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.

SKY BUSTING from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

poems,

I’m working on a new one about Haida Gwaii while sucked into the Plath vortex again after finding a volume in a used book store. Not good. As moving as her work is, I wind up feeling weak, pathetic and unworthy. Still, I persist. Surely I must be mad as well.

SKY BUSTING

To the hillbilly born
a cursed monarch who swore
this pothunter could not be her blood
with his short gait, sight, temperament.
They must have abducted her
from a conclave of columned nobles,
the bastards, and this she declared
into her black lab’s ruff. Unless her peeps
traded her for gasoline in a time of war?
Splitting dog hairs, she knew this much;
she would never know.
She must adapt and learn. She scrubs
and sweeps though never convincingly,
swift clips to the noggin ever reminding her.

Neither was she popular with him in the marsh,
standing as he knelt next to her, shotgun
between them, instructing her how to squeeze Continue reading →

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”

Journal

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 →

POVs, or Redheads Rule Romania, from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

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A long poem-for me-about my trip to Romania a few years back. Several Romanians have taken issue with it but I found their country fascinating. Every nation has it’s problems, challenges and usually, a turbulent history.

POVs

DAY 1

At Heathrow I am wan, so pooped my heart quits
palpitating. I stop scrutinizing threat level colour codes,
unattended backpacks, retreat to my insignificance,
listen as a wife recites The London Times,
as foreign to me as Rome’s Il Messaggero. Katrina who?
These are disturbing times, dear. Cartoonist hit lists.
Boils of slam. Novelist fatwas. Bird flu dread.
Spread by beak or spicy chicken wing?
Off to hotbed of Romania, host to more than one virus.
Online scamming. Corruption. HIV. European Union
bid in peril. Does the average Brit give a feck?
Do rhetorical questions require a question mark?

DAY 2

Bucharest terminal quiet but for the cabbies. I nearly miss
foundation staffer Caroline’s hand-inked sign.
She leads me to a young American with a Welsh name
and an English woman with a broken tooth. Wait here
while we search for the poet laureate of New Hampshire’s
luggage. Not another reality show, please. Pale silhouettes
amble past a riot of architecture, crepuscular on the banks
of the Dâmboviţa. Baroque. Modern. Renaissance. Gothic.
Squat, Soviet blocks abut opulent cathedrals.

DAY 3

Currency—lei—so overwhelms me with zeros I don’t buy
books or icons of Mary and the saints. Resistance heroes
in stone. An Arcul de Triumf and a monument
to the 89 coup d’état, Memorial of Rebirth, a tall, marble
pillar and orb locals scorn as the toothpick and the olive.
Redheads rule Romania now, mine violet in the gamut of tints,
ox blood to bozo carrot. I don’t blend in. Women in heavy kohl
stumble on cobblestones. Toward vogue. Glamazons vying
to be 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”

Journal

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 →

ROUGH CUT-new poem

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Despite all the poems I’ve spawned, each time I sit down to write, I have absolutely no confidence that I can do it. The anxiety and trepidation nearly overwhelm me, but I persist, work through it I suppose, hence the writing process; my process anyway which feels like torture. I know I am not alone.

It took four years to assimilate a nightmarish episode to the point where I was able to depict it. Remember, poetic license; the she is not necessarily me, at least not in every line, stanza. Here it be, a rough draft.

ROUGH CUT

After a gestation period of eighteen months
and several bouts of incommunicado-ness
she dutifully reported to the pica-
eater’s rat’s nest to defend her lump of art
before he nibbled away all the footage.

She sang his praises
pretending the indiscriminate cravings
and grinding teeth didn’t exist,
didn’t wear her down.

Meth-heads don’t generate, they spin
scratched vinyl, shoot blankly,
regurgitate turbulence,
brew dandelion wine
because it’s as free
as the blackberries and psilocybin.

Pirate of his own ship-
bachelor pad bouncy house,
he slept in a pocket on the floor,
close to the cache
when he wasn’t busy
snipping,
sniping.

Under the red toque
a mind’s eye so muddied
it could see nothing
move.
Images, frames, shots
blurred unremittingly.
Recreate, rework, repeat.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.

With no redress,
no kind release,
she considered murder.