A quick note: For those of you who have not signed up for our newsletter, tomorrow night is our 6th Open Mic! Come on out, bring your work, and if you have nothing to share, you’re always welcome to read a passage of a beloved book! The doors will be open at 7PM, and the reading will begin within half an hour. Afterwards, we’ll go out for drinks.
Hope to see you there!
Hello folks! Here’s our Argo Bookshop May 2012 Newsletter (just click on the link). If you’d like to receive our newsletter by email, just send us an email at argobookshop@gmail.com. Here’s some shop news for the month:
One of the most influential thinkers of the contemporary world, Michel Foucault’s work has affected disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. The Foucault Readeroffers an excellent introduction to the entire body of his work, containing selections from each area of the man’s work, as well as previously unpublished writings including the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality and interviews with Foucault himself.
His philosophy is comprised of a fantastic intellectual breadth, stemming from a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault’s analyses of power as it manifests itself in the organized forms that compose society (schools, factories, the family schema, etc.) are brought together in The Foucault Reader, creating an overview of his perspectives on power, and the broad social and political visions that underlie them.
Hope to see you in the shop!
Poet Walid Bitar (The Empire’s Missing Links), acclaimed poet launches his fifth book, Divide and Rule, a new collection of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power structured in rhymed quatrains alongside the launch of the wonderful poet Anita Lahey’s (Out to Dry in Cape Breton) second book of poems, Spinning Side Kick. Come out and listen to these fantastic writers read their work on April 30th at our fine shop @ 7PM.
c/o Coach House: In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspectives constantly shifting, point followed by counterpoint, subtle phrase by savage outburst. Bitar’s enigmatic speakers are partially rational creatures, have some need to explain, and may succeed in partially explaining, but, in the end, communication and subterfuge are inseparable – must, so to speak, co-exist.
Walid’s Bio:
Walid Bitar was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1961. He immigrated to Canada in 1969. His previous poetry collections are Maps with Moving Parts, 2 Guys on Holy Land, Bastardi Puri and The Empire’s Missing Links. He lives in Toronto. His latest book, published by Coach House Books this April, is Divide and Rule.
c/o Vehicule: Anita Lahey’s second collection, Spinning Side Kick (Vehicule Press), is a hard-knuckled look at the other half. These lively poems mix a girl-about-town cockiness with an all-too-rare emotional honesty about men, love, and relationships. Whether the subject is a one-man chimney demolition, the lifelong fidelity of seahorses, a lover at war in Afghanistan or a kickboxing match, Lahey confronts the enduring disconnect between the sexes in a language that is slangy and quick, punctuated with jabs. She eyes those moments–in a day, in a life–when the normal clues we rely on disappear, shifting the line between domesticity and danger. In Spinning Side Kick, a talented poet returns with sharper aim.
Anita’s Bio:
Anita Lahey’s second collection of poems, Spinning Side Kick, was released by Véhicule Press in 2011. Her first book, Out to Dry in Cape Breton, was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Ottawa Book Award, and she is a past winner of the Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize and the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem, among others. Her work has been shortlisted several times for the CBC Literary Award for Poetry. She worked as editor of Arc Poetry Magazine from 2004 to 2011, and is also a journalist who has written on a wide range of topics for Canadian publications such as The Walrus, Cottage Life, Maisonneuve, Canadian Geographic, Quill & Quire, and several others. She has lived in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, and currently lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
The event will be hosted by poet and editor Carmine Starnino. Doors @ 7PM, reading @ 7:30PM. Admission is free.
To celebrate the release of two new books devoted to Glassco, ‘John Glassco and the Other Montreal’ (a new selected poems/essay edited and selected by Carmine Starnino) and Brian Busby’s lauded authoritative biography ‘A Gentleman of Pleasure’ (currently a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism), the two authors of said books will be holding a lively discussion on Glassco’s work. Among these fantastic authors, there will be surprise guests!
Wine and food will be served, admission is free, and the following three books will be for sale, which can be purchased for $85, saving $10:
1. “John Glassco and the Other Montreal“, selections and essay by Carmine Starnino and an original portrait by Wesley W. Bates… This limited edition book is one of the few collections of Glassco’s work currently available. “The bindings and print are made with archival and acid-free 80 lb. Mohawk Eggshell Text. Typeset in ‘Filosofia’ designed by Zuzana Licko of Émigré Fonts with titling in ‘Tisa’ designed by Mitja Miklavcic. 88 pgs.” (Frog Hollow Press)
The price is $35 ($5 off the online price).
2. “A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer” by Brian Busby… “In a lively account of a man given to deception, who took delight in hoaxes, Busby manages to substantiate many of the often unreliable statements Glassco made about his life and work. A Gentleman of Pleasure is a remarkable biography that captures the knowable truth about a fascinatingly complex and secretive man.” (McGill-Queens Univeristy Press)
The price $40 for the hardcover edition (paperback has not been released).
3. “Memoirs of Montparnasse” by John Glassco, “…a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco’s memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.” (New York Times Book Review)
The price is $20.
