poetry blog
Tagged "They Will Take My Island", Arshile Gorky, Camille Martin, Paul Vermeersch
I’ll be reading with Shannon Maguire, Aisha Sasha John, and Zorras Multimedia Troupe—a treat to be reading with these terrific poets! And many thanks to Eric Schmaltz and the Niagara Artist Centre for making this event happen.
Then on to Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, Washington DC, and New York.
I’ll have copies of Codes of Public Sleep and Sonnets at each stop on the tours, but if you’d like to get a copy now, just go to my website, which lists clickable vendors for these books.
I’m doing all these trips by VIA Rail and Amtrak. There’s nothing better for writing than a window seat on a train . . .
Meanwhile, please have a look at my newly spruced-up website—it’s leaner and cleaner and easier to navigate:
Enjoy the perusing. Comments welcome!
In other news, I recently completed a new collection of poems, “Looms.” I used the Toronto New School of Writing‘s Manuscript Midwives program and went through intensive and gratifying editing sessions with poet Phil Hall, who has an uncanny ability to figure out what you want to do and help you do it better. I’m excited about this new manuscript, which is getting encouraging feedback from poet friends who’ve read the manuscript and heard my readings from it, most recently at AvantGarden.
And onward to a new poetry manuscript with the working title “Cambrian Blues.”
Cheers!
Camille Martin
I’ll read never-before-aired poems from my new manuscript “Looms.” Copies of my recently-published Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010) will be available for purchase.
A big thanks to hosts Liz Howard and Shannon Maguire!
Time: Tuesday, June 7, 6:30 pm—9:30 pm
Location: The Ossington (61 Ossington Avenue, Toronto)
Beatriz Hausner’s (Toronto, ON) poetry is rooted in the legacy of international surrealism, especially its Spanish American expression. Hausner’s extensive work as a translator has focused on the writers of that literature, including Rosamel del Valle, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, César Moro, the poets of Mandrágora, among many others. Hausner’s work has been anthologized and published in journals both in Canada and internationally, in French, Spanish and Portuguese translation. Recent publications of her poetry include: The Wardrobe Mistress (2003), Towards the Ideal Man Poems (2003), The Stitched Heart (2004), The Archival Stone (2005) and Sew Him Up (2010). Hausner is one of the publishers of Quattro Books (www.quattrobooks.ca). She works as a public librarian in Toronto.
Camille Martin, a Toronto poet, is the author of three books of poetry: Sonnets, Codes of Public Sleep, and Sesame Kiosk. Her work has been widely and internationally published in journals and translated into Spanish and German. Her current works in progress are “Looms,” a collection of layered narratives, and “The Evangeline Papers,” a poetic sequence based on her Cajun/Acadian heritage.
Claire Lacey blogs as poetactics. Claire studied English language and literature at Glendon College then headed west to cause a ruckus as a patagrad at the University of Calgary, where she writes poetry about linguistics and birds and bridges. Claire spent the last year working as writer-in-residence at a Calgary high school to convince students that poetry isn’t boring. Claire is poetry editor of Dandelion magazine.
Camille Martin
Posted in poetry, poetry reading
Tagged AvantGarden, Beatriz Hausner, Camille Martin, Claire Lacey, Liz Howard, poems, poetry, poetry reading, Shannon Maguire, Shearsman Books, sonnets
photo: rob mclennan
What a brilliant idea, this class! In a few weeks, I’ll be on the other side of the magnifying glass as I give a talk on Kaie Kellough’s Maple Leaf Rag. I’m especially looking forward to hearing Kaie again. I read with him in Montreal a couple of years ago—he’s a mind-blowing performer!
Camille Martin
Villanueva’s take: Sonnets is “rigorous and uncompromising . . . intellectually fearsome . . . torqued high.”
Click here for links to distributors that carry Sonnets.
Camille Martin
Posted in poetry, poetry review
Tagged Camille Martin, Eileen Tabios, Galatea Resurrects, Marianne Villanueva, poetry, poetry review, Shearsman Books, sonnets
Here’s a peek:
Click here to see the whole paean to greed.
Camille Martin
Posted in concrete poetry, poetry, Vispo, visual art
Tagged Amanda Earl, Camille Martin, collage, consumerism, gimme, greed, National Poetry Month, ransom note collage, visual poetry
I’ll read a little from Sonnets but mostly new stuff from two books in progress, Looms and The Evangeline Papers.
It’s my first reading in T-dot in over a year . . . please come!
