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Roger Farr teaches at Capilano University and has edited PARSER: New Poetry and Poetics and CUE Books.
His first book SURPLUS (Line Books, 2006) was followed by IKMQ (New Star 2012), an experimental work of 64 passages that all involve the "characters" of those four letters. It was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2013.
The more Vancouver descends into vanity as a city, narcissistically awash in its city planners' self-hype and micro-managing, in a vain effort to compare itself to Copenhagen, the more people who knew the city in its previous incarnations are appalled. As a hollow construct of virtue, Vancouver is almost Trumpian in its inability to face reality. Roger Farr's I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be (New Star, 2019) looks at "unreal cities" of Modernity to provide a "psycho-geographical I-witness account" of transformation, in nine Cantos, or spheres of hell, including other cities such as Berlin and Nanaimo.
Farr is also the co-author of the collaborative research project N 49 19. 47 - W 123 8.11 (Recomposition, 2008) with Reg Johanson and Aaron Vidaver and he contributed an experimental radio documentary for Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (New Star), as well as a critical introduction to Alice Becker-Ho's The Essence of Jargon (Autonomedia 2009).
Farr has also contributed to the Canadian Journal of Communication, Fifth Estate, The International Encyclopedia of Protest and Revolution, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Rad Dad, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. According to his publisher: "A former member of the artist-run Kootenay School of Writing collective, Roger Farr's critical writing on avant-garde poetics and radical social movements has appeared in Anarchist Studies, Armed Cell, Fifth Estate, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, The Poetic Front, West Coast Line, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics."
He edited the three-volume anthology Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century (Capilano University Editions, 2008-2013) and was Critical Editor for Alice Becker-Ho's The Essence of Jargon: Argot & the Language of the Dangerous Classes (2015).
In 2019, when he was Convener of Creative Writing at Capilano University, he was editing The Amourous Comrade, a collection of writing on anarchist sexual politics by E. Armand.
Considered one of France’s best-known poets of the 15th century, much of François Villon’s work reflected his criminal behaviour and time spent in prisons. Often bawdy, Villon’s poems, written in medieval French, used slang words from the criminal underworld and aren’t easily translated into contemporary English. Not deterred by such difficulties, Roger Farr has delved into Villon’s oeuvre with unique translations and queer re-workings in After Villon (New Star, 2022). Farr substitutes present day slang from diverse places like prison, theatre, culinary, military and carnivals. Farr also subverts sex and gender designations by changing gender, pronouns and names in recognition of the problems with translating Villon.
BOOKS:
Surplus (Line Books, 2006)
Means (2002)
Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol.2 (Capilano University Editions) $16 978-0-9810122-6-1
IKMQ (New Star, 2012) $16 978-1-55420-064-1
I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be (New Star, 2019). $18 9781554201525
After Villon (New Star, 2022) $16 9781554201877
[BCBW 2022] "Poetry"
Time Out of Time
by Arleen Paré (Caitlin $20)
•
After Villon by Roger Farr
(New Star $16)
Review by Brett Josef Grubisic
The aphorism “Poetry is philosophy in evening-wear” appears midway through Arleen Paré’s latest poetry collection, Time Out of Time.
The idea, courtesy of Ontario artist Kevin Heslop, is provocative, as it points out the serious side of poetry as well as the genre’s affinity for aesthetic finery.
In the case of the new poetry collections by Victoria’s Paré and Gabriola Island’s Roger Farr, “evening-wear” takes the form of pensive and inquisitive volumes singing with reverence for two special but dead poets. Their volumes are meditations on poetic heritage and forebears—with each poet paying homage to the works, lives, and accomplishments of literary influences and inspirations. As cerebral and eulogistic as that might sound, happily, Paré’s Time Out of Time and Farr’s After Villon are also playful, funny, heartfelt and stimulating.