Tell your friends and family, all are welcome. Doors are open and the sign-up sheet begins at 7PM. The reading will begin at 7:30PM… and if you can’t make it, invite some of your Montreal pals out in your stead!
And if this won’t be your cup of tea, check out Art’s Stars in Hollywood-Screening and readings @ 2 rue Sainte-Catherine Est, local 301, Montréal (www.artext
March 28th @ 7PM: A week from today, Bryan Sentes will be reading from and signing copies of his latest publication of poetry, March End Prill, published by Book Thug last year. Copies will be selling for $18.
The book is summarized to be a “periplum [a map constructed in the course of the voyage] songline that charts a way through our S.A.D. Zeitgeist to a thawing of the sources of speech song,” and this description is no shortage of promise for the reading. Sentes has filled his latest collection with rollicking word-work, disjointed phrases and combinations of words that give new meaning to portmanteaux. What we have here is a wonderful recalling of Roman Jakobson’s “organized violence on ordinary speech”, where Sentes is putting the hyper in hypertext, playing with typeface, allusion, personal account and structure, to mention only a few. Here is the first poem of the collection, A Cut to Bear Nigh Thought:
A Cut to Bear Nigh Thought
‘aieZeus I’m mercurial saturnine melancholic
wounduptight hypersensitive hys
terical the smallest slight sets me off
moon low as it gets tonight or not
night always surprisingly early
leaves yellow leprous black spotted
on Mount Royal paths no
rust twig snake warms in the sun
just lean grey squirrels hopping
how much “M39″ freezercoldRussianKartoffelsaft
mgsSSRI/daily melatonin orgone-spikes does it take?!
~
…For some contextualization, here is a link to Bryan Sentes talking about March End Prill. As for the author, he has published two books of poetry, Ladonian Magnitudes (DC Books, 2006) and before that, Grand Gnostic Central & other poems (DC Books, 1998). Sentes was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, earning a B.A. in philosophy (University of Regina, 1986) and an M.A. in English literature (Concordia University, 1990) before, during and after his residence there. Presently, he earns his living teaching English literature and composition at Dawson College and creative writing at Concordia University, both here in Montreal. He has read his poetry widely in both North America and Europe. Aside from poetry, he has published reviews, translations, and scholarship in the sociology of religion, mythology, and popular culture, and has conducted radio interviews with the likes of William Gibson and Martin Amis. He can be found on-line here.
Introducing Bryan Sentes, we have three writers. Here they are in order of appearance:
#1: David Bradford is a man of both mystery and letters.
#2: Jason Freure is a Montreal-based writer, a recent graduate of Concordia University, and a busboy on Crescent Street. He’s the author of Irving Layton Award-winning “St-Laurent Boulevard,” and has been published in The Maynard and the Show Thieves Anthology.
#3: Carina says “I am doing a Masters in Classical Studies. My thesis is going to be about the way that ancient Greek tragedy was used in South Africa during apartheid as a means to protest that regime and then after apartheid as a means to process what was and what could be. I mention Classics and apartheid because these things, though not always apparent, are the main preoccupations and influences in my writing. Besides that, I have lived in Montreal for a while now and like it just fine.”
So please, come on out and witness this extravaganza of excellence! Coffee and tea will be served! A trip to Grumpy’s will ensue!
That’s March 28th, one week from today. Doors at 7PM, and the reading will begin at 7:30PM. Free and open to all.
Hello everyone!
We are holding our fourth monthly Open Mic on this upcoming Wednesday. The doors are at 7PM to coincide with our new hours, and the reading is scheduled to begin at 7:30. We hope to see both admirers and performers alike come out. A note to the performers: All is welcome. Poets, bring your lyrical poems, your conceptually avant-garde works, your slam poetry, your meditative haikus! Musicians are welcome to regale, storytellers are encouraged, dramatists are free to play, lecturers and essayists may openly expound!
The last open mic we held was a fantastic one, with contributions from award winners and dabblers, spanning into a full two hours of entertainment. We’re always happy to see so many talented individuals in the shop, and we’d love it if you could tell your friends and family to come as well. We have had a very supportive turn-out thus far, and hope to see the numbers grow.
We’d just like to take this moment to say thank you for all of the endearing experiences! Hope to see you this Wednesday!
Argo Open Mic #4, Wednesday March 14th, Doors @ 7PM.
Coffee, tea and cookies will be served.
A trip to Grumpy’s bar will ensue for live jazz!
Valentine’s Day? There’s two ways of going about this: You can either A) Enjoy a romantic day with one another, enjoying the time set aside for one another, and come enjoy some poetry after a pleasant dinner of Chinese food! or B) Disregard the affair as a ridiculous capitalist concoction of needless flair and excuses, let it lie, and come enjoy some poetry!
With no relation to the day whatsoever, we give you our third installment of the Argo Featured Reading Series. Montreal-born poet Asa Boxer will be headlining the event, preceding by Jacob Spector and Michael Saunders, poets and students of Concordia’s Creative Writing and English Literature program.
