Category Archives: Journal

Tracking bear, deer, cougar, weasels; snaking past catastrophe

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Don’t tread on me! In a funk, discombobulated, plagued with a nasty headache and nightmares as I scramble to meet two hard deadlines, recovering from a low blow by our (former) collaborator who “terminated” our video projects. Terminal City? He might very well have succeeded but happily, I’m working with the inimitable Chris Coon, my Bent Tail-punk rock cohort. (Impatient Youth, The Sleepers, The Woundz, Clocks of Paradise, No Alternative.) It’s a relief as well, to drive 15 minutes to a studio rather than 5 hours to record who-knows-where, or how, which saves heaps of money too; no more travel expenses.

Do we engineer the crises in our lives? In search of authentic experience, to provide creative stimulation? Certainly, it’s something artists, writers do. Is Van Gogh not equated with tortured? August Strindberg is another example: “Of humble origin and melancholy disposition, Strindberg was consumed by an insatiable desire for knowledge and a need for authentic existence.”-New Foundations. “Strindberg created experiences and pressured situations in order to write about them; he inflicted pain on himself to gain extra material and he became suicidal when fiction and reality were interpenetrating so deeply that he was scared of finding which was which.”-Ronald Hayman. I know the difference and though I’m no longer no one’s victim, by associating with artists in various stages of evolution, conflict is inevitable.

Lately, a veritable zoo of of animals stampedes my dreams and reality. Fortunately, I am able to distinguish between the two! Bear, deer, serpents. Someone was holding the head of a . . . Continue reading →

Who remains. Undead, unbowed, vital.

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Hairiness; much hairiness! Who has time for spring cleaning with all that’s been going on? I’m still recovering from the premiere of Susanne Tabata’s punk rock movie, Bloodied But Unbowed. I couldn’t decide whether, or how to wear the Subhumans-Incorrect Thoughts, Rock Against Racism and Avengers buttons I dug out of my collection. Hey, I didn’t brandish badges then, why start now? I didn’t shave my head or wear a black leather jacket either. I couldn’t afford one! I stuffed the relics in a pocket to share with my Vancouver punk rock homies.

I was delighted to see former band members Conny Nowe, drummer of my first group, the all-girl Zellots-who just happened to be visiting from Toronto-and The 45s Brad Kent and Randy Rampage. Conny’s been playing music, currently in an outfit called Swamperella with renowned bassist Rachel Melas. I marveled at how marvelous she looked as we chatted before the movie started rolling.

I’ve run into Randy a few times over the years but hadn’t seen Brad since I was nine months pregnant, my son, now 15. I’d been walking down the street near 12th and Clark in Vancouver when I heard a voice braying “Hollywood and Western,” the scene of a notorious east end rehearsal space the 45s used. I turned around and there was Brad! The meeting was a little awkward and fleeting but at Thursday night’s after-party, he came and sat with me, gave me a big hug and apologized profusely about breaking up the 45s on the eve of our gig with PiL at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. “I’ve been wanting to say that to you all these years.”

My biggest regret . . . Continue reading →

Bloodied But Unbowed-Jazz cats on stage, old school punks on the big screen

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Canucks won their do or die match against Chicago! I don’t understand why they can’t play that well consistently. I suppose beating the Hawks in two more games is within the realm of possibility but seems unlikely. Funny, I try to ignore hockey but you know you’ve got it bad when you find yourself actually reading the Sports section. I always manage to get caught up in the excitement, recently and entirely sucked into Team Canada-Olympics games. I can’t help it; it’s in my DNA according to my long gone mother Corona Beliveau, second cousin to the great and beloved Montreal Canadian  Jean Beliveau, still going strong, last I heard.

They do share the same thick, dark hair and good looks but I took everything Ma said with a grain of salt. She was also Irish, a real queen of blarney and consummate storyteller. I’m convinced it’s one of the reasons I am a poet. She also said my grandmother Genora Beliveau, would throw empty mickey bottles at the opposing team’s players, ejected from more than a few games. Grandma was quite the spitfire, sadly dying of cancer when I was just a toddler. On that note, Happy Mother’s Day! My boys took me out to dinner, a nice break from the routine.

I did go out Saturday night though, to W2 and Jamie Reid’s book launch for Prez, his Lester Young book, Prez being Billy Holiday’s nickname for the legendary saxophonist. Kim Goldberg opened with a performance of poetry from her book Red Zone, shining an unerring spotlight on Nanaimo’s homelessness and urban decay. Pete (Trower) read some of his musical jazz poems and Jamie read from his lyrical homage, backed sublimely by Craig McCaul on guitar, Niko Friesen and Jen Hodge on bass. I met fellow ROCKsalter George Payerle and got to visit with pals Daniela Elza, Kagan Goh, Warren Dean Fulton, Shannon Rayne, Carol Reid and Kedrick James, a superb master of ceremonies.  A fabulous evening and as Jamie said, “Dancing until the dust rose in clouds from the floor, / they put sweet rhythms into Lester’s horn.” Pete remarked he was happy to see young people playing jazz. It’s not going away. Jazz will always have its aficionados, just like punk rock, the Vancouver breed immortalized in Susanne Tabata’s Bloodied But Unbowed, premiering at DOXA Documentary Film Festival this Thursday. I’m sure to run into some of my punk rock homies though DOA is on the road, not surprisingly. Susanne got in touch with me at one point for an interview as I was in the 45s with Randy Rampage and Brad Kent but the meeting never happened. Story of my life, I swear! Surely I’m not the only one. Reportedly there are over 100 hours of out-takes.

