Fear of poetry waning, and the Globe opens the Bök on lipograms

The Huffington Post has taught Quillblog a new word. “Metrophobia” is not an aversion to riding the Paris subway or to well-coiffed men; it refers to a fear of poetry. And apparently, this affliction is on the decline in America. Kim Rosen writes that after a few generations in which the American public retreated from poetry, the tide seems to be turning:

Finally, it seems, we are rising from the sick-bed of Metrophobia, and returning to poetry. Signs of health begin to accrue. Hundreds of thousands of teens throughout the U.S. choose to learn classical and modern poems by heart and practice together for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation competition. Slam, jam, Def, Hip Hop and rap poets tell it like it is on TV, YouTube, radio waves, and the stages of basement coffeehouses and national theaters. A major Hollywood release of the 2009 holiday season, Invictus, is about Nelson Mandela and how he was saved by a poem. Even our own president is reported to turn to Urdu poetry for sustenance.

Granted, this is still nowhere near the popular acceptance poetry enjoys in the Middle East – where Rosen points out that the most popular television show, an American Idol-style poetry competition called The Million’s Poet, has become such a sensation that it launched a television station exclusively devoted to poetry – but it’s an encouraging sign nonetheless.

Here in Canada, metrophobia has not seemed to affect the sales of Christian Bök’s experimental poem Euonia, which Coach House Books re-released at the end of last year in an expanded edition. In The Globe and Mail, resident logophile Warren Clemens uses the reissue of Bök’s volume as an opportunity to examine the literary tradition of employing lipograms in writing:

Bök, inspired by earlier writers who operated with severe, self-imposed formal restraints, set himself the challenge of using only one of the vowels in each chapter. Pieces from which certain letters are excluded are called lipograms, which has nothing to do with the great Chinese poet Li Po but derives from the Greek lipogrammatis (lacking a letter), blending leipein (leave) and gramma (letter).

Wordsmith Robert Hendrickson, a fount of information on the subject, says the first creator of lipograms was the Greek lyric poet Lasus in 548 BC, but the text that really knocked everyone’s socks off was Odyssey of Tryphiodorus, a Greek work containing 26 books, each of which left out one letter from A to Z. In 1969, French author Georges Perec wrote La Disparition (translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void), which contained no “e” in the text. Ernest Vincent Wright had achieved the same result in his 1939 book, Gadsby: Champion of Youth.

Event photos: Christian Bök as Santa, Mark Breslin with Ralph Benmergui

The book world is just starting to shake itself awake after the holidays, so here are a couple of photos from events that happened before the break.

Avast! Canada’s Dada bard has a Santa hat: Coach House published a revised edition of Christian Bök’s “univocular” work Eunoia, and celebrated the re-launch at Toronto’s Supermarket on Dec. 15 with readings from Andrew Pyper, Ken Babstock, Darren Wershler, Priscilla Uppal, and Bök himself, pictured here wearing the finest in Maple Leafs headgear. (Photo by Rick/Simon, courtesy of Coach House Books)

We assume they’re laughing on the inside: JAZZ FM host and occasional comic Ralph Benmergui interviewed Yuk Yuk’s head honcho Mark Breslin at a This is Not a Reading Series event at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto on Dec. 9 to launch The Yuk Yuk’s Guide To Canadian Stand-up (HarperCollins Canada). Above: Breslin (left) takes Benmergui step-by-step through the comedy “rule of three.” (Photo by Chris Reed, courtesy of HarperCollins Canada)

2009 ReLit Award Winners Announced

The 2009 ReLit Award winners have been announced. From the press release:

Short fiction: Lisa Foad, The Night Is a Mouth (Exile Editions)

Poetry: Maurice Mierau, Fear Not (Turnstone Press)

Novel: Michael Blouin, Chase & Haven (Coach House Books)

The winners will be presented with their ReLit rings at the special celebration on Oct. 25 at the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

Event photos: Coach House Wayzgoose

Coach House Books held its annual Wayzgoose get-together on Sep. 3, and the turnout was excellent, as you can see from the pics below (provided by photographer Gary Mo). This year’s celebration was extra merry, as it was the first Wayzgoose at which Coach House could proudly proclaim ownership of the building it has occupied all these many years.

The crowd outside the coach house.

Coach House Books owner Stan Bevington, talking about the early days of the press.

Michael Ondaatje pays tribute to his old publisher, while Stuart Ross minds the book table.

The assembled revellers pray for the continued health of small presses. (Or maybe they’re just applauding a speaker.)

Bookmarks: YouTube review revenge and library porn

• The best revenge on bad reviews

• Coach House Books publicist Evan Munday asks, “Which Canadian book should be made into a movie?”
  

