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Stan Burfield - Poems & Interview

5/26/2017

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The featured poet at the June 7th, 2017 London Open Mic will be the organization’s founder and organizer Stan Burfield. The June event is the last of his tenure, the culmination of five seasons of work. He will be passing the torch to co-organizers Mary Dowds and Kevin Heslop. Before his featured reading, he will be introduced by his wife Linda. 

BURFIELD’S BIO:

     I was raised on a small farm in central Alberta. My first ambition, a very serious one, was to live alone in a log cabin as a trapper. That changed to farmer, then biologist, then journalist, then florist.
    In Calgary, I studied biology, then journalism. Amongst numerous more-nondescript jobs, I was for two years a reporter.
    Then, over a four-year period, I went on some extremely long, arduous adventures by foot, canoe and bicycle, hoping they would break me out of my life-long shyness and anxiety. No such luck. So, having read that poetry was a possible route into the subconscious, which I assumed was the home of my anxiety, I took a poetry anthology out into a closed provincial park near St. John’s, Newfoundland. For a month and a half, I read, wrote and memorized poetry until it floated across the sky in my dreams. But it did nothing for my anxiety.
    In 1987, I married Linda, a flower designer, and we opened and ran a flower shop in Vancouver for nineteen years.
When we sold the shop and semi-retired, we moved to London, Ontario in 2008 to be near our children and grandchildren.
    With more time on my hands, I revved up my poetry writing, and, as a form of shyness therapy, began attending Ron Stewart's excellent poetry workshop. When I got used to that, the next logical step in the direction of my fear was to find a place to read to an audience. Since there was no open mic for regular “page poets” in London then, I decided I would have to organize one. In doing so, the constant social contacts that were necessary turned out to be just the therapy I needed. The stress nearly killed me but I eventually got used to it, and by the fifth season had lost most of my shyness. After 62 years, I felt like I was stepping through a door into a completely new life.
    In the process, my ability to write decent poetry has dramatically improved. And I have a place to read it!

RECOGNITION: 
• The 2014 Ted Plantos Memorial Award from The Ontario Poetry Society.
• 2nd Prize in the 2014 Poetry London Poetry Contest.


Staircase--eleven floors

At the bottom I start again

lift myself, glance up.
And try to peel away
all those things I've always known--
the objects, their dryness, their hold,

even touch those
old splashed years--
scrabbling after
some other life.

But now I've decided it's
next foot above the last--
sadness, now relief--
my muscles, my joints, my eyes open,

my own solid walls moving past. 


Concerning our Glorious Future

As I lift the spoon
from this morning’s coffee
I feel the same long pull of time
that my father did
my mother
that their parents did
and theirs
a chain rattling down
into the well so far
I cannot imagine.
And up, out of that darkness
into this present,
all of it--
the slow ages of our reptilian forebears,
our fearful hominid ancestors,
the entire charging ascent of Man--
comes to a juddering halt
at this drop of coffee
falling
from this
spoon. 

We are stranded here
immovable
at the endpoint
of time, banging
our heads
on the ceiling.


I Am Standing On A Crate Reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am here now. This
is no longer an alternate future, or someone else's.
I am stretched up tight on this crate
looking down at these
slow-moving bodies,
my spine hard against
the stone edge
of Starbuck's window wall,
buffeted by wind and buses
that bellow around this cold corner--
this dark Richmond and Dundas
where I would not be. 

Yet I am only two barefoot beatnik blocks down
from City Lights Book Shop
nicely named for Ferlinghetti's own,
in Frisco way back then. 

And now up on the crate I too am wearing
that F-beard in which he preached to his
beat colleagues passion
for all these dead poor
these no fame no friends
these leaning here into the slow tide of the block
drifting through time's
pool out of jail for a while
getting by as if free
maybe trying
to like each other or one or some. 

I am calm standing on this crate,
wearing this body here now
like someone else's or no one's-- 

and anyway no one looks at me; my eyes
are always in the book, my ears on my sonorous
voice; and elsewhere
with Ferlinghetti
enticing his empathetic, liberal
poet friends: 

"Let's go
Come on
Let's go
Empty out our pockets
and disappear,
Missing all our appointments..." 