Farr’s new poems could strike a casual reader as impossibly avant-garde. Dada-adjacent lines—such as “queer: when that muttnik cries prang! PRANG!,” “National aqua chattis are gross mooses,” and “Funcanny Valley what a face the MLA has”—are like conceptual evening-wear: perhaps made for appreciation by the cognoscenti but difficult to anyone else.
Give it time, though, honestly. Acclimate by reading through Farr’s slim volume more than once. And pay close attention to the footnotes: informative, clever and wry, they’re invaluable little tour guides that communicate in standard English.
Farr’s muse, Francois Villon was a legendary poet born in Paris around 1431 who died under mysterious (and, in fact, unknown) circumstances at thirty-two. In his time, Villon was known as a thief, wanderer, bard, inmate, subversive, provocateur and gang member. He challenged literary conventions, and he scattered slang, codes and wordplay throughout in his poems. “You use words to communicate ideas to certain people, while deceiving others,” Farr writes. With innovative verse, Villon sketched the rogues, outliers and criminals of the Parisian subculture. He addressed poetic staples too: love and heartache, old age and death, lost ideals and regrets.
Farr translates Villon and composes à la Villon (and, in the poem “Compario,” he offers ten different translations—including one by Google Translate—of a single quatrain of Villon’s). The pieces in After Villon imagine backdrops: a note beneath the four stanzas of “Ballad of Erotic Misery” adds, “The soundtrack to this ballad consisted of rumbling coal carts, screaming fishmongers and chestnut vendors, church bells, horse and donkeys and pigs and dogs. It would be considered Romantic to suggest it was first presented at a tavern, in front of an ex-lover’s house, in court, or perhaps a bath house.”
In poems like “Ballad for Friends, With Benefits,” “All Standard Language Shall Be Fried,” and “Ballad of Counter-truths,” Farr repurposes Villon’s poetic tropes for twenty-first century realities while managing to meld the disparate eras too. (Are 2022 and 1444 that different? The irreverent list of “Counter-truths”—which mocks “universal knowledge and the spooks of Truth, Law, and Fidelity”—mimics Villon’s style and outlook but is applicable right here, right now for readers to attach to local circumstances.)
In “Five Ballads in Jargon,” a feat of syllables and rhymes, Farr revisits poems “sometimes attributed to Villon” and thought to be composed in 1455 during the trial of the gang he was associated with. In these pieces, which “probably hummed for a century & a half before they were transcribed by ear,” Farr discerns coded warnings for friends and accomplices to steer clear of the authorities.
Arleen Paré’s relationship to a predecessor has fewer complications. Time Out of Time was written in “praise and celebration” of Etel Adnan (1925–2021). Born in Lebanon, Adnan worked as a journalist and professor alongside her partner, Simone Fattal, in a handful of countries after obtaining a philosophy degree in France.
For Paré, reading Time (Adnan’s 2019 collection of poems) amounted to “love at first page.” Paré writes, slyly, “my wife doesn’t mind she knows / I have fallen in love with an arrant ideal.” A record of “long-distance affection,” the elegant and spare Time Out of Time describes a poet enthralled by another lesbian artist, “haunted” by her phrases and infatuated with their beauty. In the poem “Etel Adnan 3,” the poet shouts out her willingness to “get lost once again / or forever / in your words,” while “Etel Adnan 9” celebrates the profundity of Adnan’s economical poems: “does brevity not bear / its fair share / of depth.”
Whether she addresses weather (rain that’s “insistent as pins”), wonderment (“the world is a staggering place”), the “freaky fragility” of the planet, social invisibility, the blessing of a long romantic partnership, or aging and death (“is there anything that does not lead in this dreamy direction”), Paré ties her observations to Adnan’s poetry. In effect, she creates a dialogue—a dazzling exchange of heady ideas—between souls that never met in real life but really ought to have.
After Villon: 9781554201877
Time Out of Time: 9781773860794
Brett Josef Grubisic has published fivenovels including The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck. He resides on Salt Spring Island.
