POETIC CANADA

I’ve just been published in Canadian Poetry no. 64, a poetry review put out by the English Department of my alma mater, The University of Western Ontario. (HBA in History, 1982.) It’s a special issue on Anglo-Quebec Poetry, guest edited by Jason Camlot, and featuring scholarly studies on Rob Allen, David McGimpsey, Erin Mouré and Carmine Starnino, among others.

My piece is in a class of its own, “Documents.” ‘in search of the poetic in everyday life’ began as a rumination on the day when Canadian poetry was transformed from a distant, fusty concept to a vibrant, living presence in my life. I suppose it’s also about my own birth as a poet. Jason Camlot heard me read the piece at Erica Ruth Kelly’s chapbook launch at Cagibi last year, and asked me if I’d contribute it to Canadian Poetry.

An earlier version of ‘in search of the poetic in everyday life’ appeared in my November 2008 prose chapbook Drift.

100 SHOWS AND COUNTING …

Kaie Kellough rocks the mic.

I’m co-hosting a gala spoken word show Sunday, October 25th at Sala Rossa. It includes some of the most talented spoken word / poetry purveyors of Montreal. There’ll also be a dash or two of cabaret, a yummy side order of performance art, and a simmering thick trance vibe courtesy of Pharmakon. With spacial guest star T.L. Cowan coming all the way from Edmonton, and members of the Throw Collective national slam team. Information is below:

Our 100th Wired on Words and Music Show is coming up this weekend,
on October 25th, in a special showing at the Sala Rossa, 4848 St-Laurent, Montreal.

The event will be a packed literature and music show and will feature some of the top names in spoken word, many of whom have appeared in our shows over the years, including:

Alexis O’Hara – audio artiste extraordinaire
D. Kimm – poet, audio artist and director of voix d’ameriques festival
Taqralik Partridge – slow-burnin’ Inuit spoken word artist
Pharmakon MTL – eerie trance improv music – spoken word & multiple guitar and vocal harmonies
TL Cowan – in from Edmonton for one night, she puts the GRRR in girl.
Fortner Anderson – the spoken word man
Kaie Kellough – Excellent D-D-D-dub/poetry specialist and author of Lettricity.
Geneviève Letarte – fabulously talented Québec poet, performer and translator

Hosts for the evening will be Vincent Tinguely and Ian Ferrier

Think of it as a big celebration for a show that grew up with spoken word in Montreal.

Wired on Words and Music
100th Show
at the Sala Rossa
4848 St-Laurent
Sunday October 25th
$5
doors open 8:30; show starts 9:30

First 25 people at the door get a free CD from Wired on Words Productions

All proceeds go to send the Montreal Slam Team to the national slam finals in Victoria, B.C.

For more info, write to the

poets@wiredonwords.com

a golden cloud of the metaphysical

Sally: "My wrists are on fire!"

I call this batch of poems ‘metaphysical ‘ because that’s where my mind seems to want to go, lately – it prefers not to concern itself with the strictly material . Mining reality-perception for nuggets of insight. If I’m going to maintain a subjective perspective in my poetry, I can’t get away from ruminations on mortality; but if I am more and more aware of the limits of life, I am also growing more aware of its infinite charms. (And if that seems paradoxical – that’s poetry for you.)

‘Metaphysical’ might imply ‘God’ to some. While I certainly show symptoms of the classic Western Civilization God-lack hangover, my cosmologarage does not house a personal jesus roadster. After pillaging the Catholic pantheon, flirting with paganism and indulging in a most sincere period of goddess-worship, I find the impersonality of the scientific-objective universe to be most comforting. It calls to our imagination, can’t you hear it calling? It is endless mystery. It will haunt us as long as our species walks the Earth.

(I remember when I started sending poems around to various quarterlies, back in the late eighties, there was one that quite pointedly, in its submission guidelines, told prospective contributors not to send any poems that contained the words ‘soul’ or ‘God’ or suchlike. Happily for that editor, should he or she chance across my little blog entry here, these poems contain neither word, except for one example of the negative form ‘soulless’.)

‘Metaphysical’, in my mind, has more to do with the function of ideals in our lives, and how we express them to ourselves and each other. We’re in a very conflicted time … an infuriating shouting-match of a time … certainly we’re on the cusp of enormous change, change that none of us can really understand on an individual level.  And beyond the simple nuts-and-bolts issues of how these coming changes are going to be dealt with, on individual and collective levels, locally and globally … there’s also the question of how we’re going to arm our spirits to meet these changes.

Are we going to go off the deep end and call it Apocalypse? Take refuge in fatalism? I can understand the allure of Death Writ Large – this world is a fucking pain in the ass, after all, and who isn’t fed up? – but if we’re collectively considering ‘ending it all’, then the way is also open for radical, joyful change, an opening of the way, at last, to all the crazy hopeful ideas that have been waiting in the wings.

While the dying forms (big industry, big money, and – dare I say it? – big religion) have kept throwing the dice (“one more time, baby, I’m feelin’ lucky tonight!”) and kept the door barred against the rapidly changing face of the future, still, fingers of light shine through. These poems are about that.

Memory unfolds memory unfolds memory unfolds memory …

Spark plays fetch in the Petawawa River.

My latest batch of poems immediately suggested a number of themes to me. This posting gathers several of the ones that seem to be concerned with memory.

∞

I want to remember because
We are the only ones who remember

Because everything rolls on
Like an avalanche
Like a hurricane
No
Just like an ocean wave
Of forgetting
Things and things
Swept away heedlessly by time

And we are the only ones
Who care to remember

We are the only ones who care
We cling to memories
We can love a thing, like a book
Or a song
Or a picture
We’re just trying to make
something, anything
Last

In the midst of an
Explosion of cascading changes
A simple ocean wave
A hurricane
An avalanche

Not something greater than ourselves
Just ourselves
But mediated
Transformed, transfigured
Carried safe through time
As an image, a word
A thought

Simply because
We care to remember

Simply because
We care

– 12 Oct 08 –