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RMTC’s The Fighting Days is about Francis Beynon, who believed in suffrage for all women http://t.co/kJ16ZtP2 @uptownmag #theatre #winnipeg Thursday February 9, 2012
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On April 27th at the packed Auburn Saloon, the Talonbooks Spring Launch came to Calgary for a thoughtfully provocative evening amid deep bathos and belly laughter.

The start of the night was rife with technosophist hypertext as Frank Davey read from his book of carefully strategized searches Bardy Google, suitably followed by derek beaulieu’s bombastic delivery of pieces from How To Write. Both books scrutinize the fine line dividing the intellectual properties of literature and copyism in our contemporary cut-and-paste society.

Next was Ken Norris, with his elegant epigrammatic interpretation of the travel writing genre, reading from the third book in his Dantean trilogy, Asian Skies. Norris was keen to point out that the eight books on the spring list were cohesive works of poetry and not merely collections of individual poems, what Jack Spicer would have called “one night stands”.

The crowd was very merry when George Bowering took it to another level of contagious hilarity. Laughter abounded as he read from his series of poems in My Darling Nellie Grey.

After the break, Stephen Collis read from his structuralist poems about social excess in On the Material, even going so far as to imitate the voice of an oil can.

Then, Weyman Chan, another beloved resident of “Cowtown”, received a warm reception from his friends and family as he launched into philosophical wanderings from Hypoderm, elaborating upon the subtext in these “notes to himself”.
Garry Thomas Morse concluded the event, reading lyrical roasts, admonitions and “epistolary pathetiques” from After Jack, his homage to Jack Spicer.
(photographs courtesy of Kristen Ingram)

Thursday February 9, 2012 in Meta-Talon
Suffragette City: The Fighting Days
(Marina Stephenson Kerr plays Nellie McClung, on one side of an ethical split within the suffrage movement in Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days)
In the play, Francis Beynon, who is passionately antiwar, clashes with Nellie McClung over military conscription, and over McClung’s position that the vote should be withheld from “non-Empire” immigrant women during the war.
Thursday February 2, 2012 in Meta-Talon
How to Bank Your Life on Speculative "Futures"
Jonathan Ball interviews Garry Thomas Morse about various speculative “futures”:
In two volumes of The Chaos! Quincunx, I use what William S. Burroughs called the “fold-in” method, which feels rather like battering some batter in a bowl. This process is exciting, because of its sense of immediacy. I’m never quite sure what the characters are going to do next!
Thursday January 26, 2012 in Meta-Talon
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again Comes to Kamloops
Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again comes to Kamloops:
They may seem like everyday moments — and in many ways they are — but, with Lorne Cardinal and Margo Kane playing the only two characters, the play becomes “an homage to his mother,” Leyshon said.
Monday January 23, 2012 in Meta-Talon
Anis Shivani Interviews Michael McClure
Anis Shivani interviewed Beat Poet Michael McClure On Jim Morrison, The Doors, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac for The Huffington Post on March 03, 2011:
Shivani: Is Olson the major figure in American poetry after Pound?
McClure: I do not like seeing poetry as literature rather than art and I’m not happy with the separation of Poetry and the sister arts, I prefer to see Art as Art. I perceive that a major figure after Pound would be Jackson Pollock, and instead of looking at “American” Poetry as William Carlos Williams exhorted all to do, I would look worldwide at the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and of course Charles Olson, and all.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program; and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing activities.