May 9th, 2012
writing is fun, publishing not so much
Just this morning I was talking to myself, looking at my “submitted for publication” file, and convincing myself to give up checking for news each and every (frakking) day. Then this afternoon I get a notice saying another poem of mine is being published. This morning, one of the things I told myself is that it doesn’t much matter if you get an acceptance or a rejection because after a brief moment of either elation or disappointment (and both are very brief), nothing changes.
I was right. And nothing is changed because I still have other poems waiting in their queue and I almost certainly will check on them tomorrow. And I still have 3 or 4 unwritten poems circling the imagination and simultaneously trying to get written. Same. Same. Oh well.
May 6th, 2012
Erin Mouré, poetry
I’m reading Erin Mouré’s book The Unmemntioable. No, that’s not a typo. (I still keep checking to see if that’s what she titled the book.) It should give you a clue about the nature of her poetry, if you are unfamiliar with Mouré. I think this is what you call “experimental”.
Reproducing her work is next to impossible without putting up her pages as images, but this example should give you a taste. Even if you generally want poetry that is essentially a rhyming story, I encourage you to get a book of hers and have a look. They are little mixed-media packages of verbal/image art.

I mean doesn’t that just shake up your head?
May 3rd, 2012
I amuse myself by
(well, lots of things, but in this case by) submitting the following “paragraph” when asked what my writing process (poetry) was like.
Notes on process?
OK.
Coffee outside, or under a window with computer, or in bed with a baby computer _ in any of those cases, close eyes, breathe, breathe, tickle that fertile air space about 17cm in front of first vertebral rib (right side)_shudder_and wait. When words surface, start typing.
heh
love to get a gander re their response
May 2nd, 2012
Sharon Thesen, a poem
I actually don’t remember how I came by Sharon Thesen‘s name but I had her name on a little list of “poets to read” and so when I came across The Pangs of Sunday I picked it up.
Here’s one of her poems.
Tangling the Day Tangle the day up which is black does not wish you to shine a yellow flower on it, if it likes butter - That bee it composes - daffodils, cyclamen, a record going round, the sound of Haydn's piano & the car accidents out on Broadway so frequent now I rather like the sound of a small collision & don't bother going out to see.
Such spare language. And the use of sound – like “a record going round, the sound” – I love it when poets do that, use long sounds together to exemplify the content. And the way “s” and “l” work in the line “the sound of a small collision”. It’s music, of course, but not melodic exactly, but like the sounds air makes as it rushes through holes in rock. I rather like that power, and I like the sense of inhumanness it evokes. In that anyway, this poem reminds me a bit of Robinson Jeffers.
April 22nd, 2012
rage and power
I think about the relationship between rage and power quite a bit. Different reasons for that, but there it is. So I love to read poets (and others) who deal with the issue in one way or another.
Here’s Chyrstos.
From Fire Power
Sometimes Sitting in the Airport when the normal white women in pretty summer dresses laughing eyes bows in their hair float by burbling inane remarks playful comments like a vast bouquet of flowers lilies of the field so happy I hate them fiercely just for that
OK. Before I start I just want to say I actually love much of Chrystos’ poetry. It’s fierce, truthful, blunt, unforgiving. These are all traits I admire and respect.
But.
There’s always a but. And always the oblivious human being who walks right through misery, causes it, even preens in its heat, all without ever seeing the human being in the middle of the rage and pain.
That’s one of the things it means to be human. No changing that. Not without evolving the whole species. And maybe not even then.
Not that I think talking to those “normal” women is worth anything. I don’t. Actually I think it’s a waste of time. They are oblivious to anyone outside their immediate need and desire.
I know them. I’ve been trampled by them. But am I mad? At what? It’s like an ant being mad at the boulder tumbling down the hill. Or me being mad at the earthquake because it wrecked my yard. I mean what point is there in that.
The trick seems to me to learn to spot them and avoid the suckers. Get on with things that really matter, that you actually want to do.
So when I read Chrystos’ poetry I wonder about all that spinning rage. All that energy. I imagine it turned like steam into a potent force turning a wheel instead of just loose heat not moving anything or anyone.
But of course that’s not true exactly. It moves me, her other readers. But moves to what? I can’t help but wonder if it is an efficient use of the power that rage gives. Actually wonder. I don’t have an answer.
April 12th, 2012
Thomas Heise_a poem
Thomas Heise is a new voice to me. I don’t even know where I got the name now, but Horror Vacui came to my door and so I started to read. Oh goodness.
You might want to read here and here if you like this.
