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Interview & 4 poems: John B. Lee, London Open Mic's June 3rd, 2015, featured poet

5/19/2015

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John B. Lee will be the June 3rd, 2015 featured poet at London Open Mic Poetry Night at Mykonos Restaurant in London, Ontario. 

In 2005 John B. Lee was inducted as Poet Laureate of Brantford in perpetuity. The same year he received the distinction of being named Honourary Life Member of The Canadian Poetry Association and The Ontario Poetry Society. In 2007 he was made a member of the Chancellor’s Circle of the President’s Club of McMaster University and named first recipient of the Souwesto Award for his contribution to literature in his home region of southwestern Ontario and he was named winner of the inaugural Black Moss Press Souwesto Award for his contribution to the ethos of writing in Southwestern Ontario. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County (2011-14) and in 2015 Honourary Poet Laureate of Norfolk County for life. A recipient of over eighty prestigious international awards for his writing he is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People’s Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of Windsor). In 2007 he was named winner of the Winston Collins Award for Best Canadian Poem, an award he won again in 2012. He has well-over seventy books published to date and is the editor of seven anthologies including two best-selling works: That Sign of Perfection: poems and stories on the game of hockey; and Smaller Than God: words of spiritual longing. He co-edited a special issue of Windsor Review—Alice Munro: A Souwesto Celebration published in the fall of 2014. His work has appeared internationally in over 500 publications, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. He has read his work in nations all over the world including South Africa, France, Korea, Cuba, Canada and the United States. He has received letters of praise from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Australian Poet, Les Murray, and Senator Romeo Dallaire. Called “the greatest living poet in English,” by poet George Whipple, he lives in Port Dover, Ontario where he works as a full time author.

THE POEMS

Bonfire

the mind is soaked
in the fallen soldier’s sorrowful story
like dipping a book
into grey-paged water
there in the memory of weeping ink
only the sound of one sad horse
plodding unheard
under the saddle shadow 
of a weightless rider
a lugubrious clip clop
gone silent but for the 
quietness of imaginary war—endless elsewhere
the absent master sits where he drifts in the light
like smoke above burning
his empty boots facing away from the mane
as though they remained
at the foot of his bed
where he dreams on in timeless repose
over unmeasured reams of moonlit darkness
his mount turned to stone
in a vanishing orchard of shade
where he grazes on grass jeweled with dew
see where he sips
at the blackening pool
of the soul of the man he has lost

in an autumn of strangers
when evening falls early and soon
and then in the hoar frost of morning
with its white-glazed grasses of dawn
we are late to remember
the losses of gloaming
and lest we forget 
we lived and were loved in a short-lived blue
but for the woe of one horse called forever
with his sad fardel of funereal grief
know that he carries us all to the sun
like a lake in a shivering landscape of rain


All Too Often

the fibers of the alpaca
come falling
filthy from the beast
tumbling away from the ribs
in yellow smoulders
like wet smoke
the fleece stinks
of the fecal aromas
of grey-green mountain graze
it is stained by the piss 
of sleeping
in the camel slant of the Andes
high in the thin-to-breathe air

in the Sacred Valley
where the fluvial rush
of the Urubamba sweetens the earth
the sacha Paraqay root
is grated into a foamy wash
to clean spun yarn

in Lima
a three-thousand-year-old
shroud hangs 
like a hand-woven tapestry
on a museum wall
this blanket for the dead
outlasting even the old weather
of ancient gods
imagines the working fingers
of the women of the loom
plucking the red music of the cochineal
the carmine-coloured wood louse
like the cut-throat crimson of the sun gone down
draining its blood in a rainless blue

all too often when we may seem real
even in unrecollectable dreaming 
when the time-dry flesh of a dead king
shivers to be wakened like touched leather
as the bones come clear on the hands
like the shadow-crossed branches of night  

Stubborn Asshole

I am walking on
under ever-changing hues
of the mutable skies
of the mind
which vanish into yellow-black
when I close my eyes
on sunlight
shining through the semi-porous
flesh of the lids like candled linen
and we are all tourists
climbing the hard path
winding upward
through thin air of the Andes

if I stop and stand
panting and leaning on the catch breath
of a short stone wall
I feel myself buoyed within my flesh
like a hide boat
mooring to the slip and flow
of a calm-enough river
I might seem 
a statue seeping to the ankles
in runoff from rain 
about to sink soaked in the rising of silt
I take my language slow as a sleeper
waking from the stupor of a dream

and so I must push on
muling my swayback bones
like a kindle-burdened beast
as I hear
one fellow-traveller
hissing from behind with a hostile whisper
“stubborn asshole”
speaking of me
and what I might think of
as my brave refusal to be defeated
by almost fainting away in shadow float
like the gliding in flight of a kestrel 

know this of me, dear stranger
I value kindness, every sort of kindness
over all our human virtues
every kindness
save one—self kindness
for that I’d lash 
my heart within a sharp throng of thorns
where it would beat
and bloom forth like a deep-in-a-thicket rose
and from the shadow-centre of that tangled darkness
while God’s hand holds his lifting palm line to my breast
I would love the world
as a drumbeat loves the hills

In the Catacombs of St. Francis, Lima, Peru

I watch how the teenagers
dance and jostle
rub living shoulder to
living shoulder
feeling the adolescent heat
and prickle of bare arms touching together
in the heart-warmed eros
of their young bodies
the lovely girls
toss their dark hair
some holding up their black tresses
some falling forward in waves
in a shadow-splash of beauty
the boys raw-voiced
the half-swallowed silent
snow apple of the larynx
their new faces
fragrant with the efflorescence
of cheap cologne
they all
lean hard on the stone lip
for a closer view
looking down
at the dust and bone
denizens of the catacombs of Lima
the ulnas organized in bins
lying elbow to wrist
in a deep and dry earth-coloured darkness
the skulls
like broken crockery
dream gourds of a city harvest
from twenty-thousand dead
dead some five hundred years 
in that breathless basement

how time-tired 
these lost ladies of Thanatos
these caballeros of absence
rubbled in heaps
like a crop of tubers
turned by a four-pronged potato fork

what sad lucubration
in the midnight melancholia of poets
might unlock 
the ludic predicament 
of thirty young lives
gawking with fascination
at the hermetic abundance of the dead

there exists 
such an inescapable
lassitude
in these disarticulated heaps
like the lost 
wine cellars of noble Lords 
and petty gods
sour sipping the full lips
of these awestruck children
like dust on the breath of a kiss


THE INTERVIEW
(Interview by London Open Mic Poetry Night)

KH:  The brief biographical note in the final pages of your first collection of poems concludes with "… and hopes to write the perfect line." What did/do you mean by this?

JBL: “and hopes to write the perfect line ..."   I suppose by this I throw my lot in with those who write poetry rather than those who aspire to be called poets.  This latter ycleption seems something of a verdict.  I want to write poetry, to be in the midst of the thrilling impossibility of doing the thing we do when we surrender.  Henry Moore speaking to American poet Donald Hall put it this way, "The secret of life is to have a task, something to devote your entire life to, something to bring everything to, every minute of every day for your whole life.  And the most important thing is--it must be something you cannot possibly do!"

KH:  Describe, if you would, your writing process. Has it, or the degree to which you edit/re-write, changed? 

JBL: I write when the first line comes.  I rarely have any idea what I'm about to write.  Intention has little to do with execution.  When John Lennon wrote "Nowhere Man," he'd spent the entire morning struggling with silence and failing to write a song. In frustration, he went for a little lie down on the couch, and the song came flooding into his mind in whole cloth.  That's my process.  Distract the conscious mind, and let the poem slip through.

KH:  Which author(s) or poem(s) do you continue to mine for insight, inspiration or instruction?

JBL: Right now, I'm reading an anthology of Peruvian poems.  I'm fresh back from Machu Picchu, and my imagination is fevered by what I experienced there.  The poets I'm reading, contemporary Peruvian poets in Spanish with English translations, fire my imagination at the moment.  I've already written five poems since arriving home at 3:30 a.m. Friday morning.  And it's now Sunday morning at 10:10.  I revisit Dylan Thomas often.  Recently I reread Yeats later poems.  Reading poetry is my first love as a reader.  Poetry, then essays, then non-fiction, then short fiction, finally fiction.  I'm reading Wolf Hall right now.  

KH:  To what degree to do you value humour in your work and what, when maximally effective, may humour achieve? 

JBL: Humour unlocks sorrow.  If you want to make someone weep, first make them laugh.  Humour takes us deep.  I love silly jokes.  Word play.  I love to laugh out loud.  I'm reading Lil Bastard by David McGimpsey.  It's a book of what he calls 'chubby sonnets" sixteen lines long.  I was reading it aloud to my wife at the airport on our way to Peru.  And John Wing, he's a comedian by profession a poet by avocation.  I recently read with him and he had the crowd laughing till they wept and their sides ached, and then he read an absolutely amazing and poignant poem inspired by his daughter who had recently given up on her dream of becoming a professional musician, a dream which she suddenly realized was her father's dream for her, not her own dream for herself.  And the poem was not humourous at all.  On the contrary it partook of the melancholia of disappointment when a child disappoints her father, and the father feels the burden of his own aspirations carried by the child.  What made that poem go so deep in the heart, and hook itself there forever was the laughter that left us open to the sorrow.

KH:  As a student, it sometimes seems to me that the humanities in general and languages in particular are viewed as "marketable" disciplines. I noticed recently, for example, in a corridor of the U.W.O. Arts & Humanities Building (formerly the Ivey MBA building) a poster which read, I think, verbatim: "Why get a degree in the humanities? Think Hire". 
Articulate, if you would – and I realize this is a stupidly broad question, but – as an educator and a writer of long-standing, what is the importance of humanistic study for its own sake?

JBL: In life, only the stupid chase money for its own sake.  This recent commodification of education is almost so dumb and destructive as to make it unworthy of the dignity of a serious response.  I'm reminded here of Wilde's statement concerning the cynic who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.  It applies here.  A certain sort of ambition, all careerism, every kind of commerce measured solely in coin received and given has the capacity to be toxic to the soul, the heart, the mind and the body.  Great poetry, like all great art is an antidote to poison, an anodyne to the painful disappointment of an otherwise empty life, the life that chases money catches only the shadow of meaning, the simulacrum of a vacuous dream.

KH:  To what degree do you find solace(?) in the kind of truths science offers, and how do these contribute to or influence your work?

JBL: If I think at all of science, I think of two things.  I think of the scientific method and of the body of scientific knowledge.  The former of these is only one way of looking and not the only method of reliable cognition.  The latter of these is always evolving ever-changing latest best guess which has often been gloriously mistaken about the nature of nature.  I read widely and in my reading I include any number of books dedicated to science.  Of course, I've read Lucretius long poem, "The Nature of Things."  I've read Gilgamesh.  The Bible.  The Koran.  Hawkins.  I've considered the central question of cosmology "why is there something instead of nothing?"  I've read Bronowski's 'Ascent of Man,"  and I've read Darwin.  I'm not certain what we mean by the word ''truth" or what you mean when you speak of the "kind of truth" that science offers.  I'll take my moonlight also from the poems of Li Po even as I gaze upon the moon rocks kept under glass in Florida.  I remember one small step for man and was a child amazed.  I once wrote that "mythology is metaphysics simplified by story,"  and I see in the story of science the potential honey trap in the almost inescapable monotony of one view subject to the limited tyranny of logic, and the potential poverty of the rational mind if it stands alone without the warming inclusion of those things that cannot be measured or quantified or observed by the cold and objective cognition of an intelligence  trained by the exclusive and exclusionary world of most contemporary schools.

KH:  Two sentences for the young writers and readers of a future generation or two?

JBL: Two sentences for youth:  Never allow anyone to steal your joy.  If you would be a poet, read, write, be fully awake and alive as you fall head over heels in love with language and the world.

KH:  What is the question you’d see best fit to include in an interview in this context, and how would you respond to it?

JBL: I suppose the question I've been asked often is "why poetry?"  This question is asked because fiction is so often thought of as superior in sales and reader interest.  Why would one choose to write poetry when poetry has no audience in contemporary reader's life in Canada.  And the evidence might be had by the placement of poetry in the marketplace.  Go to the big-box bookstores and try to find poetry.  You end up on your hands and knees crawling along the floor sniffing at the bottom shelves in a remote region far from the potpourri that perfumes the bestseller entryway with Heather's pics stinking of rose petals and coffee cup aromas of Columbian brew percolating at the doorway.  

Why poetry--is asked of me as though I had a choice.  And if I had a choice, I'd still choose poetry.  Poetry is second only to music in my mind as the best of all the arts.  Poetry chose me, not the other way round.  And having been chosen, I write.

KH:  In “Bigger Love” – Dressed in Dead Uncles (Black Moss Press, 2010) – the lines:

and also here
on Black Out Thursday
the children of Toronto
wondered
what the stars were
haunting the urban darkness
of their newly visible heaven

seem to imply an absence of the numinous or mythopoeic among this next generation. I wonder if you would explore the meaning of the absence of a supra-narrative (if this is an appropriate term), poetic and otherwise, by which we seem as a species to have required momentum, identity, response, etc. 

JBL: Black Out Thursday is a lamentation on behalf loss when the past goes missing and the present vanishes due to it having been replaced by the filter of human aculturation.  The modern predicament is so polluted by ambient light the enormity of night, the beautiful and dazzling amazement of midnight heavens alive with stars is unavailable to an entire generation of children who are prisoners of civilization and the city.  What purity of perception might be had were we not seeing the world through the inescapable filters of literacy.  Imagine the pre-Adamic wonder, being awake and alive in a world where our cognition was not corrupted and contaminated and shaped by the fixed symbols of written language.  The grain of the first cultivated fields need not be seen as something destined for the counting houses of the owners of the land.  This is not nostalgia for a time that never was.  It is simply an acknowledgement of the unacknowledged assumptions that colour experience and obstruct the potential purity of experience.  In that poem, Bigger Love, I long for a more primitive, less human (ironically more human) world where the grand metaphysical questions come to us in raw light--sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and the luminous and fearless possibility of a vanishing of the difference between the interior world (the secondary world of what we see) and the primary world (the universe as it exists outside of our consciousness).  And the greatest obstacle to that purity is war.

KH:  Many of the poems of the second section of your first collection [Doppelgänger and Poems Only a Dog Could Love (Applegarth Follies, 1967), respectively], deal consciously with the theme of writing poetry, as “IX”, which begins with the sentence “Poetry instead / of suicide / you said.”, and “XX”, which draws poems as “salvation” for “their God”. With the accumulation of similes and sharply sparse language, the image of a kind of agonized twenty-something leaping inconsolably from page to page evolves. If this evocation is accurate, do you continue to see the writing of poetry as such a lifeline? And is, as the sometimes-explicit undertone of this collection seems to demonstrate, the act of writing a poem for you synonymous with or even preferable to (or inseparable from?) an ideal form of religious devotion or spirituality. 

JBL: My favourite lines from Dylan Thomas writing about himself in his Collected Poems, a book which I read when I was about sixteen, are these words: "These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't."  (Dylan Thomas, November 1952).  I still find those words to be true, as they were true for him then, they remain true for me now.

KH:  With respect to your decades of experience as an instructor, how has the university system in Canada, both in practice and in theory, changed most significantly between your years of formal study and now?

JBL: When I attended Western, the campus book store had a very large and impressive selection of poetry books for sale.  I was like a kid in a candy shop.  I went there often and browsed and bought and read and returned to browse and buy and read until I had accumulated such a wonderful personal library as to be the envy of any lover of poetry.  I bought dozens and dozens of poetry books.  That book store no longer has a poetry section.  Enough said?   I taught a class in Sport Literature in the department of kinesiology.  When I was teaching the novel "The Power of One," a novel set in South Africa during WWII, I discovered that most of the students in the class had no idea as to when WWII was fought, and at least half of the class (most of whom were on the dean's honour list) had no idea as to whether Canada had been involved in the war.  Enough said?

KH:  With respect to your decades of experience as a poet and author in Canada, in what way(s) has the relationship between Canadian poetry and Canadian politics most markedly changed? Are these “p” words bedfellows? How are they doing – counseling, second honeymoon, new parakeet? And in this context what do you think of the Mayor’s Poetry Challenge, and/or (presuming there's a relation, here) the recent NDP swing in Alberta?

JBL: I find recent Canadian politics to be quite weird.  The election of the NDP member in Quebec who was in Vegas at the time of her election and she had never been in the riding where she was a candidate seems disgraceful to me.  The failure to exercise your franchise on the part of over half of the citizens in the country is an anathema and it deserves the approbrium of those of us who vote and then suffer from the stupid neo-conservative governments that shame us all.  The law-and-order hawkishness of our current right wing majority has used its mandate to attack essential institutions like the CBC all the while stoking fear and attacking the arts as though we were members of a criminal class.  In the meantime, I cannot complain as to the attention I am receiving from the local community.  Over 100 people attended a reading I gave at the local library in Port Dover.  And those people paid $20 a ticket to come.  In the village of Highgate, where I attended elementary school, I have read there five times now, and I have had audiences in excess of 100 in a village of less than 300 people.  In Windsor, I have participated in poetry readings with over 400 in attendance.  I have faith that we who love this world will find one another and we will create a community that refuses the neoconservative individualism and careerism that poisons the well and threatens to destroy the minds of the next generation of children with the toxic mendacity of materialism and war.

The Mayor's Challenge raises the profile of poets and poetry, but it is only a brief breath in time.  If it becomes precious oxygen for a few, then it is doing important business.  It briefly dignifies what we do.

As for Alberta politics and the recent election, I only know the results, I do not know the reason behind those results (although I could speculate, it would not be well-informed speculation) and I do not know anything about the long-term impact of this upset.  I witnessed the NDP victory in my own province.  I know it was a backlash against the hubris of the liberal incumbent premier of the day with his smarmy smile and crimson tie, and in the wake of a startling victory for Bob Rae, the machinery of the popular press went into overdrive to demonize and vilify his government.  We reaped the whirlwind by electing Mike Harris, arguably the worst government in the history of Canada.  I spent the entire mandate of that neoconservative era listening to the ugly-minded supporters of his government waging verbal war on the poor.  As for the arts, during his government the arts were characterized as a criminal underclass.  Informed opinion was scoffed at.  Let them eat canned tuna was the mantra of the day.  So, when the electorate swings wildly this way and that, I fear what comes next, what comes in the wake of a sea change.  In Ontario, the province swung so far to the right in the aftershock of our brief flirtation with NDP, it has taken us ten years to recover, and we are still suffering the destructive juggernaut of right wing's crushing of the democratic benevolence of what it means to be Canadian.  


KH: To take a stanza from In the Catacombs of St. Francis, Lima, Peru: 

what sad lucubration
in the midnight melancholia of poets
might unlock
the ludic predicament
of thirty young lives
gawking with fascination
at the hermetic abundance of the dead

Firstly, do you see the oblique or frivolous consideration of death by the young in particular as cultural or human?
Secondly, regarding your choice of words, and the craftsperson’s joy and emotive precision conveyed thereby, I wonder if you ever feel, for example, as Ferlinghetti did in “Constantly risking absurdity and death” – “whenever he performs / above the heads / of his audience”? In view of your description of trying “to find poetry” in “big-box bookstores”, do you identify, to some degree, with Baudelaire in his vignette “The Dog and the Scent Bottle”? And is this a question for today, or a question for the arts generally?
Poetry is often charged with – and successfully convicted of, considering, in part, the constitution of the juries in question – with lexical elitism. Is it to pander to modernity to write in Wordsworth’s or Whitman’s or Bukowski’s ‘language of the street’? Does one shirk responsibility thereby? Is obligation an improper term? Or may it only apply to what one has to the page?

JBL: I actually find the fascination with death by these young people to me quite charming.  I'm reminded of my own period of fixation on the macabre when I was a teenager.  Evenings at the home of friends playing with the ouija board, reading ghost stories well into the night, a youthful flirtation with Alfred Hitchcock presents, and so on.  I watched those young people staring down at the bones in the catacomb and saw my own self in their awestruck youth.  

I certainly hope I don't perform above the heads of an audience, if by that he means complexities beyond their ken.  I guess what I'm hoping for is that poetry slows us down enough, makes us linger long enough to see.  If we poets are sometimes given the gift of drawing water from the deep wells that we share a common thirst.  

I hadn't read Baudelaire's "The Dog and the Scent Bottle," or at least I hadn't remembered reading it until you brought it to my attention.  I guess I'd say that what he is implying about humans is only sometimes true.  When I was very young a radio station I listened to sometimes used to host a feature called "battle of the bands" and they'd play two songs and ask the audience to call in and choose one of the two as the better song at any given moment.  Herman's Hermits 'I'm Henry the Eighth I am" soundly defeated "Strawberry Fields," by the Beatles.  Time has rendered that particular competition ridiculous in the extreme.  Of course, some of us knew at the time, and obviously others did not.  Mood rings, pet rocks, novelty songs, certain kinds of cool in the moment slang, the mullet, garish bling, powdered wigs, wax lips, jawbreakers, candy cigarettes, Tiny Tim, every dog will have his day sniffing excrement and lapping up garbage.  I refuse to forget the boy I was when I was a super-cool Poindexter strutting the brick halls of RDHS in my winkle pickers with steel clickers on the heels.  I refuse to sit in judgement of that risible boy.  There is no such a thing as an apprentice responder.  Everyone has his Hardy Boy days when some of the teachers who did not get it made light of our enthusiasm.  If I don't refuse to forget then I fail to imagine.  I smile to think of those young listeners phoning in and voting for Herman's Hermits.  I'm grateful that I wasn't one of them, that even then I knew the difference between bubble gum and art.  But then, that wasn't true of every aspect of my youthful taste and judgement.  Sad to think how some people never get it.  But I say, "better a bad poem than a good bomb."  Leave it at that.