No one hears.
And these, with no appointments
to miss, don't care.
His friends aren't here. 

Even so, we few crate poets
yes we have left our safe homes
our cars in the overnight lots
our cell phones in our pockets
and like Ferlinghetti we do our hour
up on our soap boxes
dropping loud words
down into the block.


INTERVIEW


An important component of London’s literary arts scene, the Open Mic has provided a platform for poets “up on our soap boxes / dropping loud words / down into the block.” 
            Riff, if you would, on how your experience as a poet in and citizen of London has been affected by your tenure as the Open Mic’s organizer. What did you set out to achieve by establishing this series? Why do you think it has been successful?


        It’s all been very interesting, to say the least. From both the personal angle and the community angle. A big discovery was that in going in the one direction I necessarily went in the other simultaneously. My main concern at the beginning was personal, to try to solve my serious shyness. The idea was that reading my poems in public, a very scary proposition, would be a form of therapy. Since there was no such place for page poets in London, I had to create one, and it turned out that the social work of creating the community I needed was exactly what it took to demonstrate to my subconscious that it didn’t have to be so afraid of people. It worked amazingly well for me. And I think some of my fellow poets here in London are getting a similar benefit, to some degree, from the open mic, both from reading at it and from being a member of the community. 
         Another reason the open mic has been a success is simply that it gives poets a goal. If they’re writing only for their own pleasure and nobody else’s, chances are their motivation will peter out at some point. And if they send to journals, that long wait can be frustrating. But giving themselves a simple, immediate goal like reading a new poem at the open mic can supply for some people the impetus they need to work on those poems. And thus to read and maybe study. As with me. Over these five years, I’ve read a lot more poetry than I ever would have otherwise, some of it written by the poets I’ve featured. In the process, I’ve learned a lot, and my poetry has improved tremendously. 
         Another thing: London Open Mic provides one more big poetry event in the city (actually more than one), which is one more reason for people to keep thinking about poetry and writing it. If, every time they turn around they see another poetry thing taking place, how can it not excite, and once they’re into the idea because so many other people are the poetry itself will take over. It only needs to get its toe in. Ever since the beginning of the open mic, my idea of real success was seeing people move to London because of the poetry scene here. Well, I don’t know if that’s happened yet, but I expect to hear about that person any time now. 
 
“Staircase--eleven floors” metaphorizes the narrator’s climb of an apartment-complex staircase and the poet’s encounter with the blank page: “At the bottom I start again // lift myself, glance up. / And try to peel away / all those things I’ve always known....” 
          What, if anything, does writing (or reading) a poem promise or afford you––escape, respite, ascension?
 

       For me, poetry does give a bit of respite from anxiety. The creative act enforces a temporary calm. Which is wonderful. But in another sense, poetry is just the opposite of respite and escape. Reading it brings me out of myself into someone else’s reality, into their outlook, their inner being. In doing so, it gives me one little revelation after another. I’m continually shocked to see how different we are from each other and thus to see how immense is the subjective world we all live in. And that I could be living in. … You mention ascension. Yes, I guess you could say that following all the little revelations is a process of mind expansion, as we hippies used to call it, and so could be seen as a sort of ascension. But let’s face it, we’re all here together on the face of the earth. There are no super-wonderful poets up there floating around above the rest of us. 
        Writing poetry for me is an even more wonderful experience than reading it. The creative act focuses my mind, which, for someone with ADD, is the opposite of my norm and so is like an orgasm in its intensity. In writing some of my better poems, I create my own revelations, pulling many things together that previously hadn’t been connected. Not random things, but pieces of reality that really are part of a larger whole. To me that’s one of the astonishing possibilities that writing a poem allows, and which seldom happens elsewhere. 
        I’ve also used writing poetry as a tool in helping to connect my conscious mind to my unconscious mind. That isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Sometimes, wanting to do it strongly enough is all it takes to make it happen. The conscious and unconscious sources of words and thoughts can become so blended that it’s impossible to tell which are conscious products and which unconscious. Most poets have experienced this without even trying. After the writing, a lot can be learned just from analyzing the poem, as if someone else had written it. By the way, two seemingly different aspects of human life are heavy with metaphor: poetry and dreams. When your subconscious mind helps you write a poem, it’s actually your dreaming self you’re working with. In the daytime. 
 