THESE NEW DAYS
After the Massacre of Lost Objects the sun went dead dark three days. The sorrow in the orchard of orange trees was ours, my family's. The zero fell off the largest number in the world. On my hand I wrote left and please return to owner. The echo in my son's skull was so loud we slept numb in the living room. I walked a mile to watch them tear off the church bell like a pear and throw it in the mud pit. Sullage spilt out of the abattoir where they were beheading the cows with a buzz-saw all summer. How soft the hay, the uneaten grass. I found my open wound and lay down next to it in a field, my wound the jellyfish. Each hour, halos of new colors, phosphorescent, pulsed once, faded, over the little earth. Little explosions. Then a city of spires bloomed in a full aurora of my last hope, where, faraway, I was wavinggoodbye, or was it hello, from a future I no longer recall.
April 8th, 2012
Alice Oswald, oh my what a poet
Yesterday I got a copy of Spacecraft Voyager 1 New and Selected Poems by Alice Oswald. During my not-long-before-bed reading time, I started in on the volume. I have to tell you she is fast becoming one of my favourite poets.
Here’s a poem from the “new” portion of the book.
In a tidal valley flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not one among many moodswung creatures that have settled in this beautiful Uncountry of an Estuary swans pitching your wings in the reedy layby of a vacancy where the house of the sea can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour all you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace is both a barren mud-site and a speeded up garden full of lake-offerings and slabs of light which then unwills itself listen all you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall all you mudswarms ranging up and down I notice you are very alert and worn out skulking about and grabbing what you can listen this is not the ordinary surface river this is not river at all this is something like a huge repeating mechanism banging and banging the jetty very hard to define, most close in kind to the mighty angels of purgatory who come solar-powered into darkness using no other sails than their shining wings yes this is the Moon this hurrying muscular unsolid unstillness this endless wavering in whose engine I too am living
Frakkin brilliant. “Moodswung creatures”, the way she conflates identity with “all you flooded and stranded weeds” and my favourite – “where the house of the sea / can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour”.
That one kept me up for at least an additional hour. My mind would swim inside it, words came tumbling in on its waves, I had to get up and write them down to use later. It’s so simple really, fitting the metaphorical shift of what one can do in a human house to the non-human versions of living environments. Yet finding something like that connection that works as well as it does in Oswald’s poem is bloody difficult. I am delighted to have found her.
March 31st, 2012
Alice Oswald, poetry and the river
I write quite a bit of poetry about water, mostly two rivers, the Snake and the Columbia. I suspect they are some of my most obscure, perhaps most personal of poems and they are the ones (of course) that I like the best. They are always about large time, and how our human issues appear in the face of that.
One of my sons died as an infant. The first “waters” poem I ever wrote looked at creation of what is now British Columbia, the waters that continually flow down from all the blocks of land being pushed in to create new mountains, new coast lands, and the death of a human infant. How can one feel grief in the face of eons?
Anyway, I came across the poet Alice Oswald and her book length poem The Dart – about River Dart, if you didn’t know. Oh, such a poem!
The opening of the book reads:
This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.
Fabulous idea because rivers, and their wide beds (otherwise known as the earth) do have local “voices”. The Snake, for example, is vastly different than the lower Columbia, even with the dams messing with the flow. And the region around the origin of the Snake and the Columbia—different as well. And of course the Snake flows into the Columbia, while the Columbia flows into the sea.
Anyway .. I think a lot about the unwelt of the river, as compared to the people who live, use and think about the river. Then there are the animals and plant worlds. They all co-exist creating the entirety of the world, even if we can’t appreciate it all. That’s the thing about having an unwelt, that it is the world that we perceive, and not the world that is.
Here’s a piece at the end of Oswald’s poem.
But tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning. No clocking in, no time bell. In summer you can dive in, see whales jumping, catch turtles the size of a dory. You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him You don’t know what you are till you’ve seen that
they start the boat, they climb as if over the river's vertebrae out of its body into the wings of the sea rounding the Mew Stone, the last bone of the Dart where the shag stands criticising the weather and rolls of seals haul out and scrabble away and the seal-watcher on his wave-ski shouts and waves and slowly paddles out of sight. I steer my wave-ski into caves sealwatcher horrible to enter alone The fur, the hair, the fingernails, the bones. Flick out the torch, the only thread between down here and daylight and count five while the sea suckles and settles. Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine. At low water I swim up a dog-leg bend into the cliff, the tide slooshes me almost to the roof and float inwards into the trembling sphere of one freshwater drip drip drip where my name disappears and the sea slides in to replace it. There the musky fishy genital smell of things not yet actual: shivering impulses, shadows, propensities, little amorous movements, quicksilver strainings and restrainings: each winter they gather here, twenty seals in this room behind the sea, all swaddled and tucked in fat, like the soul in its cylinder of flesh. With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft eyes, asking who's this moving in the dark? Me. This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy, all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals, driving my many selves from cave to cave...