Why does the word schadenfreude exist?  What mysteries of the complexities of happiness are unlocked by knowing the word eudaimonia. It's always been obvious to me that deliberate obscurity is a vice of bad poetry.  I agree with Neitzche's caveat concerning the fact that certain poets muddy their waters to make them look deep.  When I was sixteen and reading Elliot's "The Waste Land" for the first time, I was frustrated by the erudition that seemed exclusionary.   But the language is so lovely, and comprehension so profoundly satisfying that I've read that poem dozens and dozens of times to wrestle with the deep mysteries with which the poet is concerned.   I've been called a People's Poet often enough to know the value of accessibility.  On the other hand, I love words for their music and use them for their qualities as dictionary music.  Don Gutteridge once told me that the difference between a good reader and a bad arises from the fact that the former knows enough to read a passage twice and then again and perhaps again in order to unlock the meaning.  It's the not knowing that you don't know or the laziness of the imagination that thinks we can experience the deeper truth without the shared experience of common language available to us in a dictionary.  Read Shakespeare if you want to see how a great writer celebrates the breadth of language.  And I rarely use a word I didn't know when I was seventeen.  I grew up on a farm and my mother would sometimes say to me, "talk farmer."  To this I told her, Virgil was a farmer.  I'll take the entirety of available music and sing like a songbird dreaming his song whilst he sleeps.

I do love Bukowski, by the way.  And Wordsworth too.  But I prefer Coleridge to Wordsworth and Dickinson to Bukowski.  Read Emily Dickinson's letters if you want to see the genius of an original mind.  Wrestle with her complexities and see how the universe blooms.

In those lines you've chosen, I see a contrast between the language of ''sad lucubration" and the giddy metaphysics of children.  They are both thinking of death.  Think here of Hopkins poem "Spring and Fall" to a young child, "Margaret are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving,"  wherein he writes "And yet you weep and know not why" ... the poet's meditation on aging and death gifts the child with knowledge or at least with wrestling as a child does with the great metaphysical questions.  One dare not fall into the honey trap that dumbs us down to a willful simplicity when the rich language of the entire lexicon makes irony, complexity, paradox luminous and true.  Language is a light by which we might glimpse varieties and variations of meaning.



THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, enclosed terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Doors: 6:00 to 6:30 (It's a restaurant.) Event begins at 7:00

THE FEATURED POET:  John B. Lee will open the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, open mic poets will read until the intermission at about 8:00. Depending on the number of open mic poets signed up, readings could go as late as 10:30, with a second intermission at about 9:00, but the event usually ends about 9:30. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served, so those who come early have a wider choice of when they will read.

COVER: By donation (in donation jar on back table, or use Donate Button on website Donate Page). Donations are our only source of income to cover expenses. 

RAFFLE PRIZES: 
Anyone who donates at the event receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. 

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Interview & Four Poems: Laurie D Graham, Featured Poet for London Open Mic, May 6/15

4/24/2015

0 Comments

 
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Laurie's Bio
Laurie D Graham was raised in Sherwood Park, Alberta, and now lives in London, where she writes, reviews, teaches, and helps edit Brick magazine. Rove, her first book of poetry, was published by Regina’s Hagios Press in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second book of poetry is due out with McClelland & Stewart in 2016. Work from that forthcoming collection recently won The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the  CBC Poetry Prize and Arc’s Poem of the Year contest, and is forthcoming in Prairie Fire.


Four Poems by Laurie


Two excerpts from Rove


Say my father is sitting on the roof.
Every childhood dog, every car he ever had, looking.

And say I’m three, crouched in the yard like someone
trying to peel reason from above.

Say the big spruce came down before
or after the picture, or say it’s still there,

upwardly-assertive, sap-starved and churning up the sewer pipes,
shading my brother’s bedroom window.

Now say It was a different big tree that left.
Maybe the poplar by the garage.

Maybe in some groove of needle or spawn of cone
my brother is still five and home

from kindergarten with the flu, sweet-speaking,
cherub-rough, puffy eyes and a cowlick,

for once not smarter than me. Maybe
just five and tucked in to read Harry the Dirty Dog.

Maybe our house on Fir Street,
someone’s fifth of an acre, someone’s protective thicket

is where I’m three and crouching,
looking up at Dad while he smiles out at his wife and the camera

and the grass is softer than grass between my toes.
 
 

*

 

Could we find that place, that slough at the curve of what road
that we’d visit in the van in the summer,

with its weeping branches like the walls of a top-lit room,
the sky like a skylight, the red-winged blackbirds

as present as peacocks and the insects deafening?

Where Dad would quiet the engine so we could watch
and we could listen and let the scene press into our memory.

Not the name or place. There’d be nothing
for the computer when we are older

and want to find it.

 

Lady of Attiwandaron

Ground fizzing and what sounds like cannon fire in the distance, three echoes.
Corn stalks and chunks of cob skittered into the ravine, over the infill, over the boundary precipice.
Surface water fizzing, trapped in sod, pooling in bootprints, adding static
to the Star Trek whirring of a lone bird to the northwest.

The fizzing, the moving grass and the wind moving the grass,
and a fly, and the whirring of a far stand of trees to the Northwest, trees cold and encircling,
graffitied, human knives, these sisters, one smooth-skinned, one rough-skinned, one half-smooth
and half-rough standing inside the 500-year-old barricade, earthen, two-souled.

Branch snap in the woods and cannon fire, wind in my ears and retreating bootprints,
that single whirr to the north now, behind me.
At the gate the biggest tree, old sister carved up, grown out of earthworks’ hump,
roots let down all around, seed accidental, singular, dead branches poised above.

Her canopy. AF&JM carved 20 ft up. Cannon-fire, cannon-fire, whirr.
Her roots a ground-seep fizzing, her roots water rolling in each direction,
toward the ghosts of trees nearest Iona Road—small, hollow stumps leading you out,
walking sticks propped against, pointing back to the corn field, to corn, to cannon.



John Graves Simcoe

Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada 1791–1796

         We walked over a rich meadow, and at its extremity came to the forks of the river. 
         The Governor wished to examine this situation and its environs; 
         and we therefore remained here all day. 
         He judged it to be a situation eminently calculated for the metropolis of all Canada
.

         — Major Edward Baker Littlehales, Simcoe’s adjutant and secretary, March 1793

I’ve passed a few seasons in London, a few more anyway than you.
Human to think a capital onto this spot, I suppose,
your paths now turned to concrete at the fork of Askunessippi, the antlered river,
La Tranche, your Thames.
Through the walls of the forest, the darkened pineries, the gnarl of walnut,
primeval, your staff etching into their diaries, their years of marching through shrub and swamp,
hacking into the frail, impossible, dense Carolinian forest.
You were human after all.
Primeval is a mouthful folks here don’t know how to swallow
so we live toothless, razed, this city like ringworm, the joke of green sod, the jonesing mainstreets.
Did you calculate on your day beside the river the factory plumes, coffee cups in the runoff,
an army of sleeping bags decaying along these banks,
the geese sinking like rocks into the riverbed?



THE INTERVIEW
(Interview by Kevin Heslop for London Open Mic Poetry Night)

KH: I guess one of the first things someone might notice is the sentence, that a voice more akin to prose in “Lady of Attiwandaron” sharpens into poetry; dispersive language focuses into punctuated knots and a tighter succession of images. I wonder if in the writing you feel a certain sense of incantation or a kind of Homeric supplication to the muses? A kind of seatbelt, headlights, try the wipers, put it in gear, reverse out of the driveway before the necessity of obstacles or byways determine your path. A kind of lubricate the subconscious with descriptive scene-setting before the going. In the context of being spoken through rather than speaking, to what degree do you feel at the helm of your work? 

LG: A fair bit, ultimately. That move, in “Lady of Attiwandaron,” from prose sentences to image-litany is a deliberate one, to show the senses intensifying in that place (the Southwold Earthworks), the sounds and images revealing themselves and piling up and humming ever louder. But you might be right about getting into the mode of poetry, into the cockpit. I try to start with an image or an idea, and I try to start in an unassuming way—sort of surprising the reader into the poem—but I am indeed the one doing the sensing, the perspective is mine, and to claim that there is something speaking through me assumes that what I say contains some sort of unadulterated objectivity, some sort of truth, which I can’t (and mustn’t) claim.


KH: Who or which works would you cite as early influences, and from whom or what or which place or what kind of experience do you continue to draw inspiration? 

LG: I count as earliest influences Shel Silverstein, Dennis Lee, Maya Angelou, Charles Bukowski, Diane Di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. While I was writing Rove, I had a handful of books acting as totems: Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Jan Zwicky’sRobinson’s Crossing, Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, and Myrna Kostash’s All of Baba’s Children. These days it’s the story of these lands and the colonial history of this place that’s driving the work.


KH: And then the question of sod. The word comes up in “John Graves Simcoe” as “the joke of sod” and in “Lady of Attiwandaron” as “trapped in sod”. Is lament for the maimed natural world, for you, an essential place for the contemporary poet? If the mammal in the lifting and the sipping from the plastic bottle remains a mammal, what is lost? Or, more precisely, what is found? Do you feel your work to be necessitated by or born out of a post-industrial ethos? Getting and spending, to what degree do we lay waste our powers, and wherein may those powers be reclaimed? 

LG: I find certain words/phrases/images coming up again and again in my work, and sod is one of them. My poems are outside often, out trying to say the names of things. And they take the form or tone of elegy quite a lot—a mode of grief that ends up being creative—so yes, I think you’re on to something there. That’s where I go in my work, but contemporary poets can (and must!) shoot off in all sorts of directions.


KH: You continue to be an active member of the London poetry community: you’ll be reading at Poetry London on Wednesday April 22, at Central Library the following Saturday, and at Mykonos in May. You’ve agreed to serve as one of three judges this year, along with Ola Nowosad and Ron Stewart, for the Alfred Poynt Award in Poetry. I wonder if you might share a few words about your impression of the London literary community, about, in your capacity as an editor for several literary journals cited as the finest in the country, the Canadian literary landscape, and a principle difference or two between what may be achieved through a public reading in contrast to the written word on paper.

LG: Hard to put in a few words! Regarding the literary community in London: it was so welcoming to me when I moved here in 2013, and that continues to be the case. Small but vigorous and dedicated is how I’d describe it. I’ve found more support here than I could have anticipated.

Secondly, I feel the same way about the Canadian literary landscape as I do about Canada itself: I am skeptical of the designation. I think literature is more local than that, just like I think sovereignty and identity is more local than that. But I think there’s a lot going on in the literary community in Canada, and things are dire and robust and cash-starved and invigorating and challenging and adversarial and ever-changing. And always the boundaries need to be pushed out. The voices we hear need to more accurately reflect our “country” and who’s in it and the things they see and know.

On reading to an audience versus having people read your work in a magazine or a book: these are two parts of a whole when it comes to poetry, or the type of poetry I make anyway. It needs to be both heard and read. So doing both just completes the circuit. The differences between the two are big, the most significant of which being that you can see or sense your audience’s reaction to the work at a reading, whereas on the page your “audience” can read your work however they want. This modulation between “active” reading and “passive” listening has the potential to create significantly different understandings of the very same groupings of words, which I find not only fascinating but vital to the craft.

KH: You mentioned that the colonial history of this place drives your work these days. I wonder if you’d be willing to expand on what it means to you to live in a colony, and how this understanding shapes the perspective of your work and daily thought. 

LG: That’s a hard thing for me to express well in anything other than poetry. It hits on deep identity issues and ongoing injustice, bigotry, violence. The destructiveness of forcing a colonial statehood model onto societal structures that have existed here for tens of thousands of years is something that so many people are still in full-on denial about, and that propels the poetry for me. And so, as I started to address in Rove, I come from homesteaders that farmed land on the last parts of the prairie that Macdonald ignored into submission so he could ship goods from Ontario by train. And now I live in a place from which those goods originated, and that age of manufacturing seems over. As is the train, largely. That trips me into poetry. What was—what is—all that violence for? 


KH: On the question of early influences: Bukowski, Angelou and Ginsberg in particular seem distinct, if not contrasting, voices. I wonder if you might say a word or two on what it was in these writers and their approach to poetry that impelled your early writing, and whether anything in particular to which you responded bonds them.

LG: With Bukowski it was a baseness, a rawness, making not just the colloquial but the fucked up belong to something as “put together” as poetry can be. Plus all the swearing, which always draws in the young. With Angelou it was strength, a welcoming strength. I read her work as a young adolescent and she had a big effect on me. She also taught me about race at a time when I was starting to form ideas about what the world was. And with Ginsberg it was a hugeness, a willingness to include—or rather an insistence on including—the whole of his world in his poetry. So maybe the three of them have boundary-pushing in common, trying to make poetry more accurately reflect what’s in the world.


The Pivot Questionnaire 

What is your favourite word?
Threnody.

What is your least favourite word?
Pant, singular. “A khaki pant” is the most disgusting phrase in existence.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Movement. Going for a walk or a bike ride. Looking out the window of a bus or a train. These things stir the mind and the senses for me.

What turns you off?
Malls.

What is your favourite curse word?
Fuck. I’m a traditionalist. Sorry, Dad.

What sound or noise do you love?
The bird sanctuary that is my backyard at sunrise.

What sound or noise do you hate?
The drone of road traffic.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
I’d become an arborist in half a heartbeat.

What profession would you definitely not like to attempt?
I’d never want to be a cop or a security guard.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
I got a few people I want you to meet.



THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, enclosed terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Doors: 6:00 to 6:30 (It's a restaurant.) Event begins at 7:00


OPEN MIC: Following the two featured poets in the first hour and the intermission, open mic poets will read until 10:30. There may be a second intermission after the first 15 have read. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

COVER: By donation (in donation jar on back table, or use Donate Button on website Donate Page). Donations are our only source of income to cover expenses. 

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates at the event receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. 


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Interview and Four Poems: John Nyman, featured poet for April 1st, 2015

3/24/2015

1 Comment

 
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John Nyman will be one of two poets featured at the April 1st National Poetry Month reading at London Open Mic Poetry Night. The other will be Penn Kemp.

John's  Bio
John Nyman types, speaks, and constructs poetries ranging from lyric verse through to visual and conceptual forms. His poems and short fiction have been featured in a variety of print and online journals and collections—most recently including Rampike, (parenthetical), ditch, and Cordite Poetry Review—and he has performed at and/or co-hosted several prominent reading series. Since summer 2014 he has also designed and self-published innovative, small-scale chapbooks featuring visual and experimental poetry.

Originally from Toronto (where he often still appears at barroom open mics and house-readings), John is currently studying towards a PhD in Theory and Criticism at Western University with a focus on postmodern theories of language and contemporary conceptual writing. In the past he has served as Senior Fiction Editor of Existere, a biannual art and literature journal published out of York University’s Vanier College, and Arts Editor of Excalibur, York’s campus newspaper. John is also a graduate of York University’s undergraduate program in Creative Writing.

John Nyman lives in the body, the body lives in the world, and the world lives in the text.

More information and links to past publications can be found at https://johnnymanwriting.wordpress.com/.



Four Poems by John Nyman



When You Need Water


If the CD skipping in my old-time walkman
sounds like water,
And the me inside is diving out my breastplate hollow to bathe
in the cesspool at the TV,
And his skin is pruny as a thumbprint,
And the blinking light blinks sky blue,
And I’m unpardoned on the wicker sofa,
Well, even the blackboard night might be bigger than my future.
In total, it takes a whole lotta water to breathe.

By the power invested, by the energy skittered away,
Along the rivulet of the second dimension
of the ass-bare moon,
After the water ransacked the follows,
altercations,
Darling, you cross at my side until the changing of the water,
Though I’ve never really been there in the moment,
And it’s also still visible in the rude distance,
And it has never been explained clearly.
Hold it a bullet.

If the smoke is on the water,
If the smoke is beautiful, and by that I mean,
If the last of the pack tastes a lot like an ice cream sundae
just in time,
You’ve caught me right in the middle of something,
’Cause I’m a stone-cold shame just a-lookin’ for some fame,
Or a pointy-haired boss bogarting the water cooler.
Or noodling over a secret,
In a hole in a log at the bottom of the harshest part of the Outback.


[originally published in The Quilliad 2]




Not One


I saw a pregnant woman on the bus
collect a blonde-haired, red-tied ponytail.
I read a sign that advertised a sale

for men’s suits, catching troughs of sun glow
in its gloss and spitting it back out into
the sky. I watched a music video
that sang: seventy millions of people

do this, do that, keeping the number hallowed,
the notes shivering with the strength of the sum
of all those unique humans, differences swallowed
together. The best numbers are not one,

though you say we have that many minds and souls.
I’d dissolve if I argued, guarding thoughts too much
like zebra mussels or flocks of white seagulls.


[originally published in The Quilliad 1]




I’ve Started Waking Up Earlier


One summer I spent every night
awake and wandering. Watched the cartoon
channel that flowed all hours—decades-old
shows draining black seconds. Saw
“One Froggy Evening” for the first time,
the Broadway-singing frog’s phonograph songs
tearing down a world as fast as Acme Construction.
I held my thin, black sleeve
to the lamp. The light shone straight and strong
through every fibre,
emblazoned an asteroid cloud of cotton dust
in my clothes.
                          The mornings, now, are like smoke,
even though I’m cleaner and more alert.
I eat breakfast now. I might be nostalgic
if I knew what it meant, but the word won’t form
in high numbered hours.
No shade of regret floats like bacteria in this
crisp air, though there is regret.
I solved the mystery of the dark thump
at my door each night near 5 AM.
Sometimes I read the paper.



[originally published in Cordite Poetry Review 42]




Revolutionary Haiku Composed at Niagara Falls



If enough of us
moved fast enough, nobody
could realize we’d thawed

—not even us, fall-
ing like mortar, ten thousand
head black-spotted cows

becoming water,
becoming a wild, white smoke,
and then air, the air.


***


What power’s greater
than the still-tumbling pillar?
That which stilled “pillar.”


[originally published in Hamilton Arts and Letters 6.2]



THE INTERVIEW
(Interview by Kevin Heslop for London Open Mic Poetry Night)


KH: I’m trying to be aware that the poems you’ve chosen for the interview are ripe for projection in the psychoanalytic sense, and the possible danger of some lurid showmanship on my part in the responding; they feel sparse and porous and somehow like a rapid kind of complex Frogger ballet during which at a certain point a three-dimensional helicopter appears above the busy street to unfurl a rope ladder for the dancer who takes it and is carried off, and that that. And I’m feeling infantile with attempts to derive patterns or linearity: that awful phrase “and what was the poet trying to say?”, as if he had somehow failed to say exactly what was to be said, and for the experience of reading the poem to have been full and unswerving like watching a candleflame which loses dimension at the moment of photographing. Anyway, a throat-clearing to encourage digressions and any suitable restructuring of the questions to follow. I’m just trying to push first dominoes. 

JN: Combining Frogger and ballet as fluidly as you do should probably seem strange. But strangely, it doesn’t to me. Characterizing a poem as a dance is tried and true, but I think a videogame is at least as apt a metaphor. Because if a poem is a dance, it’s one I dance with my body only as much as I also dance it with the technologies of language, culture, keyboards and pixels.

A brief note on “what the poet was trying to say”: I once heard a poet (I’m monstrously ashamed to admit I forget who it was) introduce one of her readings by saying, “If it’s aboutness that you need, this poem is about….” I loved it because it reminded me that aboutness is only one thing among many. At the same time, sometimes we do need it.

KH:: To sound maybe plebby, the concluding images in Not One–“I’d dissolve if I argued, guarding thoughts too much / like zebra mussels or flocks of white seagulls”– preceded by a meditation on modern monolithic culture “the sum / of all those unique humans, differences swallowed / together”, seem so intuited as to be almost dream-inspired. 

The question, then, would be, I think: (1) how and to what degree do you feel your work is intuited rather than bound to linearity, (2) how for you does intuition relate to experimentation and (3) does your process of composition ever feel contiguous with, for example, the dream world, the poem in the writing an exploration of synaptic terrain?

JN: Definitely not linear, but I don’t believe in intuition. To be more specific: “intuition,” I think, is an easy out, usually invoked to explain away the need to draw connections. Now, connections may not always be direct, obvious, or logical—i.e. “linear”—they might not even be the same connections tomorrow. But they are always possible, and poetry demands them.

Connections are often described in terms of lines, so maybe I shouldn’t be so down on “linearity” after all. As long as it doesn’t mean “unilinearity,” since there are many possible lines. “Polylinearity,” or even “demi-linearity,” might suit me better.

Let’s pretend that by “intuition” in (2) you meant “polylinearity” (now I’m scrambling all kinds of lines): then I’d answer, it has everything to do with it. For me, experimentation means looking at all the possible connections (variables), precisely selecting a few to test, then registering the experience of how they play out. Experimentation is about making something happen, preferably in such a way that you can watch it happen.

To be more generous to your third question: even if I’m skeptical about “intuition,” what I’m trying to talk about has everything to do with the dream world. My dreams (and yours too, I hope!) are full of logics and narratives that would never fly in waking life. Your idea of “synaptic terrain” is especially appropriate since “synapse” refers to a junction or linkage: dreams are overstuffed with words and events that “click” or rhyme, ultimately in more ways than you’ll ever fully realize (Freud would tell you this). What’s important to me is that what happens in dreams still “happens,” even if nobody else (or not even you, yourself) can make sense of it. Dreams contain possible connections; they can be experimented with.

