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Dec
03
HYBRID LAUNCH & READING | Jason Camlot - Vlarf and John Emil Vincent - Bitter in the Belly
Friday, December 3rd, 20217:00 PM-9:00 PM ET
Argo Bookshop, 1915 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montreal, QC
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Argo Bookshop presents a joint hybrid in-person and virtual reading to celebrate the launch of Jason Camlot’s Vlarf and John Emil Vincent’s Bitter in the Belly.
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.
