DEATH HAS NO STING (ON THE INTERNET)

Ran holds the mirror to FPE. Photo by Susan Coolen.

It always amazes me to find things I wrote five, ten, fifteen years ago still floating around out in the ether known as ‘The World Wide Web’. This is a byproduct of the net’s ever-increasing capacity to archive anything and everything ever posted.

I did some personal internet ‘house-cleaning’ a couple of months back, and deleted four of my old blogs. They’d been up for three or four years, and a lot of the content had grown rather stale. While I don’t really regret doing that, there always is the temptation to just leave it all up there in perpetuity, just because I can.

Although Fish Piss the zine is no longer active, it lives on in the form of reprints and a complete internet archive. Just the other day, someone was telling me they’re read one of my pieces – ‘Letters To Ran’, actually two letters I’d written to fellow Fluffy Pagan Echo Ran Elfassy back in 1995 – in a Fish Piss they picked up at this year’s Expozine. I’ve contributed many pieces to FP over the eons, including poems, reviews, and articles about things like K-Tel Records and 45s. You can find links to all of them here.

Tireless poetry promoter and poet Todd Swift (he just recently launched his first UK collection, he’s already got several Canadian poetry books under his belt) accepted a couple of politically-concerned poems from me when he was poetry editor at nthposition.com, an online zine that’s still active. In their archives you’ll find a couple of the free downloadable chapbooks I appear in, as edited by Swift: 100 Poets Against The War and Babylon Burning.

And let’s not forget the jillions and bzillions of pieces on the topic of poetry and spoken word events that I’ve written for the Montreal Mirror since 2000. Mostly short blurbs, but there’s also articles covering all kinds of interesting folks.

As we move further into this crazy fucking century, I suspect more and more ‘content’ will find its home, not on the printed page, but on this evanescent, screen-dependent ‘platform’. I don’t know what to say about this trend, except that at least it’ll save some trees. One thing we should all realize, of course, is that the more it becomes the dominant system for the delivery of everything from music to movies to books, the more we’re gonna have to pay for what is currently ‘free’ (excepting internet fees, of course).

In the meantime, books as a physical artifact will survive, of course, just as movies survived the advent of video, just as painting survived the advent of photography. And maybe they’ll become much, much more beautiful …

ADVENTURES IN THE NOISE RACKET

FingerDog rocks da house.

In solidarity with all non-musicians everywhere who are trying to put hard-working musicians out of business (especially those musicians who have spent several years earning a degree in, say, jazz), FingerDog is launching a sudden, gnarly post-listenable CDR at Expozine!

The disc features droney clattery guitar excrescences produced under appallingly lo fi conditions last summer, mixed with even more egregiously badly-recorded vocal ditherings (some might call them ‘poems’) captured this week on a cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap old old old old old microphone plugged into a laptop. Recording conditions were so absurd, we had to use a sad pair of iPod headphones to check out our ‘mixes’ because traffic noise from outside was drowning out the powerful laptop speakers.

The results are, if anything, majestic.

You’ll find copies on sale at the Four Minutes to Midnight table at Expozine. You can also check out the ’sounds’ of FingerDog at their rudimentary myspace page.

 

In related noisy news, the last few copies of the name no name mini-CD, featuring more of my grimy collaborative work, are on sale in the Casa Del Popolo’s distroboto machine. Just look for the sign of the four-leaf clover.

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 –

WALKING SPANISH DOWN THE HALL

The latest issue of The Apostle's Review.

Just a couple of random and unrelated things literary / artistic that I have had the honour to be included in. First, an artists’ book called Drop Names that I co-created with Victoria Stanton in 1995 has appeared in the newly-launched ‘virtual’ exhibition Artists’ Books: Bound in Art. The exhibit is a project of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. Our work is only represented by a single picture, but there’s more than 140 artists’ books digitized on the site and available for browsing.

Second, two of my poems have appeared in the latest issue of The Apostles Review, a Spanish-language literary magazine published here in Montreal. The poems, ‘The Aesthetics of Emotional Control’ and ‘Prayer’, originally appeared in my triple-chapbook set SEX, POWER, MYTH, which I self-published back in late 2004. Alejandro Saravia bought a set at the launch party, and was quite taken with a few of the pieces.