KH: An old remark on haiku, which I’m paraphrasing poorly: Those haiku of which we understand 90% are great haiku; but of those of which we understand 40% we never tire. What for you is the importance of ambiguity, mystery, surprise and unprecedented experimentation? How does this view effect or sculpt or relate to the relationship between your reader and your self?

JN: I’m glad your question isn’t about haiku, because I know nothing about it. The concepts you mention are very important to me, largely because they can open into their opposites. Ambiguities can be clarified, clarities can be ambiguated, etc.

I like these openings or crossings between categories. Chain a few together and you have something really interesting. Have you ever been surprised to hear someone say something so incredibly predictable? Or have you ever expected to be surprised? (Is anyone ever really surprised by a surprise birthday party?)

Somewhere around here is that 40% you speak of.

More to the point: I do value ambiguous, mystifying, and surprising writing, but I also like to interrogate our expectations and the things that seem to just “make sense.” I love being able to give the reader something to work with, even if it’s just barely enough for her to keep reading, while the rest of the poem falls apart around her. I’m after that sense of the deceptively simple (although often it’s more like simply deceptive).

I’ve left a loose end: “unprecedented experimentation.” But I don’t think I could speak of the unprecedented, especially if I were intending to respond to a question!

KH: I’ve often heard it said by actors that, after reaching a certain threshold of familiarity with one’s lines and the scene or play at hand, one can sort of mentally do away with the lines and be at liberty to explore a moment and a character in a circumstance. Considering the wealth of poetic and critical theory you carry, I wonder if you feel similarly about writing poetry, how that might manifest in the process of writing, and how practiced familiarity with theory shapes your work. 

JN: I never write from the heart. I can’t and I don’t want to—in this way I guess I’m childish. When I write, I feel like I’m giving up my effort to some voice that naturally has something to say.

What you have called “liberty” I would call a demand: when I know something well (“by heart,” so they say) I also know that it isn’t mine to use or abuse as I wish. Rather, by virtue of knowing it, I owe it its own life and voice. Maybe, then, it wouldn’t make sense to say that my poems are about the things I’ve heard and read, but that they are those things.

Theory is one of these, for sure. But ultimately I’m not sure what’s special about its being called “theory.” I have to admit that I can’t understand theory to be anything besides another voice talking.

KH: In your response to the second question, terms usually attributable to the domain of mathematics come into play, as poly-linearity, logical, variables. Your work also often feels formulaic in its execution, clean and almost cubistic. I wonder if and to what degree you feel the sciences and poetry are interrelated species–”refrain” and “recursion” sharing a conceptual root, for example, likewise experimentation in both the chemical and verbal senses. 

JN: I appreciate your ability to frame our dialogue in such a way that “formulaic” comes off as a compliment, even though it seems like one of the last words we’d use to describe good poetry.

One thing I take from formalism is the sense that fixed structures and “clean” execution are neither traditionalist hindrances to poetic genius nor simply fortuitous discoveries, but actually first-order vital components of a poem’s quality. For a formalist, writing is work: it’s specific and even finicky, and if it isn’t done a certain way it’s probably not worth doing. I believe there is a kinship here with scientific research and engineering, since in these fields experimentation and design must proceed through very strict structural limitations. As a result, they also tend to explicitly demand intensive and repetitive labour. But this is by no means to say that science and engineering can’t have profound and unexpected consequences—quite the opposite, in fact.

Many poets, I feel, are wishy-washy about this. I rarely hear poets speak in detail about the fine-grained, mechanical labour required to fit words to a poetic apparatus, and even virtuosically executed fixed forms tend to be explained away as little more than happy accidents. For example, “it just seemed to fit what I was doing in the poem” seems to be a common justification for attempting what are actually very difficult feats of metre, rhyme, and other constraints. Personally, I would assert that poetic form is often artificial and arbitrary, but not for that reason any less “worth it.” I wonder if, were poets to (excuse the expression) get real about their work and speak more explicitly to the formulaic components of their process, we might invite a greater degree of legitimacy for our practice as well as opening doors to collaboration and common ground with other art forms.

KH:: In your response to the fourth question, you say “my poems are [not] about the things I’ve heard and read, but... they are those things.” With this in mind: in most of the poems you provided, a narrative “I” features prominently; pursue, if you would, your distinction between subject and subjectivity. 

JN: You’ve certainly found an apparent contradiction, and it is true that the narrative “I” is in some ways very important, if not fundamental, to my writing. But it’s also true, as you’ve implied, that all of this rests on a distinction between subject and subjectivity. Maybe I could try to understand it this way: For me the narrative “I” isn’t evidence that I, John (or anyone else, for that matter), am there to be discovered behind the poem; rather, I try to make the “I” a means of propulsion for the words themselves, a way to make the poem speak for itself and to speak toyou. As if it were another person—a friend or, perhaps better, a prospective lover—staring back at you from across the table. The poem is speech or speaking speech--it speaks, it says “I”—not just something that’s been said. In turn, it demands that you engage with it (and here I mean any poem, not just my own) by listening, not by deciphering.

If I were behind the poem, or even if I consciously tried to write the poem from the perspective of someone who wasn’t me, the poem would have a subject—and this is exactly what I don’t want. “Subject,” here, has at least two of its dominant meanings in English (subject as the human origin of action or thought, and subject as the matter being discussed): if the poem originates in a certain person’s perspective, the poem seems also be about that person, and then the reader’s goal would be to decipher what the poem says about that person. I already mentioned how I feel about “aboutness.” But subjectivity comes before all that. To me it really meansintersubjectivity, the power we have to appear to each other and interact with each other as if we were subjects, when in reality our subjecthood is always incomplete (we are constantly growing, changing, surprising each other, etc.).

Of course, you can always try to discover a subject behind the speaking “I.” Who are they? What do they mean? Why are they important to me? But that won’t stop them from speaking. Sometimes urgently. Please, listen.


KH: So here’s part of John Steffler’s response to a question about subverting technology with his poetry, to which I wonder if you have a response:

“Our technologies have increasingly distanced us from our immediate interaction with the world, and I think that this is most telling, from my point of view, [with regard to] the technology of language. 

“I think of language as our foremost technology; it’s really the first technology that creates a symbolic reality. And this was really brought home to me in thinking about the internet and cyber space and so on. It has struck people that we know we have so called “virtual reality” with the computer screen [which] is becoming more and more capable of simulating more than just visual reality but sound and who knows what–they’ll try to adopt other artificial sense perceptions.

“I even remember being at a party talking to this cooky man who suggested: why instead of windows don’t we just have flat screens that could show us the scene outside and then we wouldn’t have to be losing heat out through the windows; we could just be surrounded by screens...

“So there is this notion of virtual reality replacing reality, but language did that hundreds of thousands of years ago when we started with symbolic sounds to represent things, and actions and states of mind and the whole syntactical and grammatical apparatus that suggests causality and possession and time and so on. That has already distanced [us] from the world–we can carry the world around in our heads as language. 

“So, getting back to my interest in poetry, it’s to take language as a technology and give it back to nature in some sense, to sort of green language. To subvert language as a technology. So I accept that we are technological beings but I think that in poetry and in the arts there’s a worthy and important mission to be engaged in in trying to reverse the direction of technology and make it work to bring us back into contact with the world rather than isolate us from the world further.”

When challenged on this point, he enfleshed this idea of subversion: 

“I think before humans invented language... we were closer to what the rest of the animal kingdom is like now. And creatures do sense things and are aware of things in a pre-linguistic way. And I think that we still have a great measure of that kind of communication in music, and in body language, and in many other semiotic forms apart from language. Poetry happens to be the linguistic art form or discourse that retains some of those elements inside language. And I think that it’s very clear that a poem doesn’t–I mean, why write a poem? If you just want to say something clearly in words, you write an essay. A poem enacts something. The surface meaning, the denotations of words are just on the surface; what a poem is really doing is in the sounds of the words, and in the dance of the words, and in the subliminal message that’s coming in below the denotative level, on the connotative level, on the imagistic level, on the metaphoric level and so on. And that’s what I mean about going back into language, going back to a deeper kind of signification in language. It’s just what poetry’s all about. Otherwise, why write poetry? Write an essay. Write a hist–, you know?”

Let's say the question is: To what degree, in your view, can language as a form of techonology be subverted? And to what degree, in light of Steffler's remarks, is this subversion necessary? What does technology mean to your poetry, to poetry, to the exchange between two consciousnesses, the importance of the subversion of technology, the subversion of technology by technology (i.e. language). etc.

JN: You’ve set me up for an analytical moment. Better fasten your seatbelt.

To start, I agree with Steffler on some of his major points, and I think his understanding of poetry is a necessary one. Like him, I feel poetry describes a unique possibility of finding something in language that isn’t just “what it says,” and that this is one feature that distinguishes poetry from more classically explanatory genres. Also like him, I feel that this “something” is something “enacted,” often sonically, gesturally, or subliminally. And I believe that language is a technology, perhaps even “our foremost technology.”

At other levels, though, I disagree with Steffler, and as a result I would suggest we have substantially different approaches to writing. Probably my biggest contention is this: I don’t think it is possible to “reverse the direction of technology” and get “back to nature,” so to speak (here I am paraphrasing a bit), nor do I wish to.

First, regardless of how much and how diversely a poem “enacts,” it also still “says” something; words, and even letters, have relatively denotative meanings regardless of how poetically they’re employed. Poet or no, who am I to say these denotative meanings aren’t important, when they’re what make up most of our everyday experience of language?

Second, even “nature” is a technology. It is a word, after all. When Steffler suggests the occupation of poetry is to “green language,” he uses a brand or technology—the concept of “greening”—which was developed in a relatively recent moment of human history to promote certain economic, societal, and cultural goals. “Greening” isn’t non-technological; it’s a way to reorient the way we live with technology by introducing new directions—in many cases, healthier and more beautiful directions. Poetry can do this, too.

To summarize all this: unlike Steffler, I don’t write poetry to avoid what words “say,” or to try to subtract technology from language in order to get “back” to reality. I write poetry because words say things, because they’re a technology that makes reality. Again, it’s all about polylinearity.

In this sense your idea of “subversion of technology by technology” is closer to what I want, although I’d probably drop the word “subversion.” I find it harder and harder to understand why we would want to make enemies of concepts within the abstract sphere of poetics. Better to make enemies of concrete things, like politicians who steal our rights and corporations who steal our money. In poetry you have to compromise, because this is the only way to communicate. And I don’t just mean you should compromise, but more that you can’t even avoid it, since as soon as you say a word its meaning is determined as much by anyone else’s interpretation as by your own. Actually, this may be what I find so special about poetry compared to other art forms. In poetry you always share your ideas with your readers, since you need to share a language to write anything in the first place. You never get to make up all the rules yourself, since they’re literally already written into your medium.



THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, enclosed terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Doors: 6:00 to 6:30 (It's a restaurant.) Event begins at 7:00

THE FEATURED POETS:  Our two features, John Nyman and Penn Kemp, will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.  See Penn Kemp's bio, poems and interview.

OPEN MIC: Following the two featured poets in the first hour and the intermission, open mic poets will read until 10:30. There may be a second intermission after the first 15 have read. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

COVER: By donation (in donation jar on back table, or use Donate Button on website Donate Page). Donations are our only source of income to cover expenses. 

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates at the event receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. 

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Interview & 4 Poems: Patricia Black, Featured Poet for London Open Mic, March 4/15

2/20/2015

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Picture"This cartoon was done in 1998 by Kio, who was the cartoonist for Scene Magazine at that time. It depicts my fellow-poet/reviewers Sheila Martindale and John Tyndall (who'll be introducing me on the 4th) and myself, reading Haiku with a gourd on top of my head."













Patricia's Bio


PERSONAL:                            Born London, England in 1936
                                                Immigrated to Toronto from London, England in 1958
                                                Married Alistair Black in 1961 (Toronto)
                                                Kirsteen born in 1962
                                                Divorced in 1966
                                                Moved with Kirsteen to London in 1970
                                                Married Bryan Burwash in 2006
                                                Grandmother to Scott, Jennifer, Heather, Rachel and Melissa
                                                Step-grandmother to Kimberley, Jennifer, Jack, Carter and Keith
                                                Great-grandmother to Landon and Tom

WRITING & THEATRE
BACKGROUND:                     First poem published in high school magazine
                                                 Amateur acting in England
                                                Wrote humorous skits in London, England and London, Canada
                                                Re-commenced writing poetry in 1960s in Toronto
                                                Wrote occasional poems and prose pieces all my life
                                                Following participation in a Creative Writing course in London, Ontario                                                                                       in 1981 approx, began writing poetry in earnest         
                               
PUBLICATIONS:
Poetry:                                   The Creative Circus Book, Red Kite Press 1984 (anthology edited by                                                                                               Marianne Micros)
                                                Memory's Rapturous Pain 1987 (anthology)
                                                Barbed Lyres – Canadian Venomous Verse - 1990 (anthology)
                                                This Magazine (1990)
                                                The Fourth Morningside Papers (1991)
                                            
Personal Memoir:                 The Fifth Morningside Papers (1994)

Interviews:                              Author and playwright Timothy Findley in Carousel Magazine (1994)
                                                 Many interviews with theatre personalities published in Scene Magazine

Numerous public readings and readings on Radio and TV in London and elsewhere in Ontario

Haiku (along with two others on the same theme) set to music by Hawksley Workman and performed at the 2011 Home County Folk Festival

Poem circulated on LTC buses in 2012 as part of the Poetry in Motion contest

Edited The Babbling Book, Vols I and II (an anthology of poetry and prose by the participants in the “For Love of Words” writing course, Program 60)

WRITING
ASPIRATIONS:                        To write a play

AWARDS:                                 The Nathan Cohen (National) Award for Excellence in Theatre Criticism                                                                                      (Short Review Category) 1994
                                                  The Chris Doty Award – Brickenden Award for Lifelong Contributions to                                                                                     Theatre in London 2013

SPORTS:                                    Then: Field hockey, tennis, swimming, skating, walking, dancing,                                                                                                  bicycling, horseback riding

                                                    Now: (Since two hip replacements): aquafit and walking

HOBBIES:                                  Reading, music, singing, concerts, TV, movies, live theatre, cooking,                                                                                             gardening, conversation 

Over my very full lifetime my work, my interests, tastes and activities have been eclectic; I have many passions, but above all for those whom I love, and for writing, and live theatre.

EDUCATION:                        Grammar School in London, England; completed Grade XII equivalent in                                                                                    1952 - main interests were languages, literature, live theatre

                                               Secretarial college, London, England for one year

                                               University courses at Western University in 1980s and 90s, including 
                                               Creative Writing and non-credit courses in Theatre, as well as other                                                                                            general interest courses and workshops since immigration to Canada in                                                                                    1958

                                                Completed Certificate in Thanatology, King's College – 1984 approx.

EMPLOYMENT :                   

1) 1953 – 1959 approx. - Secretary at a publishing company, London, England then photographer and reporter, then secretary for the then British Travel and Holidays Association (i.e. Britain's official tourism organization), London, England and Toronto, Canada 

2) 1959 – 1970 - Secretarial positions with Toronto Industrial Leaseholds, the Crest Theatre, and the Ontario Law Reform Commission 

3) 1970 – 1977 - Admissions Officer, Faculty of Law, the University of Western Ontario  

4) 1978 – 2006 - Various secretarial positions with the Bank of Montreal; Faculty of Nursing, UWO; Dept of Social Work, Victoria Hospital; Hamilton Road Family Medical Centre; Parkwood Hospital; Student Health Services, UWO

ADDITIONAL EMPLOYMENT: 

1984 – 2005 approx. - Facilitator/Instructor – Creative Writing Courses for “Program 60” (run by the then PUC at Beal Secondary School; Part-time and Continuing Education, UWO; Elderhostel, and gave workshops in Creative Writing and Autobiographical Writing for various organizations and individuals.                                                                                                                           
1990 - 2005 - Theatre columnist for Scene Magazine. 

1996 – present -Standardized Patient for the Clinical Skills Learning Program, Western University –

Contributed articles on live theatre to various other publications

VOLUNTEER WORK:    Volunteer positions with various non-profit organizations

FOUR POEMS BY PATRICIA 
Centre of My Universe

Centre of my world
     my universe
Blond boy
     warming my cool     faltering heart
Living     loving blond boy
     sweet-voiced     takes my hand

Shall we ride haywagons?
     Fly kites?           
     Pick wildflowers?
     Walk in rutted lanes
      in summer's soft     kind air?

Tired     at twilight
     laughing     singing
     stroll through fairgrounds?

Watch sunset from a rocky shore?
     Breathe woodsmoke-scented air?

Hushed     by water's edge
     sight the first star?

Will you lead me gently
     to your cabin fire?

Sing me your own songs
     later?

                                                                                    For Scott David Winn

                                                                                                                           From Grandmother Patricia Black
                                                                                                                            May 1989                 

 


In utero in Utah

My great-grandson appears
on my computer screen
I am enthralled     bemused     deeply touched

A gossamer boy     water babe
kitten-curled

Feathery tracings     images
like sea fronds waving
come to me
across the miles
through cyber space

I am enchanted     sobered
and a little afraid for him

So early in his journey
Four months left until his due date

But his Dad     filmmaker Scott
calls it “Landon's first home video”
has set it to music
has labelled “arm”     “spine”     “leg”
and an arrow points to
a minute protruberance
“boy”!

Landon     tiny being
undulates     blithely prepares

Scott and Becca are
confident     joyous

but I     great-grandmother
want to be sure of his safe arrival
so I watch with mixed emotions

Awed by today's technology
yet overwhelmed with love
for this new life
this kinship     this bloodlink
this continuation

Already bonding    bonded
with the son of my daughter's
son!                                                                                                                     
                                                                                  Patricia Black – May 20, 2010


           Fanciful Bus Ride

            Through London streets the buses huff and puff
            What if they sped on rails above the trees?
            Silent and sleek and smooth instead of rough
            Swaying and swinging gently in the breeze
            Fanciful buses floating in the air
            Their drivers clad in robes of shining silk
            No passengers would have to pay a fare
            In this fair land of honey and of milk
            Music and wind chimes, birdsong serenade
            And all who ride the buses would be friends
            The hustle-bustle down below would fade
            While everyone their disbelief suspends
            But, haste, is this too much frivolity           
            For those who run our city's LTC?

                                                                                    Patricia Black

                                                                                    [last two lines added
                                                                                   May 17, 2012 – original 12-line                                                                                                                                                              poem selected for Poetry in                                                                                                                                                                  Motion along with 15 others]

                                                                                  
The Magic of Radio
(for Dylan)

Back in a long-ago, far-away bedroom
It all began
Two teens sitting on the floor
My brown-eyed soulmate
opened wide a door
into the holy realm
the Welsh-laden words
of Dylan Thomas

There in the soft-rugged, cosy-nest
I read
and knew the
I knew
a poet

Fifty-four flew by, crept by years

Today   sitting on a soft companioned couch
cosied by an old dog
brown-eyed soulmate
and looking out at the rust-gold, brown-green trees
the dusty-brown, red-tinged, black-capped
feather-wearers
fluttering, feeding
in the lazy Autumn afternoon
they are busy as spinning circus twirlers
under the grey-cloud, heavy-layer, winter-warning sky

I, now crone, listen
to his plush voice, lush voice of 1959
and his mother's warm, syrupsoft Welsh words
down the packed years and the empty years
a radio interview
from Laugherne

and all the words in between
the worlds of words
melt, fluid into one another
oceans of years and miles and words and tears and smiles

Here in my cosy-rosy home
I am in that holy-full, wholly full place
again

                                                                                    Patricia BlacK
                                                                                    Rev November 18, 2009

 

THE INTERVIEW
(Interview by Kevin Heslop for London Open Mic Poetry Night)
KH:            Were there particular texts which drew you to writing? What specifically about those texts or their authors - perhaps in terms of style, diction, meter, atmosphere - encouraged you to recognize the theatre as one to which you would contribute? Do you identify with a school of poetics (i.e. Surrealism, Romanticism, Imagism)?