“Concerning our Glorious Future” begins by tying its narrator to what rapidly becomes our deep ancestry, and concludes with a reflexive, ironic turn whereby we are “banging / our heads / on the ceiling.” 
          Two questions. Was this poem, for you, a statement of sorrow at the denouement of the anthropocene (or a more personal statement)? And secondly how might a biologist square or assimilate the human drive to write poems?
 

        I just threw in the cavemen to give a feeling of the enormous length of time we have all spent jumping our little lives forward, one tiny generation after another. At the time, I was sitting at my desk at the flower auction in Vancouver at 5 in the morning trying to wake up with a coffee, looking down over the heads of some 150 buyers, and it occurred to me that many of these people, especially some of the Chinese corner store owners, were sitting in the same seats as had their fathers. And maybe their father’s fathers before them. And suddenly I had this sleepy feeling of these zillions of people, from endlessly far back, all pushing themselves into the future, an immense process which, at that moment, ended right there, as that drop of coffee was falling from my spoon. I was thinking that even with all that lineage pushing forward, nothing then or now actually exists but the present. How can that be? I just about wrapped my mind around the whole thing in that one second. “Grokked it”, as Heinlein used to say. I put down the spoon and picked up my pen and wrote it as a poem. That was one of those revelations. 
       I don’t know how a biologist would use his profession in his poetry. Good question. Definitely, there are good poets who use science as their prime subject. It’s not for me though. Except in the sense of trying to communicate a large vision. And there are plenty of those in science. For instance, the most astonishing vision I’ve ever had was of seeing how nature came about. Life. Nothing else can compare to that one. I’ve tried to get it across in prose, and by describing it aurally. But it never takes. However, it might be done in a poem, not by describing it but by setting up the readers’ minds so they suddenly see it on their own. The thing is, any vision like that never comes in words, only as a visual intuition. And I think poetry is the only medium that can carry that kind of thing. I tried for it, sort of, in “Concerning Our Glorious Future” but I haven’t seen anybody jump up and down about it yet. 
 
The influence of the Beats––Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Huncke, others––and by extension the jazz intonations with which they, especially Kerouac and Ginsberg, wrote, comes across in “I Am Standing On a Crate Reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti”. 
         I know you undertook a cross-country journey similar to Sal Paradise’s. How and when did you first encounter the Beats? And how has the ethos they represented influenced your own life and work? 


       My first big encounter with the Beats was back in the late 80’s when Linda and I had our flower shop in Vancouver. Ginsberg came to town and gave a reading flowing with that rhythm, and his Buddhist thing, all to the wheeze of the squeeze box in his lap. It was entrancing, in its odd way. (I happened to have a pretty good recorder with me and got the whole thing on tape, which a friend has just transferred to digital for me. So I’m gonna put it online when I get around to it.) But I never really got into the Beats after that, other than the occasional poem, until you introduced me to them again, Kev. And now, this moment, as I put your name and The Beats together on the same line, in my mind I can hear you reciting Kerouac. So good. Yeah, that jazz rhythm. Would you do me a big favour and recite it for me again June 7th? … “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey…” 
        Yeah, those cross-country journeys. That was when I got heavily into poetry. It started slowly on the first trip, as I tried to make it across Canada on foot. (Which turned out to be impossible to do in one year: I got only half way across.) For the first couple weeks I was reading Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North In my tent at night by candle light. Basho’s presence stayed with me all the way to Thunder Bay so I took the occasional break along the road to write a poem. I even wrote one as I walked, writing and revising it in my mind on the go, not really seeing the environment at all. But none of those poems were that good. Strong memories though. The next year I went on an equally long, seven-month canoe trip from Calgary to Quebec City, but didn’t write a single poem that whole time because the three other people I was with so stressed me out emotionally, continuously over the entire three thousand miles, me being so shy and they being such judgemental types. In that sense, the canoe trip was just as difficult as the walk had been. Two years later I bicycled the eastern half of Canada, the easiest of the three trips by far. But as I rolled down into St. John’s, Newfoundland I was depressed and desperate, realizing I was still as shy and anxious as I had ever been. All that endurance and determination hadn’t made me a bit stronger emotionally, and I knew that when I went home I would never have this chance again. So I pedalled back out to a closed provincial park and stayed there a month and a half till winter set in, doing nothing but poetry. I had read along the road one night that poetry was a possible path into the subconscious, and I figured that had to be the source of my. Well, I was right: the poetry did its job, in that I did get in touch with my subconscious. But no, I didn’t lose any anxiety. I nearly went insane instead. It wasn’t until decades later, when Linda and I had retired here to London to be near her relatives, that I realized if I were going to lose my shyness I would have to go towards people, not away from them. Damn. A counsellor could have told me that back at the beginning of my life. But that’s okay; I finally solved it myself by creating London Open Mic, lost my shyness, and here we are in the present. Another drop of coffee falling from another spoon. It took me a lifetime to get here, but it was my own adventure.
 