Oh well, it’s a . . .

Continue reading →

My life in verse, or rather, OUR life in verse

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Thus far, and including my poetry inside a bomb. See below.

I have several comrades in verse with whom I like to commiserate. We delight in bashing the already fractured literary scene, or scenes, belittling ourselves and our vocation—beating detractors to the punch—while bearing in mind it’s a shared passion and we’re damn good. Sadly, a way with words won’t  necessarily pay the rent. Despite the reality of the situation, my real and virtual friends keep composing the stuff. I’m currently enjoying Miranda Pearson’s Harbour and Clara Blackwood’s Subway Medusa, having recently completed Michael O’ Keefe’s eloquently and variously tragic or comic Swimming From Under My Father.

Other lunatic poetical friends go so far as to take it on the road! Coming to a (U.S.) town near you . . . My pal S.A. Griffin has cleverly devised THE POETRY BOMB Tour Of Words 2010 and according to my commemorative t-shirt, will be leaving Alburquerque, NM to play Austin, TX tomorrow. With all the years I lived in Los Angeles, S.A. is the only actor I befriended. Hmmm. Well, acting is his profession and like the aforementioned maniacs, verse, his obsession. This isn’t the first time S.A. has hit the road. He and the Carma Bums (Doug Knott, Michael Mollet, Mike Bruner, Scott Wannberg) toured relentlessly some of the most undomesticated, unsurpassed performance poetry I’ve been privileged to see.

Lately I’ve been working with my son on his Distance Ed classes, tutoring him in his poetry unit, using verse from my own collections to illustrate simile and metaphor. He detests it, naturally, but we’ve managed to write haiku and free verse and he knows the difference between a couplet, a quatrain and a stanza. I tried to persuade him there’s a close relation between song and verse, appeal to his passion for music but he’s not biting.

I’m spending less time on Facebook (the honeymoon may be over) and more at my own website which is getting spammed regularly, through this blog and WordPress I suspect. Our videopoems-Bushwhack and How To Remain are nearing the final stage of production as I prepare to go to Salt Spring Island to work intensively with my collaborateur Roderick Shoolbraid. Three Blocks West of Wonderland book launch parties are in the works. We better rehearse our AURAL Heather act as we are planning to perform at said launches. Yikes! With all this behind me soon, I intend to spend the remainder of 2010 focused on writing, though I will be working hard on our Visible Verse 10 year anniversary festival and celebration coming up in November. No rest for the wicked, or the poet, apparently.

Sage Hill

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I’ve applied for Sage Hill Writing Experience Fiction Workshop in Saskatchewan this July, hoping for ten days of writing and critiques with facilitator/author Terry Jordan. After my book launch parties and my videopoems are completed I want to focus on writing and new works for the rest of the year. I’ve heard only good things from Sage Hill alumni and it would be such a boon to my novel, The Town Slut’s Daughter. I’d stand a good chance of completing a final draft at last. We shall see. If I’m not selected, a friend has offered his cabin in the Nicola Valley for a writing retreat. It’s really the only way I can get a leg up on such a big project, to flee the domestic front.

WINNIPEG DOWNS from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

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When a mother prefers cards and bingo to cooking and childcare . . .

Winnipeg Downs

Games of chance. Sleight of hand. Games invented
to wash us out of her lush, chestnut hair,
setting little sister and me off to stoop and scoop
discarded tickets. Plucky as yard hens. Two bags
full. Staggered, not by one-too-many beers
but a winning wager, she whooped I can buy
you girls supper! Dragged around like carrion
in a diesel-rank yellow Beetle, we fought

to hide in the nausea-inducing verboten slot
where balled-up fists could not reach.
Dutifully she ordered a Mama burger
though professing to prefer the Teen. Two bites. I bet
she had no appetite after six months of whiplash prescription.
Her lumpy thumbs hefted fivers, entering the weekly lottery,
blowing crumbs of crud off a scratch & win ticket between pulls
on a machine-rolled fag, corduroy car coat pockmarked
with cigarette burns. Bingo-lottery-horse-and card-playing loser.

