Alessandro Porco

Tuesday, May 1st at 7:00 p.m., at the Magpie Taproom (831 Dundas St. West), Moez Surani is launching his new collection of poetry, Floating Life, alongside fellow Wolsak & Wynn authors Oana Avasilichioaei (We, Beasts) and Catherine Owen (Catalysts: Confrontations with the muse). I conducted an interview with Surani about his new book. Enjoy!

The Art of Infidelity: An Interview with Mike Spry

Mike Spry is the author of JACK, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Quebec Writers' Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and he was longlisted for the 2010 Journey Prize. He lives in Montreal where he is the Programs Director for Summer Literary Seminars, one of the world's largest international literary programs (St. Petersburg, Montreal, Vilnius, and Nairobi-Lamu).

I had the pleasure of asking Spry questions about his new book of short fiction. Our conversation follows below. After the interview, you will find information about Spry's forthcoming book-launch events. Enjoy!

*

Dear Open Book Readers:

my run as Writer-in-Residence for the month of June has come and gone. I'd like to thank you very much for the kind and encouraging email notes many of you've passed along to me. I am very grateful for the support, and I look forward to continuing to post short articles, essays, and interviews here at Open Book, which is such an important site in terms of fostering discussion about the arts.

In addition, I'd ask that you all turn your attention to July's WIR, Thom Vernon, who has a new novel called The Drifts, which you should all pick up asap. I look forward to his posts throughout the month!

Translation is a tricky thing. It probably works best when some degree of mistranslation, whether willful or not, is involved in the process. That doesn’t mean it should necessarily dominate, however. As I said, it’s a tricky thing.

Consider the brilliant 2004 film Anchorman. Now, there’s a fascinating back-and-forth between the film’s two central characters— Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone— that is an astonishingly smart and insightful take on translation practices.

“. . . to be influenced by a writer is to have a chance inspiration from him; or to take what one wants; or to see things one has overlooked.” – T.S. Eliot

Hi, everyone. I’m almost at the end of my run here as Writer-in-Residence at Open Book. Somewhere along the line in my recent travels, I caught a nasty chest cold that’s knocked me out for the last week or so -- hence the dearth of recent posts. Nonetheless, I am venturing forth. Posted below is my last interview for the month. And in the next couple of days you can expect a small flurry of posts, including “My T.S. Eliot” and “Secret Influences,” as well as a couple of other surprises. Stay tuned… and, now, my interview with Gary Barwin!

Here's some info from Jesse & Charlie Huisken, explaining the current situation at This Ain't the Rosedale Library: http://thisaintblog.wordpress....

You can donate through paypal. Just click on the "Donate" link.

A

Earlier this month, I posted a short discussion on early chapbook publications by Toronto poet Daniel f. Bradley (http://www.openbooktoronto.com...). Today, I want to briefly turn your attention to his more recent work. I am going to focus on three publications: A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia, T=I=D=Y Language, and The Murder of Semiotics.

Hi, everyone. It's my pleasure to introduce you all to poet Sheryda Warrener. I had the grand opportunity to serve as editor on Warrener's forthcoming debut collection. She's a fine poet. I asked Warrener a few questions via email. After the interview, there's even a poem by Warrener.

It’s Father’s Day tomorrow. Happy father’s day, pop! My dad, Giovanni Porco, has taught me many things, of course, and I am forever in his debt; he’s the best damn guy I know. Period. One thing he taught me and my siblings is the Italian language. So, in thanks, I thought I’d post my translation of a poem by 19th century Italian poet Giuseppe Giusti. I love the original, and I’ve worked long and hard to preserve its flat yet cuttingly funny (pun intended) tone.

Poet and former Open Book: Toronto writer-in-residence Jacob McArthur Mooney conducts a series of interviews that he posts over at Torontoist.com. I interviewed Mooney about his interview process. Enjoy! (And please do check out Mooney's fine blog, Vox Populism; there's a link for it in the "Recommended Links" section of my WIR homepage.)

I’ve been thinking about literary friendship lately.

I don’t mean the fake kind, which is distinguished by overly-mannered compliments like “Oh, it’s so good to see you, I just loved your latest collection of poetry about memory and the moon” (translation: not only haven’t I read it, I ain’t even gonna buy the dang thing). No, I mean something else entirely.

Originally from Sarnia, Ontario, Venright moved to Toronto in the early 1980s. Since then, he's been producing poetry that explores what he refers to as “domains of existence vivid and compelling beyond even this miraculous reality we call the world.” Venright also happens to be one of my favourite Canadian poets— and he’s disastrously underappreciated. (That may be a cliché thing to say about any author, but that doesn’t make it any less true in this case.)

Here are some excerpts from a new series of poems called THE MINUTES. I'll be reading from THE MINUTES next week in Montreal, as part of the Summer Literary Seminars. Parts I-V are forthcoming from the journal P-Queue. Enjoy!

Today's post is near and dear to my heart (no pun intended). Below is an interview I conducted with Canadian filmmaker Geoff Morrison about his forthcoming film No Heart Feelings, which hits big screens this July. Morrison also happens to be a great friend. We met twelve years ago, as freshmen; he had the dorm room next to mine. He screened an early version of No Heart Feelings for me last December, and it's a fantastic film!

Okay, so today I’m going to introduce Open Book: Toronto readers to early chapbook publications from poet Daniel f. Bradley. These handmade volumes, published between 1990-1994, are the only source for Bradley’s early work. (Some of his later work is collected in A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia [BookThug, 2005]) and I’ll talk about that in a later post.)

A few months ago, I wrote an article called “Duty Free” for Open Book: Toronto’s Winter Magazine. The article was a salvage project. I wanted to return to Canada’s literary-historical consciousness an event that took place -- if you would believe -- in Buffalo, New York many years ago. In 1980, Robert Creeley, Robert Bertholf, and Victor Coleman organized the four-day Canadian Poetry Festival (http://www.openbooktoronto.com...)

But there’s no reason the Q.E.W. should only accommodate one-way travel.

During my run as Writer-in-Residence this month, I plan on occassionally including interviews with Canadian authors. The people at ECW kindly provided a copy of George Murray’s forthcoming Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms — you can find it linked in my “Recommended Readings.” I had the pleasure of interviewing Murray about the book.

Kids say the darndest things, and Canadian poetry happens in the darndest places.

For example, in the early 1940s, a librarian named Helen Collins started a community writing workshop in Cleveland. The Free Lance Workshop soon extended into a literary journal, also called Free Lance. Included in the Free Lance Workshop was a poet named Russell Atkins, a black avant-garde poet and theorist who, by the 1950s, would play a significant role in editing the magazine and establishing its particular aesthetic vision. A great scholar — and poet in his own right — Aldon Nielsen talks at length about Atkins and outlines this zine history in his wonderful study Black Chant.