What is your favourite word?

Hmmm. Don’t really have a favourite word. But if you were to ask what my favourite concept is, I can answer that one easily. I love concepts, understanding things. My life has been one long series of attempts to get what’s going on. 

What is your least favourite word?

Any word that has snob appeal.
 
What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally? 

I love a sense of reality, whatever that entails. I love seeing the bare bones, the structure that underlies things, whatever that may be. Emotionally, I’m turned on by calmness, by true empathy, or at least the idea of it, by people being able to communicate and relate somehow with each other’s true selves. Or at least the idea of it. And trust. And I especially love doing something to help someone along their path, no matter what that path consists of. The more different from mine it is, the more I get out of it. 

What turns you off? 

Artifice, pointless wordplay, the imposition of ego, judgement. (But I love to suddenly see the reasons for them, which frees me from my own judgement.) 

What is your favourite curse word? 

Damn. When I was a kid, I only heard my father swear one time. He was blind, and that day he was putting up a fence on the farm, pounding a big staple into a fence post to hold a wire. I happened to be standing there, probably distracted him, and he hit his finger with the hammer. Damn. Quietly, like he was making a remark to somebody. I was shocked. I still remember it clearly. 

What sound or noise do you love? 

Bird song. 

What sound or noise do you hate? 

The slurping and crunching that people do when they eat with their mouths open. 

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? 

I would be a scientist in a heartbeat. The only reason I’m not is because of my ADD, which prevented me from getting through those textbooks on biochemistry. I simply couldn’t focus long enough. (My ADD, by the way, was caused by being sprayed with a cloud of DDT from a low-flying biplane, which my mother had forgotten was coming over our farm that day. I was a little kid at the time and was totally soaked in it, and breathing it in like I was under water.) 

What profession would you not like to do?  

I would have said social organizer, but now I can hack it. Just barely. 

If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? 

“You did okay.”

​

THE EVENT

WHERE: 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. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: June 7th, 2017. Poetry begins at 7 pm. Come anytime before that and place your order.

THE FEATURED POET: Stan Burfield opens the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, with an intermission at about 8:00. 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: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario Poetry Society.



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Jason Dickson - Poems & Interview

4/22/2017

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Jason Dickson is a writer and bookseller from London, Ontario. He has three titles published by BookThug. His latest book (co-authored with Vanessa Brown) London Culture: 150 Moments will be published by Biblioasis this June. His writing has appeared in Quill and Quire, Geist, Maine Antiques Digest, Kotaku, Rue Morgue, Canadian Notes and Queries, Fine Books and Collections, and Open Letter. He also co-owns with Vanessa the antiquarian bookstore Brown & Dickson located on Richmond Street.





It is Easy to Get Lost Near the Thames


It is easy to get lost near the Thames
as it sneaks through the tufts of forests
appearing every acre, near farms
with their own wildness, settlement

and entrapments.

but to approach it from the fields,
for a moment, and reach a clearing,
as They never enter the water,

often baptized and clean.

On a moonlit evening, the folk
lining the road with their wagons
watching, as each took their turn

falling in the water, born in the water
learning that the river, not their good farm
is the safest place to be.


Mercury, Deposited

How do they call us?
Is there another light inside of us,
in the blind parts of our body?

