HYBRID LAUNCH & READING | A Belly full of Vlarf: Seriously fun readings from brand new poetry books by Jason Camlot and John Emil Vincent

Room H-1220, Hall Building, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, QC H4B 1R6
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Inspired by the long-format readings held at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in the 1960s, this book launch will celebrate two new titles, Jason Camlot’s Vlarf and John Emil Vincent’s Bitter in the Belly.

Katherine McLeod will moderate the proceedings as the poets alternate between readings of 25 minutes each (x2), allowing the audience to experience a substantial performance with commentary by the authors of these new home-grown collections. Each book creates its own gleefully strange and sadly hilarious world from a wide gamut of emotions and texts. It will be a poetry event of the fun variety.

Jason Camlot is professor of English and research chair in literature and sound studies at Concordia University in Montreal. John Emil Vincent has written several books of poetry including Excitement Tax and Ganymede’s Dog. He lives in Montreal.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love.

Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light - what there is of light, when the light is on.