Camille Martin (Sonnets)
Jonathan Bennett (Civil and Civic)
Paul Vermeersch (The Reinvention of the Human Hand)
The Pivot Reading Series
The Press Club
850 Dundas Street W.
8 PM
PYWC
Camille Martin
It starts soon, so if you’re interested, click here to register through the University of Toronto School of Continuing Education.
Here’s the schedule:
April 6 opening evening (For MC and registrants)
April 13 rob mcclennan speaking on Camille Martin’s Sonnets
April 20 Daniel Scott Tysdal speaking on Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies
April 27 Larissa Lai speaking on Mark Truscott’s Nature
May 4 Mark Truscott on Daniel Scott Tysdal’s The Mourner’s Book of Albums
May 11 Camille Martin speaking on Kaie Kellough’s Maple Leaf Rag
May 18 Kaie Kellough speaking on rob mcclennan’s Wild Horses
May 25
A combined evening at a venue not on U of T campus, also open to public (for a door fee).
Rachel Zolf on Erin Moure’s Pillage Laud AND Erin Moure on Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure
No class June 1
June 8 Final potluck and Student Intertexts on Influency 9 authors and books (important! please attend!)
Classes are facilitated by Margaret Christakos.
Influency 10: A Toronto Poetry Salon
April 6- June 8 2011 (no class June 1)
Wednesday evenings, 7-9:30 pm (we begin promptly at 7:05 and make every effort to end by 9:30; some classes may extend to 10pm).
For readers and writers alike. A powerful way to reconnect with poetry, to build bridges into the contemporary poetry scene, and to deepen critical engagement with poetry. Many writers and literature buffs attend this course; the class is equally welcoming to people with a beginner’s level of experience with reading poetry. Adults from 18-1000 years welcome. Approximately half the registrants in any given session have taken previous sessions of the class; and each session we welcome newcomers. The course may count towards a certificate in creative writing, or be taken for pleasure. Registrants compose readerly critical responses to books weekly, and write a final “Intertext” reflecting on two or more of the books studied, for presentation. Registrants also take turns in small groups introducing guests and bringing along snacks and non-alcoholic beverages to produce a congenial social environment for each evening.
Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon has run twice annually from Fall 2006. In each session, 8 accomplished poets working in distinctive styles will appear as both guest readers and peer critics in this unique lecture-reading series hosted by Margaret Christakos. Each poet’s critique of a colleague’s work will be followed with a reading by the poet under discussion. A group discussion led by Christakos will follow. Students will accumulate critical vocabulary to discuss more fluently the divergences of approach, motive, process and product typical of Toronto’s multitraditional literary culture. The 8-book package under discussion will be available in class for $130. Register a week prior to course beginning if possible to facilitate smooth running of a complex course! Note this spring’s session is 9 in-class meetings, with an extended evening on May 25 at an off-campus location.
The course has also spawned a fledgling online magazine called http://www.influencysalon.ca; please visit to see some of the essays and responses presented at some of our earlier classes.
* * *
Location: Rm 108, St George Campus Health Sciences Building, University of Toronto (one block west of University, south side of College St. Queen’s Park subway station at College and University)
Course number 1777 – 010
Register at http://www.learn.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Creative Writing program. No prerequisite.
Course $249 plus $130 book fee (8 poetry books). Fee is paid at first class by personal cheque or cash.
Camille Martin
Duration: 5 weeks (Tuesdays), 15 March – 12 April 2011, 6:30 – 8:30pm
Capacity: 12 students
Combining a historical overview of the sonnet form (or as Anselm Hollo once called it, the sonnet state of mind) with creative writing assignments, this course offers students the opportunity to experience the sonnet as a traditional and experimental network of possibilities.
Through a series of Reading/Writing sessions focused around various “sonnet-inspired models,” participants will deepen their appreciation of the evolution of the sonnet across history as well as generate their own sonnets, investigating relationships between the rubrics of tradition and form and content and meaning, while continuing the momentum of the “little song’s” enduring popularity.
Required Texts: Sonnets by Camille Martin, as well as a selection of readings that will be provided.
Click here to register for the class at the TNSOW website.
Camille Martin
Posted in poetry, poetry workshop
Tagged Camille Martin, poetry, poetry workshop, sonnet, TNSOW, Toronto New School of Writing
Posted in poetry, poetry reading
Tagged Adam Seelig, Camille Martin, CIUT FM, Daniel Tysdal, Donna G, poetry, Souvankham Thammavongsa
Camille Martin
Posted in poetry
Tagged Camille Martin, sonnets, The Street Names of Toronto, Toronto
Rogue Embryo
Rogue Embryo 