Where’s the poem? Swamped this week screening submissions for Visible Verse Festival 2011 and up to my eyeballs in experimental film, which happens every year. Without being semantical, I have to say poetic is not the same as visible verse, or a video poem or a cine-poem, or whichever term you prefer. I think I just got semantical.
Still laughing and sharing photos from Kevin Chong’s book launch of new novel Beauty and Pity at Vancouver’s infamous Penthouse nightclub, the first and likely the last time I’ll ever set my ass down in there. I was surprised; the interior does not reflect the fading building facade. Neither did the carpet reek of stale beer, wall of framed 8×10 black and white celebrity headshots only one of its charms. Anyway, I’ve spent enough time in strip clubs. Bartending was the only job I could find in New York City when I resided, or rather survived a year there in the 80s. Man, it was a tough town, nothing like it is now, inhabitable. A friend of a friend got me a job at the Baby Doll, a topless bar on White Street, just down from the Mudd Club, where we used to convene after our shifts ended at 2 AM, or at the sushi bar imbibing hot sake, which goes down well in the company of bitterly cold Manhattanites. Club management kept trying to get me to strip too. I was quite miserable after my band broke up and told them, “No thanks, I don’t miss the stage that much.” I only had to watch the dancers—what was left of them—flaunt it, appalled by the Wall Street fat cat CEOs and bankers turned on by such pathetic junkies. No way I was going to wind up down there.
But back to Vancouver. I love book launches that are beyond readings. Kevin commissioned a book trailer, directed and produced by mutual friends Pam Bentley and Tara Flynn and it was hilarious. The book jacket states “Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twenty-something Asian-Canadian who is about to embark on a modeling career.” Kevin had Owen Kwong, a real male model, portray him. Later during the reading, host Charles Demers applied makeup to Kevin’s face, and not expertly, bestowing him with a magnificent unibrow. Kevin admirably kept reciting throughout the lipstick and purple wig application. What an event! And so glamorous. I’m enjoying the book immensely, can recommend it.
Swamped. Fighting a virus. Sick of editing but if the manuscript isn’t 100% print ready, it’s pretty darn close. So, so long slogging, hello hustling. As soon as I square away a swack of domestic duties and finish screening nearly 60 videopoems for Visible Verse Festival which happens on Friday, Nov. 4 this year. Forge. That’s what I’m doing. Well, aren’t we all? Born forgers we are, regular blacksmiths.
Had an interesting exchange with a friend who was reluctant to remove a photo of moi from a Facebook album, which led to a discussion about FB photo posting etiquette. She suggested that the protocol was to tag only the pics that the subject liked. I said protocol schmotocal, friends remove pics that friends aren’t comfortable with. Common courtesy, common sense. To me. But then I’m media hack from way back and make no apologies for it. Fundamental in this age of Facebook and social media. I realize absolute control is impossible but it’s my right to have input over the end result of our collaboration (mine and a photographer’s, which I always discuss ahead of a shoot) and the distribution of said images. But that’s just me. I think the real issue is integrity. Trust. Mutual respect between artist and subject. Artists are not gods, above or beyond their subjects. But it’s a slippery slope indeed because what we do is vital and the truth must come out. I think of Lincoln Clarkes and those incendiary photos he took of drug addicted women in the downtown Eastside, and Diane Arbus, both whom I believe always asked permission. It also happens to be the way to a better photograph. I’m also suspicious of a lot of *documentary* films. We all know how easy it is to skew facts with editing, etc. Which makes me think of the Strickland character in Robert Stone’s novel, Outerbridge Reach, a true opportunist/artist, some would say sociopath. But if you pose for a photo, presumably you are taking a bit of a risk, she said. I said, I try not to presume anything. Posing does not necessarily equate with permission. License.
And here’s my other 9/11 poem. Or perhaps it’s more about the fallout.
SECHELT
It’s so lovely here. Burdock wafting, whooshing.
Sleek cyclist slows for no man, woman or child.
Kamikaze starlings chase off rivals reflected in glass.
Springtime. Neo-hippie chicks and plump lesbians.
Round, orange buoys in the cove. Boatload of mental
cases on an outing covert as a DARPA project.
A prattling punk rocker can’t conquer fear
but can contain it, her sunbathing Labrador
sleeping through everything. Loudspeaker honks.
“This sale is an extravaganza! Prawns. Maple syrup.
Smoked salmon. ALL on special!”
A longwinded lute maker. Old world restaurant,
pickle juice in the potato salad,
bird lover training orphaned fledglings.