PB:            I loved reading from a very early age and my two older sisters and I were fortunate to have had a father who encouraged us to read extensively. I was enraptured by words - one of the first books I read was a collection of children's stories based on Greek myths, "Tanglewood Tales" - I still remember reading "and she placed the child in her bosum" and thinking it was some kind of large bag!
            My father and I used to share new words.  He too was intrigued by language - in fact, in family discussions, at lunch on Sundays, if a word came up that was new to us, we girls were sent to find the definition in the dictionary.
            We were so privileged to have had this encouragement and exposure to the arts all our lives.  And it has paid off in spades, since our children and grandchildren and even my great-grandchildren are all readers, one is a dancer, one is a film-maker and composer, they play musical instruments and our family is full of teachers - all this from my parents who had very little formal education.
            My taste in literature, poetry, art, music, dance and theatre has always been - and still is - extremely eclectic and I am thankful for that, because it is a kind of freedom to savour almost anything and everything that has been created artistically.  My own writing and poetry also tend to be eclectic.
            We were also taken to live theatre from a very early age - after Christmas each year it would be the annual Pantomime - and from those we were soon going to Broadway musicals in London, England, as well as other theatrical productions.  I acted in school and in Sunday School plays from the age of about 7 - I played "Little Boy Blue" to another little girl's "Little Bo Peep" - it's a poem by A.A. Milne.  Also, we always had music in our home - lisening to the "wireless," or gramophone records; my mother had a beautiful contralto voice and my Dad played piano - all our many parties included a singalong around the piano.  I still have the words of hundreds of songs engraved in my memory.  All these contributed to my love of words, rhythm and music.
            I wanted to write from a very early age; my first published poem was in the school magazine when I was around 11 - about a swan, floating on a lake (how original)!
            So I was throughly immersed in writing in its every shape and form from my earliest years and my passion for words has never waned.  Theatre became another passion and it too still feeds my soul.
            I have loved the Romanticists and the Imagists - I was thrilled when I discovered the great haiku masters - Basho for example - and the incredible power of their poems.  A haiku I wrote for the Great Canadian Haiku contest (part of the Home County Folk Festival in 2011), along with two other local poets' haiku on the same theme, was set to music and performed by Hawksley Workman at the Festival, as were many other haiku. Now that was a thrill, hearing one's poem sung with a large audience sitting on the grass in Victoria Park - Catherine McInnes and Penn Kemp (who was London's Poet Laureate at the time and who conributed so much both to London and London's poets during her tenure) were largely instrumental in bringing this event to fruition.
            An epiphany happened when I was a teenager and first read Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood."  I was utterly captivated by his poetry.  One of the poems I'm attaching to these responses is about my love affair with Dylan Thomas's poetry, "The Magic of Radio."
            bill bissett has been another significant poet in my life - when he lived in London we would visit at either his apartment or mine.  Once he and I ripped wallpaper off his walls with great abandon!  I was swept into another wonderful world by the plays of James Reaney.  I am entranced by imaginative, free-flowing writing.  Playfulness is another way I pamper myself in my writing.
            John Tyndall has been a huge influence - his meticulousness and experimentation with words, his research into rare and ancient manuscripts which he turns into brilliant poems - all these are confounding; John B. Lee, too always inspires me.
            Women poets by whom I have been influenced.  The first was probably Eleanor Farjeon, who wrote the words to "Morning Has Broken" in 1931, set to a traditional Gaelic tune (which Cat Stevens famously recorded 40 years later).  We used to sing it from our school hymnal at morning assembly in the grammar school I attended.  Elizabeth Barrett-Browning; Kate Bush; Colleen Thibaudeau, Julie Berry, Mollie Peacock, Margaret Atwood . . . and countless other poets of both genders.
            Everything is a potential poem!  Everyone is a potential poet!
            At 15 or so I wanted to go into journalism.  But this was not a career choice my father would support - in England in the 50s, in the family environment in which I grew up, a girl was more or less expected to go into nursing or secretarial work until she married.  Even although my English teacher wanted me to go to university, my father would not hear of it - and it did not even occur to me to rebel, despite the fact that in many ways I was the rebel of the family!
            So, secretarial school it was - and I didn't write poetry again until I was in my late 20s, in Toronto, in a very passionate love affair!  From then on, as a sole support single Mum, and working in a pretty demanding job (here in London, where my daughter and I moved in 1970), I put away my poetry (a treat to myself I didn't dare to indulge) until my daughter was approaching university age and I decided it was time to do something for myself.  I signed up for a non-credit creative writing course at Western.  My "entry" to the course, given by poet and (then) UWO professor, Marianne Micros, was a memoir I had written about my mother's dying and death in England in 1977.  I continued writing prose and resumed writing poetry (although I never did not write, in the sense that I was always a letter writer of lengthy missives, wrote observations constantly and wherever I happened to be - on the bus, in the street, curled up in my favourite armchair or sitting outside by water, under the trees)  - and recorded my long and detailed dreams, which are stories in themselves and have sometimes morphed into poems.  With my interest in theatre, I had written a few skits here and there over the years.  That too had been nurtured in my childhood, because as a family, with all our aunts, uncles and cousins, at Christmas we played "Charades" - Brit-style.  In other words, a word chosen by one team was split into syllables and on the spot we wrote a short skit in which the syllable was hidden.  This was repeated with all the syllables and a final skit for the full word.  A second team would have to guess each syllable until they figured out the whole word.  These were absolutely hilarious -  we dressed up and I recall one skit in which even my dog played a role!
            The magic, the intricacies and intrigue of universal languages never cease to taunt and haunt me.
            That first creative writing course in which I enrolled was the opening of a new door. The participants in that course formed a group - we met every two weeks and eventually called ourselves The Creative Circus.  John Tyndall was a member of that group, as were our instructor, Marianne Micros, D'vorah Elias and London seer, Roy McDonald.  In 1984 Red Kite Press published an anthology of our poems entitled, The Creative Circus Book.
            From the time I entered Marianne's course, I started to "permit" myself to write poetry again; mostly prose poetry, although gradually I tried writing in traditional forms (another attached poem is a sonnet I wrote for the Poetry in Motion contest in 2012].  And always, in addition to any other writing, I created rhyming doggerel, usually humorous, ironic, satirical and/or for special occasions.  I have a poem I wrote about John Crosby, published in a book of satirical verse, "Barbed Lyres - Canadian Venomous Verse" in 1990.

KH:            In what way are you conscious of your reader? Would you identify a choice reader?

PB:            In what way am I conscious of my reader?  That's an interesting question.  When I gradually became part of London's writing community back in the 80s, there were many opportunities to read one's poems in public. A large group of poets used to meet on Saturday afternoons at various venues over the years.  They were rich, wonderful times.  Soon I was enjoying reading my own poems to an audience - and loved the interaction.  It became my primary way of "publishing" my poems and as a consequence I have not spent a lot of time submitting poems for publication.  That's a bit of a cop out, I concede.  But over several years it was very satisfying and rewarding to me. I loved "feeling," as well as hearing the reactions of my audience and didn't experience a strong need to have my poems contained within a book (although, in my later years, I do think it would be lovely to be able to leave a book of my poems as a legacy).
            A choice reader would be one who finds meaning in my writing which I may have missed myself.  Sometimes I am gob-smacked by what others detect in my poems.
            It wasn't very long before I found myself facilitating creative writing courses myself - initially with a group of seniors who were participants in a program run by the then-PUC at Beal Secondary School.  I have loved nurturing others' creativity and particularly in assisting others in writing their own life stories.  From there, and with many creative writing courses under my belt, in 1990 I was given the opportunity to write theatre reviews for the then new Scene Magazine.  At 54 this was like a dream come true! To be able to write for an entertainment publication about live theatre!  My two passions combined.  I wrote for Scene for years and in 1994 won the Canadian Theatre Critics Association's Nathan Cohen Award for Excellence in Theatre Criticism (short review category) for a review of that year's Stratford Festival production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night."  This was so validating for me and in a way an odd coincidence - in the 60s I had worked at the Crest Theatre in Toronto, when Nathan Cohen was theatre critic for The Star.
            Fellow poets Sheila Martindale and John Tyndall were also reviewers for Scene and we wrote one column together entitled "Poets as Reviewers."  It was our conviction that our own poetic leanings enriched our prose and our vision.

KH:            Have any specific works or sensibilities executed in mediums other than poetry (i.e. visual art, theatre, music) charged or shaped your aesthetic or aim?

PB:            Music is always inspirational and I have several poems inspired by music; there have also been works of art which have inspired poems.  But I'm inclined to write poems about anything and everything - including very basic, day-to-day topics, political issues, people, nature . . . .
            Many of my poems have been inspired by my grandchildren and, in the past four years, my two great-grandsons, in Utah.  So two other poems included here span the generations - one about my grandson Scott, "Centre of My Universe," written in 1989 and the other about his first child, Landon, "In Utero in Utah," written in 2010.

KH:            One immediately notices your use of indentation in place of commas, and the absence of the period in your work, choices shared with bissett, whom you mentioned as an influence on your work. Why, in your view, is space in poetry preferable to the comma and the period? 


PB:     When I started writing my own poetry again, having been raised with the classic poets until that epiphany when I first discovered Dylan Thomas, I found a great sense of freedom in writing prose poetry, without having to focus on punctuation, caps at the beginnnings of lines, conformity and rhyming.  I shied away from traditional forms, glorying in experimentation and being "non-linear."  This occurred unconsciously and long before I read bissett - probably his writing simply enhanced my sense of permission not to "conform," which had first been confirmed by John Tyndall - even although he is probably the most disciplined poet I know.
            I have never forgotten taking my then 4-year old daughter to a Rembrandt exhibit in Toronto and her question, "How did he keep in the lines"?  That, for me, sums up the restrictions which were imposed on so many of us in our education
             When I was facilitating the many seniors with whom I've worked, I found that we had been immersed so thoroughly in the restrictions of our education, that it hampered and intimidated many of us when we were faced with a blank page.  I wanted everyone to learn the freedom I had found - and so many of the older participants in my classes were blown away with the discovery of being able to write poetry/prose once they had "slipped the surly bonds. . . ."  I made extensive use in my classes of a book entitled "Writing the Natural Way," by Gabriele Lusser Rico, which uses "clustering" (a form of stream of consciousness writing). 
            And yet, I have embraced (and still do) the discipline of traditional forms and also many of my poems rhyme, although many rely on rhythm rather than rhyme. 
            When I begin writing a poem, it falls naturally into its own form or pattern - with the indentations and spacing you mention as well as the line endings.  As mentioned, it was John Tyndall's writing which reinforced my natural inclination to use spaces rather than commas and periods (not that I never use those and other forms of punctuation).  For me, having written so much non-poetry (eg theatre reviews, skits and many other articles, papers and so on), I have found that traditional punctuation feels somewhat "binding" in my poetry.

KH:            As your poem “Fanciful Bus Ride”, included in part in the LTC initiative Poetry in Motion, seems to weigh, albeit fancifully, on the public sphere, and as you mentioned our former poet laureate Penn Kemp, whom to my knowledge amiably coined the term 'poetician', what is the importance in your view of poetry engaging the political and public spheres and a society in general? 

PB:     For most of my life I have engaged in the "political and public spheres, and society in general."  It is my long-held opinion that satire and humour are likely to have far more impact than earnest, serious writing (not that this doesn't have its own valid and crucial place, of course).  The attention of the majority of people is more likely to be caught if they are amused - then, when it becomes obvious that the subject is serious and even dangerous, they experience shock, but - it is to be hoped - their awareness is considerably greater than if they have been preached to.  Whilst poetry is not the chosen form of literature of a high percentage of the population, certainly a sonnet such as "Fanciful Bus Ride," displayed in public, is likely to catch the eye of a rider; its brevity, too, makes for a greater "WOW" or "OUCH" response than a long, rambling diatribe.  Haiku - and their imagistic brevity - are profound statements which evoke in their reader or listener a powerful reaction, and this reaction can be enhanced on repeated readings and reflection. 

 KH:            In your poem “The Magic of Radio”, your relationship with Dylan Thomas' work seems to have been untouched, unblemished by the accumulation of years. You return, finally, to that “holy-full, wholly full place / again”, as you found it in “a long-ago, far-away bedroom”. Expand, if you would, on that sense of rediscovery, the immortality of great work and how your personal evolution shapes such works when you meet them in youth, then meet them in age.

 PB:   This question gives me goosebumps!  Something that seared itself into my very soul many years ago was a comment I had read about Anthony Powell's 12-novel work, "A Dance to the Music of Time."  The comment suggested that life is like a circle dance, where people in one's life circle in and out over the years - even if only in dreams or in sudden thoughts, out of the blue, of someone one knew many years ago.  This I believe with my whole heart; and it can be just a sudden whiff of a smell which brings a person and/or event back full-force to one's consciousness.  I recall attending a Remembrance Day Service for the Veterans at Parkwood Hospital one year in the 90s.  Listening to some of the speeches that day, suddenly I "smelled" a whiff of the wooden pencils we had in a drawer in the bomb shelter attached to my childhood home, during World War II in the 40s - this sensation was as powerful and as present 50 years later, as if such a pencil had been held under my nose!  And people from the past can "come back" just as forcefully - a glimpse in passing of a face which is vaguely familiar and all at once that person is as present as when we knew him or her.  But - there is another factor at work here.  If experiences have been painful or unhappy, even to the point that we can't bear to revisit them or the person/s considered responsible for or contributor/s to those experiences, with the passing years and the maturation gained over those years, we may be able to revisit those "dark" times and find we have another, more positive perspective.  This in itself has the ability to be healing.  This is why recording our life stories is so important for the writer, as well as being a legacy for one's descendants and, indeed, society-at-large.
            And one eventually comes full circle, revisiting the past, but with a new and often gentler, enlightened perspective.
            There are poems I learned by rote in childhood - for example, Wordsworth's "The Daffodils," which I can still recite by heart - but now it is more a source of beauty and tender memories of such visions in my native England, whereas at the time I first knew it, it was something Ihad to memorize.  That said, my earliest sensibilities probably loved the words, the cadences, the images at the same time that I felt a resistance to having it as part of my school curriculum!  We read Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" in primary school and recently I found a very old copy of it in my husband's collection of books.  It was a serendipity and now I know I can reread it at any time.
            And, yes, great work is immortal - and we are ourselves immortal in the words, photos, art, music, artifacts, memories, etc., we leave behind as well as in the way our children are our immortality.






THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Wednesday, March 4th, 2015

MUSIC: We are quietening down our music to allow for easier conversation than was possible in the past. Consequently, we will have live accompanying music from 6:30 to 7:00, or, if we can't get a musician, piped-in restaurant music.

THE FEATURED POET: Patricia Black will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read for about 1.5 hours, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt!
 
 

  



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Gary Barwin, Featured Poet for Open Mic, Feb. 4: Poems and Interview

1/21/2015

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Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and the author of 18 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for kids. His most recent collection is Moon Baboon Canoe (poetry, Mansfield Press, 2014.) Forthcoming books include Yiddish for Pirates (novel, Random House Canada, 2016), I, Dr Greenblatt, Orthdontist, 251-1457  (fiction, Anvil 2015) and Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton (WLUP, 2015). 

Other recent books include Franzlations (with Hugh Thomas; New Star), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; BookThug) and The Porcupinity of the Stars  (Coach House.) He was Young Voices eWriter-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library in Fall of 2013 and he will be Writer-in-Residence at Western University in 2014-2015. Barwin received a PhD (music composition) from SUNY at Buffalo.

Barwin is winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition, the 2010 bpNichol chapbook award, the KM Hunter Artist Award, and the President’s Prize for Poetry (York University). His young adult fiction has been shortlisted for both the Canadian Library Association YA Book of the Year and the Arthur Ellis Award. He has received major grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for his work. 

He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com. 

Four Poems by Gary Barwin

CIVILIZATION 

for Carmel Purkis

We use our mouths to carry birds
We so often carry pitchforks

History is holes to fill
We so often carry birds

Our heads are marble busts in a museum
We hardly remember the missing limbs
 
We so often use the wind for a mouth 
What is missing is also pitchforks

The mouth: birds made of pitchforks
a museum for farmers

Look through the mouth at the haystack of birds
filled with holes we think of as flying

We use our mouths to carry birds
We could carry pitchforks or kings

We spit birds out like the history of birds
Here: a ticket to the museum


China

In bed, China is a baby kitten. India purrs expectantly. America twists on its back, shows me its belly. They’re jealous. Here China. Here’s milk. Let me scratch you. Let me love you, poor frail thing. Come under my long moustache, China, for it protects those over which its thin shadow falls. My rock n’ roll hydroelectric brain, my bird’s nest calligraphic heart. Each border between cell wall and cell wall, the delicate tracing of ink. A nostalgia for a future. China, there you were on my doorstep. Your thin cry, your scrabbling paws. The moon is a superpower. I hold you in my arms, whisper to your economy, your ecological disaster, your hope. China, the world is a superpower. We comfort each other. 
 

The New Squeeze

A new accordion because the accordion is the world and it should do more than push and pull. The hiss and sigh, the 1 and 0, the squeeze and press are three dimensions only, considering time. But what of Newton’s up and down, sink and rise, backward and forward, away and toward, what of the new tessitura of spacetime, the infolding diapason within the electron, the asymptotic passacaglias of hadrons, the tiny cassotto of exotic mesons and tetraquarks? There’s a cave filled with the shadows of accordions or of accordion music. There’s a pyre of accordions alight. We cannot know if the accordion plays or not, or is inflamed, or both.  The caged accordion observed is not the incorporeal accordion true. An accordion may be dimensionless polka or a chatroom hora, but we cannot know if it is Mozart, if its shadows play the numinous ompah of root and fifth, if our true love wrapped in an accordion is but an emergent system of grace notes and obligatos drawn from our connected minds, or stripped naked to the waist, what risk is ours to play. Inside the accordion, the vast multidimensional darkness of the possible; above us, the constellation of buttons and keys, the dance pattern of what we know already and would now like to forget.


The Sleep of Elephants

             On its side, half-covered in blanket, the elephant fills the bed, its slow breathing a confession, the consolation of lungs. The elephant, its shadow skin, cobweb-coloured. I am a road, grey and endless, leading out from the fog-bound house. I am an elephant also, if only in solidarity. 
             World, I say, your parking meters and slate roofs, your storm clouds and uncertainties, pencil leads and the rain. You have always been elephantine, winding through the half-lit maze, your baleful trumpeting and subaudible song. Mouse, you whale of the wainscot; bat, you whale of dusk, you are elephants seen through the multifaceted eyes of insects. All roads are elephants, all bathtubs, laundromats, and reference texts. What is plural is elephant. What is singular. A rural road, I fly alone in the night sky, itself a dark road with no border but the horizon and the rich elephantine earth, a constellation of shadows. 
                I find a pillow, half-buried beneath the vast foreleg of the elephant. I wash my hands, my face. I lie down beside the elephant which is dying. I do not hear, but feel the elephant’s murmuring, the worlds it speaks in consolation, time, a kind of twilight articulated in sound. I sleep beside its universe, its inhalations and outbreaths, a slow expansion and contraction of the rolling curves of its body. If there are stars, they have closed their eyes, they are past shining outward. 
                Elephant, old man, old woman, what is beyond old man and woman. Landscape, helium, dust; settlement, spacetime, nest. Let us be governed by twilight, or the twilight of twilight which is a shadow in the mirror. Elephant, there are others, too, who will find you, who will bring you the consolation of sleep. The somnolent rest with you, march beside you into night. And when you turn, deep in your dream, our crushed bones will become, like a comet’s dust, a radiant trail of loss and return, an elephant.

 
Interview with Gary
(Interview by Kevin Heslop for London Open Mic Poetry Night)
 
         KH: As Burgess has his Cervantes say: “God is a comedian. God does not suffer the tragic consequences of a flawed essence. Tragedy is all too human. Comedy is divine.” 
         This collection has been noted for containing your “trademark humour”; the words “goofiness” and “witty” also find the back cover. Any response to Burgess’ Cervantes quotation? What, in your opinion, is unique to humour, and of what importance is it to the human condition?

         GB: Look how I’m windmilling my arms around while Burgess charges at me with his “Take all of creation…Please!” It’s because I disagree with his Cervantes. I believe comedy is inherently human exactly because tragedy is inherently human. After consciousness—and an awareness that we have ‘lives’ and ‘feeling’, comedy is one of the great existential technologies that we humans have discovered. And we needed to, exactly because of this consciousness. 
         This existential comedy includes the inherent comedy of communication. We’re mimes on a telephone. Underwater. But this comedy is deeply, darkly beautiful. It speaks of our affection, our connection to our experience, to our sorrow, our joy, ourselves. 
         The traditional Jewish line is that “we laugh to keep from crying.” And as David Foster Wallace puts it about Kafka, “the deeper alchemy by which Kafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy [is] always also an immense and reverent joy.” This suffering, this joy, this ungainly staggering in uncertainty, contingency, and conflict is ridiculous and is ours, is our comedy and tragedy, and so, without being able to help it, we can’t but love it. It not only helps us keep going, but is a tool of understanding and knowledge. It unpacks. It questions. It wonders.

         What’s funnier than finding half a worm in your apple?
         The Holocaust.

         KH: The poem “civilization” seems to explore the contrast between unbeautiful action and artful stasis, or, perhaps - and I’m tentative because there’s a porous quality to this collection which eludes interpretational mettle - the rift between gymnastic academia and an earthier workforce, the bourgeois and the proletariat, say. The lines “Our heads are marble busts in the museum / We hardly remember the missing limbs” and, later, “We use our mouths to carry birds / We could carry pitchforks or kings” seem to support this interpretation. 
         Having been involved in and recognized by both the marketplace and the ivory tower, (1) how have these two worlds influenced your work, (2) do you in fact see them as distinct and (3) what insight(s) into the place of poetry in contemporary society as a whole has the position of writer-in-residence at Western, uniquely allowing you one foot in both camps, granted you? 

         GB: I’m very interested in your thoughts on my poem, “Civilization.”  It certainly does engage with ideas regarding the mind (thoughts) and the body—both somehow mediated by language. “We use our mouths to carry birds.” The ‘mouth’ here is both body and mind (language.) And birds, here, are, I think, both physical (birds-in-the-world) as well as the idea of birds, of language, of art. Of moving from one place to another. My notion of birds is of movement, of activity, of a connection between one modality and another (earth/sky; flight/gravity; creature/song.) You do mention “artful stasis” and “unbeautiful action.” That’s there in the birds as well as the contrast between the marble heads in the museum and the farmers and their pitchforks. Do people use pitchforks still? I always think of those wooden implement handles, smoothed and shaped by their use. I’d hope a poem could be like that, though maybe also encouraging you to perform an activity that you weren’t expecting. Making hay while the language aitches. Milking A while the language itches. 
         As to your question of the place of poetry in contemporary society, I’d say that it leads inevitably to the larger question of how language works in society. Of the relationship of our understanding and communication to systems which become epistemological frames such as capitalism and/or power and its team of reindeer:  media, commodification, government. I have a poem:

         why do we worry?
         we word every earth
         is in place perfect the

         KH: As both a composer and poet, how do you differentiate between whether a creative impulse is to manifest musically or poetically? How liberally do the mediums overlap, in your case? To what degree is your muse forked, spliced?

