Rubies in Crystal

Friday, April 20, 2018

Video: Bren Clews @ the Art Bar 2018

Direct link: Bren @ the Art Bar

It is always a privilege to read at the Art Bar, Toronto's longest running poetry series, begun in 1990. My novella, Fugue in Green (Quattro Books, Dec 2017), while it has a narrative, is written in a prose poetry. A hybrid style. I begin this reading with a section on how poetry is the vector between the concrete world and the world of the imagination, and end with lovemaking, and what could be more poetic than that? Carl Jung would say to his mistress, 'Let's go and make poetry.'

In the editorial process, the copy editor turned all the sentence fragments in the original manuscript into proper sentences, and combined the one sentence paragraphs into larger paragraphs, removing much of the obvious poetry, but the flow and imagery remained, and I liked the decisive grammar, and so I okayed her suggestions.

But Fugue in Green remains, to me, a book grounded in poetry.

The Art Bar Poetry Series at the Free Times Café in Toronto on April 17th, 2018, hosted by John Oughton.

The original clip was over-exposed with the bright lights, and so I used FCPX's colour vectors and many colour masks to balance the light and skin and colour tones, and did what I could with the sound (which is from the camera).

Praise for my little book, and a number of reviews, and links to all major booksellers may be found at my website.
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