[BCBW 2022]
His first book SURPLUS (Line Books, 2006) was followed by IKMQ (New Star 2012), an experimental work of 64 passages that all involve the "characters" of those four letters. It was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2013.
The more Vancouver descends into vanity as a city, narcissistically awash in its city planners' self-hype and micro-managing, in a vain effort to compare itself to Copenhagen, the more people who knew the city in its previous incarnations are appalled. As a hollow construct of virtue, Vancouver is almost Trumpian in its inability to face reality. Roger Farr's I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be (New Star, 2019) looks at "unreal cities" of Modernity to provide a "psycho-geographical I-witness account" of transformation, in nine Cantos, or spheres of hell, including other cities such as Berlin and Nanaimo.
Farr is also the co-author of the collaborative research project N 49 19. 47 - W 123 8.11 (Recomposition, 2008) with Reg Johanson and Aaron Vidaver and he contributed an experimental radio documentary for Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (New Star), as well as a critical introduction to Alice Becker-Ho's The Essence of Jargon (Autonomedia 2009).
Farr has also contributed to the Canadian Journal of Communication, Fifth Estate, The International Encyclopedia of Protest and Revolution, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Rad Dad, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. According to his publisher: "A former member of the artist-run Kootenay School of Writing collective, Roger Farr's critical writing on avant-garde poetics and radical social movements has appeared in Anarchist Studies, Armed Cell, Fifth Estate, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, The Poetic Front, West Coast Line, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics."
He edited the three-volume anthology Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century (Capilano University Editions, 2008-2013) and was Critical Editor for Alice Becker-Ho's The Essence of Jargon: Argot & the Language of the Dangerous Classes (2015).
In 2019, when he was Convener of Creative Writing at Capilano University, he was editing The Amourous Comrade, a collection of writing on anarchist sexual politics by E. Armand.
Considered one of France’s best-known poets of the 15th century, much of François Villon’s work reflected his criminal behaviour and time spent in prisons. Often bawdy, Villon’s poems, written in medieval French, used slang words from the criminal underworld and aren’t easily translated into contemporary English. Not deterred by such difficulties, Roger Farr has delved into Villon’s oeuvre with unique translations and queer re-workings in After Villon (New Star, 2022). Farr substitutes present day slang from diverse places like prison, theatre, culinary, military and carnivals. Farr also subverts sex and gender designations by changing gender, pronouns and names in recognition of the problems with translating Villon.
BOOKS:
Surplus (Line Books, 2006)
Means (2002)
Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol.2 (Capilano University Editions) $16 978-0-9810122-6-1
IKMQ (New Star, 2012) $16 978-1-55420-064-1
I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be (New Star, 2019). $18 9781554201525
After Villon (New Star, 2022) $16 9781554201877
[BCBW 2022] "Poetry"
Time Out of Time
by Arleen Paré (Caitlin $20)
•
After Villon by Roger Farr
(New Star $16)
Review by Brett Josef Grubisic
The aphorism “Poetry is philosophy in evening-wear” appears midway through Arleen Paré’s latest poetry collection, Time Out of Time.
The idea, courtesy of Ontario artist Kevin Heslop, is provocative, as it points out the serious side of poetry as well as the genre’s affinity for aesthetic finery.
In the case of the new poetry collections by Victoria’s Paré and Gabriola Island’s Roger Farr, “evening-wear” takes the form of pensive and inquisitive volumes singing with reverence for two special but dead poets. Their volumes are meditations on poetic heritage and forebears—with each poet paying homage to the works, lives, and accomplishments of literary influences and inspirations. As cerebral and eulogistic as that might sound, happily, Paré’s Time Out of Time and Farr’s After Villon are also playful, funny, heartfelt and stimulating.