Florida flight schools, Atta and eighteen others.
Big clue, red flag, CIA too bullish to see.
Why take flying lessons only to play
hooky on Descent & Landing day?
It’s lovely here. I have nothing to complain about
except, some people complain too much.
My new friend Sophie, whining
about the pub’s crappy coasters, catching a nasty cold
from a cabbie in Reno, the jerk she moved here to marry,
a lazy fisherman, busy cutting the head off her mettle.
She grows defensive as a row of swaying cypress trees
when I offer suggestions. I retire to the gazebo,
hear a train and some blues huffing across the water.
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee?
I wake to news of coffin-sized cells. Torture.
An American Extraordinary Rendition Unit
nabbing suspected terrorists for one-way flights
to top-secret sites around the globe. For questioning.
I am informed there are no railroad tracks near Sechelt.
Those rhythms must have come from machinery
at the cement quarry on the other side of the inlet.
My cranium feels like a washbowl.
Mascara brush too fat,
like trying to apply a bumblebee
to my eyelashes.
Oh, I have nothing to complain about.
It’s lovely here.
And we’re still here, though it is time to kiss summer goodbye, slowly, for it lingers. Perhaps we are being granted the sunshine we were deprived of in July.
Last Thursday I featured with Al Mader at the Twisted Poets Literary Salon at the Prophouse Cafe in Vancouver, a lively Pandora’s Collective series hosted by Bonnie Nish and Warren Dean Fulton, proprietor Ross Judge a most congenial host. I felt right at home amongst a museum-like collection of artifacts, lighting, posters, memorabilia and knick-knacks, hence the name. I thought it brave to open a café across the street from the long-established Uprising Bakery on Venables, but nonplussed Ross is successfully cultivating his own clientele. I wasn’t surprised to see people come in to chat, eat, drink and hang out. So though I had time to kill, it flew by in such good company. Ross is a hockey mad historian and very knowledgeable about the history of the Vancouver as well.
Witty, kooky Al Mader took requests and played his driftwood saxophone though I think his vocal impression sounds more like a clarinet. Catherine Owen debuted her fabulous Hot Sonnet calendar featuring photographs by Patrik Jandak, poems by Fred Wah, Kate Braid, Miranda Pearson, C.R. Avery, George Bowering, Maxine Gadd and eight others. I was told my performance was stellar and new friend Wanda Kehewin gave me one of the loveliest compliments I’ve ever received. She said I delivered every word as if it were precious. Of course, every word is precious. To me. To us. Then later over a late supper, my friend Rhonda said nearly the same thing. Perhaps I am finally hitting my mark.
So back to the grind which includes Visible Verse Festival programming, homeschooling and teaching Junior to drive. I indulged myself with a lot of movies this summer so back to my reading list as well.
Good night Irene! Let’s hope hurricane season is over along with the end of end times? We always have hope. Of course the 10th anniversary of 9/11 looms on the horizon. I suppose it’s appropriate to remember where I was that fateful day, perhaps even de rigueur? I was on the street when a passerby asked, did you hear? The Pentagon was bombed! Frantic and with a deep sense of foreboding, I was soon frustrated in my attempts to find out what was happening; we had no cable, or AM radio, CBC playing greatest classical hits as usual. CBC News kicked in at last and we heard about jetliners crashing into the World Trade Center. We must have gone to a friend or relative’s place to watch the news coverage but I’ll never forget my shock at seeing the towers come down. Brutal. It hadn’t occurred to me they could topple. New York was a very different place in the 80s when I resided there but I have fond memories and love to visit. As we were listening to the radio, the announcer said, “Many Canadians live and work in New York City,” and then I heard my best friend Cathy’s boyfriend Dave Gregg’s voice as he was interviewed in the back of a cab going up 5th Avenue, which made the day all the more surreal. My son was only 7 at the time, too tender to assimilate any of it so we shielded him. Ten years later, it’s a familiar topic of discussion along with many other disturbing issues. He is very well informed and suffers no dearth of opinions.
Also de rigueur? My 9/11 poem, written in 2002, from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland.”
SOAR
Before you-know-what, you-know-when,
I flew in an airplane. I won’t say what.
Or when. People are sick from it.
NASDAQ crashed. Family plan with it.
I remained on the upswing. Going somewhere.
Chicago specifically, e-poets’ geo-conference.
I am digerati. A doyenne of new media culture.
Still, airport security confiscates my apple.
My orange. Half my dinner. They take nothing
from the hinky, hacky-sacking Travis Bickle
doppelgänger who must pose more of a threat,
though that’s like comparing potheads to divas.