         GB: I have a long-standing interest in the relationship between music and literature. There are so many ways that they can connect. The way material can be patterned or organized formally, the play of rhythms, the pacing of ideas, the connection between sound and content. I’ve written many works that include both music and spoken text—my doctoral dissertation was a composition that used an interactive music program which created music from the speech patterns of a spoken text. And I write and perform sound poetry exploring the nonsemantic elements of language and its performative aspects.
         I try to allow the material to suggest where it might go, so it is more of a question of how particular material attracts my attention and makes me wonder or inspires me to explore it further. I feel that the material dictates the medium. Of course, a particular sound might inspire a short story just as much as a composition. Its texture, its synaesthetic association, its heft might result in words as much as sound, or in an image as much as a narrative.

         KH: You mentioned David Foster Wallace, the titanic post-modern, and in many ways, post-television writer, who once said: “I was raised to view television as my main artistic snorkel to the universe, and I think television, that’s a commercial art, that’s fun, that requires very little of the recipient of the art, I think affects what people are looking for in various kinds of art.”
         Firstly, to what degree do you see capitalism and art fused and, perhaps more importantly, extricable? And secondly, with or without reference to the above quotation, how intimately aware during composition are you of your audience?

         GB: I love the phrase, “main artistic snorkel.” Is that the internet now? Or is the net both snorkel and ocean? Or, a ‘net’ as in fishing net or ‘net’ as in opposed to ‘gross’? Either way, a tough net to crack, a daft knot to crock, a titch gnat to creak. 
         I think it is one of the roles of any art (and certainly for a thoughtful audience) to unpack our assumptions and, indeed, the assumptions inherent in the transaction that is art. You know the phrase, “the male gaze”? Identifying this concept helps us to be aware of what is implicitly being constructed in certain communications or texts.  I think interacting with art (and more specifically literature) asks us to consider what is our gaze, what are the gazes implied by the work. So, at least in this way, I believe, art can have some independence from capitalism (even when it is entangled with it) by allowing us to reckon with its relationship to capitalism, and by allowing us to ‘look under the hood’ and allow us a glimpse of how it’s all working. Now give me twenty dollars.
         In answering your question about considering audience, my word processing program accidentally created a smiley-face emoticon. J Doesn’t that seem apt? I thought you’d think so, dear readers. I think I am aware of audience. Some of my awareness is internalized, sometimes I’m aware that I’m creating a piece for a certain context. The best times, though, for me, are when I’m ‘in the zone,’ that is, when I’m visited by the muse of lack-of-self-consciousness and follow the writing (whatever kind of writing that is), the resonances, pulses, gravities, physics, and allure of the language as if I were in a direct relationship with it, though of course that relationship is highly constructed by context, culture, implied notion of audience, reading practice, etc. 

         KH: I spoke recently to Western’s own professor Joel Faflak, asking him to respond to the slightly sardonic statement: “The Tweet shall inherit the Verse.” He replied, in part, as follows:
         “On one hand, that’s dictated by the fact that your generation apparently has a much shorter attention span than mine did. I don’t know necessarily if that’s true or not, but the technology that you’ve grown up with has forced upon you a completely different way of processing information. ...My generation was taught about depth and verticality, you know, looking beneath the surface or above in the skies. Your generation works across the surface. And I’m not saying that one is better than the other, I’m saying that they’re both integral. But what it’s ended up producing is the sound byte.”
         Your response? As a writer of youth fiction in particular, do you feel in any way obliged to address, forced to adapt to or constrained by the virtual ubiquity of social media platforms and the technology which makes it tick?

         GB: I don’t know that I agree that there is something inherently different in the cognitive abilities or processing proclivities of the “youth” today that results in ‘sound bytes.’ I actually think that the sound byte (and the phenomenon of ‘click bait’ social engagement/analysis) is a result of the way a particular approach to commodity drives the media to pursue certain forms of engagement with its audience. Click on this link. You won’t believe what happens next. It’s not what you expect. In this interview, I seem to come across as all Marxist in my analysis, but I think that it is too easy to put the cart before the horse—in this case, the media (the horse) as passively responding to its audience (the cart)— instead of the correct way round. It is true that with the rise of the internet and access to massive amounts of data (and the ability to perform “distance reading” as Franco Moretti puts it) we are able to consider things in a different way, and our daily lives are certainly “mediated” by social media and the net in a different way than before, but, do we really fundamentally process information differently? Is it just that we have access to different data sets, and are able to process information differently? I don’t know that we (or “the youth today”) all are in a state of “continuous partial attention” (to use Linda Stone’s term) continuously or inherently. 
         Professor Faflak’s contends that his “generation was taught about depth and verticality.” I want to say that “horizontality is the new verticality,” and that “surface is the new depth.” You just have to lie down and everything is different. But it is true that there is a deeper sense of context when one is able to consider a broader range of data. If you are able, instead of burrowing deep down into the canon, to consider the wider field of literature, does that necessarily produce “the sound byte”—i.e. a simple often glib summation without insight or context?
         But I haven’t yet answered your question about writing youth fiction. Sorry. Short attention span. My last post on Facebook was getting lots of likes. Weird. Because I posted it on tumblr while tweeting with instagrammatic snapchatitude while twerking dilithium on LinkedIn. Much amaze. 
         But writing youth fiction is about creating a perspective that youth can engage with, so that necessarily includes considering the technological, material, and interactional realities of their lives. This doesn’t mean that the work has to include explicit references to these things—and with material things its easy to miss the subtleties and specificities of their experience, or to condemn a work to a very short best-before date—but it does mean being aware of them. I think it is more about entering the youth zeitgeist. Or to be aware of it while guiding them somewhere else. Just like any piece of creative work. 


THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Wednesday, Feb. 4th, 2015

MUSIC: We are quieting down our music to allow for easier conversation than was possible in the past. Consequently, we will have live accompanying music from 6:30 to 7:00, or, if we can't get a musician, piped-in restaurant music.

THE FEATURED POET: Gary Barwin will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read for about 1.5 hours, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt!



______________________________
GARY BARWIN
garybarwin.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
New book: Moon Baboon Canoe (Poetry, Mansfield Press, Spring 2014)

Forthcoming: 

I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 (fiction; Anvil Press, Spring 2015)
Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton (Laurier Poetry Series, Spring 2015)
Yiddish for Pirates (novel; Random House Canada, 2016)

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Debbie Okun Hill, Featured Poet for Open Mic, Dec. 3: Interview and 4 Poems

11/21/2014

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Debbie Okun Hill confesses that she once went to a Halloween party dressed as a bookworm so she could sit in a corner and read.

“Call me an introvert with a thirst for knowledge. For the first five years of my life, I lived on the prairies in a three-room house with no running water or working toilet. That serene life (books, words, open rural spaces and unscheduled play) is something I still treasure. My interest in poetry developed much later.”

What started as a writing career in print journalism and public relations in her twenties and thirties has evolved into a poetic journey spanning over the last eleven years.

Today, she is a professional poet currently on tour with Tarnished Trophies (Black Moss Press, 2014) her first full collection of poetry by a trade publisher. She is the Past President of The Ontario Poetry Society, a Member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Writers Union of Canada, Sarnia’s AfterHours Poets and the recipient of two Writers’ Reserve grants from the Ontario Arts Council. She loves promoting the work of other writers and for eight years she has been a co-host of a monthly open mic event in southwestern Ontario.

To date, over 290 of her poems have been published in over 110 different publications/websites including the Literary Review of Canada, Descant, Existere, Vallum, The Windsor Review, and Other Voices in Canada plus Mobius, The Binnacle, Thema, and Still Point Arts Quarterly in the United States. She has read her work throughout Ontario including the Fringe Stage of the 2011 Eden Mills Writers’ Festival and during the 2012 PoeTrain Express/Spring Pulse Poetry Festival in Cobalt. Several of her poems have won awards.

In addition to her Black Moss Press book, she has two chapbooks published by Beret Days Press and is part of EnCompass I, a 75-page anthology featuring the work of five Canadian poets. Between touring, she hopes to polish two new manuscripts. Next spring she will be editing Mindshadows, a 2015 membership anthology for The Ontario Poetry Society.

Follow her website/blog Kites Without Strings  and on twitter @OkunHill.

Four Poems by Debbie Okun Hill 

On the Way to the Cottage

You see them stranded
aborted trailers
male metal apron strings
cut from a father’s fist
the ball and chain
used to drag them
his aluminum baggage of
material status
his sail boat
tall towering
his motorcycle
quick spin of tires
his motor home
barely out of the box
 
Heavy burden of debt
no match for tiny tires
broken axle succumbed
to extra weight
fallen merchandise
now littering gravel roads

 (First published in POEMATA, Volume 25, Number 01  The Canadian Poetry Association, 2010 ISSN 1920-8847 (PDF)
(Reprinted in Tarnished Trophies, Black Moss Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-088753-528-4 (pbk)

Spilling Warm Lemonade

I remember sinking
soft slow slide
deep in summer’s
webbed chair
the way it cushioned
made crisscross imprints
on the back of my thighs
my legs dangling
toes slipping in
cool pool water
your blank stare
distorting your reflection
 
You were angry that day
spilling your warm lemonade
not saying a word
kicking your thoughts
against wooden fence
hot sun blanketing
blistering your shoulders
the blue faces of
forget-me-nots
shriveled and curled brown

You had forgotten
your favorite sport
the way you swam laps
first your breast stroke
the steady up and down rhythm
your twisted turn, then
a smooth glide off pool wall
your fluttering fin feet
against nature’s current
 
Instead you kept asking
about your lemonade
as your memories spilled
sticky and thick
like a fog over your empty deck.
 
(First published in Tarnished Trophies, Black Moss Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-088753-528-4 (pbk)
(Reprinted on http://www.leafpress.ca/Mondays_Poems_2014/Debbie-Okun-Hill/Spilling-Warm-Lemonade.htm (Leaf Press Monday’s Poem link) Leaf Press Website September 7 to 14, 2014 then archived on site)
(Broadcast on http://findingavoiceoncfrcfm.wordpress.com October 31, 2014 4 to 5 p.m. (40:00 to 42:00) Recorded at October 7, 2014 ‘Poetry at the Artel’ Open Mic Reading Series in Kingston, Ontario).


Train Station
 
Standing alone, near wooden post
ostracized from adult crowd
young male teen
fidgets, kicks a pebble
outside rural train station
loose gravel crunching
beneath his feet
hot sun searing his cheeks
quick snap-pop, click of teeth
his tongue twirling
juicy piece of bubble gum
grape flavour released
ball cap turned backwards
skateboard shoes untied

In this afternoon game of waiting
he loses valuable playtime
like rolling childhood marbles
on his stepfather’s whittle wasting hours
wood-chipped seconds suspended

locomotion      slow
 
each yellow dandelion
turning grey between thin cracks
slight breeze unraveling
unnourished seeds of his mind
wandering, blown away
when no one picks him up
leaves him feeling small
reminiscent of his days
hiding as an abused toddler
curled beneath a bench
coiled, thick wad, stale
like his gum—stuck
with no place to go

(First published with the title “ Stuck at the Train Station” on  http://badpoetsclub.blogspot.com/ Bad Poets Club Blog Website Thursday, July 22, 2010)
Reprinted  in Tarnished Trophies, Black Moss Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-088753-528-4 (pbk)
(Broadcast on http://findingavoiceoncfrcfm.wordpress.com October 31, 2014 4 to 5 p.m. (42:00 to 43:30) Recorded at October 7, 2014 ‘Poetry at the Artel’ Open Mic Reading Series in Kingston, Ontario).


The Finish Line

So those who are last will be first,
and those who are first will be last.

                                   --Matthew 20:16

In this obstacle race, steeplechase with horses
she cannot run from the black stallion
his flaring nostrils, a clutch of death
upheld by his team of immortal jockeys
they are buried in the ash
at the base of the church steeple
his hoof prints, their haunting voices
rising like waves, surfing behind her
chasing her like vicious sundogs
nipping at her ankles

Turn this way, turn that way
she tries to escape, to lose them
to hide in her whirling cloud dust
 
Each hour, she runs through her daily life
attempting to create a better world
where Olympic torches lead athletes
away from gutters and ditches
dark bowling over lanes
unsafe alleyways

Confused, she pauses, catches her breath
as if the phoenix feather
the wings of Pegasus she carries
can survive, can stay preserved
in the cup of her hands
these rewards of winning
in becoming first, in pushing forward
over the rapids, across the deep valley
how quick will they lead her
to death’s finish line?
 
She hears the hoof prints, she teeters on the edge
this is a race, a line she refuses to cross

(Published in Tarnished Trophies, Black Moss Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-088753-528-4 (pbk)
(Broadcast on http://findingavoiceoncfrcfm.wordpress.com October 31, 2014 4 to 5 p.m. (43:30 to 46:30) Recorded at October 7, 2014 ‘Poetry at the Artel’ Open Mic Reading Series in Kingston, Ontario


Interview with Debbie
(Interview by Kevin Heslop for London Open Mic Poetry Night)

H:
 On the homepage of your website, Kites Without Strings, your make reference to Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. What does the phrase mean to you, and what compelled you to take “that road less travelled”?
 
O.H: For me, life is more about the journey than the destination. We can set goals and work hard towards them, but often along the way we encounter a fork in the road which forces us to rethink our original plans. In his poem “The Road Not Taken”, Frost writes about “Two roads diverged in a wood” but if you extrapolate this idea, and think outside the box,  there are actually more than two paths a traveller can follow. For example, a person can turn right or left but an adventurous soul might sit on a stone fence, build a wood cabin and remain content with an inward journey without taking another physical step. Or she may forge a new route through the woods, dig a tunnel down to China or climb up a white pine tree and explore the skies. He might even go back home the way  he came. For me, those are the roads or options that are often forgotten. Too often we see the world in black and white when in reality it is filled with not only shades and light of grey but also a multitude of colour. Look close, a leaf isn’t just green but includes streaks of brown, yellow, red and blue. I believe highly creative individuals like artists, poets, philosophers, and musicians are better problem solvers because they are not afraid to explore those roads less travelled. As for what compelled me to embark on this poetic journey, I would have to say it started off as strong nudge by a local writers’ group. For decades I hated poetry and yet, for the last 11 years, I’ve been a full-time poet.  Today, I like to advocate: if you don’t like poetry, you just haven’t found the right poem yet.

H: The phrase “the love of creating word pictures”, referring to a writer’s journey, appears in “Starting Over”, first published by Sydenham Press in 2007. Would you identify yourself in relation to Imagism, or any particular school of poetics? What can a poem achieve, and how, with respect to ‘poem as succession of word pictures’, may it do so?

O.H: I hate labels such as “imagism”, “objectivism” or “surrealism”. At the same time,  I know university scholars like to analyze and study the movements of past and current poetics. I want my poems to be like kites without strings: not tied down to a particular school but free to fly in new, perhaps less travelled directions. During my teens, my obsession for reading lessened as I explored my interest in the visual arts. I would spend hours in front of a paint easel or a sketch pad. In my twenties, I worked in the public relations department of The Winnipeg Art Gallery so the importance of cultural and artistic expression stayed with me. For me, poetry is organic, just like art is organic. It is the channel through which the muse speaks. A poem’s achievement or lack of it should never be part of the equation. Remember, the reward is in the journey. Once a poem is published or read aloud, it takes on new meanings based on the reader’s or listener’s own experiences. Of course, not everyone will agree, nor will everyone like the same poetry. I like to think that my work is eclectic. Some ‘word pictures’ are clear like a traditional landscape painting but other images are fictionalized with talking objects or askew with surrealism like a Salvador Dali masterpiece.

H: In “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape”, A.M. Klein offers the lines:  

... Set apart,
he finds himself, with special haircut and dress,
as on a reservation. Introvert.
He does not understand this; sad conjecture
muscles and palls thrombotic on his heart.
 
If you’ll forgive Klein’s limited pronoun, how has introversion informed or shaped your writing and sense of self?

O.H: Wow, what a long and powerful poem! I wish I had time to fully explore the depth of meaning behind A. M. Klein’s work. I cannot speak for all introverts, and again I don’t like using labels, but for me, it’s easier to retain your sense of self when you have a strong support group behind you: people who love you unconditional despite all the failures. My mother is that loving person and cheerleader. My husband is my rock. I have several close friends who keep me grounded. It’s also easier to understand who you are when you are older than when you first leave home as a young adult. Yes, I’ve had to develop coping skills to deal with large parities or crowds. Yes, I’ve had to learn to be ‘out there’ when promoting a new book but I will always need that space to unwind and  to re-charge my batteries.
 
As for shaping my writing, introversion helped me to become a better listener (I ask lots of questions) and to watch for the non-verbal clues that can often go un-noticed. I am fascinated by people who live on the fringe, those individuals who dare to be different in a society that wants everyone to conform to a certain image. Because I am  happiest at my desk writing, reading, creating or spending time one-on-one with close friends and family, it is easy for me to pump out poems on a daily or nightly basis. Also it is during those quiet moments that it becomes easier to enter that mystical  ‘ZONE’ , tap into the muse or become aware of the spiritual thread running through our lives.
 
H: Your most recent book of poems, “Tarnished Trophies”, explores the sports world. Explore, if you will, the impetus for merging the ostensibly disjunctive worlds of poetry and sport.

O.H: Earlier, we chatted about the road less travelled. I neglected to mention that life sometimes throws you a fastball and knocks you off home plate. Marty Gervais and Black Moss Press did that for me. I had submitted a sample of sports poems for a submission call for The Windsor Review. The publisher liked them so much he called to ask if I had any more. At the time, I didn’t tell him that I was at a fork in the road: ready to quit poetry and to change my focus to either short stories or photography. Three long years later, Tarnished Trophies, my first trade book was released. As noted on the back cover: “Debbie Okun Hill leaps from the bleachers into the light and shadow of the sports world. Mixed with the poetic portraits of sweat..the thirst for first…and the juicy taste of orange victory are the metaphorical snapshots of tarnished men and women, the unrewarded failures, and the need to reflect. Tarnished Trophieswrestles the athletic soul: this essence of winning and losing, loving and changing, growing and shaping.”
 
Some readers may shy away from this athletic theme but I’m hoping others will take that chance to see how sports can be a metaphor for life where more traditional poetic themes such as competition, bullying, ageing and suicide are also addressed. The truth is that I see poetry in everything and everywhere. Last month, Lummox Press in California published a themed anthology on desire and roadkill. Yes, now, I even have a published  ‘roadkill’ poem inspired by Canadian artist Robert Bateman’s interpretation of a busy highway well-travelled by beavers.  The poetic journey continues.

H: It seems you’ve had something of a love/hate relationship with poetry: “For decades I hated poetry and yet, for the last 11 years, I’ve been a full time poet." Later, you mentioned you were “ready to quit poetry and change my focus...”. Which poems or poets urged you to write poetry in the first place, and which specific emotions, uses of language or resonances within those texts helped you recognize the theatre as your own?

O.H: My answer is complicated. May I include novelists and children’s games in my list? Consider wooden puzzles, blocks, Scrabble and in my adult years, the Rubik’s Cube, Word Seek games and the Jumble puzzle. My mind needs to be busy so I seek out mentors and friends who I can have deep and challenging conversations with. Agatha Christie fueled my love for a good mystery. In high school Margaret Atwood spoke to me through her books: The Edible Woman and Surfacing. From then on, I was hooked on symbolism. I even purchased A Dictionary of Symbols to deepen my writing. However, poetry was never a significant part of my life until I met Sarnia poet Peggy Fletcher in 2002. She was the one who told me I was a poet. Of course, I didn’t believe her. I wanted to write fiction but agreed to try poetry as a stepping stone towards my larger goal.  Then Bunny Iskov and  The Ontario Poetry Society provided me with poetic challenges and deadlines. Before I knew it I was on this poetic journey, a road that I never expected to be on. It’s been fun but difficult at the same time. You need to have a tough skin to handle all the rejections from publishers and people who think writing poetry should be a hobby versus a worthwhile career.
 
H: “On the Way to the Cottage” renders the abandonment of male status icons; the sailboat, the motorcycle, the trailer, all reduced to “litter”. How and to what degree do you see the hollowness of ‘really existing capitalism’ and this patriarchic society as fused, limbs of the same animal? 
 
O.H: Another tough question. What I want this poem and the poems in my book to do is to stir up a conversation about all competition, not just in the sports arena or amongst a specific gender. It’s easy to point fingers at Capitalism and a patriarchal society but the world is more complex than that. When you’ve been raised in a traditional family in an impoverished area, you see the importance of the team where neighbors and friends must work together to help each other survive. However, after living in a more prosperous province, I see how greed, the ‘thirst for first’ and the worship of materialistic goods can be detrimental to the well-being of others. I’m also old enough to see the paradigm shift where not only men but women are becoming more aggressive and self-absorbed in their own importance. Is this good? You tell me. I see many rich but very unhappy people.
 
H: You mentioned being inclined towards short story writing in the early stages of what would become “Tarnished Trophies”. What can poetry accomplish that prose can not, and vice versa? What kind of stories or messages are better fit for one or the other medium?
 
