In his essay, "A Broadcast from Cairo: Poetry, Politics and the Extraordinary Pressure of News" Todd Swift muses on the compatibility of poetry and politics. The essay is particularly timely given the recent oil spill in the Gulf and the ensuing poetic engagement, and also the recent G20 riots in Toronto and the participation of writers as activists and protestors. How does art or how can art respond to war, unrest and disaster or should art respond at all?
in his poetry, fiction and poetics, rob mclennan often writes about the importance of place and geography. "house: a (tiny) memoir" rob tells us about his childhood in Glengarry County by way of old family photos, his own memories and recollections from family.
"Home is a series of recollections, of distances, as easily remembered as mis-remembered, and a blending of events that can sometimes never be confirmed. …And why write as a "memoir" instead of calling them "prose poems"? I want these stories not to be misunderstood; I want them to be seen as what I remember, what I believe to be true, from my vantage point of some three decades later, and thousands of miles. It felt like reclaiming something that had been far away for a very long time, but no longer. It felt like bringing out the good out from underneath all the bad that came later, overshadowing so much of what had happened before." rob mclennan
$5; Limited Edition of 50 copies. ISBN: 978-0-9783780-7-3
in "over my dead corpus" Pearl Pirie offers up a feast of sounds, playful and thoughtful poems culled from the corpus of the world. "The main source corpus is over 500 pages of scrap notes that served as fodder for recombinance. Words or phrases were scraped for letter sequences within syllable or that broke across syllable or word. The other corpus is incidental word combinations from scrabble strung in the mind's insistence for meaning or sound." Pearl Pirie
$5; Limited Edition of 50 copies. ISBN: 978-1-926786-00-1
The second issue of Experiment-O is now on line and features work by Jamie Bradley, Peter Cicariello, K. S. Ernst, Caroline Gomersall, John C. Goodman, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Gil McElroy, Christine McNair, Sean Moreland and Dominik Parisien.