Pick up my e-ticket. Wait with the other sulky,
wannabe passengers, SeaTac muggy as a laundromat,
air fouled with KFC. Machines vend to the grounded.
Concrete pillars tremble in the wake of each landing.
Since this is before you-know-what, I don’t assume
a 747 will take out the Space Needle or land
right through us. I don’t equate jet with bomb.
I need only worry about the quake. The Big One
Vancouver and Seattle—sitting queenly
upon the Juan de Fuca fault line—are overdue for.
I am anticipating flight, savouring my thrills,
bumpy joyrides, like motherhood.
Junior calls. Yes dear, Mommy will be home soon.
Before the split, his father cautioned us:
Mercury in our mouths. Vaccines.
Population control. Microwaves.
A conspiracy of urologists.
Fluoride. Fallout. Wheat.
He has found a healer. Can he be cured?
We all know I’m doomed to be infected.
I’m the one who will eat tainted salmon
at the barbeque, the one with stretch marks
and eyes closed in the photographs. The one
who defected, the one who didn’t want
what he wanted, sixteen hours on a film set,
baby languishing with a sitter.
He gets on the phone. Another forecast.
I dreamed you died in a plane crash. I saw you
flailing about in the ocean with your books.
Oh stop polluting my trip with your Eeyore pooh.
I am part of a feminist plot against fathers,
and it was a controlled explosion
set off by the U.S. government.
Suddenly he is solvent, taking me to court,
re-staking his claim to our precious cargo,
crusading to save his son from the new world order.
I board. Window seat. Always, despite dire warnings.
Junior likes to compare the people to ants.
Houses are Lego, mountains, papier mâché.
We land. Kurt appears in the flesh, our virtual rapport
downloaded to O’Hara minus the time-outs and errors.
I feel at home in Chicago, loose in its Loop, towers,
Art Institute. Go to live in Chagall’s epic blue
glass dream for a day, emerge bestowed with wings,
like all his lovers and madonnas.
I have not flown since you-know-what,
you-know-when. We are saddled with dread
after witnessing steel crumple like tin.
It is safe to grieve. Cockpits secured.
Air marshals on board. We will fly again,
prepared to take down any motherfucker
who thinks he’s going to hijack anyone.
We will soar, for we are armed,
knowing where the lies land us.
High on verse. High on life and staying out of trouble (for the most part), occupied with events and performance, recently honoured to participate in a tribute to bill bissett with Daniel Zomparelli, Elizabeth Bachinsky and host Billeh Nickerson at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. I read the powerful burning up oblivion and at th first breath of life we stir and rise from a bill collection, pass th food release the sprit book published by Talon right around the time I was beginning to get serious about writing poetry. As I said at the festival, bill may not know this but bill saved my ass, my depressed, suicidal teenaged ass. I was very fortunate to have an excellent English teacher in high school, Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter, who happened to be gay, didn’t just hand out text books and assignments but turned me on to bill bissett and Canadian poetry, an exotic thing out in Cloverdale, which describes bill well and explains why I was so immediately affected by his imagery and imagination. bill is a gem, bill is a gift and I swear by now embedded in our national psyche. To me, bill is a poetical Peter Pan and whenever I’ve had the great privilege of seeing and hearing him in performance, have always wished I was Wendy and could fly away with him. For bill is winged. bill soars! Above and beyond. And thank you Mr. Carter, wherever you are. For I too soar, whenever possible. The film, Strange Grey Day This was fascinating, depicting a long ago Vancouver, in the rain naturally and a beguiling, waifish, rather melancholy boy bill.
Hear me roar today at 2 PM on Wax Poetic on Coop Radio and tomorrow night I’m a featured reader at the Twisted Poets Literary Salon, at the Prophouse Cafe. I’ll be screening some videopoems as well, hope to see all your raging high flying selves there.
A kiss.
Coral. Incandescent.
We wanted a kiss.
We wanted a moment
of, no one knows us.
In a hovel or the firs
we wanted a moment
of, no one watching.
We wanted a ride,
the roiling innards.
We wanted a night.
One night, to escape
the ether, the library,
all that shushing.
We wanted more
than one season
of abundance.
He has entered text
red as a target,
invited a stoning,
but, we are very bear.
Mewling accomplice
pawing at the door,
I track charred meat
from bower to suite.
From a fly coastal trip
drenched in dark highway,
through a fuming winter
of snarling heat,
to blasted spring robins
and lilacs blaring perfume
we have muzzled nothing,
growling in the gut wicked
as songs loud as our heads,
deafening aches
silent as screen voices
deep at night.