O.H: Poetry is a rain droplet. Prose is a rain barrel filled with droplets. Both are an expression of creativity; one more compact than the other. Snapshot images or word pictures are best captured in a poem. Concrete or shaped poems add an element of visual design to the published words. I have never seen this done with prose. Poems based on sound or slam poetry are additional forms that work best on the poetic stage versus being printed in a book. Narratives with setting/characters/dialogue are best expanded upon in prose. However there are exceptions to every rule and I admire when writers stretch those boundaries. The prose poem is an example of an interesting blend. I wish I had some statistics to share, but I’m guessing there is a larger audience for prose than poetry. Readers want to be entertained by prose. Poetry is for those who like to think and feel.
 
H: “The Finish Line” seems to be a kind of manifesto within the collection. It explores the vapidity of ‘victory’ in the face of oblivion, rendering the poet alone with her irreconcilable entanglement, all scoreboards darkened or useless. Extrapolate on this relationship between death and the fleetingness of victory in sport, if you would, with reference to your abstention from the use of the period, that final punctuating mark. 
 
O.H: Like the vanishing periods, we are all going to die at some point; some sooner, some later than others. When the casket is lowered, what happens to these “undusted unappreciated trophies of/tarnished men and women/molded in various fitness poses”? Does it matter who is first or last? As stated on the back cover of my book, “Tarnished Trophies wrestles the athletic soul: this essence of winning and losing, loving and changing, growing and shaping”. Divided into three sections: Training, Building Muscle, and Hitting Home, the book also touches on bullying, ageing and yes death, including suicide. The first poem “It Starts Here” explores the planting of competitive seeds. The last poem “This is Where it Ends” is a whimsical resurrection of  “all-star immortal heroes”.  For those who enjoy a challenge, the meaning of life and death is another mystery to solve.


THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014.

MUSIC: We are quietening down our music to allow for easier conversation than was possible in the past. Consequently, we will have live accompanying music from 6:30 to 7:00, or, if we can't get a musician, piped-in restaurant music.

THE FEATURED POET: Debbie Okun Hill will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read for about 1.5 hours, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt!
 

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Frank Davey: new interview and poems, for Nov. 30th book launch

11/19/2014

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Frank Davey will read from his new collection of poetry Nov. 30th at Mykonos Restaurant, as Mansfield Press launches books by four of its authors, including poets Nelson Ball and Laura Farina, and novelist Christine Miscione.  

The four are beginning a tour of Southern Ontario. Davey will read from Poems Suitable for Current Material Conditions, Laura Farina from Some Talk of Being Human and Christine Miscione from her novel Carafola. (Nelson Ball won't be at this event. Someone else will present his poetry collection, Some Mornings.)

Mansfield Press publisher/editor Denis De Klerck and editor Stuart Ross will host the event, which begins at 7:00 pm.

FRANK DAVEY: Current resident of Strathroy, Ont., poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010, author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol 2012. Davey, in Sept. 2014, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, "the highest honour a scholar can achieve in the arts, humanities and sciences." The Royal Society said Davey is "an internationally recognized scholar and a leading figure in exploring alternative and experimental theories of Canadian literature. His critical studies have transformed our understanding of language and discourse in the study of Canadian texts. Professor Davey’s sustained efforts – as critic, theorist, editor and poet – to enlarge and redirect Canadian literature studies have been essential contributions to its contemporary diversity and self awareness."

London Open Mic Poetry Night's new interview with Frank Davey follows the poems below.


Five New Poems by Frank Davey

This

This is going to be a real game changer.
If you’re tired of the game you’ve been playing
or hunting or following
then this is the one for you. A ree-al
game changer. It will change
any game you want, baseball into crokinole
antelope into muskoxen
politics into table tennis—you remember that one
right? Even if you play the poetry game
with this game changer you can convert
villanelles to limericks, free verse
to conceptual verse, Galway Kinnell
to Ron Silliman. This is the one you need
a game changer to change all game changers
don’t get stuck in the same old game
this will change the game of bonds to the game
of derivatives, a bear market to a bull
equities into sparkling futures
parlour games into war games
sex games into video games
rupees into bitcoins
pyjama games into arcade games
X-Box into MP3
chess into Red Dead Revolver
it will change the game of thrones
to the game of deck chairs, the game of life
to the game of death, the game of love
to whatever you want, what could be better?—but wait
if you buy our guaranteed game changer in the next five minutes
we will send you our new life changer absolutely free
so don’t wait, change everything today
get a leg up on the future, be game not gamey, be protean, mercurial
be way far out ahead of the changing game

-

Calls for Progress

Substitutes recommended for religion.
New treatments tested for sex offenders.
Alternatives sought to racism.
New approaches considered for child molesters.
Answers suggested to suicide bombers.
New procedures mooted for terrorism.
Mother hits out against family violence.
New methods investigated for executions.
Solutions required for acid attacks.
New thinking needed for gang rape.
Other means considered for war.

-

In the Moment

This poem is being written in the moment.
I have tried writing poems outside the moment
but that doesn’t seem to work, so this one
is being written in the moment, or maybe inside
a series of moments
because now, not just momentarily,
I can hardly remember
that first-line moment from just
moments ago.

Really mindful of that I am working hard
at staying in the moment while writing this poem
& having tons of mindfulness of it. This poem,
its sounds—poem, moment, mindful moment…
It used to be that you could be caught up
in the moment, as if the moment were a hawk
or maybe a vulture, but you don’t hear
much about that anymore, just like you don’t hear much
about nests of singing birds, so poets have to work now
at being in the moment. There are some people
knocking on my front door, but I think
they are in a different moment so I am trying
to ignore them & their moment
& be really mindful of this poem
& its own moment or moments. This is not the moment
for a sweet hello, this is the moment
for a poem with close attention to syllables, junctures,
punctuation, pitch & phonemes & momentary rimes
if no one minds.

-

Poetry Values

Like most things today
poems need values. Not
just values added
but intrinsic values
built-in values
like the air we breathe, like
temperature values, humidex values
wind chill values.

Values are now a big deal for poems.
It’s not that poems didn’t have values before
but they were subtle, hidden--
no values but in things I believe
one poet said. There’s lots of those--
property values, Blue Book values
core sample values, nutrient
reference values, blood sugar values
body mass values—long poems sure have them.

Today’s poem, especially today’s ‘avant’ poem
must declare its values
they must be upfront values
community values, data values, home values
blended values, Quebec values
seasonal values, constant field values
exposure limit values, must openly
oppose racist values, heteronormal values
traditional operating values
stock values, dollar values
colour hex values and

what’s a poem without obvious values
when there’s so many around.
Values, that is.
What would be the value in that.

-

Bottom Line

The bottom line is not the one to begin with.
The bottom line is the one you hope you will know.
It’s the one you hope will be sufficient
so you don’t have to re-read the other lines.

Sometimes the bottom line is only
a faded bikini line, and sometimes it’s the punchline
and you’re the one that’s punched,
when you get your eyes too close

to the bottom line.
The bottom line
can be the end of the line.
The right-hand end of the line.

If you spend all your time
thinking about the bottom line
you might be writing a lyric poem,
or imagining your life as a lyric poem

and the bottom line is the one
that will make all the other lines about stuff
you were seeing or doing back then add up
give them new value, make them all

shore up your so-called ruins, and say
in some spectacular way
this poem’s
bottomed out, everyone.

-

Interview with Frank Davey
This new interview is by  London Open Mic Poetry Night's Kevin Heslop.

KH: It seems to me that you have been integral in both weaving and criticizing the Canadian cultural tapestry of letters from the late 1950’s and early 60’s at UBC onward. If you’ll indulge the metaphor for a moment, are there any particular differences between the way you engage the tapestry, both creatively and critically, today, and the way you have engaged it in the past?

FD: I wouldn’t think of it as a tapestry – a tapestry isn’t continually in motion. I started writing at UBC in a small community of young writers who exchanged new poems among themselves, read them to each other, arranged their own literary discussion meetings, were extremely aware of British Columbia’s isolation from much of Canada’s political and literary events, and who soon became editors and publishers as well as poets and sent their publications out to participate in and influence such events – you’ve probably heard of Tish, Blew Ointment, The Georgia Straight, Very Stone House, Talonbooks, Pulp Press, New Star Books, NMFG, Island, West Coast Line, Capilano Review – some of which are still very much active. I still think of writing – whether it’s a poem, review, academic book or cultural criticism – as a social intervention – as at least the offering of further alternatives for language, literary form, personal relations, social actions and other cultural practices. 

But I also follow that “further alternative” aim in my own writing. I try not to write books or poems that closely resemble my earlier ones. I look to push my writing some place further – further concerns and means, further provocations – each time out. Robert Duncan used to say “My revisions are my new work.” I wouldn’t want my life’s work to be a tapestry – I’d rather it be an evolving participatory project. 

KH: What can a creative writing class do for a young writer that a six-pack, a notebook and a pencil can’t?

FD: Well, that six-pack, notebook and pencil can’t read your poem, can’t discuss it among themselves, can’t tell you what they think of, can’t show their jealousy, if any, of how good it is, or their pleasure that someone their age is writing so well. One of the best things of being a college student is the community of bright curious people it puts you among. In a writing class the other students are at least as important as the instructor, often – perhaps usually – more so. Most of those students are plugged into a culture similar to the one you are, and are discovering, like you, surprising things elsewhere in their studies. Some of them may be your writing companions for the rest of your life. Many of their discoveries and reading interests may be more important for you to follow than those on curricula. 

Unless you’re sharing that six-pack with other writers, it and the notebook and pencil suggest rather solitary and individualistic writing habits. That’s not the way writing works. It’s a social activity – you write to and for and with others, not just to and for and with yourself. When you publish – i.e. make public – your writing has to find a way through current writing practices, linking with some, building on some, refusing some, and implicitly offering others. You’d better know what those practices are, and that six-pack ain’t going to tell you by itself.

KH: Having witnessed and written from and reflected upon the avant-garde of Canadian literary culture for nearly half a century, where and with whom in your opinion lies the razor edge, the disreputable frontier, the experimental playground of Canadian letters today?

FD:  Let me restrict my reply here to poetry – I don’t believe there is any “disreputable frontier” today in Canadian fiction, and I haven’t been following drama. So much of current fiction writing is predominantly commercial or cultural in its ambition, and forgetful that it could also aim to change the history of fiction writing. Playwrights do much better, probably because the theatre is so obviously social and because – much like for poets – there is little possibility of becoming wealthy. So now I’ve made your question easy to answer – the disreputable frontier currently in Canadian poetry is with Christian Bok, Lisa Robertson, Derek Beaulieu, Peter Jaeger, Erin Moure, Gary Barwin, Sina Queyras, Stephen Cain, and various younger conceptual writers you likely wouldn’t have heard of, such as Jonathan Ball, and to some extent still with Steve McCaffery, who has now been disreputable in Canada for four decades, although almost an established poet in the US. It’s notable that many of these are their 40s – it’s a sign of how conservative official Canadian 'poetry' culture has been – and that they all probably have more readers internationally than they do in Canada. The internet has opened the globe to Canadian poets – they can sidestep the slower-moving Canadian poetry scene and find audiences and risk-taking collaborators elsewhere.

KH: How did your poetic style evolve, who or what influenced you the most?

FD: I was first influenced simultaneously by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his relaxed yet precise conversational poetic, and by the pretentious Yeats-imitations of one Desmond Fitzgerald, 28th Knight of Glin, who was the acknowledged hero-poet on the UBC campus in the late 1950s, and whose poems embodied everything I didn’t want in my own. I realized that I wanted the sound of my poems to be North American, and perceived also that effectively-communicating poems, such as those of Ferlinghetti, risked being perceived by some audiences as anti-poetry. It was a risk I’ve always been eager to take. My strongest influence in early 1960s was Charles Olson, in the later 1960s it was Robert Duncan and Daphne Marlatt, in the early 1970s Jack Spicer and George Bowering, in the later 1970s and early 80s it was bpNichol and Jackson Mac Low. All of those have stayed with me, with the addition of Charles Bernstein and the painter Greg Curnoe in the 1990s. You’ll notice here the names of contemporaries and colleagues, such as Marlatt, Bowering and Nichol – here’s that social aspect of writing again, that you learn and grow by communicating and interacting.

KH: What, in your opinion, can a poem not do without? 

FD: Language – the communally made medium that we all work with and contribute to.

KH: You mentioned Ferlinghetti's ostensibly anti-poetry style. What does the term anti-poetry mean to you and how has it evolved? Is there a tacit danger regarding modern, colloquial poetry that 'the Tweet shall inherit the Verse'?

FD: I don’t see how these two questions are connected. Perhaps I should have capitalized “Poetry” earlier to distinguish it from “poetry.” There’s been a persistent tendency in English-language poetry to fossilize the understanding of what poetry is – to understand it as whatever the last large new accomplishment has brought. After Milton poetry was understood to sound Miltonic. After Dryden and Pope poetry was understood to be written in heroic couplets and to exclude “enthusiasm.” After the Romantics it was understood to be written in blank verse, odes, sonnets and ballads, and to express “feelings.” After Eliot and the New Critics it was understood to be “impersonal” and sculptural. What is perceived to be unpoetic in any period is relative to the dominant or ‘official’ understanding of poetry – i.e. Poetry. The poetries of Ferlinghetti, Corso and Ginsberg appeared in the 1950s when the understanding of Poetry was that of the New Criticism. At UBC some English faculty suggested that it was material more appropriate to the Sociology department than to English. To them it definitely wasn’t “Poetry” – although later to many of the Language Poets it came to be. As for the “colloquial,” most of the major canonical poets have written in the colloquial language of their periods – Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Keats, Whitman, Pound. I can imagine all of them tweeting, each quite differently. 

KH: Otsuji [Seki Osuga] once stated : "If 90% of a haiku can be understood it is a good haiku. If 50-60% can be understood it is wonderful. This kind of haiku we never tire of. "  In the vein of the advocatus diaboli, can Osuga's line apply to modern traditional, rather than ostensibly anti-, poetry? Is there implicit value in ambiguity?

FD: I think you have it backward. Your “modern traditional” is usually 90% or more understandable because its poetics have been around for so long and become so familiar. Non-normative poetry is often only 50% or less understandable – sometimes much less – because we haven’t yet learned to read it. In 1959 readers – me included – struggled to understand 20% of Olson and Creeley. Unfortunately, classroom instructors often prefer the familiar and easily teachable Poem. As for the “ambiguity” that you mention, it isn’t usually a property of what Bernstein jokingly calls the “Difficult Poem.” It’s produced by the reader who is unfamiliar with its poetics. Moreover all good poems contain difficult-to-perceive meanings, and reward repeated readings as the reader becomes more familiar with the poem’s means. If a poem doesn’t reward repeated readings with new understanding, it may not have been worth reading in the first place. 

KH: Billy Collins has been known to distinguish the prose writer as looking into peoples' homes from the poet whom looks out his or her own window. As a writer of both prose and poetry, does this distinction resonate with you?

FD: No. It would limit what prose can do to realism and what poetry can do to anecdote.  

KH: Are there any particular poetic mechanisms which you employ on a consistent basis to pique a reader's interest, spur narrative movement or conclude a poem?

FD: Possibly unconsciously, although as I indicated earlier I do try to avoid consistency – I’m not interested in having an identifiable life-long “style” or “voice” – to me having those is a sure way of having your poems  become Poetry. So if I find myself using any “particular poetic mechanisms” in an habitual way, I try to stop. 

KH: "Calls for Progress" seems to redress, with a tongue-in-cheek tone, vain attempts to address systemic issues by way of an endless parade of novel, symptomatic interventions - "Alternatives sought to racism", "New treatments tested for sex offenders". Do you see any specific methods of dealing with these systemic issues directly (apart from writing a poem to identify the flaws of such forms of address)?

W.H. Auden notably wrote that "In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals only to a handful of people, they remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous members, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens." 

Do you agree with Auden's assessment?

FD: I'm sure you've noticed the resistance of Harper -- and of other politicos and "managers" --  to the concept of the systemic, most recently as it should apply to murdered and disappeared Indigenous women. It's a fundamental political act to insist on it.

And the remedies are collective, not individual. Even Naomi Klein's books are more about mobilizing social action than offering "specific methods" for reforming or ending capitalism.

So yes,  Auden here makes a lot of sense to me. Art should make many people uncomfortable. It should make them more aware of the fissures in their beliefs, the contradictions in their culture's practices, and the often deliberate imprecisions of its language habits.

-

The Event

FEATURED READINGS: 
  •  Poems Suitable for Current Material Conditions, poetry by Frank Davey (See bio above).
  • -Some Mornings, poetry by Nelson Ball:  Ball is a poet, former publisher (Weed Flower Press) and bookseller at Nelson Ball, Bookseller in Paris, Ontario. Nelson is the author of over 20 poetry books and chapbooks, his latest collection of poems is titled In This Thin Rain (Mansfield Press). In the fall of 2014 Mansfield Press will publish Ball’s new book of poetry Some Mornings. Nelson's latest chapbook, A Rattle of Spring Frogs (Hamilton Arts & Letters/samzidat press) can be read in full here. (Nelson Ball won't be at this event. Someone else will present his poetry collection, Some Mornings.)
  • Some Talk of Being Human, poetry by Laura Farina: Farina's first book of poetry, This Woman Alphabetical, won the 2006 Archibald Lampman Award. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine and taught Creative Writing to young people in Ontario and Chicago.
  • Carafola, a novel by Christine Miscione:  Miscione is a Canadian fiction writer. Her work has appeared in various Canadian publications, such as  Exile: The Literary Quarterly, This Magazine, and The Puritan. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Hamilton Arts Award for Best Emerging Writer. In 2012, Miscione’s story, Skin Just, won first place in the Gloria Vanderbilt/Exile Editions CVC Short Fiction Contest (emerging writer category). Her debut short story collection,Auxiliary Skins, was released in 2013. Carafola is her first novel.

HOSTS:    Mansfield Press publisher/editor Denis De Klerck and editor Stuart Ross.
WHERE:  Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, in the large, covered terrace in the back. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Parking behind, with overflow parking available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.
WHEN: Sunday, Nov. 30th. Starting at 7:00 pm.


        

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Interview with Julie Berry, Featured Poet for Open Mic, Nov. 5

10/22/2014

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Julie Berry’s first book, worn thresholds was published by Brick in 1995 and reprinted in 2006. A second collection of poems was published by Buschek Books of Ottawa in the fall of 2010. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals from Canadian Forum in the late seventies to most recently, The Malahat Review and Brittle Star, a UK publication. Julie’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies including Open Wide a Wilderness from Wilfred Laurier University Press (2008).  Being an elementary school teacher for most of her working life has given her the gift of a child’s-eye view of the world. In 2007 she wrote and presented, with the help of Steve Wadhams of CBC, The Poetry of the Woods, an award-winning CBC production of Outfront and this experience has led to her present job producing children’s radio programs. She was long-listed for this year’s Canada Writes competition with an excerpt from a work-in-progress,  I am &c. The Gilbert White Poems. Julie lives just outside of St. Thomas, Ontario with her partner, Jonathan and their dog, Guinness. Her four sons have grown and flown.


Julie says of her poetry, "I want to make something beautiful and powerful that wakes the reader up," and further on she adds, "Finding humour in the abyss, that’s poetry." We are delighted to share several of Julie's poems with you, and our interview with her follows below them. 

Four Poems by Julie Berry

I WAS THERE A MONTH BEFORE HE NOTICED

My attraction was to his cantaleupes. He coddled them— 
yet repeatedly pinched back their delicate tendrilling 
their determined attempts to escape through the cracks 
of their casements & how could I resist his Grass of Parnassus 
so brashly brought out of Rutland. Vehemently thriving 
to this day in Sparrow’s Hangar. 

A fortnight after I arrived his people came up 
from South Lambeth. There was singing in the hermitage, 
Virgil along the Bostal. When they left it was just him & me. 
Something approaching the size of a Coneycroft Hill opened 
in the sky with an invisible pivot-point top & bottom.
God knows what sort of ceiling anchor kept everything 
right-side-up. All 230 square inches of skin on my scalp
sizzled with true patriot love. O Canada O glorious 

O gravel pit. 

We were coming in for a landing--
it was early morning. A southern Ontario September. 
Thick fog. School buses delayed two hours.

We set down beside a creek without a name
at the bottom of a gully a mile north of Lake Erie. 
A meandering kind of creek. You can cross a creek like that 
& still be on the same side. Gilbert was amazed. 

A raccoon mistook us for shrubs in the gloom.  
Don’t act scared I said to him under my breath.
That’s the worst thing you can do.

Here’s how we got back to 1768: 
we held our arms in front of us at shoulder height, curved 
as if we were holding an enormous bag of groceries in each one.
We began turning counter-clockwise—our left arms 
pulled us around. Our right arms 
swung to the front. 
We began spinning, slowly at first.
Then faster & faster. Keep your head up Gil, I said. 

Focus on something that’s not moving. 


THE DUKE OF RICHMOND’S MOOSE

Michaelmas 1768  

Foreign animals seldom fall in my way; my little intelligence is confined 
to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home.
                                  Gilbert White THE NATURAL HISTORY 
                                  OF SELBORNE, Letter XXVIII to Thomas Pennant

At that time the wasps were thinning
& the hop-picking was nearly over. 
Hedgehogs were boring into the grass walks 
to eat the plantain roots. This was the year 
nectarines rotted on the trees. The morning 
he heard of the moose-deer, rooks were playing by pairs 
in the air over the church mead & three black warty water-efts 
with fin tails & yellow bellies were drawn up in the well-bucket.

