Poetics of a sort
I work mostly in the long poem or series form these days. I am interested in the work itself and the persona of the work rather than having a specific voice myself or a specific style. The works that have generated poetic responses by me are Robert Kroetsch, the Horn Books of Rita K and Completed Field Notes; Dennis Cooley, the Bentleys; Natalie Stephens, Je Nathanaël; Lisa Robertson, The Weather; Rob Winger, Muybridge's Horse.
Interviews and poetic statements are here:
http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2007/11/12-or-20-questions-with-amanda-earl.html
www.ottawater.com Issue 5.0
Current project:
For the past few years, I've been working on a long poem inspired by 1920s and 30s Paris, with special emphasis on Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse. Kiki was a model, painter, silent film actress, cabaret singer and sexual celebrant who associated with many of the central figures of art and culture of the era from Ernest Hemingway and Jean Cocteau to Man Ray and Foujita.
Current excitement:
the new Norton Anthology, American Hybrid edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John. it's full of poets i've never heard of before and a few i have. the basic premice of the anthology is that rather than working in one of two camps, writers are relying on all kinds of influences. i believe this. i don't put myself in one camp or another. i just write.
http://www.pw.org/content/poetry_makes_strange_bedfellows
Chapbooks
If you wish to purchase a chapbook, please go to the publishers' sites as listed below or contact me directly.
Welcome to Earth, Poem for Alien(s), Book Thug, 2008
Review of Amanda Earl, Welcome to Earth: Poem for Alien(s).
Bookthug, Toronto, 2008. 18pp., Kane X. Faucher
With the silent saga of Voyagers I and II well beyond radio reach, one could wonder what an intelligent extraterrestrial species would make of the on-board greeting from earth with its compendious cacophony of earth-based sounds. A well-intentioned dog's breakfast of auditory curiousities? A sound-collage of a species desperate to communicate? A melange of unintelligible squeaks and garbling that would be grievously mistaken as a declaration of war?
Amanda Earl departs on an intrepid journey away from her devoted Ottawa regionalism apparently redressing what the onboard greeting on Voyager 2 forgot. The delicately visceral quality of this long sequence poem opens upon what would first register for a cosmic visitor: a pulsating energy flickering in a remote pocket of the universe. From here, Earl twists and imbricates themes of language and light into a kind of golden poetic braid. Earl finesses each line so that it is less broken than tapered and frayed. From light and the ocular delights, Earl moves along her corporeal register into the domain of liquidity, resolving these themes in darkness and silence. The body as diluvian entity frees the subject from the noun-fixity of gravid concepts, giving over Being to that aleatory movement of the verb:
for those whom the first is water
what they know they know from swimming & from rain
this is how to learn to continue
this is how to find quench drip
lips of downpour of throat & teaches touch
the sounds of
falling heavy in the body a flood.
At times, this poem reads as an isolated radio whisper, crackling and staccato in its utterances, while at other times it reads as a litany of an undiscovered body. Its questing voice and earnest exploration makes the poem a curiously welcome complement to Jason Camlot's The Debaucher. The sustainability of Earl's poetic greeting is seemingly almost meant to be sung, making Welcome to Earth: poem for Alien(s) an alternative psalm for a choir of a space-alien future-fantastic.
The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman, above/ground press, 2008
Eleanor, above/ground press, 2007
Review of Eleanor by Sina Queyras on her LemonHound blog
Visual Poetry
I have synaesthesia, which means that I blend senses together. In my case it is colour and text, and sometimes sound and colour. My particular form is called grapheme synaesthesia. This is one reason why I enjoy playing around with text in smaller units than the word. Here are a few places where you can find my attempts at visual poetry:
Drunken Boat Issue 10
Synaesthesian Alphabet, by Amanda Earl
Amanda Earl at otherclutter.com
Red, by Amanda Earl at unlikelystories.org