Some of you might remember our performance at the April 2008 Words and Music at the Casa, where I read my poems in English and Alejandro then read the translated versions. At first, he’d translated a few of them just for his own pleasure. Then he floated the possibility that they might appear online. Imagine my delight when they actually appeared in print! It’s a really nice magazine, too, and features a lot of Spanish poets and prose writers, including Saravia himself, Angel Mota and Nela Rio.

POEM FOR DEIRDRE

Chipper day co-host with
Punk art hair and
Old thrift store house dress chic
Just 18 and ripe to bursting
Staunch baby dyke defender of
Gay rights and abortion rights
Said it outright on radio and
I, awkward, a-gah, a-guh
About all of it
But slowly milling and mulling
Until summer came and she went away
And I went
Where the wild things are

Now she’s a video star and
I sneak into her latest installation
Sit solitary with multiple screens
Staring as she
Shimmers in sexy sepia tones
Same old Deirdre
Wide-eyed, questioning,
Never wavering
O the home of the brave
O the little
Superman

FRESH FROM THE NOTEBOOK

I just finished transcribing poems and stuff from a notebook I finished back in September. (Notebook number 34, in fact.) This is part of my writing practice – I keep a notebook by my bed, another one by the chair where I veg out watching DVDs or listening to stuff with headphones late at night stoned, and another little one I carry around in my knapsack … and I constantly jot down thoughts, streams of thought, blips of ideas, images, memories, dreams, and poems. It’s a well-worn rut of writing practice, dating back to my very first notebook, given to me as a gift by an artist back in 1983. In fact, my first notebook predates my first ’serious’ poetry (of course there was the ‘non-serious’ joke poetry before that, and school assignments), and just having it probably prompted me to start writing that form.

I generally wait until the notebook is full before I transcribe the poems. By then they’ve ‘cooled’; they’re not still coruscating and crepitating with the emotional / psychic energy that originally kicked them out into the textual universe. If they’ve ’set’ properly they’re already hard-edged, gemlike, even before I start knocking off the false starts and lame endings. However, I do occasionally transcribe a poem before I finish a notebook – if I’m particularly taken with it, and decide to use it in a poetry performance or post it on a blog right away. Several from this batch made it out that way, including ‘Wild Life,’ ‘Cottage Country’ and ‘My Icelandic Grandmother.’ A few others managed to get themselves published (or self-published).

Themes that crop up chronically in this batch of poems include Jack Kerouac and the Beats in general – because I was reading some heavy Kerouac stuff like Some of the Dharma and the scroll version of On The Road; old flames – because old flames are better than no flames; and the book store where I work part time.

Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to put a few of these ‘new’ (newly transcribed) poems out on a blog entry. Here they are. (Unfortunately WordPress and other blog programs seem to hate poetry – I cannot figure out how to format this so that a) it doesn’t wipe out my indentations, and b) most annoyingly, why it takes out the spaces between the poem entries. If you have any editing advice I’d appreciate it!)

I unroll a liminal blanket
Down the damp dark smelling
street slope to
Sand sparkling carpet of
crushed glass
Twinkling in velvet dawn shadow
at hill’s foot
I can pretend, in the muggy
old port summer morn
That it’s ice and snow sparkling
And it’s fifty below

- 7 Jun 07 -

INTERROGATION

Do you ask questions of others
In order to learn
Something about them
Or something about yourself?
What do other people
Mean to you?
To what degree are you curious
About other people
About their belongings
Their secrets, their treasures?
When you’re in their rooms
Can you read them by their
accoutrements?
Are they an open or a closed
book?
What do their gestures mean to
you?
Their habits, their tics,
Their nervous repetitive actions?
Is there something about
Their voices? Or their words,
The words they choose?
Are you more concerned with
This one over that one
So that this one and his things
Form a whole constellation of
fascinations
While that one
Leaves you indifferent?
So it seems to me
In this imperfectly perceived
world
Lit as if by guttering candles
The tiny flames
Of our distracted and
distraught
Consciousnesses.

- 29 Jun 07 -