The deer-moose had died the Monday before 
& was being kept in an old greenhouse
slung under the belly & chin by ropes
so to be in a standing position--
long legs, short neck, ears vast 
& loping, as long as the neck
with a head like an ass. Its lips were excessive
(a delicacy he’d been told) & its nostrils huge.
He wished to take measurements,
examine the teeth, tongue, lips, hoofs, etc. minutely
but it was in so putrid a state.
The stench was hardly supportable--
he had to stay clear of it 


the walnut-cracking machine

aunt nelly was a fitch from fingal 
small like a wren  
inside her she carried 
an immense drawstring bag 
crammed with small kindnesses
her husband ingersoll was well-read  
a farmer with a butterfly collection
and a killing jar he kept on the kitchen counter 
he was born and died in the same house
painted once as high as he could reach 
without a ladder

late april snow covered the green grass 
the morning i dropped in for tea
a vise-like creation sat on the kitchen table
somebody had been using it to crack walnuts 
i tried it out a few times 
while aunt nelly boiled water
fussed with a plate of cookies 
uncle ingersoll called from the dining room
would you like to see the automatic nut cracker?

he was using a walker so the trip through the kitchen 
down the back porch steps
across the wet lawn took a good half hour
the walnut cracker had been out all winter  
he kneeled 
tinkered with it a few minutes 
nelly yelled from the back door  
it’ll never work 

he reached for the switch 
               nothing 
plug it in he yelled to nelly
i took a step back 
alarmed that electricity was involved 

it started up right away
people miles away that morning
in shedden or frome
planting peas or leaf lettuce
likely straightened their backs
turned their faces to the southwest

but when uncle ingersoll dumped 
the pail of last fall’s walnuts 
into the large funnel-shaped pipe  
the trees the house the clouds 
the planets and all their moons 
collapsed under the weight of the din 
all creation tumbled together down the pipe
and cracked in a rupturous clatter 
i pressed the heels of my hands over my ears 
and squeezed my eyes shut

the machine broke up the shells 
spit them out one side
the meat of the walnuts dropped into
a small china bowl underneath 
uncle ingersoll reached down 
turned the machine off 
the silence was a solid embraceable thing 
i carried home     
sometimes i take it out and hold it
and dream of someday making something 
as loud and useful 
as the walnut-cracking machine


not the heaven of raccoons

philosophically and logistically speaking 
there are some problems with my theory 
of separate heavens for separate people 
as my sister pointed out the other night 
when we met for coffee after going to 
the funeral home 

wouldn't it be lonely she wondered 

my response involves advanced theories of quantum physics in which the universe is 
expanding so fast that there are infinite alternate universes created which are almost 
identical to other universes except that in one universe there might be raccoons up
in trees while hound dogs bark underneath them and in another universe the raccoons 
are in the cornfield feasting while in heaven right next door somebody has plugged 
a radio into a long extension cord and music from the local radio station has scared 
the raccoons away and bushels of corn are picked by a woman who loves the feel 
of the perfect ears in her hands because this is her heaven you see not the heaven 
of raccoons

"the walnut-cracking machine,"and "not the heaven of raccoons" are both from the walnut-cracking machine (Buschek, 2010). "I WAS THERE A MONTH BEFORE HE NOTICED" and "THE DUKE OF RICHMOND'S MOOSE" are from the Gilbert White manuscript on which Julie is working. 

  THE INTERVIEW
Interview by Shelly Harder for London Open Mic Poetry Night 
   
SH: When and why did you start writing poetry?

JB: I started writing poetry in my early twenties. I was keeping a daily journal and sometimes the entries felt like poems. I was married before I was 20 and had two kids by the time I was 27. Four kids by the time I was 32. I began teaching school when I was 24. A busy time but whenever I found the time I would scribble poems into my journal. During a maternity leave (thank goodness for maternity leaves!) I sent a poem to Canadian Forum. I don’t think I’d sent anything out before that. I was very surprised when they accepted it. I can remember the day that I received the acceptance notice in the mail. I opened the letter with my second son in my arms. He was a newborn and he got a wild ride that day. I danced, I truly danced around the house. 

So why did I start writing poetry? Because I liked playing with words and I liked making poems. I was reading a lot of poetry and I loved it, and wanted to do it as well as the poets I was reading. It was a thrill to have a line come for me, the perfect line. Writing was an escape from the chaos of mothering and teaching and living life. It was also in some mysterious way a direct line into those very parts of life. Kind of like being in a poetry-coma while hooked up to life support, where the life support is your daily life—the sick kids, the lesson plans, the breakfasts, lunches and dinners.  Being a teacher and a mother gave me a lot of practice focusing on a still point while kids pulled at my clothes and yelled my name. I’m way too good at it, even today.

SH: What have been the biggest influences on your poetry over your life?

JB: My grade 13 English teacher told us that reading Tinturn Abby by Wordsworth made him cry. It didn’t make me cry but I was impressed that a poem could make a grown man cry. A poem by P.K. Page described how I felt about a boyfriend way back then—“Adolescence”.  .  . “and white was mixed with all their colours.” I loved that poem. 

I intended to be a Phys. Ed. Teacher when I went to University. The young man who coached the intramural flag football team showed me his paperback copy of Walt Whitman. By second year the idea of being a gym teacher didn’t seem like such a good idea after all. I happened upon an anthology called I am a Sensation that was put together by Gerry Goldberg and George Wright with the assistance of students at Kipling Collegiate in Toronto. It included poems and prose written centuries earlier along with very fresh, new poems. It grabbed me by the throat. I abandoned the whole educational enterprise 6 weeks into my third year and headed west to find myself. Who didn’t? It was the early seventies. 

Came home, got married, had kids. Got a career. 

Early influences were Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman and Walt Whitman. I still pick up that old paperback copy of Leaves of Grass and delve into it.  Later, after the shock and awe of motherhood had died down a little, I continued to read and write poems. At first I believed that I could never be a “real” poet because I lived in a small city in the middle of nowhere. People who wrote real poetry lived in Paris or in the English countryside with their poet husbands. Sylvia Plath was a poet I admired but she lived a life that seemed glamorous and impossible for me. I would never have the kind of life that would generate good poems. I read everything I could get my hands on and I read in every spare moment. I read entire books, I’m sure, standing in doorways. All of my books are a mess. It’s inevitable when you read while brushing your teeth. 

Bronwyn Wallace changed my life. And she allowed me to speak, to write in my voice. I wish I could have met her. “The more particular you are, the more general you will be.” I think those are the words of Diane Arbus, but I first encountered the words through Bronwyn Wallace. 

Two other poets need to be thanked here. Janice Redecop and Ted Plantos. These poets were writers-in-residence at the local library in St. Thomas, Ontario. In the early nineties I was a closet poet. Nobody had seen my work and I had been writing for over 15 years. Long story short. My second life began. They were kind and encouraging. My first workshop group formed itself, and with the help of Ted Plantos, we published two little books of poetry. We called ourselves “The Roundhouse Poets”. I belong to another workshop in London now and the monthly meetings keep me going. 

SH: Can you say something about how your poetic style evolved, and what you generally try to accomplish in your poetry?  

JB: How my poetic style evolved. Well, poetic style is a slippery topic, isn’t it? I don’t like that question. Let’s go on to the next one. The first poem I wrote in my voice was “dissection kit” in worn thresholds. Unbeknownst to me, the poem was a prophecy. It’s interesting how poems, like some dreams, are prophetic. 

What I try to accomplish in my poetry? I want to make something beautiful and powerful that wakes the reader up in some way. That’s what I like about poetry too. I want to be surprised. I don’t mind being mystified and unable to say what the poem is “about” but I want to feel like I’ll never be the same person after reading it. Writing a poem like that is my goal, every time. 

SH: In your poetry you mention place names of southern Ontario. In what ways has this locale shaped and inspired your writing?

JB: I was born in St. Thomas and have lived here for all of my adult life. I grew up in Toronto, in Rexdale, mostly. It would have been truly awful except we lived next door to a public library and the Humber River was within walking distance. In those days parents let their kids loose to spend hours of unsupervised exploring. At least my parents did. Weekends we’d get into the car and drive west to Port Stanley, where my dad’s parents had a 35 acre farm crisscrossed by a couple of gullies. My great aunts and uncles lived on farms and in small villages around there and we were a close-knit family. Fingal, Shedden, Lawrence Station, Iona Station. Tryconnell. Port Bruce. In one of my earliest memories I’m sitting in a laneway of fine sand, letting it fall through my fingers. There’s a tobacco kiln nearby. The smell of curing tobacco in the air. 

I tried my hand at market gardening on this farm in an attempt to pay my university tuition. Ploughed, disked and harrowed the fields, planted sweet corn mainly, cultivated it and applied pesticides and herbicides galore. I grew a lot of corn but didn’t make any money at all.   

Growing up in the suburbs of Toronto gave me a perspective that most kids don’t get. I fell in love with rural southwestern Ontario at a very young age because I knew the suburban desert. I will never stray far from the gully in my writing, whether it’s a poem about Taipei, Taiwan or Bas Cap Pele, New Brunswick. 

Becoming intimate with a place grows your capacity to love other places. This explains, partially, my five-year love affair with the long dead Gilbert White and his beloved village of Selborne in southwest England, which is another story. 

SH: Particularly when reading, “I WAS THERE A MONTH BEFORE HE NOTICED,” I was struck by your sense of humour, for example in the lovely enjambment that descends from “O Canada O glorious” into the bathos of “O gravel pit.” How would you describe the role of humour in your writing and perception of life?

JB: My father had a great sense of humour and my memories of childhood involve a lot of laughter. I was blessed with a quick tongue and the ability to perceive the ridiculous in the ordinary. This can often be funny, but not always. When you have the ability to turn everything into a clever joke that will make people laugh, you run the risk of living on the surface and being a very superficial person. I fear I am that person a lot of the time and I try to be careful to fall down an abyss of two at least once a day. Finding humour in the abyss, that’s poetry. 

Also, having four children means you must develop a sense of humour. It’s a matter of survival. I was an elementary school teacher for thirty years, half of them spent with kindergarten kids. Again, a sense of humour was a requirement to maintain sanity. The other thing about spending so much time with young children—you know a thing or two about play. If you want to write poems but you don’t know how to play, how to be silly or how to put two things together that are absolutely not supposed to go together—you will have trouble. 

The funny bits in my poems are, for the most part, the residue of play. Also, I pay attention to life because life is hilarious much of the time.  One little example from my first book, worn thresholds—in the poem, “touching ground.” It’s about my mother and my children and a Christian mystic who buried small bites of herself in the garden. I’m driving my sons to a local hockey arena for an early-morning practice. My youngest is with us because there’s nobody at home to look after him. It’s still dark outside. 

holding the opening of his new rubber boot up to his
ear thomas shouts from the back seat i can hear the 
ocean

Oh, yes, and I’m an obsessive journal-keeper and moments like this must be recorded or else they will fall through the cracks of that abyss I mentioned earlier. 

SH: Both “the walnut-cracking machine” and “THE DUKE OF RICHMOND’S MOOSE” draw attention to their orientation toward the past. How do you conceive of the relationship of the present to histories both near and far?

JB: The older I get the closer I feel to the Big Bang. Time began telescoping down for me when I hit middle age, when my kids started growing up and moving out. As a child World War II, the holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima seemed like remote times, far removed from me. They certainly had nothing to do with me. The European conquest of North America was so long ago it didn’t catch my attention at all. All of that has changed, of course, as I have reached my juicy-crone stage. I would describe my relationship to time as more like living in a giant soup or stew with the principal ingredient being time. The past, present and future rub shoulders in this big soup pot. It’s getting pretty hot in here, these days.  

SH: What do you think of the newest directions in poetry. Do you find any you like? Or dislike?

JB: Conceptualist poetry is a newish kind of writing (to me, anyway). Some of it I like. Some of it is way beyond me. It often doesn’t speak to me at all. I don’t think it’s a shortcoming of the poetry. I think it’s my own laziness as a reader. And my impatience. I have tried my hand at it and some of the poems in my present manuscript contain work inspired by Craig Dworkin, in particular. The procedure I adopted was a good way to give readers the flavor of Gilbert White and his times without being insufferably boring and prosaic. It’s the next best thing to reading Gilbert White’s journals yourself, in their entirety. Everyone should read his journals in their entirety, by the way.  

SH: What can we expect from you in the future?

JB: In the future? I’m going to finish this book about Gilbert White and then I’m going to revisit my life as a teacher. I kept meticulous, detailed journals while I was a teacher and I completed a collection of poetry called writing school as part of my Master’s thesis at the Ontario Institute of Education.  I wasn’t ready to write about being a teacher right after I exited the teaching profession but now I am. 

I want to write about that. 



THE EVENT

WHERE:  The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Wednesday, November 5th, 2014.

LIVE MUSIC: "The Aforementioned,"  a folk, blues, and country group, will open the event at 6:30. They will also perform during the intermission and  at the end of the event. 

THE FEATURED POET: Julie Berry will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read for about 1.5 hours, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt!
 

 

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Oct. 1st, 2014: Roy McDonald interview

9/8/2014

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PictureRoy MacDonald & interviewer Kevin Heslop
Roy McDonald, possibly London's most well-known citizen, will be the featured poet at the October 1st, 2014 London Open Mic Poetry Night at Mykonos Restaurant.

Roy was born in London in 1937 to the tuning of global war drums. He has since been an active member of the demonstrative community: he participated in the call for universal civil rights, environmental awareness and an end to the southeast Asian bloodbath of the 1960’s and 70‘s, and, more recently, denounced and supported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Occupy movement of 2011, respectively. 

1970 met Roy with the publication of his poem “The Answer Questioned”, a stream of idiosyncratic puns which found the January edition of 20 Cents Magazine; it was reprinted and bound in 1979 by ERGO Productions and twice since by Conestoga Press. In 1978, ERGO productions again favoured Roy with the publication of “Living: A London Journal”. In 1979, Don Bell’s “Pocketman”, a novel which loosely follows Roy’s “wanderings and exploits”, was published by Dorset Publishing. A play about Roy’s life entitled “Beard”, written by Jason Rip, found the ARTS Project theatre in 2012 under the direction of Adam Corrigan Holowitz. After decades of transience, including residence in Montréal and Rochdale College in Toronto, all the while comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable, Roy presently lives in his childhood home in London, Ontario. 

The Interview 
(Interview by Kevin Heslop for London Open Mic Poetry Night)

Despite the fact that this interview – originally an eight-thousand word transcript – has been segmented into themes, it retains the linearity of the conversation between Roy, Stan, and I. Roy’s words have been reproduced in their original form with some minor, faithful sculpturing in the interest of clarity. Put another way, the following consists of the two fillets of a single tuna, cubed raw.   K.H.

On Writing

KH: Do you feel any obligation, speaking specifically of poetry, to your reader? Or do you write solely for yourself?

RM: I think a writer writes for both. There are different ways of writing, different reasons people write poetry or anything else. If we talk about poetry, it’s a way of thinking, a way of therapy. It can be very good therapy. You know, someone breaks up with one’s girlfriend or one’s girlfriend breaks up with you, and then you write a poem about the heartache. It helps. To write about the relationship can be very helpful. And another reason, of course, is memory. When I recite a poem... There’s a whole different feeling when one recites a poem than when one just reads a poem. 
And [at] most poetry readings, people read their poems. I’ve made it a point to memorize a lot of my poems, and that just makes it easier to get directly to the other person because you’re not just reading it from a sheet of paper or a book. And if I’ve had certain memorable experiences, I write about them, and then when I read them to myself, to others, to an audience, to one person, to a group, the feelings come back that I wrote the experience about. And that’s valuable too. 

KH: What do you think about structure in poetry? Meter. Form. Is it important? Is human communication through poetry best when structured, metered, and rhymed?

RM: Well, you know, that’s how it used to be in the oral cultures. With all that structure, poems are easily remembered because they’re rhyme schemes and so on throughout the centuries. And now we don’t need that. Denise Levertov. Have you ever heard of her?

KH: No.

RM: British-Russian background. Wonderful poet. She was an activist poet as well, as Margaret Atwood is. I really admire that in a poet. As is Robert Bly. Opposing the war in Viet Nam... [But] Denise Levertov talks about organic structure. It’s as you write it; it’s as your thought, your breath, your own individual way of doing it. And that’s what I do. I don’t start worrying about rhyme scheme and so on, anything like that. And people say what I’ve written ‘is just prose. That isn’t poetry.’ And I don’t c-, you know. Call it prose, you know. I call it poetry. A key thing about having something written as poetry is the lines, rather than the paragraphs. You know, like the right hand margin? 

KH: OK. 

RM: OK. And prose is written right to the end of each sentence, right? With poetry you have the white space around it? 

KH: Mhm.

RM: Well, the white space in the lines, the way poetry is structured in stanzas, indicates pauses and helps you pause. And, rather than rushing through a statement – I’ll read political things, I’ll just rush right through... Poetry, partly because of the structure, slows you down and makes you... contemplative.

-

On Friendship 

Did I tell you about the anecdote about how when I met Leonard Cohen, reciting one of his poems to him? 

KH: Go ahead.

RM: Well, I met Leonard Cohen in Montréal in a bar called the Winston Churchill. And I sat with him, with a group, a small group of people. We were talking. And about half an hour after I’d met him I told him how I recited a poem that he wrote at a friend’s wedding ‘cause she liked the poem so much she wanted me to recite it at her wedding, and I did. And he said, ‘What poem was that?’ And I said, ‘It’s called “Song.”’ And he said, ‘”Song?” What’s that?’ He’d forgotten, or he didn’t; you know, you write a lot of poetry. ‘Song,’ he didn’t remember, and he didn’t know what I was referring to and so I said, ‘Well, I can recite it for you if you like.’ And I did and this is it:

Song

I almost went to bed 
without remembering 
the four white violets 
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater
and how I kissed you then
and you kissed me 
shy as though I’d 
never been your lover.

And at that point – beautiful poem – at that point we’re sitting around a table like this, and he gives me a hug. Now, I’d met him half an hour earlier and he gives me a hug. And I said, ‘Wow,’ you know. ‘What’s that for? Because you couldn’t remember the poem?’ And he said ‘No, the way you recited the poem brought back to my mind the experience I wrote the poem about and for that I am appreciative.’

Now that meant a lot to me. When a person is a poet you admire and if a person remembers your poetry so well they can recite it, even one poem – I’ve found that myself – that means a lot. 

And I’ve done that with other poets as well. I’ve made it a point to. I know maybe about at least a hundred poems by heart. Several of mine, but those of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake, Canadian writers, American writers, British writers, modern writers, and they come in handy to me when I’m going through certain experiences. And, because they’re in my head, I don’t have to have any paper, any books. I can just recite them like I could the poem that I recited that Leonard Cohen wrote.

-

On Self, Personal Influences and the Arts 

KH: You mentioned [when we last spoke] that you’re a Jungian, or if you prefer, that Jung is the psychoanalyst with whom you most identify. I’m curious as to who else has shaped your philosophical foundation, say, or your sense of self? People you’ve known, or who have lived, with whom you most identify?

RM: Well, I did mention before Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis. It’s a whole psychological system and I am a qualified psychotherapist as a psychosynthesist-psychotherapist. Roberto Assagioli was a Venetian born in Venice. The worldwide center of psychosynthesis is in Florence. It’s a beautiful system that includes the Spiritual in the broadest sense, as does Jungian psychotherapy. And I’m into the Spiritual in the broadest sense. Again, the Spiritual...

KH: As different from the religious. 

RM: Yeah. That’s an important distinction. I think that we are all spiritual beings. We’re not earthly beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience. 

KH: What do you think about the idea of soul?

RM: *slightly exasperated sigh*

KH: Or... are you a materialist, in other words?

RM: No. I’m an anti-reductionist and a non-materialist. In other words, you know the concept that our thoughts, our minds, are just epiphenomenon of the brain? I don’t believe that at all. 

KH: What do you think our thoughts are, then?

RM: Well, the concept that I hold to is that we are part of a soul, a universal soul. Everything is tied together. And even quantum mechanics, quantum physics, tells you that. We’re all interdependent. We couldn’t last for five minutes if it wasn’t for the air around us. And the air around us is exchanging molecules from you and I and from other people and so on. We are beings in the environment. We can’t last without the grass, without the trees, without the animals. 

KH: But that doesn’t necessarily mean that thoughts aren’t material. 

RM: Again, what is material? When you get back to energy, it’s all energy. We live in an energetic universe. That this *indicating a chair* can be turned into energy or back into matter. We are not just our brains and our bodies. I’ll put it that way. We are much beyond that. 

I like the concept that we are ‘not just our skin-encapsulated egos.’ Alan Watts used that term. I like it. It’s a very good term. I’m not just what’s inside here. I’m part of all of this. As Tennyson said in Ulysses, ‘I am a part of all that I have met.’ And Walt Whitman makes the same kind of comment, as did Richard Maurice Bucke, another person that I admire. I mean, people I admire, you know I could go on for an hour about different people that I admire, including poets. I think poetry should be a part of the furniture of one’s mind. 

KH: That’s a fine phrase. 

RM: You like that? Yeah. Being able to call on poetry. And art as well. I’m a lover and appreciator of art, good art. From the ancient cave paintings to the modern work of... modern Canadian and American painters. People like Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers. These are London-area painters. Emily Carr. The Group of Seven. The arts are incredibly important. And yet, we know what’s happening with funding, eh? The arts are the first to go because they’re frills. People consider them as airy-fairy stuff... Well, what do we remember of past civilizations? Do we remember the millionaires and the rich people, or do we remember poets and writers and artists?

KH: But, I guess one of the arguments that could be made against art – just to entertain the thought – that could sort of relegate it to the fringe in terms of funding, would be that it’s not as functional as, say, a bridge or a repaired road. 