My hand. A mother rather like that species Continue reading →

Reading the ground with a bear’s eye

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Frantic week behind, hectic week ahead but I always make time for a walk in the woods. Josef opened up some of the deer trails on our property recently which has encouraged my bushwhacking—or our bushwhacking—the mutts and mine. I love it when they kick up layers of needles, lichen and loam. Is there any richer smell? It’s a fairly strenuous workout, with all the climbing up and down boulders green with moss and crumbling cedar logs. Like all the islands and the Sunshine Coast, Bowen was clear-cut about 100 years ago. Imagine how convenient it must have been tossing all that timber into the ocean. I’m kidding. Sort of.

I spotted this remnant lying on the ground and it brought to mind the cover of Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife. I’m no anthropologist—though I harboured aspirations at one time—but it would appear the shape could have inspired west coast native artists. It’s an eye! See?

A bear’s eye. Bringhurst talks of reading as an “ancient, preliterate craft. We read the tracks and scat of animals, the depth and lustre of their coats, the set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of course, the voices that we hear.”

Speaking of voices, I’m still recovering after hosting Penn Kemp at a boisterous salon on Saturday. Is that an oxymoron? Well, our salons get pretty festive. Penn is droll and vivacious, possessing a singular voice, literally, figuratively. She was a big hit with the 35 or so die-hards who turned out despite a nearly constant downpour, including some of my favourite urbanites Kyle Hawke, Warren Dean Fulton, Shannon Rayne and Rhonda Milne who took pleasure in the food, poetry and water taxi experience from Horseshoe Bay to Snug Cove. Penn had Josef perform some of her poetry in German! Now that’s a first, I’m glad we got pictures. I participated in another piece called Poem for Peace in Two Voices. Soundings—what Penn calls her readings, and sublimely sonic they are. Later, we let our hair down, madly dancing and rockin’ out, then lolled about in the hot tub before finally conking out around four in the morning. “Thanks to you, Beauty, for your magnificent presence and hospitality. What a hoot and holler! Glorious to be with you. And I so know how much work went into the grace of the evening!” Penn’s right. It was a hoot.

Last Thursday, I attended Anvil Press’s launch for a deluxe edition of Continue reading →

Blame it on spring fever

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“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”–Diane Arbus

I saw a documentary recently wherein young teenage girls in braces were asked about their hopes for the future and more than one said, “I hope nothing bad happens.” I’d been through so much crap by age 14 I was expecting relief not trauma, anticipating liberation, a time when I would reclaim my life from defective and abusive parental units.

2010. Wow. It’s turning out to be one volatile year, a brave new world in fact, this past weekend brutal, exhausting. Suffice to say, my personal life is going through much upheaval and I’m no slave to the status quo, not always, but ultimately shaking things up. I had to work through Continue reading →

SNOW BIRD from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

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Rambling girl spoke of shirking her mother
land, Anne Murray songs,
the morally superior and migrating south.
She harboured an impulse to haunt
Big Sur, disturb Henry Miller,
though it meant straying off the I-5.
By Frisco, she was plummeting,
lollipops licked, pubic hair drenched,
small indentation behind her ears dry.

Illegal as any breaststroking the-Rio-Grande
wetback, she adopted derelict kittens, drummers,
ghost wrote rock reviews, screenplays, phone sex scripts.
Detected by no one, she relished peanutty Paydays,
played solitaire on the futon. Cavities, lonesomeness
swelled. She met Jello. Unrequited esteem.
He called her cheesehead as if she were from Wisconsin.
Her first LA boyfriend liked Doll, or My Nordic Princess,
as if she were a blow-up or a cruise ship.

Instincts erode. She persisted in exile.
Why not?
They don’t know she’s ditched the nation
via Pacific flyway. They’re too wintry, too white,
too busy redressing the past, the visible mistakes,
to notice she too too is exotic.
Coral in their aggression,
always courteous, gusto beneath them.
If she goes back she intends to arrive.
Like an American.
In a helicopter, like Bill Gates.
They will smile.
They will be pissed, despite themselves.
They.

Nature of time

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Heather Haley & the Zellots

It’s running out! This picture was taken when I still felt like I was going to live forever. I don’t know if 40 is the magic number, but at some point it hits you—maybe when musicians stop lining up to play for free—that the vicious rumours are true, that indeed, you are going to die. It’s only a matter of time. Bittersweet knowledge that’s supposed to make us appreciate life more. One life. Short and sweet.

Speaking of sweet, Happy Easter! Another Christian holiday we must work hard to ignore. 5 pounds. Apparently that’s the amount of chocolate the average kid will eat this long weekend, and you know it’s going to be crappy chocolate. I haven’t chowed down on bunnies since I was a kid, when I didn’t know bad from good chocolate or anything else. Maybe all chocolate was better quality or I had more taste buds or they were more sensitive. I’ve noticed the texture of chocolate bars has changed; they’re waxy. Yuk. My mother was a good lapsed Catholic and never did much to observe Easter besides buy us candy. My sisters and I would collect pop bottles those years when Ma was broke and we’d go to the store and buy our own. I always got a pop and a comic book too.

Ah, country living. A pair of Northern Flicker woodpeckers is mating on the roof of the house, which entails Continue reading →