Just a reminder that The Recipe hold spoken word workshops at Umi Cafe every Wednesday this month! 7:00 -8:30 at Umi Cafe, east end of Chinatown. For details check out Umi's website!
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 7:11 PM EST
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It's been a pretty busy weekend so far. In part I suppose I can blame the newly warmed-up weather that means not only can I bike downtown, but I sorta want to.
Friday night I got to see CR Avery at the NAC Fourth Stage. The first time I ever saw CR Avery he was featuring at Capital Slam, and I knew then that I had never heard anything like this guy before. Or, actually, that's not quite true, I had, but not in that combination. He's like a bizarre, perfectly balanced alloy of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. Oh, and he beatboxes like a god, occasionally through a harmonica into the mike. It has to be heard to be believed. This show also featured a backup group with three violins, a cello, and an electric guitar, and if he's fun onstage by himself, you really have to see him with a band. (This, in fact, is where the Nick Cave similarities surfaced for me - the way he moved onstage around and through the other musicians and the mike.) They were good, too - two violins tended to take the solo lines and had marvellously different voices - one raw fiddle, the other full-throated Gypsy.
Watch this video of CR doing his poem "The Birdcage" in Arizona. I just found it, and it's mesmerizing. He did that one Friday night too.
I think what I really love about him is the originality. I've never heard anyone else do this before. His poems/lyrics are surreal and gripping. And I wish I knew, in poems like 'The Birdcage' or the one about the cat, how and when he decides to throw in that explosive beatbox. What's going on in his head, what's the process? It's startling and unintuitive: it's not like he uses it as a 'hook' or refrain, or even in the places you would expect. And it's just about perfect where it is.
Anyway, this show was just off the hook. I haven't been as transported in a long time. And as an extra bonus, there was an opening set with pieces from Nathanael Larochette, Marcus Jameel, Festrell & Danielle Gregoire, PrufRock, Kevin Matthews and John Akpata.
And then, there was Saturday night. I wish I had been able to make it to the Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament lauch, but somehow that didn't happen. I did, however, get to the Mercury Lounge for a show that Nathanael Larochette referred to, when I talked to him about it on Friday, as "the night I forget to take my schizophrenia drugs and just turn into three people."
I know Nathanael as a spoken word poet. He hosts Capital Slam, which is where I met him back when he first started slamming (and I was sitting at the sidelines keeping score or time or something.) This show was billed as "One Man, Three Sets" - a set of poetry, followed by a set with Nathanael's neo-folk/classical group Musk Ox, followed by a set with his heavy metal band, The Night Watch.
I've heard Musk Ox before on the radio (they get some play on CBC) but I had only heard the general rumours that Nathanael was a heavy metal musician as well. And admittedly, the usual reaction to that is, "Nathanael? Really? But he's so... quiet." But then, sometimes the biggest metalheads don't really look like metalheads, right?
Musk Ox was Nathanael on classical guitar with a violin and a cello played by a guy in a metal shirt who (to be honest) looked like he had to be about eighteen. I'm never all that good at describing music, but their stuff was minor-keyed, trans-cultural sort of stuff. Nathanael kept using the phrase "epic journey" and I suppose that does fit. Rafael, the cello player, in particular blew me away. And there is something about an instrumental band where you can hear the players inhaling together before phrases. It was meditative, soundscapey stuff. Beautiful. Completely mellow, relaxed me enough that I was no longer as grumpy and shy as I had been going in (I had found a chair in the corner in the dark and, to be honest, avoided the eyes of people I recognized: I wasn't feeling much like being out, but had really wanted to see this particular show. By the time Musk Ox was done with me, I was feeling much, much better.
And then Night Watch came out. In this group Nathanael plays electric guitar: there's also a drummer, who was absolutely hilarious to watch, and a guy who looked like he might be a third grade teacher, but who completely wailed on the electric violin. "Metal" is such a wide-ranging term that I didn't really know what to expect out of this group. But I was really impressed. They're tight, which is really important in any band, but which, given the speed you sometimes have to play, is pretty much crucial for a good metal band. And they're fun, and smart. They play with rhythms and time signatures, they mess around with quoting beats and lines from other styles of music. They had a song that threw in bossa nova beats, they had the requisite medieval song (ah, medieval metal!), they opened with a tune from the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. The violinist improvises all of his solos on the spot - wow - and was versatile and fun. And the drummer was - delicate where he needed to be, jazzy almost, and clowned around with a set of windchimes and with the silences as much as he blistered it on the fast chunks.
Plus, their last piece completely blew off the roof. Complex, epic, trading between quiet and loud, with chunks of machine-gunning speed and delicate beautiful lines in empty spaces. It was awesome.
I do hope Nathanael does another one of these: part of what I enjoyed about it was getting to watch his versatility, but it was also fun to think that maybe someone had come for the metal and been surprised by the poetry, and vice versa. He said something about wanting to blow the stereotypes off poetry, folk, and metal, which I think he managed to do - all in one show.
So, it's been a pretty good weekend so far! And a friend's got a spare ticket to a comedy show tonight, so I might actually go for the weekend trifecta. We'll see!
I'm still processing the Dusty Owl show from Sunday afternoon. John Akpata got up on the stage during the open mike and commented on what a 'heavy room' it was - with the National Slam Champions featuring (and are they ever a force to be reckoned with: their team set in particular was mesmerizing), a whole lot of representation from 3 Dreads and a Bald Head in the audience, and people like PrufRock and Hodan Ibrahim hanging out in the audience, it really was a seriously heady collection of passionate, powerful, creative talent all in one place. I was reminded of one Writers Festival event a couple of years ago, where Marcus McCann blogged later, speculating that if a bomb had been dropped on the room, poetry in Ottawa would have been set back decades - it was like that for spoken word and hip hop in Swizzles on Sunday.
