OUR HEARTS, OUR PRAYERS GO OUT TO YOU...
...in Manhattan, in Washington and throughout the United States. It has been an awful, chilling week. The sun shone and the streets were quiet here in Montreal -- a September so beautiful one wonders how such beauty can be so oppressive -- and then finds the answer on every TV channel.

The nation of Canada bowed their heads for a minute of silence today, Friday, a national day of mourning for our friends in the United States. I was sitting down to lunch with my wife and our two young children. All was peaceful in the house, and we sat there quietly -- thinking of our friends and relatives in Manhattan, of the firefighters and rescue workers who went in to save strangers, of survivors staggering through the dust and flames, of all the heroes who have been born out of this week. The sun broke through for a few seconds and we were showered with a brilliant light.

This afternoon the darkness came back again and stayed all afternoon. It is this darkness I fight the most, feeling that however hurt and oppressed we are by these terrible acts, we cannot give in to them. If we do, then the spirit of those who perpetrated them scars us, makes us less than what we are.

So I was heartened tonight to see thousands of people outside a cathedral in London England, all singing the Star Spangled Banner. And more thousands in Berlin, in Ottawa, in cities throughout North America and in nations throughout the world -- all gathering to mourn and show our support for you during this critical time. We, Canada, are a country defined by our friends, and most of our friends are in the United States. Our hearts, our prayers go out to you.

Ian Ferrier
Montreal, Canada

Occasionally the irony of covering the poetry scene in a country 4000 miles wide does occur to me.... So it was nice to hear that we have an Australian correspondent coming aboard at Museletter. Welcome to another huge country with miles of empty space, and poetry scenes that span cities thousands of miles apart! O well, what the hell, why not start in a city 3000 miles away from where I am:

TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS
This month I'll begin in Vancouver, where Tanya Evanson is the host of Tales of Ordinary Madness, a fine reading series that has been running once a week at Bukowski’s on Commercial Drive for nearly three years. Tanya’s next show is this Tuesday, September 11, and features Charles Potts, a poet and publisher whose first book saw the light way back in 1963. His latest is a collaboration with Toronto artist Robert McNealy, a title called Slash and Burn, which is launching in a limited edition of 100 copies.

Vancouver is host to more than one good performance series, as Whitman McGowan and Margery Snyder (hey, that’s you Margery!) can attest. On August 26th they were the featured performers at Thundering Word Heard, a new spoken word + music fusion experiment happening every Sunday at Cafe Montmartre, and the next night they were at Conscious Development, a poetry&music show billed as the place “where Hip Hop, Jazz & Spoken Word unite,” backed by the great house band, the Golden Section, at The Blarney Stone, 216 Carral Street in Vancouver.

TRAINS OF WINNIPEG
This September also marks the launch of Trains of Winnipeg, a really fine poetry/music CD from Clive Holden, a poet/filmmaker and publisher currently living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Clive is the founder of Cyclops Press, which along with Wired on Words is one of the two labels in Canada that regularly publish poetry and literature in performance.

Trains of Winnipeg is a really beautiful CD, with variety, pace, excellent balance between words and music and top-flight musicianship. The title track is a lovely mix of words, music and field recordings, and there are nice touches like just a dash of cymbal keeping time and suddenly the creak and moan of wheels on metal rails as the engineer hits the brakes. Another fine cut is “18,000 Dead in Gordon Head,” a haunting poem that centers on Holden’s witnessing a young girl shot by a sniper in a suburb on Vancouver Island. Well done, Clive! and you can hear it in RealAudio and MP3 at www.trainsofwinnipeg.com.

CANZINE
Meanwhile back in Toronto, the people at Broken Pencil magazine are gearing up for the fantastic annual zine fair called Canzine. A massive one-day free(!) festival of underground literature, the event takes place on Sunday, September 23rd from 1 pm - 7 pm at the Big Bop (downtown Toronto, 651 Queen Street, corner of Queen and Bathurst):

Featuring over 150 zines from across Canada and the US, the zine fair is one of the largest in North America. This is a not-to-be-missed exposition of the vibrant and important underground publishing scene in this country. Look for infamous titles including Montreal based hands-on feminist guide Red Alert, the poignant literary celebration of the Yukon Territories, Whitehorse’s Out of Service, and of course all of Toronto’s greatest indie mags from the punk rock stylings of Ache to the unbelievable beauty of micro chapbook publisher Pas de Chance. Zine centers including Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax will be well represented, making Canzine your complete cross-Canada portal into the underground.

HOWL FESTIVAL OF ART & REVOLUTION
Then it’s spoken word night, as the Big Bop will feature one of the main Toronto events in the Howl Festival of Art & Revolution that same night, September 23rd. Started by Stefan Christoff last year in Montreal, the Howl Festival brings artists together in benefits for social justice. This year the festival spans three cities, with events scheduled in Toronto, Montreal and New York.

Toronto’s night at the Big Bop will feature Toronto poet and dub legend Clifton Joseph, as well as Catherine Kidd, Ian Ferrier (hey, that’s me…!), singer/songwriter Anna-Belle Chovstek, Jennifer Patterson, and a fine young poet named Kaie Kellough, a man who consistently reminds me that poetry is what tells us about ourselves, about where we live, and about how we live.... If you don’t catch Kellough in Toronto, he and I will be following the Howl Festival to New York for a performance at ABC No Rio on the 26th of October. For more information on the events in all three cities, check out the Howl Festival Web site.

TO WRAP UP SEPTEMBER...
You can catch the launch of You and Your Bright Ideas, an anthology of the best and brightest of Montreal writers at the Sala Rosa, the Casa's fine new performance space and showbar, across the street at 4870 Boulevard St. Laurent in Montreal. On October 21st, the same space will host the launch of Ribsauce, a book and CD anthology of new writing, poetry and performances by Canadian women writers. Two years in the making, this book and CD anthology is a co-production between Vehicule Press and Wired on Words. It threatens to define a lot of the voices you can expect to hear for a long time to come.

Bye bye to summer, and talk to you again before the snow falls....

Ian Ferrier