Farr’s new poems could strike a casual reader as impossibly avant-garde. Dada-adjacent lines—such as “queer: when that muttnik cries prang! PRANG!,” “National aqua chattis are gross mooses,” and “Funcanny Valley what a face the MLA has”—are like conceptual evening-wear: perhaps made for appreciation by the cognoscenti but difficult to anyone else.
Give it time, though, honestly. Acclimate by reading through Farr’s slim volume more than once. And pay close attention to the footnotes: informative, clever and wry, they’re invaluable little tour guides that communicate in standard English.
Farr’s muse, Francois Villon was a legendary poet born in Paris around 1431 who died under mysterious (and, in fact, unknown) circumstances at thirty-two. In his time, Villon was known as a thief, wanderer, bard, inmate, subversive, provocateur and gang member. He challenged literary conventions, and he scattered slang, codes and wordplay throughout in his poems. “You use words to communicate ideas to certain people, while deceiving others,” Farr writes. With innovative verse, Villon sketched the rogues, outliers and criminals of the Parisian subculture. He addressed poetic staples too: love and heartache, old age and death, lost ideals and regrets.
Farr translates Villon and composes à la Villon (and, in the poem “Compario,” he offers ten different translations—including one by Google Translate—of a single quatrain of Villon’s). The pieces in After Villon imagine backdrops: a note beneath the four stanzas of “Ballad of Erotic Misery” adds, “The soundtrack to this ballad consisted of rumbling coal carts, screaming fishmongers and chestnut vendors, church bells, horse and donkeys and pigs and dogs. It would be considered Romantic to suggest it was first presented at a tavern, in front of an ex-lover’s house, in court, or perhaps a bath house.”
In poems like “Ballad for Friends, With Benefits,” “All Standard Language Shall Be Fried,” and “Ballad of Counter-truths,” Farr repurposes Villon’s poetic tropes for twenty-first century realities while managing to meld the disparate eras too. (Are 2022 and 1444 that different? The irreverent list of “Counter-truths”—which mocks “universal knowledge and the spooks of Truth, Law, and Fidelity”—mimics Villon’s style and outlook but is applicable right here, right now for readers to attach to local circumstances.)
In “Five Ballads in Jargon,” a feat of syllables and rhymes, Farr revisits poems “sometimes attributed to Villon” and thought to be composed in 1455 during the trial of the gang he was associated with. In these pieces, which “probably hummed for a century & a half before they were transcribed by ear,” Farr discerns coded warnings for friends and accomplices to steer clear of the authorities.
Arleen Paré’s relationship to a predecessor has fewer complications. Time Out of Time was written in “praise and celebration” of Etel Adnan (1925–2021). Born in Lebanon, Adnan worked as a journalist and professor alongside her partner, Simone Fattal, in a handful of countries after obtaining a philosophy degree in France.
For Paré, reading Time (Adnan’s 2019 collection of poems) amounted to “love at first page.” Paré writes, slyly, “my wife doesn’t mind she knows / I have fallen in love with an arrant ideal.” A record of “long-distance affection,” the elegant and spare Time Out of Time describes a poet enthralled by another lesbian artist, “haunted” by her phrases and infatuated with their beauty. In the poem “Etel Adnan 3,” the poet shouts out her willingness to “get lost once again / or forever / in your words,” while “Etel Adnan 9” celebrates the profundity of Adnan’s economical poems: “does brevity not bear / its fair share / of depth.”
Whether she addresses weather (rain that’s “insistent as pins”), wonderment (“the world is a staggering place”), the “freaky fragility” of the planet, social invisibility, the blessing of a long romantic partnership, or aging and death (“is there anything that does not lead in this dreamy direction”), Paré ties her observations to Adnan’s poetry. In effect, she creates a dialogue—a dazzling exchange of heady ideas—between souls that never met in real life but really ought to have.
After Villon: 9781554201877
Time Out of Time: 9781773860794
Brett Josef Grubisic has published fivenovels including The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck. He resides on Salt Spring Island.
[BCBW 2022]