How awesome is that.
I’ve ordered another of her books (a new and collected). I do wonder what else she writes.
March 27th, 2012
Mary Dalton, a poem or two
I got a couple of Mary Dalton books today. One is Merrybegot and the other Red Ledger. I mean the titles alone are killer.
Here’s one from Merrybegot.
After All That Gumption? It's clear he didn't Have the sense God gave a kitten. And it was after all that He got in tack with the other one— A real blatherskite If ever I saw one, Traipsing the beach all hours of the day, Or caterwauling away to the hens. Oh, she'd light up when she saw him, But in the kitchen with her nose in a book She'd burn water in a pot.
Heh.
This one is from Red Leger.
Backhome Blues: Another Tune So you sashayed down the road that balmy summer night, a jingling parade of one, had a high-class tantrum because you'd turned your back and the scene shifted? Who did you think you were? You are just a blip, old trout. A bit player. It's as if a dust mote stood on its hind legs and howled at the injustice of gravity. The granite erratics are laughing. Those fences you're shedding your crocodile tears over— a few sticks of wood. Those sheep and those hens: usurpers of the wolves' run. Your pastoral tableau a nanosecond in the long story. Legions of ghosts crowd round these ponds. Glaciers gouged out valleys and D'Iberville's fires roared down these hills; rogues roosted; rivers ran. You're read Gaff Topsails, yes? Then open your eyes wider and wise up.
I love the voice here. So far that last one is my favourite, but I’ve not quite finished the book. Of course I like the familiarity of the practical (rural? lower class?), but there is also the deep self-reflectiveness that chastises for the earlier sentimentality, sentimentality that very often is only possible by refusing to reference how that land came to be “owned” before it was “lost”.
History is hard to remember when it slashes away at privilege, so I do very much admire the capacity to remember when it is evident.
March 23rd, 2012
Lissa Wolsak, poems
I’ve been reading Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 by Lissa Wolsak.
I’ve had mixed reactions to it. Parts of the text remind me forcibly of Robin Blaser, a poet I just can’t get to like. But there are parts in this large volume of work that I adore, and there are moments of form, punctuation and other such small events that seem to me remarkably verdant: the use of .. for example. Just 2 dots. Not 3. Not 1. But 2. For some reason I love that and in the last week or so I’ve seen it appear under my hands and break the surface of my computer screen. I’m waiting now to see what colour blossom comes from that green punctuation.
Here I just want to give you some bits I love from the section called “An Heuristic Prolusion”__even the title!
~ I question as if mine, separation, causation, otherness, placelessness, subjectivity, the unconscious .. proprioception, the generosity and violence of the entangled states, signature patterns of humans who are not explicitly acknowledge within the formalism of the everyday, in trans- anthropological mind-acts and their apartheids ..
Part of my love of this is the use of academic theory. The words become bright pins holding peacock tails of idea to a fence made out of grammar. It reminds me of one of those celebrity street sites, or spontaneous street art moments when shiny bits of our culture accumulate and make a kind of meme conglomerate.
~ Writing is my way of listening and ventriloquising until I reach the place of speaking. Or, in order to perceive, I create distance, and re-situate my own epistemological ideas of causation, separation and otherness. To find axis, or an orbital angular moment, in rejection of its own centrality, always already disturbing its own refinement. To equipoise opposing forces, in their moving equilibriums, their tableaux.
I mean, how many times have you heard “equipoise” used? So wonderful when words like that show up. A couple of days ago I used the word “absquatulate” in a title, so I totally get the delight.
Appearing in Wolsak’s sequence are quotes from Celan, Lacan, Heidegger, the Buddha, and others. It seems like a very good writer’s “reaction paper” to a nest of ideas current in our culture. I suppose I like that part of Wolsak’s writing so much because I do this myself. I sit here in my room with (currently) Baudrillard, design books, molecular chemistry, Gadamer, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Sir Thomas Browne and others and they swirl around in my head clacking against each other and sometimes click-lock and a line of poetry comes to be.
Anyway, the whole book is quite diverse, and maybe you love Blaser. If you do there are bits in the book you’ll love. But even if not, should you want to get a mental stretch, dip in and read.

