Maha Choir, this Friday and Saturday

From Elvi:

Please come and help me celebrate a very good year.

Je vous invite de tout coeur de venir m'accompagner

dans la célébration d'une merveilleuse année.

Choeur Maha presents

"Vers le Vert!" TWO NIGHTS!!

April 18 AND 19At 8:00 p.m.

At: The Eastern Bloc, 7240 Clark (near Jean-Talon) $10

With special guest: Willow Rutherford

http://www.myspace.com/willowrutherford

**MORE INFO: Choeur Maha, our much-loved Montreal women's choir, has been about challenging musical and social conventions. It has taken us fromexperimental sound installations to spontaneously spreading the singing anddancing groove into the audience. Directed by Kathy Kennedy. www.kathykennedy.ca

Why Are You so Sad?

Without putting too much stock in it, I was still pleased to hear that "Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems" by David W. McFadden was a finalist for this year's Griffin Prize (how many remember who won the Griffin last year? Two years ago?). I've been making my way slowly through the book since I bought it a month or two ago and I'm enjoying it. The volume covers McFadden's entire poetry career ('poetry career', oxymoron alert.) The book is lively and refreshing. Not sad at all, in spite of the title. But what struck me most about the poetry, which is varied in form and content, funny, experimental, rambling, precise, sad and joyous, is how uniformly heartfelt and accessible it is. We are firmly entrenched in the era of specialty, from the arts to the sciences, everyone is a specialist. And one thing that's always bothered me about much of today's poetry is how it seems to be the product of specialists. Too many practitioners and critics these days appear to be obsessed with the minutiae of form and content and they too often lose sight of the basic element of poetry, that it must first and foremost speak to the heart. On the few occasions I went to visit Irving Layton in his home on Monkland Avenue, I always found him sitting at his dining room table, pipe in hand, surrounded by a scattering of books. Each time I made sure to survey the titles. What was the master reading I had to know. I expected to see poetry, of course. I never did. I saw philosophy, politics, fiction, classics, but I can't remember ever seeing a book of poetry on the table. Layton frequently bemoaned the narrowness of thought and perspective that he saw developing in the young minds being produced by the universities. He felt that creative writing programs would sound the death-knell of poetry. (Layton himself was a graduate in agriculture and political science. I once told him that he had the perfect education for a poet.) Layton understood that being narrow of mind was dangerous. It was a concern he constantly railed against, the loss of our common humanity. I sense the same in McFadden's poetry. He's of that ilk, a generalist, a throwback to an earlier era, whose poetry sometimes feels like a leisurely garden stroll, alive, redolent and joyful. At other times he's on the hunt, tracking frightful beasts. He's got a range rarely seen these days.

And the national capital of poetry is...

Really nice Montreal launch of A Dream of Birds last night at the Jewish Public Library. A refreshingly eclectic program that featured unfairly forgotten rabbis, poetry, and anecdotes about sadistic Jewish dentists. Also, the screening of, according to Seymour, the first ever original animated Yiddish film in the history of cinema. It was a real bonus to see so many friends who came out Rachel Alkallay, Jeffrey Mackie, Elvi Nyveen among them. Thanks again to the JPL and in particular Roxana Brauns for organizing another successful event.

In case you missed the Gazette this past weekend, in celebration of April, the coming of spring and our national poetry month, I wrote a piece asking a handful of poets from across the country to nominate a poetry capital of Canada. Some of the responses are surprising. There's plenty of room for opinion. Your input is welcome on the blog.

Montreal launch of A Dream of Birds

Here's an announcement of our upcoming event this sunday. If you anywhere within a hundred miles of Montreal it'd be nice to see you, if not to hear me and Seymour then at least to hear Ira Robinson talk about an intriguing, little written about chapter in Montreal's Jewish history. Another bonus is that Sharon Katz's multiple-award winning animated film "Slide" will be screened. She designed our book and used bird images from the film.

The Jewish Public Library in collaboration with the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies present (More than a) book launch of

“Rabbis and Their Community” by Ira Robinson
AND
“A Dream of Birds” – Word Sonnets by Seymour Mayne and B. Glen Rotchin

with illustrations by Sharon Katz

SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2008 AT 7:30 P.M.

Click here to view the flyer

What the Shohtim Did in Their Spare Time

Ira Robinson, Professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Religion, Concordia University, who has published extensively in the area of Jewish Studies, will talk about early 20th-century Montreal’s Shohtim, men who also often displayed literary and artistic talent. Even with their inherently difficult job of slaughtering cattle for Montreal’s kosher meat industry, they had ample time to pursue other occupations and avocations, including Torah and Jewish philosophy scholarship, journalism and music. In doing so, they contributed significantly to Jewish Montreal’s intellectual atmosphere.
Introduced by Prof. Dr. Norman Ravvin, Chair of the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.