Smoked out,
files burned,
anointed with ash,
we are fallout.
Ruthless particulars
roaming summer,
lapping up
bare mounds
and berries,
moving and moved
by shattered outcrops,
words of praise
and generous mouths.
Hangnails and chainsaws. Men and power toys. Boys and bombs and London’s burning! White riot, wanna riot of my own. Are we moving forward? Well, regardless, “this is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.” No time to look over my shoulder. Watched Fight Club with Junior. Two things; he needs to learn to fight, (defend himself) and Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem mission was moot but prescient. The banks and corporations blew themselves up. Imploded from greed. I loved Norton’s voice-over narration and Junior relished Tyler driving golf balls into a ravaged urban wasteland. My boy’s a great kid but I can’t lure him from his lair. We on the other hand were renegades; drove ourselves out and everywhere, into the big city for rock concerts, often drunk, (no I’m not condoning drinking and driving, narrowly escaping doom via car accident unlike many unlucky teens) partied hearty every day, and night, smoking heaps of ganja, dropping acid, fucking anything that moved. We were bored. To death. Junior is not bored. Needs no riot of his own. He is the bomb, brilliant, at gaming, video, all things techno but I worry. He needs to toughen up. He got interested in boxing so we set up the gear and he uses it. Sort of. Everybody needs to pack on some muscle. Kick ass. Well, he’s definitely his own man, got the good-looking part down and rocks a golf course like no one. He’s learning to drive, got his first job and hitting the road for the Pax gaming festival in Seattle. I’m just marveling at our different lives, adolescences, experiences. I’m some weird hybrid, he’s a digital native.
“Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!” Indeed. Working hard on the book. Excited, entrusted with the greatest task of all; telling the story. Without flinching. Big perk; the assholes in my life have been reduced to fodder. Entertaining fodder. Voice. Number one concern, always my main vehicle, workhorse. It’s as true to Fiona as she is to herself and I strongly believe there is more truth in fiction. Fiona is indomitable, finding her way as is this story. We never give up. Never stop seeking. Know how to fight. Another perk; dread is whittled down along with the manuscript. Oh, and there aren’t enough words in this fucking language.
She wakes grimly febrile,
desperately nostalgic
for dawdling in ditches
of tadpoles,
wagering glass
marbles in snow lanes,
sewing mini skirts
for her Barbie,
mashed potatoes,
fried baloney,
the gag reflex.
She shuts her eyes,
snubbing the town’s lens
zooming in on her culpability,
incensed at the sun’s insolence,
rising despite collisions,
the most recent death toll.
She groans, engulfed in tokens
of admirers, embattled by,
dreading the delirium of desire,
one resolutely phlegmatic
as the other effuses, plummets.
No incidental leaf
but a loose lunatic rook
lit mate old school canon
raining down like a medicine ball.
Men ostensibly,
on, off or side tracked
interpersonals interpenetrating
fictions, demands, tousles
delightfully incessant.
No accident this transport back
to forsaken tracks,
giant drainpipe beneath.
I engineered it.
I, of humble origin,
melancholy disposition
provide stimulation,
provoke the atmosphere,
orchestrate the robberies.
I, in the cliché of a crisp white shirt
and black hat
inflict pain, increase pressure,
draw hostility, reel in crisis
commonly referred to
as authentic experience.
I dare to sprawl,
invite expansion
as vital to my vitals
as blood on needlework.
Yikes! Really living my art, senses heightened, everything merging. I awaken in the novel, visiting characters. Ideas! Such a lovely escape from the pressures and banality of life, inner poor girl happy to recycle pain, angst, channel it into fiction. Not sure it works to exorcise but surely it informs, lends authenticity. This is what I wanted, to be caught up in the work of writing, free of ruts. Discussions over the dinner table cause me to jump up, make notes. Insert here. Add this. Remove that. My son was talking about a friend complaining about the yahoos next door firing guns to celebrate 4th of July, which made me recall a character’s fixation with firearms. When our hero Fiona lived in Los Angeles, she didn’t dare go out at midnight New Year’s Eve for the same reason, neighbours’ penchant for shooting up into the air, each year someone injured or killed. Only one reason why she returns to Vancouver as dismayed as she is to discover the city’s burgeoning gang activity.