A light seen only at edges of light,
where the purple light from the sun spreads out.
It is then that we feel it, rising up,

this second body, with purple eyes;
an unknown shape, turning its head,
from side to side quietly.

This shape that can pull us from our beds,
make us climb out of our windows
and shimmy down the porch banister,

Called by the demons that stand in the street.
The beautiful pale and thin demons,
with branches for fingers, bark for eyes,

that taste like maple syrup.

It is a sixth sense. And we know others have it,
because we see them, in the sky.
We see them flying from their houses.

And we all walk into the fields, together,
to the dark streams, to eat the flesh of fish,
and call out, making love, snapping the bones of animals,

always happy.


We Cannot Pull in the World

And we cannot pull in the weather.
We can’t pull in fog, and rain, and storms.

We can only assemble in a house,
at the edge of town, with our torches,
and stay awake, following the thunder.

We don’t even know if that works.

But still we hear distant animals, eating,
and barely sense something ferocious

doing its dark work in the woods.




What first led you to writing?

My first poem was about my dad and I fishing. Also I was influenced a lot by Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie. Perhaps it starts there.

Describe, if you would, the impetus behind "Mercury, Deposited".

Not sure exactly. I just know that I wanted to write a poem about these sweet small town people leaving their homes at night to visit a Sabbath. That they see themselves do it and poetically write about it ups the horror for me. Calm people talking about scary things is scary and mesmerizing.

The narrators of both "It is Easy to Get Lost Near the Thames" and "We Cannot Pull the World" seem to long for a former era of naïvety and mystery, perhaps for a London long gone. Is this near your experience of London? And, are historians necessarily plagued (or comforted) by a sense of nostalgia?

I think so. I hear it a lot in the shop. Weren't things so much better a long time ago? It's false, of course, although I feel it too. This series of poems is partly about my own family in Middlesex County and the record shows that things were definitely not easier for them back in the day. Perhaps there is something tragic about looking back for solace when life is tough. I think it is a bad idea, of course. But I do it. It seems like a very natural thing to do.

You've written that one thing you like a lot "is a character who has come to the edge of their ability to explain things." Would you offer a few words about how this interest informs your writing?

These days I like ordinary language, and an ordinary sense of the world, challenged to break open and reach for other means of understanding things. In these poems it is folks from London and Thorndale, Ontario facing some extraordinary events. Demons and ghosts. In their case they write poems, not all of them good, but all of them touching I hope in their earnest effort to make their weird lives beautiful. There's something there that interests me.

If you would, offer a few words about the importance of humour and irony in your work and in what you like to read.

Tragedy without humour is violence.

Is humour without tragedy ineffectual?

It's less funny, that's for sure.

What are you reading now?

Vanessa and I just about done final edits on our book on culture in London, Ontario (coming out this summer from Biblioasis) so sadly that's all I have time to read really. Lots of fact-checking. Lots of little things to get wrong. So I'm obsessing.

In your and Vanessa’s research for your forthcoming book, which one or two discoveries about London, Ontario have most surprised you?

Jon Kapelos, the janitor from The Breakfast Club, was from London. Also Honeymoon Suite's breakout hit "New Girl" was written in a kitchen near Fanshawe College.

What ratio of anticipated popularity to personal taste do you employ when acquiring new books at Brown and Dickson?

Hard to say. We're fortunate in that our specialty is mainly things we like ourselves. So when we're looking at a book or collection we are blessed in that anticipated popularity (will someone buy this) is answered by ourselves first (well we'd buy it if we were in a shop). There's exceptions, of course.

If you were to characterize your writing in terms of the tones and textures of musical instruments or colour palettes, which would you choose?

I honestly don't know. I want each poem to ring like a tuning fork, so perhaps musical instruments. But then I want to smear them all with garbage and confusion. So perhaps colour too.

Maybe the art in it is somehow having it both ways.

Have any particular maxims or proverbs stuck with you? If so, what are they, and why’d they stick?

"No one cares." That was said to me when I was young and at a poetry reading. I had just given it my all and this guy said that as I walked off the stage. That stuck. But it was also very helpful.

I also remember an old friend saying that he hated guitar players who always played at a 10. That's all you got, he said? The idea that 10 removed 1-9 has stuck with me too.

