what's the deal with publishing poetry?

I know I tend to get ahead of myself sometimes, cart before horse and all that jazz.

This is definitely one of those times.

BUT.

What are the rules around publishing poetry and prose on a blog? Sometimes, when you enter a contest or submit a piece to a magazine the regulations state it must be unpublished material. Does my blog count as a something?

According to the CBC Literary Awards it does.

Uggh. So that means that I can't post my poems on here if I want to submit them to something like the CBC LAs. Of course that's just one contest, but such regulations are of concern to me.

Why? Let's introspect, shall we.

Reason 1 - Up until now my creative output has been an inconsequential, unenviable mess, so when I actually do finish something it takes on far more significance than it should. Each finished piece is a symbol, something to signify ALL the potential I'm convinced rattles around in my brain.

Reason 2 - Stemming from 1, if I consider each finished piece a master-work I'm instantly convinced of its dearness and value. Something of great worth of course needs to be cherished and only launched into the world at an appropriate moment, an instant where all eyes are watching and all mouths are ready to shout its praises.

Those moments don't come around too often. In fact, if one thought for about three seconds they would realize that such convoluted logic sound more like excuse making. A way to avoid ever finding out if what I'm doing is actually good, and so...

Reason 3 - This reason is a bit of a mess, bear with me, but we can generally say the third reason I am writing this inane post is confidence.

a - As mentioned above, if I talk about publishing something or submitting something it takes attention away from the act of publishing or submitting (or the lack of action) and my untalented deceit is never revealed!

b - Stemming from 2 is another facet of confidence; FEAR! On some level I'm afraid that I won't be able to rally my creative forces ever again. This one can be overcome, simply by doing something. Then doing something new. Then following that second something with another, and a fourth, and a thirty-second (after a 29th) and so on.

To be a creative individual you need to create all the time. Do, do, do, do and do. Not think, suggest and maybe next week. Take artistry seriously. As Canadian poet David W. McFadden ( a fella I've mentioned before) said, "From Grade 11 till now I've been writing poems every day, or thinking about it a lot on the occasional day I'd miss. To me an artist had to work every day, it had to be his entire life, or he was a fake."

A fake eh? Sounds familiar. So all I need to do is write a poem a day for the next 40 years? Well, maybe I should just take the meaning of his words and apply them personally.

And reason number...I don't even know. Am I onto italicized sub-sub-headings by this stage? My next point doesn't necessarily follow from the others, I just want to include it somehow, so...

Reason 3bi - I've mentioned this before, but thinking in terms of a best sellers and smash hits is wrong-headed. Chasing the latest trend and not being true to personal creative instincts results in shallow, unformed pieces. Mere shadows of what other original people were doing weeks, months and years before.

Stick with what you love and find hilarious, however, and at the end of the day you get something that you at least find enjoyable. If it finds fans in other like-minded souls that's great, but if it doesn't, who cares?

And so I struggle. Wanting to create something that receives recognition, worrying that personal notions of grandeur might be pin-pricked and deflated (not necessarily a bad thing), and simply wanting to create and push things out there regardless of the venue. Maybe even get to a point where I'm comfortable enough with myself that I know there will be other poems after this one and that I'll have another short story idea.

And I think I'm getting there, becoming more willing to release things into the world. Able to set aside all the above mentioned concerns. And if it does turn out I have created the greatest thing ever I'm sure it will take care of itself.

What set all this off?

I'm working on a poem entitled my bedroom floor on a Wednesday just after 8 in the evening (or sweat as communication). With a name like that how can it NOT be the greatest thing ever?

I was actually thinking about not posting it on here, but after writing everything I've just written I don't think that's possible.

Now you all have something to look forward to!

subways and Fort York

Twitter is something else, eh guys?

I just sit here and everyone else finds links for me. It's great. I don't even know I want to find something until it appears. When it does I just have to write about it.

This go round we're talking architecture and public transit to start. We'll see where we end up.

Designboom had a neat post the other day detailing the best subway architecture going. I will now commence moving some of their pictures over here, then adding my own limited commentary. This post is basically me giggling uncontrollably at neat things and wanting to share said giggles more fully than a simple link would allow.

Holy Stockholm Batman! The entire system is stuffed with artwork, and they have some great design features, including the hacked out of stone feel in a lot of stations.

