Tag Archives: Small Press Distribution

Photos & report: Quill Puddle Release Party (at Detroit’s historic Scarab Club)

Posted on April 20, 2014 | Leave a comment

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* Unfortunately, not all of my photographs came out – my apologies to readers not represented in the slide show above.

          Detroit’s vibrant, grass-roots poetry community continues to bring the best of poetry from Detroit and beyond through series like the Woodward Line, held at the historic Scarab Club and organized by Kim Hunter, James Hart III, and Frances Barber. The lower floor houses an art gallery, so that poets and audience are surrounded by a compelling visual feast, which heightens the effect of the poetry.
QUILL PUDDLE 5 AND 6          Detroit is also home to Quill Puddle, a hand-made poetry magazine edited by James Hart III and Frances Barber. The evening of April 18 marked the launch of two double-issues of Quill Puddle (3-4 and 5-6), featuring poets Will Alexander, Kim Hunter, Rob Lipton, Ken Mikolowski, Christine Monhollen, Julie Patton, Chris Tysh, Dennis Teichman, Matvei Yankelevich, Barbara Henning, and myself.

          Following a mesmerizing set by The Doll Hairs (James Hart III, guitar and vocals, and Frances Barber, vocals), Julie Patton gave an extended and stunning performance, accompanied by Will Alexander (keyboard), James Hart II (percussion), and Paul Van Curen (guitar). It was magical. I hope the recording came out well, because it would be a shame not to be able to revisit that dynamic performance.
          The next day, I had the pleasure of visiting the Eastern Market, a large market area composed of many buildings, one of which is Salt & Cedar, a letterpress studio. New York poet and co-publisher of Ugly Duckling Presse Matvei Yankelevich arranged to convert the letterpress printing space into a bookstore and poetry reading venue for three months. It was a delight to meet and get to know Matvei, who is devoting his time in Detroit to enriching the already rich poetry scene there.
          Thanks to Matvei, Salt & Cedar is (for the time being, at least) bookstore heaven, stocked by titles from Ugly Duckling Presse, Small Press Distribution, and others, including several Canadian titles – I noticed books by Sina Queyras and Nicole Brossard, among others. I purchased books by Clark Coolidge (88 Sonnets), Tomaz Salamun (On the Tracks of Wild Game – part of Matvei’s Eastern European Series within UDP), Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg (A Different Practice), Matvei Yankelevich (Alpha Donuts), and Russian Absurdist Alexander Vvedensky (An Invitation for Me to Think). The last title was suggested to me by Matvei when I told him of my affinity for the work of Daniil Kharms, another Russian absurdist who, along with Vvedensky, tragically died in their thirties as a result of Stalin’s harsh persecution of writers.
          People, Detroit is a happening mecca for poets and an open community for poetry in all its manifestations, written and performed!

Camille Martin

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“A deserted city. We’ll have to imagine it’s in a movie.”

Posted on December 20, 2012 | 1 comment

On the eve of December 21, my penultimate end-of-the-world poem, this one from Looms:

*
A deserted city. We’ll have to imagine
it’s in a movie. Beneath a listless dome, walls
crumble into backlit dust. Flames on a hillside swarm,
tattered auburn fishes in the autumn wind. Glints of dying
light fall on unmoored mountains whose thoughts of home
come to nothing. Everywhere, flocks of matter dip pale snouts
into inky ponds. We’ll have to imagine someone watching
that movie. No one left to forget irrelevant seeds. Some left off
praying to the mother of a tarnished idol presiding over a flock
of angels, breath attended by golden lice. Others
paused long enough to view dusk’s leisurely descent
over the white noise of crashing surf. All found something
to swear by before it was too late. Photogenic dullards jazzed
in the waning light. A ship’s captain jingled his coins
before staving in the ship. Embers in a hearth
illuminated fish bones on plates.

NIBIRU

Sonnets and Looms are available from the following vendors:

Small Press Distribution
Book City in Toronto
Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe
Amazon.ca
Shearsman Books.

Cheers!

Camille Martin

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“Glib spice announces the news . . .”: More Pre-Mayan-Apocalypse Fiddling

Posted on December 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

from Sonnets

*
Glib spice announces the news bleeding
in the monochromatic distance. The short-term
memory of distance flees in fear. Enemies
fall, money flees. Falling gloom dazzles just
as history taught it to. Not the history of stars
made of tumbleweed nor the annals of a dust mote
singing rich disaster. Masoch was never so rich,
or so it seems to each geological layer. No
notebook records a pocket of posies between thick
layers of ash. It just is, caught in a small pocket
of time. “Time to return to star,” announces
tumbleweed on the news. The news shrinks
to a speck of pollen on a posy’s anther
in a pocket caught between thick layers of ash.

2012 - 2

Sonnets and Looms are available here:

Small Press Distribution
Book City in Toronto
Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe
Amazon.ca
Shearsman Books
The Book Depository

Cheers!

