Since the Fall

Much has happened, although not much of it pertaining to me, centrally. Life of a chair. Still, a few things have come out, a few things have been presented, a few poems read, over the more than several months since I last posted something here.

On the poetry front, I did a few readings between September and November. In September 2009 I participated in the I'm Your Man anthology launch at Westmount High School in Montreal (with about twenty other poets). That same month I read at Ian Ferrier's Words and Music Reading Series at the Casa Del Popolo. In October I read at the launch of new books by Angela Hibbs and Nathaniel G. Moore (the Fall 2009 Punchy title) and then Puggy Hammer played. And then in November, I read with a bunch of great peeps, including Sina, Erin, Thomas Heise and Gail Scott at the Modernist Studies Association poetry reading. I'll be reading at the Headlight anthology launch on April 14th, and then at the April 25th Pilot reading with Paul Vermeersh, and Larissa Andrusyshyn (launching her amazing new Punchy collection, MAMMOTH).

More recently, I've had some poems appear in This magazine and in Vallum.

On the critical essay front, I edited a special issue of the journal Canadian Poetry on English-language poetry in Quebec. It features the following essays. The cover of the issue looks like this, only more orange.



The contents of the issue:

Introduction
Jason Camlot (Concordia University)

William Douw Lighthall and the Poetics of Imperial Canada
Daniel O’Leary (Concordia University)

Robert Allen’s Cantons de l’est Encantadas
Andre Furlani (Concordia University)

Montreal’s Signal Editions: The Making of a Series
Julie Frédette (Université de Sherbrooke)

Listening: On the Self-Effacement in the Poetry and Translation of Marc Plourde
Kasper Hartman (Concordia University)

in search of the poetic in everday life
Vincent Tinguely (Montreal)

Costumed Selves and Sheep Coats:
Mimetic Translation in Erin Mouré’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person
Tina Northrup (University of Western Ontario)

Can Lit tm:
National Branding and Canadian Literary Identity in David McGimpsey’s Poetics
Courtney Richardson (Concordia University)

Exile and Audience:
Carmine Starnino and The Poetics of Engagement
Katye Seip (Concordia University)

On the lecture circuit, I delivered some lectures and organized some panels at conferences:

In October I gave a talk at "Layton Out Loud," an event held to raise awareness about the Irving Layton Archive at Concordia. The talk I gave was titled, “‘I am their mouth’: Listening to the Layton Archive.”

In November I organized a panel entitled "Hearing (in) Modernity" at the Modernist Studies Association conference, with superb papers by Jonathan Sterne, Jennifer Esmail and Alessandro Porco.

December through January were devoted to departmentally things.

Then, very recently, I went to discuss an article I'm working on entitled, "The Three Minute Victorian Novel: Remediating Dickens into Sound" with the WINCS research group at University of Toronto (and had a wonderful time talking with many great colleagues there, as well as some of their amazing graduate students), and then delivered a plenary (titled, "Reading Poetry Out Loud") at the first annual Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference (QUEUC) held at Bishop's and organized with great success by Jessica Riddell.

May and June are going to be insane, with three panels organized for the ACCUTE conference, one at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference, another at L'Acfas--plus there's hosting the Canadian Association of Chairs of English (CACE) annual meeting (lots of chairs!), and a digital poetry project that will be unveiled at the end of May during Congress.

That poetry project will deserve a new post of its own.