Suze Rotolo passed away last week after a battle with lung cancer.  She was 67.

Rotolo was an activist, artist, writer and teacher. 

She was also, for a time, muse to the 20th century's greatest song writer, Bob Dylan. 

To current and former Ottawa residents, workers and students:

February 15, 2011 is the deadline to submit poetry for the  March 2011 issue of Bywords.ca. The judge for the 2010/2011 John Newlove Poetry Award is Angela Rawlings.

**Please consult the guidelines on www.bywords.ca** then send poems to submissions@bywords.ca.

The New Quarterly's latest issue -- No. 114, "To List is Human" -- is guest edited by Diane Schoemperlen, and contains, among other things, a charming story by Julie Paul, "The Black Forest."

The esteemed New Brunswick journal The Fiddlehead celebrates its 65th anniversary with stories by Deborah-Anne Tunney and Julie Curwin, and poems by Emily Carr and charles c. smith.

And finally, a note on Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, which, while it was lauded in the Globe and Mail as "ingenious," the New Yorker has, in a mini-review, derided Martel for making "a series of baffling choices" in his attempt to create thoughtful art out of the Holocaust. Sounds like the only way to decide which one is more accurate is to read it yourself.

Sonnet L’Abbé in The A B Series

Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, both published by McClelland and Stewart. In 2000, she won the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35, and in 1999 won the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. L’Abbé has taught writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She reviews poetry for the Globe and Mail and is currently doing doctoral work at the University of British Columbia.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010
7 p.m. doors open; 7:30 p.m. performance
MERCURY LOUNGE | 56 ByWard Market Square
$7 admission at the door / $5 for people with low income

If you watched the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, you may have come away with the impression that Russia's culture is a little more...mmm...high-brow than Canada's. (Please don't think I'm necessarily complaining about this, though.) They have the Bolshoi Ballet, we have giant floating beavers; they have Valeri Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra (who, incidentally, will be at the National Arts Centre on March 15), we have William Shatner and a sadly under-used Catherine O'Hara telling very poor jokes. (We do, on the other hand, have Neil Young, who is probably worth a couple of those wordy 19th-century Russian novelists all on his own.)

The Russians have always taken their culture seriously - sometimes too much so. The poet Osip Mandelstam famously said, "Only in Russia is poetry respected - it gets people killed." (He himself would eventually become one of the victimes.) Joseph Stalin had been a well-known, even admired, romantic poet in his youth in Georgia, and showed a lively (and deadly) interest in Soviet writers and composers after he became dictator.

But still - they were also able to produce something like this:

Artists for Haiti
An art auction and sale
Tuesday, February 9th
CUBE GALLERY (7 Hamilton St. N.)
Preview and sale of artworks begins at 11 am
Reception at 5:30 pm
Auction at 8pm (minimum bid)
$5 entrance fee
Join our hosts Adrian Harewood and Oni the Haitian Sensation for an evening of Action for Haiti. Over 60 artists, poetry, drumming, and music throughout the evening.
Light refreshments, including Haitian patties, will be served.
AfrikArt Konnection and Paul Dewar, MP, in collaboration with Cube Gallery invite you to help raise funds to provide food, water, shelter, clothing and first aid to the people of Haiti through the Canadian Red Cross.
With over 80 artists including:
Barbara Gray
Beth Levin
Bruce Garner
Chikonzero Chazunguza
Cynthis O’Brien
Don Monet
Doris Lamontagene
Hawa Kaba
Heather Campbell
Ivan Petrov
Karole Marois
Nattawadee Panikom
Norman Takeuchi
Paula M Zoubek
Rollande Dufault

Ever since Bob Dylan finished the encore of his November 7th show in Kitchener with "All Along the Watchtower", I've been thinking about the power of the song and its lyrics.  

Some dismiss the lyrics as nonsense, but I can't accept that argument when lines like " Businessmen, they drink my wine/Plowmen dig my earth / None of them along the line / Know what any of it is worth"  seem so obviously applicable to Dylan's own thoughts on life during the post-motocycle accident period in which the song was written.

A quick Google search termed up this excellent close reading of the lyrics by Herb Bowie.

As noted in the analysis, "Dylan’s accomplishment here is nothing less than amazing."

Agreed.

In December of 2007 I discovered Bob Dylan. I spent the next year listening to all of his albums in chronological order. My listening habits, however, were weighted towards the studio work, so I'm not as familiar with some of the concert albums.

While fiddling with my new MP3 player, just now, I stumbled across a live version of "It Aint Me Babe" from 1984's Real Live... and it blew my mind.

The 80's are often thought of as the low point in Dylan's career, and yet, here, in this performance of an old Dylan standard, the man sounds as good as ever. I think what really sends shivers up my spine is the moment when Dylan reaches the first chorus and sings, "It aint me babe," and then, suddenly, a crowd of thousands takes over, singing, the "No, no, no's". Dylan becomes silent, letting the crowd sing the next "It aint me babe", before coming in for the final, "It aint me you're looking for, babe," to finish the chorus.

Span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents: The Ottawa Small Press Book Fair spring 2009 edition this  Saturday, June 20, 2009 in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11am for exhibitors)
admission free to the public.

$20 for exhibitors, full tables
$10 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset St W, main floor, Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7).

The fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including (at previous events) Bywords, Dusty Owl, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, and others.

Book fair information:
http://smallpressbookfair.blogspot.com/2009/02/ottawa-small-press-book-fair-spring.html

Pre-fair reading information:
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2009/05/ottawa-small-press-book-fair-spring.html

On Saturday, the Dusty Owl publishing house hosted a reading of four Aboriginal poets: Mosha Folger and Dorothee Komangapik, both Inuit; Lisa Abel, a young poet from the M'Chigeeng Reserve on Manitoulin Island, now studying journalism at Carleton; and Rob Friday, a First Nations artist and writer.

There was a wide range in the ages and backgrounds of the poets, and in their styles. Folger, young and trim, with a slightly nervous manner,  read mainly short poems that he mostly wrote as spoken word pieces. (His "Old Indifferences," about coming across destitute Inuit on Rideau Street in Ottawa, was particularly affecting.)

Komangapik, on the other hand - originally from Germany, but who married an Inuit and has been part of the Inuit community for decades - read longer narrative poems. She deftly and subtly teased out larger truths about community and tradition from examinations of very specific objects and events: an old comb found on the ground, a particularly harsh few weeks spent at her family's summer camp.