• Novelist Mariko Tamaki on fiction versus academia in the new issue of No More Potlucks

• Montreal’s Arjun Basu, author of several Twitter-length short stories, is having one turned into a short film

• Book critic Julia Keller on how to read graphic novels

• Bologna Children’s Bookfair may be forced to reinstate a fourth day, according to Publisher’s Weekly

• The much anticipated Ted Kennedy book review in The New York Times

• Random silliness: There is a great need for a sarcasm font, library porn, and the “homeless” Elle intern

Stan Bevington, David Helwig, and Jack Hodgins named to the Order of Canada

As part of yesterday’s Canada Day festivities, Governor General Michaëlle Jean has announced 60 new appointments to the Order of Canada. Among this year’s new members are BC-based novelist and short story writer Jack Hodgins and poet and novelist David Helwig. Also honoured was Coach House Books founder and “head coach” Stan Bevington and Giller Prize founder Jack Rabinovitch, who was named an officer of the Order. The Quebec writers Wajdi Mouawad, Claude LeBouthillier, and Jean O’Neil were also recognized by the Governor General.

Coach House wins big

Toronto press Coach House Books has won Ontario’s Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, worth $50,000. Coach House won in the organization category, beating out Toronto’s Hot Docs film fest, the Guelph Jazz Festival, and the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, among other nominees. (The Premier’s Award is in its second year, though this was the first for the organization category. Ojibwa artist Ron Noganosh won this year’s $35,000 individual artist prize.)

In an e-mail to Quillblog, Coach House’s Alana Wilcox says the press will spend the windfall thus:

[F]ixing/replacing the Magical Sleeper Chair, a thank-you party for the authors, a series of new broadsides, reprinting several low-on-stock titles and, sexiest of all, paying some bills.

And we’re going to have a big thank-you sale on the website.

Also, we bought a lot of cinnamon rolls this afternoon. And ate them all.

In Other Media prefers parkour

If you happen to be in Toronto this weekend and have nothing to do then perhaps you can participate in a scavenger hunt that Coach House Books is having on Sunday afternoon starting at the Gladstone Hotel. (Can you throw a scavenger hunt like you would a party? Someone get me Katherine Barber on the line.) Participants will get to mingle with contributors to Coach House’s recent book uTOpia and show off their knowledge of Parkdale, the neighbourhood where all the cool kids live. In Other Media trusts that this event will be infintely cooler than those urban scavenger hunts we occasionally come across downtown where middle-aged singles get to break out those mint-condition New Balances they bought a year ago when they joined the gym and spend a weekend living out their Amazing Race fantasies.

Related links:
Click here for more details on the Coach House event

10-year-old Conundrum at crossroads

Last week, Hal Niedzviecki wrote an article in The Globe and Mail commemorating the 10th anniversary of the small, Montreal-based publishing company Conundrum Press. Hitting some commercial success lately with books like Chandra Mayor’s novel-in-vignettes Cherry (which won the Carol Shields Manitoba Book Award), garnering a fair amount of recent media attention that included an unexpected review of another book in Flare magazine — as well as an inadvertent mention in the film Sideways — and finally qualifying for his first Canada Council Block Publishing grant, Conundrum’s publisher and sole employee Andy Brown is dismissive of his success. Still, there comes a time in a small press’s life when its publisher must decide how big it could be.

“Conundrum is at a crossroads now,” Brown says to Niedzviecki. “I can stay the same and barely make a living, which is how I always imagined the future, or do I want to try and get bigger — make more sales, change the types of books I publish?”

“Some of the authors I published early on, for them to get bigger awards and advances they have to be with other publishers,” continues Brown, perhaps speaking in part of Governor General Award-nominated Golda Fried, whose chapbook Brown published in 1997, but who published her latest novel with the larger Coach House Books. “It bothers me that they have to go somewhere else.”

Related links:
Click here for Hal Niedzviecki’s piece in The Globe and Mail
Click here for a May 2004 Q&Q feature on Conundrum

The Coach House standoff continues

Toronto’s free weekly Now has some more back and forth on the Coach House Books situation, this time in the form of a piece by Jeremy Murray, a resident of Campus Co-operative Residences. (Some background: Campus Co-op is Coach House’s landlord, and its current redevelopment plans call for the razing of two garages that house the publisher’s printing presses.) The good news is that at a recent Campus Co-op members’ meeting, a motion to evict the press outright was defeated. But the standoff continues. Writes Murray: “I’m not sure why the co-op’s proposed — and to my mind reasonable — compromises aren’t getting more air time. The co-op has told Bevington he can move the presses to the intact buildings if he shifts his storage space to the new residential facility, which it will rent him at market value.” But Bevington, as quoted in the article, counters that losing the garages “would be like being half a Christian.”

Related links:
Now piece by Campus Co-op resident Jeremy Murray