August 6th: The Love Poetry Festival
I’ll be reading poems August 6th on Toronto’s Centre Island with some poets I really admire.
Trevor Abes: Writer
Tag: literature
September 24, 2014
Spoken Word Takes a Turn for the Outrageous
Outrageous is a new reading series in Toronto that’s turning heads and making friends by breaking all the rules. Read my article about it in Torontoist.
If you’re in the city, come by for Outrageous X on September 29 at 8 p.m.
From Outrageous VIII: Alex Hood on bass and Callum MacKenzie on sax as the Rainbow Jackson Free Jazz Experience. Photo by Maite Jacobson.
April 1, 2013
How to Write a Poem in 7 Easy Steps
1. Research how to locate and outline the chin of a toy terrier. Find a toy terrier, outline its chin, then count the hairs on said chin to determine the number of lines your poem will have.
2. Purchase a hatchet and 7 copies of your most loathed newspaper. Stack the newspapers and roll them together, fastening the resulting cake roll with elastic bands. Plate and freeze. In the morning, slice off a dessert-sized portion for melting next to your bowl of cereal and cup of black coffee. If, after breakfast, you cannot deduce at least one thing you hate about the newspaper from the soggy mush, its contents will determine your poem’s subject matter. Otherwise, dump it in the trash and try the next slice tomorrow.
3. Suppose you spot the word “politics” upside down drooping over the plate onto the table and the name “Tibetan Mastiff” crossed with the word “court” in the middle of the plate where ink should be pooling. You decide to take as your theme the history of court cases in which both defendant and prosecution are of the Tibetan Mastiff breed.
4. Research famous Tibetan Mastiff trials and choose one. Suppose you choose Price v. Shanti 1983, where one Shanti Warren was accused of stealing one Price Kennedy’s gold-encrusted leg of lamb and taking it abroad from Toronto to Botswana, where security discovered counterfeit AAA-grade kibble inside of it and duly detained her.
5. For rhythm, think of the last song you had to turn off to stop yourself from getting sick of it. Play it on repeat and improvise about the case; be how you wish you were most of the time; do this until your ears are worn to the metal. Then, continue in and relish the silence. Record using tape or laptop microphone.
6. From the resulting material, select sentences you enjoy as they stand on their own.
7. Try to put them together.
December 17, 2012
Hopscotching Cross Wonder
Saint Augustine taught me about wonder. He said “you acquire it as a child, and you should never lose it, because it’ll come in handy once you get a day-job.”
To feel wonder is to be astonished, floored (but not ceiling-ed), to say “oh my” with jaw dropped and eyes wide open. It is to embrace an unfamiliar idea like a random book-vending machine.
Then after your embrace it, figure out the place it occupies in the world by asking yourself questions like: Where can I find such a machine? (Click on it for your answer). Am I prepared to learn about marine biology if that’s what Lady Fortune thinks my two cents are worth? What if it’s taxidermy, or anesthesiology, or fishing?
But don’t get overwhelmed. Too much whelm can send you to bed.
Next, wonder is never done. Or rather, it never ends. It all depends on curiosity and silliness’ willingness to strong-arm disbelief til the paper is no longer ripped but rugged.
Whomever is responsible for locking English away, I hope they reconsider. Language is claustrophobic, it needs to go outside, lest its feathers fade and its speakers forget what to do during vocabulary tests.
Unless
Someone is giving English away for Christmas. I hope for the fresh stuff, even though it spoils quicker than canned, and a canned adjective is always a two-for-one.
And finally, a few words from Mr. Vonnegut about a group of people that don’t want your money, your brain to wash, or your lawn to stick signs in.
All they want is for you to risk getting confused for a while, and lost when you have the time, to see what happens after the search party finds you.
August 15, 2012
Turning Darlings Into Words
What’s compulsive about writing is that your words can affect the world and the pieces stories need to be good are universally the same, yet adaptable to all individual personalities, even lazy ones, just not those easily prone to embarrassment.
The sexiest, most breathtaking chocolate-cake-level gift a writer can receive is motivation. There may be medical reasons behind your obsessive interest in Victorian England; you’ve recently finished an entire encyclopedia of jazz in two sittings, stifling back tears when Coltrane died; gardening is your life and it worries your family: surely it doesn’t, but that’s the passion-driven material you will hone with care and without self-doubt.
I’d be interested in reading gardening fiction. Flower personification could be charming. No? Says you.
It’s fun to think of readers as a shifting soup of expectations, because trying to please every drop is impossible and inadvisable. Imagine a friend or a fresh acquaintance telling you he likes “all music;” now imagine turning into him. Taste works by exclusion. You don’t like everything, so don’t spend valuable typeathons trying to make everyone like you. Yourself included.
I am not saying write things you don’t like. I’m saying allow yourself to write badly about things you really, really like. Transferring perfection onto a computer screen is more evacuation than careful assembly,
More murder and miracle resuscitation than nip, stitch, done,
Which is OK considering the mental image is still there to be your model in the aftermath.
When putting darlings into words, the careful get left behind: spew, cross out and redo.
Trevor Abes: Writer 