I'm always a fan of mashing the hyper-future into unfinished and naturally riotous spaces. The notion bears a connection to my aesthetic appreciation for classical architecture and the modern; having a sleek, electric tram silently snaking through a centuries old city-centre or a new windmill silhouetted in the skyline beside an ancient, stone belfry.

Nice lights Munich.

The joys of building a system starting in 1972 and being able to incorporate what other cities have already learned.

This one reminds me of St. Clair West station in Toronto, which reminds me of a lot of Metro stations in Montreal (not that I've visited them particularly intensively). Both in the colours and in the high ceilings. I love how that mirrored ceiling makes the space last forever.

Tempo from St. Clair West station. It's nice, but not all encompassing like the above example. I understand that making the station itself into the art (or at least part of the art on display) can be more expensive and difficult, but with bigger risks come bigger rewards (sometimes).

I like the clean lines in this Bilbao station. Apparently the whole system and all its stations were designed byFoster + Partners.

Or this epilepsy inducing little number in Shanghai. Because this transit system is so short it's more about the sound and light display you experience than actually moving.

Check out the amazing texture on the wall in Prague.

And the opulence you can find in Moscow.

Just because I like the future combined with nature, doesn't mean having a straight-up future future future is now look is bad, like they have at Drassanes Station in Barcelona.

So what to take from all this?

Basically we need to be bold. I'm aware of economic restrictions, but you HAVE to be willing to spend money. Something like a subway station can't be changed after the fact terribly easily, so you have to get it right the first time (I don't mean get it right in the sense that a perfect solution can be found, but instead that we need to remember this is building the city for the next 40, 60, 100 years and to change a design to save $200 000 now might result in pain and bother for years to come). Spend the money and after the basic architecture requirements are met, turn it over to the artists, or even better have the artists and architects working together from the beginning.

As people move through a transit system everyday, their existence is at least partially defined by the spaces that they pass through. If you make those spaces big, bold and inspiring the people get something positive from it. Prioritize these spaces and invest in them.

If the people hate the art I'm willing to bet they're going to complain, and THAT's good too! Complaint leads to more discussion and more discussion leads to more change. Nothing about art or architecture is static and the next big project will be influenced by the last.

The key thing to remember - and probably also the most difficult thing to wrap your head around given the brief time-spans most people and governments operate on - is that each one of these projects is building towards an unseen city of the future. The infrastructure and groundwork we lay now is what will support the layers of urban citizenship that will arrive in forms unseen tomorrow. And in an even more perfect world the groundwork we lay now should also appreciate some of that which was built in the past. The city exists in time as much as it does space.

It's tough. Even the best conjecture lacks absolute certainty. The people trying to envision what is to come and build accordingly are going to receive all sorts of complaints around cost and style. Only years later will people be able to see the brilliance and foresight in what they built (think of the under-bridge subway line on the Bloor Viaduct. If that hadn't been a possible add-on in the original bridge design the entire subway system in Toronto would be vastly different, or at least have cost way more). And of course, some of the ideas won't pan out, giving all the naysayers something to point to.

Toronto did get a mention in the above article, Museum Station's redesign was considered cool enough for a comment.

And I agree. They did a good thing here. It is a retrofit but imagine the fun they could have had if designing this station from scratch, trying to capture the same themes and images. Oh boy!

-----

One more thing, non-subway, before I go.

Toronto is designing a new Fort York Visitor Centre. You can see the design proposals on Spacing Toronto. They're pretty neat and while I haven't passed judgement on any one, I recommend having a look at 4 first because its aerial view gives you a better idea of what's going on spatially.

This project interestingly connects to the previous post on the Gardiner Expressway. Fort York used to be right beside the lake. It's not anymore due to fill dumping and land extension, and is now wedged between the city and the Gardiner Expressway and the proposed visitor centre is actually going to exist at least in part beneath the elevated road.

As I said above, all these discussions on aesthetics are ongoing, with each piece adding to and elaborating previous physical opinions. Installing a fantastically designed visitor centre underneath the Gardiner brings together multiple eras, revealing both distinct moments of design (history, culture, society and everything) and how a moment in design-time lasts. Even after fashions change.

