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September 30, 2001
I spent the day at
I spent the day at Word on the Street. Toronto's biggest writing event. Must be 100000 plus people there. I've heard that there were 150,000 last year. Seemed a bit less busy this year. But I bought two books. One is Maureen Harris' poetry. Maureen's blog is on the right. I mean the OTHER right. It is called ""A Possible Landscape"" and is quite wonderful. I also bought Don McKay's ""Another Gravity, a book of poems that I know nothing about, except that Maureen's put his work on the course readings before. This is totally not me. My idea of contemporary poetry is Lawrence Ferlingetti and Ted Hughes. And Canadian poetry? please! But these two work. Not enough aliens and dark dank moodiness, but such is life. If the words work, I can forego the bombast. Oh, and I went to my bi-weekly meeting of the Toronto Dark Writer's Association at the Tiquilla Bookworm on Queen. Steph, Mikey and I were there along with two newbies. I'm sorry I have forgotten their names, one was Tom? I'll find out if they come back again. The Tom guy was too shy to read his stuff, but he finally did let me. It was suprisingly good. Better than much of what I read when I was poetry editor for the harrow (www.theharrow.com). It had a nice combination of explicit sex, shipping metaphors and dark humour. More sophisticated than what I would expect from a stoned, nervious 22 year old. I hope he sticks around. He certainly writes better than I did at that age. But that's unfair. Everyone writes better than I did at that age. Luckily, now only 75% of the people write better than I do. That's progress for you."
Posted by jason at September 30, 2001 11:21 PM