RM: Yeah, but you see, to me it is not either/or. That’s the mistake that people make. Are you going to put the money into art and culture or into things like hospitals and things that that are needed. We need both. You know the statement, and it’s a good one: Jesus [said] ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’

-

RM: I’m very much into a concept and approach, and this is not original by any means, of Inner-Companions. And since we’re talking about poetry, poets and poetry and poems as Inner-companions. And I think of this when I think of a favourite poem of mine that’s inspired me. And I think of, say, a poem by Walt Whitman. I think of Walt Whitman. I think of him as a person. I think about how he was here in London visiting Richard Maurice Bucke in the London Psychiatric Hospital. I think of poets I know. When I read a poem by Margaret Atwood I can remember first meeting her, talking to her. Same with Leonard Cohen poems. [with] F.R. Scott who died a number of years ago. F.R. Scott, Frank Scott, wrote a wonderful poem called ‘To Anthia’:

When I no more shall feel the sun
Nor taste the salt brine on my lips;
When one to me are stinging whips
And rose leaves falling one by one,
I shall forget your little ears,
your crisp hair and your violet eyes
and all your kisses and your tears
will be as futile as your lies. 

Now, when I met Frank Scott, I recited that poem to him. And again, we were talking earlier about how you recite a poem that you’ve memorized to a favourite poet and... it’s such a wonderful feeling. And I’ve had that, when people have memorized poems of mine and can recite them back to me. And I did that with Alden Nowlan as well. You know Alden Nowlan?

KH: No. 

RM: New Brunswick poet. Underrated. Written something like 20 books of poetry. One of the best Canadian poets of the last century. He died relatively young, I think in his fifties. He was pretty young, but he was a great, great poet. And I met him, talked to him. And I’ll just recite one more poem. 

To Nancy 

Nancy, I’ve looked all over hell for you. 
Nancy, I’ve been afraid that I’d die before I found you. 
But there’s always been some mistake:
A broken streetlight, too much rum,
Or merely my wanting too much for it to be her.

Do read Alden Nowlan, you know, if you get a chance. 

-

On Vice

KH: You know, the word rum came up in the poem and maybe it’s too general but what is the apparent draw towards vice? Artists traditionally, historically, have been drawn towards vice, and I was wondering if you had an opinion as to why. 

RM: I disagree with your premise. Maybe you need to articulate more what you’re...

KH: Say, Kerouac was an alcoholic. Bukowski was an alcoholic. Ginsberg smoked cigarettes for much of his life. William S. Burroughs was a junky for a lot of his life. Say, Rimbaud, coming out of the opium dream...

RM: Well, a great many of these people, as you know, destroyed themselves. And, sooner or later – Rimbaud stopped writing poetry when he was 19 or 20. You burn out. Live fast, love hard, die young? OK, if you want to go that route. I don’t. And most of the world’s greatest poets didn’t. Including, uh, Walt Whitman wasn’t an addict...

Stan Burfield: You definitely can speak from that point of view, can’t you, because you’ve lived a lot longer than any of those people.

RM: And I’ve been there. I’ve been there. 

SB: Oh, that’s right, yeah. 

RM: I’ve been there. Don’t forget that. I talked about that [last time we spoke], that I was severely mentally ill for a number of years, for quite a few years, almost dying as a consequence of my mental illness. My mental illness was alcoholism. That is a mental illness. It’s named as such.

KH: Do you think that there’s any truth to the idea that there are certain substances which allow you to tap into a higher consciousness that you would otherwise have allowed to go unnoticed should you remain sober? LSD, for example, has been said to open your mind to -

RM: Yeah. But again, when you’re talking about drugs, there’s a great differentiation between the opiates, alcohol and other kinds of drugs and the psychedelics. So, we need to be very careful about what we’re talking about here. Yeah. Ayahuasca, LSD, psilocybin, peyote. Some of these can definitely open you up. 

KH: Have you got an opinion on why there has been, at least in modern, Western civilization, a War on Drugs, as it’s called, why the ban of these substances which seem to be able to expand consciousness?

RM: Well, the powers that be don’t want that, obviously, because what would happen if everyone started thinking for themselves?

KH: Do you think that’s a conscious decision rather than an avoidance of...

RM: I think it’s that, and I think it’s the fact that the alcohol lobbies are tremendously important. Do they want people smoking up? I’ve been to parties at Western and so forth. It used to be, at the Homecoming weekend, people were so drunk and fights and so on. And I’ve been at Woodstock where hardly anybody drank. A lot of people smoked up and it was a very peaceful scene, right? The difference between those drugs, for example. And there’s obviously a danger with these things, with mind expansion. I took morning glory seeds...

KH: LSA...

RM: It’s similar to LSD. I had a whole heaven, hell, rebirth experience. And it was so scary that afterwards I had flashbacks. Never again. I never touched anything like that again, mushrooms, anything. And yet I continued drinking and that was what was killing me. That’s the interesting thing. I was stupid. I didn’t know any better. And I drank alcohol for many reasons. It was an all-purpose drug for me. I felt sad. I drank. I felt a bit better. I felt really anxious, a few drinks, ah, I felt better. I was very shy. I’ve always been a shy person, very much an introvert. We’ve talked about that. If I was sitting here sober and there was a beautiful woman sitting over there and I wanted to meet her, I would never think about going over and introducing myself because, ‘Oh, she’s probably busy or waiting for her boyfriend or whatever.’ A couple of beers in me and I’d go over and introduce myself. A couple of more beers, I’d introduce myself and start hugging her. A couple of more beers, I’d be feeling her up. And a couple of more beers, if she was with a guy, I’d tell the guy to f-off and then start caressing her. It’s a wonder that I’m still alive, you know? I mean, really, it is. 

-

KH: If you were to choose one thing that you’re most proud of, that you’ve done or that you’ve participated in, could you narrow it down?

RM: Yeah. 

KH: What would it be?

RM: Attaining sobriety! Stopping drinking. 

SB: Why are you so proud of that? 

RM: Because I was finally able to do it, and if I hadn’t done it, I would have destroyed myself. I’d be dead now. I wouldn’t be here. And it was difficult. As I said, alcohol is an all-purpose drug. If I felt sad, I would drink. If I felt happy, if I felt good, a few drinks and I’d be flying. And then the depression sets it. But really, it’s an all-purpose drug. 

I was under the illusion that I couldn’t get through my days and nights without alcohol. It was that much of a crutch. And it was a rubber crutch. As I found out later, I could. I could get through without it. But I went through some very difficult times after I stopped drinking, but I’ve never had a relapse, fortunately. Very fortunately, because a lot of people do relapse and fall of the wagon. 

SB: Yeah, some strong streak in you. Some determined...

RM: Yeah, but also feeling, ‘If I don’t, I’m gonna die.’ When you really face death, looking at you in the face, there’s death: do I want to live or do I wanna die. When you face that, it’s very scary. But it’s pretty sobering, too. And also, memory is very important to me. Jack Kerouac was called ‘memory babe’. That was his nickname because he had an incredible memory. And I have a very good memory as well. But, again, when Kerouac would drink more and more, you know, it screws up your memory! And I didn’t like the fact that I’d be out drinking, and I’d go out to the bar that I drank at the night before, and they’d say ‘Get out of here McDonald, you’re barred.’ ‘Why?’ ‘After what you did last night?’ ‘What’d I do last night?’ ‘Oh, come on. You know what you did.’ ‘Oh, no, I did? Oh, no...’ And so it went. And I did want to remember but I’d brown out, you know, when you remember just bits and pieces? And then black out. What? What happened? And you know, waking up in jail and wondering, how did I get here? What’s the charge? I mean, when you’re thrown in at night. What’s it gonna be? Drunk, or assault, did I hit a cop? I didn’t know. Scary, very, very scary. And again cops could have said I was pugnacious and I hit him. Assault. That’s assaulting a police officer. And it was never that, it was always drunk in a public place. And then it was a 30 dollar fine or 30 days in jail. Drunk and disorderly, it was called...

But Ginsberg certainly wasn’t an alcoholic. He did drugs, but they all did. He died at 71 or 72 [70]. Or Ferlinghetti. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s still going and he’s about 94 or 95, now. Met him as well. And these are treasured meetings with people. Talking to them about their craft is very important to me. And you know Ted Hughes? Britain’s poetry laureate. He was married to Sylvia Plath. And I’ve met two Nobel Prize winners in poetry: Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet, and Derek Walcott, a West Indian poet. 

-

On Public Image 

KH: In your opinion, how is fame positive? How is it negative? 

RM: Well, you gotta know how to use fame. It can benefit you, it can hurt you. I get people out there who – and this is not uncommon – who’ll say, ‘Look at this guy, look at his appearance. He’s just a bum, but poetry? Ah, fuck. He’s a loser. He’s an old man.’ 

I get a lot of abuse and a lot of it is just pure jealousy. I’m out on the street. I’m singing and hugging all kinds of beautiful women. Because I love women, you know. I mean who doesn’t? I guess there’s some that don’t, but I do. ‘So he’s got a couple of books published, so what? Big deal.’ Well, I don’t glory about the fact that I’ve got a couple of books published. I’m glad I have. I’m glad I’ve had a book written about me and a play written about me and so on. And I’m very high profile. 

Well, it can be used for you, it can be used against you. I’ve had hassles, like the time I was thrown off the University of Western Ontario campus. I went immediately down to the [London Free Press], I knew people there. They wrote a story about it; I got right back on campus. I knew people at City Hall. I mean, it’s sad in this case, in this society, that if you know certain people. you can have power. You know certain people. Media people, mayors, provincial leaders. ‘Hey, I’ve got connections. Don’t screw me around or I’ll...’ And the poor guy or girl that’s on the street and doesn’t have any of these connections, they’re just nobody. They’re powerless... 

When I was thrown off the [Western University] campus, the Chairman of the grounds at the time who issues the orders on the grounds because it’s a semi-private place, the guy who wrote – I can’t think of his name at the moment – an editorial in the Western Gazette on my being thrown off the campus, he asked the guy in charge of the grounds, ‘Does this sort of thing happen from time to time? You know, people come up there from the community who are not students, not teachers and get asked to leave...’ He said ‘Oh, yeah it happens all the time.’ ‘And what happens to them?’ ‘They go away. We never see them again.’ They’ve got no recourse. They’re just riff-raff of London going up to the country club of Western. You can detect a bit of anger, right?

KH: It is a private establishment though, technically, no?

RM: No. Technically it’s like a mall. You can be asked to leave a mall; you can’t be asked to leave the street or in a public place...

KH: Right, but a mall is private property, too, isn’t it? It’s accessible to the public, but it...

RM: No, this goes under the law with regards to schools. Now I can see, say, you or any of us hang around a high school. Obviously, what’s going on here?

KH: Right. Lecherous. 

RM: Yeah. Now, with Western or Fanshawe you can be asked to leave with no reason given if you’re not a teacher or a student or a member of the support staff, like a cook, or if you’re working in the bookstore or whatever. You can be asked to leave. And what happens is that it’s open in the sense that there are venues there open to the public. The bookstore is open to the public. Not just the students; it’s open to the public. Events at the stadium are open to the public. Alumni Hall [holds concerts] that are open to the public. They want the public to come. On their terms. 

And they lied when they threw me off the campus. They lied to the press when they said that I didn’t have any identification. They thought I was a vagrant. Total bullshit. Bureaucratic bullshit. They knew exactly who I was and why they wanted me off the campus. By the way, I had a whole wallet of identification. They blamed it on the university cops not knowing who I was. I showed them my books. When I get that kind of bullshit and people read the paper and say, ‘They didn’t know who you were.’ Bullshit. They knew exactly who I was. You see what I mean? I’ve dealt with bureaucracies in the past and I know what they can do, how they can screw people around in every way, on every level. Not that all bureaucrats are bastards, but a certain amount of them are. And far too many of them are uncaring, you know. ‘Who are you?’ 

Like you. Hey! Why are you wearing your hair like that? You’ve got a beard. I don’t like that hat. That hat looks kind of strange. What are you doing up here? You see? You could get that tomorrow. You could go up there and get that tomorrow. 

KH: I know I’m privileged in that way. 

RM: Why? Because you’re... 

KH: Acceptable by society’s standards, more or less. 

RM: Oh, more or less. You see, well, it’s just, how far out can you be? How far out am I? Would they ask him to leave? See, it’s not just they know who they’re asking to leave and why. They knew exactly who I was. They knew I was in the cafeteria. I’d get people to think. I’m very well known. They’ve written several stories about me in the [Western Gazette] over the years. They knew me. That and, plus, my appearance. ‘He doesn’t look like a student,’ you know. 

-

On Politics 

KH: Are there any barriers to communication in particular that stand out to you, or is it too complicated to...

RM: Well, it’s just a complex question. There’s all kinds of barriers to communication, language being one obvious one. And social class, being one. And we’re a classless society. Sure we are. Sure we are. We’re not as [stratified] as the British system. 

KH: Does it come down to money? 

RM: Money. Power. And they generally go together. Though, a person can have power and not much money; but if they’re in a powerful position, they have the power and they can change things. By the way, I’m 77. I’ve gone through so many things. I’ve seen so many things. And I had to deal with putting my father in Parkwood Hospital. And I had to deal with bureaucracy there. I had to put my aunt in hospital. She had dementia. My father had a stroke from which he never recovered. That’s why he had to be put in Parkwood. My aunt had dementia. She had to be put in a nursing home. And all the bureaucracy dealings that I went through: what I could do, what I couldn’t do, and what they said. Each case was different. With my aunt, they didn’t have an opening for her. They wanted to put her in a nursing home near Chatham where I wouldn’t be able to visit her. And I got so frustrated I said, ‘Well, Don Fulton is my lawyer. He will be in touch with you regarding this matter.’ ‘Oh, he’s got a lawyer behind him.’ A week later: ‘Oh, we’ve found an opening.’ It goes that way. It goes that way in all segments of society. It shouldn’t. 

Now, a friend of mine, my best friend, Paul McKenzie, obstetrician and gynecologist, I mentioned him early on, was dealing with people. He’s travelled all over the world, helping people, helping midwives and so on. Worldwide, in Africa, in Malaysia and so on. And in some of these countries, bribery is the accepted thing. ‘Hey can I do... five dollar bill, I just put it over there, just let me talk...’ ‘Oh, yeah. I think I can do...’ You know, it’s expected. If you don’t do it, you don’t get anywhere. And he was disgusted with that. But it hurt him and he had to do it. You play the game. 

For example, he needed a telephone. He had to have a telephone. The waiting list was six months to a year for a telephone. He had to have that telephone. Fifty bucks or whatever. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’ And he got a telephone in a weeks time or whatever. I mean, we’re fortunate; we don’t have that. But a friend of mine, a good friend, he had a fifty dollar bill in his driver’s license. Stopped for speeding. ‘Driver’s license, please? Well, see now you were going so many kilometers over the speed limit.’ Takes the fifty dollars, puts it in his pocket, says, ‘Well, OK you’re lucky this time. Don’t speed.’ I mean if this guy, if my friend had been undercover, this cop would have been demoted at least. But, that was there for that purpose, and the guy knew the purpose, and the cop takes the fifty. So it happens here. It happens everywhere. 

KH: Do you vote? 

RM: Not only do I vote, but I have a perfect voting record. Municipal, provincial, federal. 

KH: In other words, you’ve always voted for the person who would win?

RM: No, I’ve never not voted. I’ve always voted. No, not for the person who won. I’ve voted NDP and they haven’t won. Well, some of them have. I’m just saying, I have a perfect voting record and I take it very seriously. On the other hand, people say, ‘Don’t vote. It just encourages the bastards.’ 

KH: Well, there’s a certain idea, not without ground, that democracy as we know it is a joke, and so why participate if you don’t have any influence?

RM: Yeah. 

KH: And yet you have?

RM: Yeah, but I know people who say just the opposite. Who say that’s what the authorities want. Don’t vote? They want that. Because then the worst bastards will get in. I vote, often I vote against. I would vote against Harper, not for this particular person. You know, stop the bastard. *mockingly tremulous* Oh, am I on tape? Oh, no. They’ll be after me! They’ll be after me!

SB: *laughing*

RM: One year I was seriously thinking of running for mayor. This was a number of years ago. A lot of people suggested that I run for mayor, and, if I did, I wasn’t just going to run as a fringe candidate, get five hundred votes and then, you know. No, I was really going to fight hard and have my proposals and so on. And I had backers, willing to back me with some money. And it takes big money behind you to get advertising, posters and so on. And I realized at a certain point that if they ever thought that I might win, they would stop me. They would put money against me, they would discredit me, because they couldn’t allow that to happen. I’d be so into anti-development, and so on. I couldn’t be elected. So I decided not to [run]. 

SB: You were probably right. 

RM: But I’ve had many experiences in my life when I’ve been really targeted because I was a spokesperson for certain things and was discredited for that by different people. And I’ll just leave it at that. I won’t go into detail for various reasons. But you talk about fame, well, that’s the negative side of being well known. You get targeted for certain things. And people have asked me, ‘will you be a spokesperson for this or that? Will you speak?’ And, you know, I’m just in the background. In a life or death situation, if something was really important, I’d stand up. But I’m just going to be in the background, you know. 

-

On Publication

KH: We were talking a bit about the world of money, and I was wondering lately about the idea of publication. It’s often been said that a writer is not the best judge of his or her own work, but, too, that an editor doesn’t necessarily have to take away anything from a poem. What do you think of the world of publication? Do you think it’s a selling-out thing? Does it cheapen the material if it’s edited to turn it into a product?

RM: No, I think that most of the great poets that I’ve met, that I’ve got to talk to, that have written about poetry, will have other poets who they respect read over their poem. Not, ‘What do the people out there think?’ No: ‘What does so and so think? This person is a really good poet, a really acknowledged poet. Can you give me some criticism.’ I’m not going to take it to anyone and ask, ‘Oh, what do you think of this?’ No. Do you see what I mean? 

Trust. You trust certain people, or maybe just one person. Now, I was fortunate enough when I got published - I’ve been in small magazines all over the place, here and there over the years - and my journal was published, my first journal, before my poetry book, as was Pocketman, the book written about me. So my publisher and others knew there was a market out there for my writings. I mean, publishers, even really, really good ones are – my publisher, who was my best friend, Winston Shell, [he] and his wife, they’re very good friends of mine, but he was in it – it’s a business. People said, ‘Oh, he just published your book because you’re his good friend.’ No, no, no. He said himself he wasn’t running a charity. He just wants to make some money. And, plus, he thought what I did was good and would sell. So, it isn’t just one thing or the other. And even at that point I had a reputation in the sense that people knew who I was. 

_

On War

KH: One of the criticisms of war is that it’s young men going to fight old men’s -

RM: Sure, sure, sure. I’d say it’s a game, you know, all the excuses for war. And then the idea, ‘Is it a just war?’ The concept of a just war. Again, it’s in every country. Canada: Wolfe and Montcalm fighting on the Plains of Abraham over the future of Canada. Is it gonna be French or is it gonna be British? And then the War of 1812 and so on. We talk about being a country with no war. Well, the Americans with the civil war, you know. Again, I could talk for hours about war. And by the way, have you read the war poets? These poets who went to war like Rupert Brooke, Sassoon, uh... 

KH: Siegfried Sassoon. 

RM: And... Owen... Wilfred Owen. And our Canadian guy, McCray. In Flanders Fields. You know, talking about patriotism and talking about Owen and Sassoon, [I think of] the terrible, terrible conditions... They were going through in the first world war and so on. These were the war poets. But again, you could do a patriotic song about war or fighting, or you can stand up against it and say how terrible it was. But generally, they’re important because they give a feeling: ‘What was it like to be in the trenches. What was it like to be there at this or that historical event?’

-

On Humour 

KH: Do you think there’s any merit to the idea that poetry is a certain way in which to show off one’s feathers, one’s ability with language, one’s depth of emotion or ability to memorize and recite poetry?

RM: Oh, sure. Sure. 

KH: How high in terms of importance would you rate that impulse as compared to, say, a feeling of solidarity or the importance of familiarizing others with language. In other words, how deep do you think that biological impulse goes?

RM: I think back to my days of high school and there were the jocks. They were the stars with women. But so were the musicians, the trumpet players in the bands. The actors were big, too. Now, how I was able to distinguish myself was by being the school clown, the class clown. So I developed my repertoire of jokes and humour. And that served me well all my life. And even in my drinking days, from some of the things I would pull, from some of the things I would do, humour saved me every time from being beaten up or badly beaten up or hurt. And I, by the way, place humour on a very, very high level. Humour, comedy, laughter, smiles, playfulness. Extremely important and tending to be underrated. And that’s why I have one whole poem, the poem I published, ‘The Answer Questioned,’ which you’ve read. It’s very funny. It’s serious as well. But it’s funny. It isn’t either one. Neither serious nor funny. It’s both. There’s punning there. I do psychological puns, literary puns, philosophical puns, corny puns, all together. And it’s something that nobody else has ever done, a book of one long pun poem. 

KH: So, did you undertake that to create something amusing, something profound?

RM: All of the above. And I’ve always loved puns. I’m a punster. I like that great statement made by Marshall McLuhan: ‘Oh, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a meta for?’

THE EVENT

WHERE: The Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Except for the coldest months, the terrace is open to the parking lot behind. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: Wednesday, October 1st, 2014

LIVE MUSIC: Jef-something Brian Thomas Ormston will open the event at 6:30. He will also perform during the intermission and at the end of the event. 

THE FEATURED POET: Roy McDonald will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read for about 1.5 hours, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt!


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