Just as a city's people move about and interact to provide its ever-changing social nature, a city's built aspects are not static. Each new piece of architecture reinterprets what is already there or was there before. Complete erasure (burying the Gardiner for instance) is not always feasible not necessarily desirable.

Given the Gardiner's decades-long role in Toronto and the lessons it has taught around prioritizing cars above people and neighbourhoods, re-interpreting it with more people friendly additions is a better way to go. As long as everything that gets built, no matter how avant-garde, remembers the person is the city's most important unit, it's difficult to really go wrong.

From pretty picture of train stations, to 200 year old forts and an expressway often called an eyesore, it's like a never-ending magical acid trip up in here.

Feral Houses

Now here's another cool thing.

As I'm sure you all know Detroit has had a bit of a demographic shift in the past few decades, meaning a shit-ton of people have left. Fortunately they were kind enough to leave their city behind. Parts of it are rotten and festering, but the urban decay has also become a focus or urban explorers and artists' more extreme, large-scale projects.

What better way to bring attention to demographic decline and housing loss than painting melting houses Tiggerific Orange?

The city has even become a centre for slow food and urban farming!

But what caught my eye recently was the feral houses pictured on Sweet Juniper.

Look at these beauties.

You can really see how thinned out the city has become. Fields where before there were fields. Or forests?

As Sweet Juniper points out gardens planted for aesthetics now frame houses in green, speaking to words like consume and swallow.

I've been talking with the plants. Their plan is to grow. Stab mortar with roots, pressure windows and invite wood back to earth. I like deconstruction sites where the foreman is nature.

These houses were obviously for the wealthy at some point. Gone. Fled. Fearful and in the suburbs.

Where do the poor people go who aren't sub-urban-knights? Where have all those people gone who lost their homes in the sub-prime mortgage debacles of the past few years? Are they all living with friends? Camping in the forests of national parks? Of Detroit? Filling up flea bag hotels where they pay by the month?

The pictures are instructive. I sometimes have a hard time getting my head around the notion that progress can be stopped, humanity might have to shrink back and try again somewhere else.

I know it has happened time and again; ancient ruins and lost cities, even North American ghost towns, all speak to the reality. Rivers change course, soil becomes infertile and saline, ore veins are bled dry. Or the industrial-capitalist system loses track of how to work in a certain place at a certain time for a certain group of people and once those that can get are gone the rest are left to their fate - be it barbarians or trees.

Cities decline, leave, end.

I know these things happen. But on a deeper level the concept of hundreds of thousands of urban citizens leaving and abandoning continues to astonish and exist just beyond real comprehensibility for me. An intangible, only coherent through numbers and words.

Individual stories - job loss and watching helplessly as a neighbourhood falls apart - I can understand those. But translating that into a coherent narrative that encompasses downtown blight and sprawling suburban growth is a trickier proposition.

How to solve a problem that in its size alone defies real comprehension? I dunno, but I think a bunch of people working at a comprehensible scale on a whack of projects can add up to something. Eventually. Don't forget about the trees when contemplating the forest and all that.

The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

Oh, The Royal, The Royal...where to begin?

I was there because of the Greenbelt display and my close association with the TRCA through BCPV meant I was (somehow) allowed to sign myself up for a bunch of shifts. Said shifts consisted of me reading my book on Tuesday, gaily handing out activity books to children on Wednesday, then aggressively handing out activity books to children while forcing others to learn about the Greenbelt on Thursday.

How do you force someone to learn about something? Basically accost them as they walk past, ask them if they are interested. Then, before they answer, tell them that they are in fact interested until they enter the display area. If that fails, telling them that learning about the Greenbelt and local food is the only way any of us will survive the zombie apocalypse also works.

(The point I was trying to make with the zombies is that a closed US-Canada border would see Toronto out of food in 3 days, I know zombie apocalypse doesn't explain this reality but it's all razzle-dazzle with kids these days.)

Not the most strenuous or all-consuming work so I had to find other things to keep me occupied.

Checking out the hot and heavy cock on cock action in the central ring:

FIGHT!

FIGHT!

FIGHT!

Also, imagine these images facing one another...I'm too tired to make it work.

Food samples: Every break I was off touring, loading crackers with salsas and sauces, pretzels with spicy mustards, and stuffing my face with all sorts of cheese (goat cheese was big with lemon and cranberry and all sorts of party flavours). I didn't buy anything. For that I suck. Oh well.

