Bart Vautor, I’ll Learn to Listen / At the Trailing Edge of the World
This chapbook by our season seven token dude, Halifax-based poet, scholar, and all-around badass Bart Vautour, is—as his epigraph insists—a conversation between the poet and the patent office. Vautour’s poetry here intervenes in thoughtful, funny, and innovative ways into the discourses of intellectual property, political responsibility, and how we take “credit” for what is “ours” in experimental poetry. Two parts vispo, one part instruction manual, this cheeky little chapbook assembles to become an important tract on listening, writing, and bullshit detection in our current political and poetic climate. It’s so good, so thoughtful, so endearing, and so beautiful, it made us go okayfiiiiine, we’ll publish another guy.
This chapbook was published in a limited run of fifty copies, kinda sorta typeset by Dani Spinosa, with a cover design by resident graphic design badass Stace Schmidt MacLean, and printed at Product Photo in Toronto.
Sample Poem:
Radio Direction Finder
(Dec. 31, 1935, US Patent 2,026,254)