A Dream of Birds

Seymour Mayne, author, editor or translator of more than 50 books, and B. Glen Rotchin, author of fiction and poetry, will launch their joint work of poetry that developed from their casual, back-and-forth dialogue as friends. The resulting literary collaboration came as a surprise even to them, like a flock of grounded birds suddenly exploding into flight. Its theme is birds; the reader might sense the push and pull of wing force in the cadences that cross its pages. The poems are responsive, sometimes playing off one another, at other times dueling.
The book also features a flip-book animated sequence of drawings by artist/film-maker Sharon Katz that is visible when its pages are turned. It also includes illustrations from Slide, her short animated film, which will also be screened at the launching.

Books and autographs available. Reception sponsored by the Tauben Family Foundation of the JPL.

Jewish Public Library, 5151 Côte Ste-Catherine
$5 JPL members/students, $10 non-members
Info: (514) 345-2627 ext. 3017
Reception to follow

April is National Poetry Month...

and spring. Here's a poem that celebrates both poetry and seasonal profusion. Read on and you will fulfil your statutory obligation to read a poem this month.



BULL’S EYE

For me a poem
is worked soil
turned and watered
a thousand times over
green profusions pruned
with blunt tools
strangling weeds uprooted
dug out stones cast aside
on a growing pile
sweaty body bending
as praying bodies must
that draw closer to their source
sifting pale fingers squirming
through black earth till
my stiff spine
refuses to straighten up again.

Amid the struggle questions occur:
Does the perfect poem radiate
like a garden in bloom
multi-coloured bands expanding
outward forever?
Or does it zero in
on a single symmetrical flower
a golden bull’s-eye word
the unpronounceable Name
as succinct, precise and encompassing
as the well-aimed arrow-point
embedded in silence?
And how can a tired man
awaken from his cramped cage of bones
to yawn and stretch
at the long day before it reaches
its unheralded conclusion?

Samuel Gesser 1930-2008

I was deeply saddened to learn this morning of the death of Montreal impresario, writer, cultural-treasure Sam Gesser. That's Sam on the left recently receiving an award at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. In the last decade of his life Sam received a pile of awards for his life's achievements from the Order of Canada to recognition from the Smithsonian Institute in Washignton. The Gazette's Bill Brownstein has penned a fitting tribute to Sam which appears today on page 3 with wonderful archival pics of Sam with Nat King Cole, Nana Mouskouri and others he worked with professionally over the years like Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger.

His cultural and artistic accomplishments were many, but I'll remember Sam most as my cousin. My dad's first cousin actually, his mother Ida and my grandmother were sisters. I got to know Sam well only about ten years ago. He was a lovely, soft-spoken and generous man who took an active interest in my writing when I wasn't writing much, and would call me up every so often to encourage me, and to see how I was doing and how things were in 'the other part of town' (it was a far way from his Place des Arts office downtown to Chabanel but he made the trip for lunch more than once.) Among the many recordings Sam did for Folkways was the classic Six Montreal Poets which included Louis Dudek, FR Scott, Irving Layton, AJM Smith, a rare reading by AM Klein at McGill, and a very young and nasally Leonard Cohen in the 1950s. My favourite story about Sam was when Cohen came to see him with some of his songs (Suzanne among them.) Sam was already making a name for himself producing concerts and making records. Sam told Leonard not to quit his day job - his music would never sell, the lyrics were too complex and confusing, and besides he couldn't sing for beans. In a culturally rich life, Sam got it right most of the time. I'll miss him.

Der Rebbe Woody

There's one thing I'll say about Montreal-native Dov Charney of American Apparel fame, he's got chutzpah. Well, now he's being sued (for the umpteenth time.) By Woody Allen no less. The article wonders what possible connection there might be between American Apparel and Woody as a hasid (a frame from Annie Hall). Like all AA campaigns it has something to do with Jewish kitsch. Not too long ago there was a display of kitschy 1970s bar-mitzvah photos in the store window on the corner of Sherbrooke and Claremont. They were absolutely hilarious. Wide lapels, fat bowties, powder-blue and gold polyester suits with velvet trim, big bushy hair. Made me wistful with memories of my own fabulous Bar (1977) held at Elm-Ridge Golf and Country Club. The theme was magic (I used to do tricks as a hobby.) The legendary Montreal magician Henry Gordon performed for the guests. Hey, Woody was also a magician, I think.