Hectic times ahead; Summer Dreams Literary Festival, Saturday, July 13 in the afternoon, I’m on a panel; Music and the Muse: Exploring the Links Between Musicality and Textuality in Verse. Bridging the Gap Between the Poetic Bard and the Minstrel with Catherine Owen and Leanne Averbach.Moderator: Sean Cranbury. Poets pontificate! A talk on what I call spoken word song, the fusion of verse and music.
Sunday, Aug. 21, I’m honoured to be reading at the Queer Film Festival’s bill bissett retrospective feature, Strange Grey Day This at Emily Carr with Daniel Zomperelli, Elizabeth Bachinsky, and bill! Hosted by Billeh Nickerson. Come on down, we can celebrate at the closing gala later that day. Thursday, Sept. 1, I’m featured at Twisted Poets Salon with the inimitable Al Mader. And I’m looking forward to a reunion of sorts with my punk rock homies at Zippy Pinhead’s birthday party at the Fairview Pub Sept. 9. See you in the city!
And Jesus loves them. I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t been journaling. I’m pissed off. I have been sick. Sick and tired, of the rain and cold. It’s going to be one of those non-summers we British Columbians suffer now and then. Fuck it. I’m turning this year around. 2011 is the year I complete my novel. Despite everything. Everyone. I have been caught up in the daunting task of cutting and revising, 150 pages slashed; didn’t think I could do it, so glad I did. When that’s complete I’ll restructure if need be. Here’s a segment of The Town Slut’s Daughter, partially set in Vancouver’s punk rock scene. You’ll have to excuse the wacky formatting, WordPress sucks. I’m afraid there’s no excuse for lapsed Catholic protagonist Fiona Larouchelle. She is not a nice girl.
“Look who’s on TV!” Rita pointed to Joey Shithead on The Vancouver Show with Pia Shandel.
“Ha!” hooted Fiona. “She looks like a Pia Shandel.”
Joey handled bubbly Pia with aplomb. Fiona threw down three tickets to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre emblazoned with Hit Someone You Love.
“Great!” said Rita. “What’s with all the misogyny? I thought the scene was so equalitarian.” Rita grabbed the kettle, turned on the tap. “Well, I suppose it is if you happen to be young, white and male.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t. Who is Transformer Productions, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Never heard of them. But it’s a great bill! Rabid, Pointed Sticks, SubHumans, K-Tels.” Angus was a hero for digging up a new venue, O’Hara’s, a derelict nightclub on the pier at the foot of Main. Her father remembered it from when he was a young buck roaming the streets. “I wanna go. We gotta see the K-Tels.”
“Okay. We’re doing our bit to fight sexism, right? We play electric guitars!”
The next night Fiona, Shannon and Rita drove down to the show, a near riot on by the time they arrived.
BAM! THUD! WHAM!
“Hey,” said Fiona, “it’s like Batman.”
Entering cautiously, they noticed a riser to their right and looked up into the scowling faces of thirty or so longhaired bikers and fat, bearded yahoos greeting them with upraised chairs and benches. A table whizzed past their heads, crashing against the wall, but when the girls advanced, like a sea parting, the bikers moved aside to let them pass.
“I guess we don’t pose a threat,” said Fiona, “or maybe they’re sparing the girls.”
Shannon laughed. “As if they have policy.”
They found the K-Tels soldiering through Automan, bassist Jim Bescott and green-haired Art so on the beam, they deftly dodged an assortment of projectiles. Fuming, Rita sidled up to a big greaser just as he was about to launch a Labatt’s can and grabbed him by the arm.
“Hey asshole! Those are my friends.”
He nearly choked on his tongue. Rita stood guard until the frustrated hit man left.
Like hyenas tracking a herd of wildebeest, their tormenters plucked the youngest, sickest, stupidest kids from the crowd, methodically pummeling all attitude out of them. The Bowery Boys were on rodeo clown duty, goading the creeps, pulling them off their friends, getting in a few punches of their own.
“This is nuts!” shouted Fiona. She waved at Oona and Spooner across the room. They dashed over. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” sputtered Oona. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I dunno, it’s bizarre,” said Spooner, glancing nervously about the room, “every biker and grease-ball in the Lower Mainland must be here. I heard they’re even coming up from Bellingham.”
Is a mob the sum of its parts? Fiona could see no eye contact, with each other or their prey. No motive, no reason. No head. No heart.
Shannon surveyed the pandemonium. “Well, if this is Valentine’s Day, it must be hell.”
“Where’s security?”
“Maybe this is security,” Rita said grimly. “I’m having visions of Altamont.”
They exited at the first opportunity. Fiona saw Dennis wrestling a Continue reading →