Watching the Mennonites: No real commentary on this, it was just nice to see them about. Also, hearing that loverly German derivation they work amongst themselves is always mighty keen.

Rural chic: I forget how people look different sometimes. Growing up on a farm just outside Keady I like to think I'm well acquainted with rural Ontario life. I've hunted groundhogs, watched tractors bale hay for an entire afternoon, started then had to stomp out a grass fire on my property because the fire department was a 40 minute drive away, and as a result have fond memories of that culture (?) no matter how slick, urban and badass I've become.

I don't want to try to illuminate what I mean here, just acknowledge that differences exist and thank the world for people in all their belt-buckled, permanently-hatted, stern-faced, same-haircut-since-1964'd glory.

Milking: The cows hanging out, waiting to be shown, still need to be milked regularly lest they burst. Interestingly, they need to be full to the right degree before being judged. A challenging life.

I wasn't THAT interested in the milking process. There were, however, some beautiful girls doing some milking. I wanted to write a hilarious commentary on milk maids and eroticism, but now I can't. Oh well.

They did remind me, in a roundabout way, of the straight to the point nature of marriage and relationships for some. You find a spouse to partner with on the farm. You make babies with said spouse so there are more people able to lend a hand. Other concerns, aesthetics or soul mate status for example, tend to be outweighed by something termed necessity.

Dear lonely individuals interested in a bit of hard work and a warm body to sleep beside, farmers need you!

Pigs: saw some pigs. Here are little ones.

The Horsey Set: A huge part of The Royal are the horse related events. I saw some prancing wee fellas and some big work teams, I even saw Ian Millar (THE IAN MILLAR) up close and personal in the warm-up ring.

Legal?

I also tried to take a really great photo. The punch line would have been about flanks, and it would have involved a combination of the following two images...you figure it out!

So many flanks...

But back to the horsey set. Evening shows at The Royal have an additional ticket attached and when I was leaving around 5, people were starting to show up for those. People were always dressed to the nines and sometimes beyond, in tuxedos and gowns.

I think this part of the fair is a great vestige of old Toronto (or perhaps old Ontario more broadly). All the self-styled gentleman farmers from around the province toodling down to Hog Town for The Royal, celebrating their good breeding and that of their animals with lots of booze and party.

Nothing says juxtaposition like a bar in a barn with a sign at the door saying "Private Club - Dress Code in Effect".

I'm expressing these ideas based purely on a general sense I have of Toronto social history. I wonder how significant it is on social calendars now versus 10, 20 or however many years ago? I wonder how many non-white people attend the glorious evening galas? Do any of the head-scarfed ladies guiding their children around the fair at 2 in the afternoon come back in the evening? (Doubtful on that last one.)

Oh jeeze, now I'm thinking of all the interesting and fun research directions that could emerge from a socio-historical analysis of The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. Maybe I do belong in academia, or maybe I just need to start a marketplace where I can sell people thesis titles.

Okay, time to bring things back down...way down. I had an unfortunate habit of taking pictures of animal's behinds. With the fowl it was because I wanted to make this fella look intimidating. Monster bird!

With this cow I just thought the udder looked funny, it was only later I noticed the...amazed face. Do you see it?

Art!

Then I became entranced with this cow's hips.

No one seemed particularly perturbed (and I assure you there were many more photos than these three), but maybe people pegged me for a judge or something. And for the people that think the hips look a little skinny, don't worry. These fine ladies are well-fed, but they are bred to give milk and milk doesn't need big fat hips.

And finally, it's time to play a game! What is it?

A map of an island off the coast of Scotland?

Okay, maybe an archipelago. With some weird undersea ridging.

Why, that's the craziest map I've ever seen!

Oh, it's a cow.

A freshly shorn cow looks so dapper and given that this one was standing right beside the salon (or what passes for a salon in a cow barn) she was the dapperest of all. I wonder if the guy doing the cutting is a full-time cow trimmer or he's just a farmer with a passion.

And where were all the bulls? I didn't go looking but I'm willing to bet farmers leave the bulls at home. Too much animal, too much danger. Save'em for the rodeo.

I think I've said enough. Other stuff happened too, but that was just me flirting with random ladies and we all know how that ends. HILARIOUSLY. So if I'm going to write about any of that it'll get its own post.