Asa Boxer’s first book was first published by Montreal’s Vehicule Press (est. 1973) in 2007, entitled Mechanical Bird which won the Canadian Authors Association Prize. As Mechanical Bird had hit a controlled, yet coiled note on the relationship between authenticity and artifice, his latest book Skullduggery upped the ante when published in 2011. It is deeper in its breadth of forms and achieves even greater highs and lows of falsity and truthfulness, with comic twists to boot. Essentially, as Vehicule itself deems, it gives “a simple message: Trust nothing.” For some preambulatory reading, check out Asa’s online chapbook on the subject of his father, Avi Boxer, an East-end poet who ran alongside the likes of A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen here. Either that, or check out the issues of Poetry London , Arc, Books in Canada, Maisonneuve, and Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ) he’s been in.
Beginning the night, Asa Boxer will be introduced by two students of Concordia: First, Michael Saunders, a great poet whose work portrays deeply humbling work, with poems that engage with visceral images, feelings and humbled announcements. He is currently aiming for Masters studies in English Literature at U of T and Western, with academic work focusing on the realms of Speculative Medievalism, Speculative Realism, and Object-Oriented Ontology. He recently gave a talk at Concordia’s first Undergraduate Colloquium with the paper Storm Still: Aristotelian Hamartia as Radical Unknowing in King Lear.
After Michael, we’ll have Jacob Spector, also a student of Creative Writing. His poems, in my personal opinion, evoke dispassionate passions, the kind of troubled knowledge of things as they are and what they will be. This pale description doesn’t do much for his work, as it can best speak for itself with this recording from the Synapse Readings (created by Sina Queyras, and curated by Steph Colbourn and Lizy Mostowski). Jacob has contributed poetry to The Incongruous Quarterly, Void Magazine, and Black and White Journal.
The doors are open at 8, and we begin roughly 15 to 30 minutes after. Hope to see you there, and if not, Happy Valentine’s Day!
A third open mic? A third open mic indeed. We’ve enjoyed filling our little shop with patrons and the voices of readers so much, we figured we’d do it again! Writers, climb out of your primordial apartments of seclusion and introversion, and show us what you’ve been working on in since you began to hibernate this winter. As for the curious: There’s been a great range of readers in terms of style and form so far, and despite the apprehensions one may suppose when thinking of this as a blind grab-bag into the depths of unpredictably miscreantial poems, we’ve had some good times. People have brought poems, yes, but also stories, articles, essays, proclamations delivered from atop our official customer chair, music…:
A good and eager energy to have in the shop.
And it’s always nice seeing folks have a good time over pints and jazz afterwards. So, without further ado, keep us in mind when February 22nd rolls around, and come enjoy the Argo’s Open Mic #3. Doors are at 8PM, and the event will begin shortly after.
Hope to see you there!
Sunday, January 22nd @ 7PM!
Norm Sibum
&
Richard Greene
Richard Greene, winner of the 2010 Governor General’s award for English language poetry for his collection Boxing the Compass, will be visiting from Cobourg, Ontario to give a reading at the Argo. Alongside Greene, we’ll have the prolific Norm Sibum, author of more than 15 (that number again, 15+!) poetry collections published in Canada and England.
People, the opportunity to hear from writers as esteemed as Greene & Sibum is too good to pass up:
Aside from his work as a poet, Richard Greene is a biographer, having been commissioned by Time Warner to write a biography of the British poet Edith Sitwell; he’s a critic and professor of English Literature at the University of Toronto; he is the editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (2007), and is a contributing editor to Books in Canada with reviews of contemporary poetry published in numerous journals in Canada and abroad! Check out his Wiki page here (if the blackout is over by now…), and a new poem by Greene here, at the Encore Literary Magazine.
Here’s an excerpt from Greene’s Boxing the Compass (the spacing of which is inaccurate, but the words!…):
“Great-grandfather,
whaler out of Nantucket,
the harder sort
who threw the harpoon,
drew warm blood,
made huge death on the open sea.
Came home one year
to find his land fenced
for ecclesiastical uses,
tore it all down,
told the priest to go to hell,
and would do his own praying
after that.”
Now, Norm Sibum: Born in Oberammergau, Germany in 1947, Norm has grown and lived in Germany, Alaska, Missouri, Utah and Washinton. Since 1994, he’s called Montreal home. Founder of the Vancouver Review in 1989 alongside Bruce Serafin, winner of the QWF’s A.M. Klein Award for Poetry for his collection Girls and Handsome Dogs (Porcupine’s Quill, 2002) and author of The Pangborn Defence (Biblioasis 2008) which was short-listed for the same award, Norm has many, many books acting as testament to the devotion of his craft: Check out his CV on his website. For a glance at his work as of late, Norm writes a daily blog entitled Ephemeris, with topics spanning across the literary, the everyday, the historical and political. Here’s one piece from Norm’s Gardens of Interregnum, Canto 20.
I particularly like this line of Norm’s from Girls and Handsome Dogs…
“I do not know what governs / Our business in this life. / I suspect a tin god speaks / For the old sovereignty of chance.”
Doors @ 7, the show starts shortly after that time.
Free for all, refreshments to be served, and inspiring times to be had.
Hope to see you there!
1915 Ste Catherine W.
Montreal, Quebec
Tel: 514-931-3442