John himself is going to be opening for Linton Kwesi Johnson this March in St. Andrews, Scotland: when he told us that yesterday I admit to going a little fangirl. I've loved LKJ since about 1991 or '92, when my brother introduced me to his work. And how cool is it that Canadian spoken word is so hot right now?
Yessiree, it's that time again... I'll be hosting Literary Landscapes tonight at 6:30 pm. Going on live, with Jacqueline Lawrence, who I don't get to see half as much as I would like to. She's working away on many things, I hear, and she'll be teaming up with The Recipe (otherwise known as the Canadian National Slam Champions) and musician Rita Carter at the Dusty Owl this weekend, in a fundraiser for the Black Youth Conference.
Confession time - I haven't gone on totally live before. AND the station has a brand new computer interface. And this is CKCU. Techies? We don't need no stinking techies! Whee!
Good thing is, I think Jacqueline has some radio experience, so I'll lean on her. Will you be listening? www.ckcufm.com or 93.1...
This just popped up randomly in my inbox (I never know where people found my email address: ah well.) It's in Toronto, but I am kind of amused that someone's dusted off the sonnet and thrown it into the slam ring. I wish someone would do something like that here.
Hmm... maybe I'll bring that up at the next Dusty Owl meeting...
I never really pegged myself as a performing poet. I admit, I think I do pay attention to the sounds of my poems and I try to focus on reading them well, but if there's an open mike I'm happy to sit back and listen, I shrug and say, "I didn't bring my stuff," or I just don't feel quite right about jumping up and claiming time that could as easily be filled with some other poet. It's the second-stringer, beta-wolf, supporting-cast side of me, I suppose.
So I was really surprised at how exhilarating it was to be a featured reader. I read at Voices of Venus last night, to a packed room at Umi Cafe, and it was fun. I wasn't even all that nervous, really. And having a whole half hour to stretch out and inhabit my work was great. I've done great shows with the Kymeras before - the Acadian set we did for the last Windborn was a highlight - but there's something qualitatively different about being the only featured artist. I found I really got comfortable up there when I had all that time and a sense of an arc to the material I was reading.
A lot of the reason for my comfort, I think, was the crowd. Voices of Venus is a really relaxed, fun space - props to Faye, the host, for creating that - and I think it is true that you can feel when a room full of people has 'clicked' somehow, when the audience is with you. It was a great feeling. I was surprised to discover that I had some funny poems - and had to remind myself to stop and wait for the laughs I hadn't been expecting - and was even more surprised by the occasional silent moment before people clapped, with a couple of of 'mm' sounds in the room. Oooh, fun.
The open mic was also great beforehand - first-timers and veteran readers alike got up and read or told stories. I admit to being a bit nervous about having to follow some of the poets that got up. But the huge variety of work that came out during the open mike dispelled that. There was such a number of different voices that I felt just fine about stepping up and saying, Okay, this is my voice. I don't slam, and haven't done open mike at Capital Slam (though I've been asked to) for that reason: my stuff just isn't slam stage material. But then nothing about this open mike was restricted to any one style.
And I was so buzzed afterwards! The coordinator, Allison, and I were standing around in the emptied-out cafe afterwards and she just kept bouncing up and down: which was pretty much exactly how I felt. I was on a complete high.
So while I never pegged myself as a performance sort of poet - I would so totally do that again!
Oh, Texas. Wasn't it there that recently the Merriam-Webster Dictionary was banned from some classrooms because the definition of "oral sex" was too racy?
Now, I'm listening to As It Happens and catch an interview with a reporter from the American Statesman who wrote a great article on which books are banned from Texas jails. No Freakonomics (they use a racial epithet in a piece on infiltrating a KKK group) and no Introduction to Physics (the inmate might turn into a mad scientist and blow the place up, MacGyver-style). And no Grisham depicting crimes of any type, no Auto Repair for Dummies, and no National Geographic "Visual History of the World" (because it contains a picture of a naked girl. The one running away from the napalm attack in Vietnam.) Oh, yeah, and no Lovely Bones either.
But - boggle - The Hitler We Loved and Why, published by White Power Publications, is apparently okay.
What astonished me was the comments that the reporter said had been cropping up on his article, suggesting that when you're not in prison, you can read whatever you want, so obviously the lesson here is: don't go to prison, and you can read Pablo Neruda all you want.
Do I even need to go into the reasons I think this is appalling?
What the jackpine sonnet is:
A sonnet-like poem.
Where it comes from:
Milton Acorn (1923–1986), a poet from Prince Edward Island, created the genre and named it after the jack pine, a tree that seeds itself in fire.
How to write one:
Write a poem with 14 lines, each line containing 7 to 13 syllables. But, in Acorn's words, "If your sonnet cuts itself off—click!—at, say line 12, 18 or 20, leave it at that." An odd number of lines is okay too. Apply the rhyme scheme of your choice, and if no rhyme comes up, be patient. Acorn advised writers to write internal rhymes (rhymes within a line) or external rhymes (rhymes at the end of consecutive lines) "to keep the flow." In the absence of rhyme, use assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds), "to keep the rhyme alive in order to come up with a true rhyme further on."
First prize: $500
Second prize: $250
Third prize: $125
How to enter the contest: Write a jackpine sonnet and send it to Geist by post or submit electronically. Include a $10 entry fee, which buys you a one-year subscription to Geist, digital edition.
Contest dead line: Canada Day, July 1, 2010
To keep up to date, join the discussion, and find out more about Milton Acorn, jackpine sonnets, and the Geist Jackpine Sonnet Contest, read the Geist Jackpine Sonnet Blog
Enter today!
Plus, there are some wikkid awesome women going to be stepping up to the open mic afterward and I'm really looking forward to that!