Camille Martin

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Fiddling While Earth Burns: Poems for the End of Time

Posted on December 18, 2012 | 2 comments

          I’m obsessed with The End, with the smorgasbord of choices for Armageddon that Neil deGrasse Tyson cheerfully ticks off: asteroid, caldera eruption, mega-tsunami, black hole. Not surprisingly, some of my poems have an apocalyptic theme.
          So in honour of the rapidly-approaching December 21, 2012—of the dreaded cataclysm that Mayan astronomers predicted (unless they just got tired of chiselling)—I’ll be posting poems to while away the countdown to the terrestrial torch. The first poem is below.
          And what would 2012 prophesies be without a little shameless commercialism? I’m selling poetry, not opulent underground condos, but then, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, survivalists die miserably on doomsday for lack of what is found in poems.
          The clock is ticking, but you can still get a copy of Sonnets and Looms from the following vendors: Small Press Distribution, Book City in Toronto, Amazon.ca, and Shearsman Books.
          Help keep my kitchen, where I’m hunkering down with proper Canadian garrison mentality, stocked with beans and rice during these anti-climactic end times.

from Sonnets:

*
From a helicopter at night, an aerial
view of a city. In the dark, gigantic
iron statues loom with an ominous
aura of permanence. The people
who live in the city obsess
about the possibility of doomsday
erupting among their soaring
buildings and effigies. Of the end
they’ve made a fetish, chatting
about it at cocktail parties as if
it were the latest vogue. They believe
that it could happen at any moment,
so they no longer bother
to make their beds in the morning.

2012

Camille Martin

 

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LOOMS now at SPD

Posted on October 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Always happy when my books arrive at Small Press Distribution!

Poetry. The title of LOOMS signifies the weaving tool as well as the shadowing appearance of something. These “woven tales” were inspired by Barbara Guest’s statement that a tale “doesn’t tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about.” The strands of their surreal allegories converse, one idea giving rise to another, and the paths of their dialogue become the fabric of the narrative. In a second meaning, something that looms remains in a state of imminent arrival. Such are these tales, like parables with infinitely deferred lessons.

“In tightly woven tapestry, Martin’s ‘backstreet songs’ re-invent a music of knowledge that navigates the hucksterism and catastrophe threatening our planet. The movement of her threads is fugue-like, punctuated by oboes and clarinets, mockingbirds and cicadas. Here, in the dream-space of time-lapse film, forms of life and ideas collide and morph, rippling through centuries of human consciousness to unravel as quickly as they ravel. Here, above all, Martin makes it possible to dance among our ‘origins in snake oil,’ our ‘crusades to mirages’ and our ‘accidental fictions’.”—Meredith Quartermain

“A dreamscape on the outskirts of town, ‘in the badlands of the vernacular,’ these hopeful, haunted poems populated by children and prisoners ‘hover between’ realms domestic and exterior, real and imagined. Like candles described herein, this book gives off a melting, tactile glow.”—Arielle Greenberg

Camille Martin

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SPD recommends Sonnets

Posted on June 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sonnets is on the “SPD Recommends” list at Small Press Distribution. Here’s their webpage for the book.

Do support this terrific distributor – I have purchased many, many books from them over the years, and am glad to see them going strong.

And if you live in Toronto, you can pick up a copy of Sonnets at the inimitable, the one and only, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. Accept no substitutes.

Camille Martin
Sonnets

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Sonnets – European reading tour

Posted on May 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

Vulcan is cooperating for now, so my reading tour in the UK, Ireland, and Paris to celebrate the publication of my new book Sonnets by the fabulous Shearsman Books is on. A recent review and ordering information follows the itinerary below. If you are going to be in any of these places, please come!

London, England
7:30 pm, Tuesday, May 4
Shearsman Reading Series
Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House / 20/21 Bloomsbury Way
Readers: Camille Martin (publisher’s launch of Sonnets) and Alasdair Paterson

Bangor, Wales
7:30 pm, Thursday, May 6
Blue Sky Cafe / High Street
A triple launch – Camille Martin’s Sonnets, Ian Davidson’s Into Thick Hair, and the new issue of Poetry Wales

St. Helier, Isle of Jersey
8:00 pm, Saturday, May 8
PoAttic Reading Series
The Attic in the Jersey Opera House

Cork, Ireland
Monday, May 10
6:30 – 8:00 pm: workshop
9:00 pm: reading
Ó Bhéal Reading Series / The Long Valley

Salford, England
6:00 – 8:00 pm, Tuesday, May 11
University of Salford
Two-hour session with students in the MA in Creative Writing program

Paris, France
7:30 pm, Tuesday, May 18
Ivy Writers Reading Series
Le Next / 17 rue Tiqutonne, Paris

A recent review of Sonnets by rob mclennan:

There are so few that seem to know how to bring something new to an often-used form that when it happens, it’s worth noting, and such is the case with Toronto poet Camille Martin in her second trade poetry collection, Sonnets (Exeter, England: Shearsman Books, 2010). Martin, an American relocated north after Hurricane Katrina, writes with the most wonderful sense of clarity, thought and play in these poems . . .

Read the entire review here

See the Shearsman webpage for ordering information, or go straight to SPD.

Cheers!
Camille Martin

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