I've become very tired trying to write at a maximum capacity for significance. There's something liberating at looking for the beauty of 1-3.

If you were to ask one question of a contemporary writer, what and who would it be?

Wanna make out? Just kidding. I'd only ask you that Kevin.

Am I to take that as tongue-in-cheek?

I refuse to answer.



THE EVENT

WHERE: 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. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: May 3rd, 2017.

FEATURED POET: Jason Dickson will read at 7pm.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, with an intermission at about 8:00. 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: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario Poetry Society.

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James Deahl & Norma West Linder - INTERVIEW & POEMS   4/5/2017

4/5/2017

1 Comment

 
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                                                  (For INTERVIEW, scroll down.)

London Open Mic is proud to feature two of Southwest Ontario's poetry legends at our National Poetry Month reading, April 5th at Mykonos Restaurant.
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Poet/publisher JAMES DEAHL was born in Pittsburgh (USA) in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands region of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970 and holds dual American/Canadian citizenship. Deahl is best know for his 1987 collaboration with Milton Acorn, A Stand of Jackpine. He is the author of twenty-six literary titles, the latest being: To Be With A Woman (Lummox Press, 2016), Landscapes (Cyclamens and Swords, 2016) and Unbroken Lines (Lummox Press, 2015).

A cycle of his poems is the focus of a one-hour TV special, Under the Watchful Eye (Silver Falls Video Productions, 1993). The audiotape of Under the Watchful Eye was released by Broken Jaw Press in September, 1995. These have been reissued on CD and DVD by Silver Falls.
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Tasting The Winter Grapes (Envoi Poets Publications, 1995) won the Award of Excellence from the Hamilton & Region Arts Council. In 2001 Deahl was presented with the Charles Olson Award for Achievements in Poetry. His When Rivers Speak (Unfinished Monument Press, 2001) won the Ramada Plaza Hotel Award. Most recently, Deahl won the 2013 Monica Ladell Award.

In addition to his writing, he has taught creative writing and Canadian literature at the high school, college, and university levels. He no longer teaches, and for the past dozen years has mostly been a full-time writer/editor/translator. As a critic and literary historian, Deahl is the leading Acornic scholar. He’s a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada.

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Poet/novelist/educator NORMA WEST LINDER was born in Toronto, spent her childhood on Manitoulin Island, and teenage years in Muskoka. She is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, PEN, The Ontario Poetry Society, The Canadian Federation of Poets, WIT (Writers in Transition), and Past President of the Sarnia Branch of the Canadian Authors Assoc. Linder is the author of 6 novels, 15 collections of poetry, a memoir of Manitoulin Island, two children’s books, and a biography of Pauline McGibbon. For 24 years she was on the faculty of Lambton College in Sarnia, teaching English and Creative Writing. For 7 years she wrote a monthly column for the Sarnia Observer, and she is a regular contributor to “Daytripping in Southern Ontario”. Her short stories have been published internationally and broadcast on the CBC. Her poetry has been published in Fiddlehead, White Wall Review, Room of One’s Own, Quills, Toward the Light, Prairie Journal, FreeFall Magazine, Mobius, and other periodicals. In 2006 she compiled and edited Enchanted Crossroads for The Ontario Poetry Society. Her latest publications are collections of poems entitled Two Paths Through The Seasons and Adder’s-tongues. She has two daughters and a son.

                                                                   

Three poems by James Deahl:

Not Crossing Trump’s America On The Terminal Day Of January

          America is over and done with.
                    — James Wright

Middle-aged men in Pennsylvania
go about in shirtsleeves;
white-tails forage fields
that once held corn
beside a toppled barn.

Someone missed his departure time
and walks the platform
wondering if there’ll be another train.

Jay’s Book Stall long closed,
women wander the streets
by the hospital.

Sixty-five years ago
snow blanketed my toy cars
placed on the porch railing . . .

a railing torn down
long ago.

Today snow falls
covering the bird seed,
grey Michigan sullen
when viewed through the storm
across slow waters.
                      
              --  James Deahl


An Obscure Pleasure

At mid-January
Huron’s still unfrozen,
its waters lie steel grey
instead of clear blue.
Ice fishers wait knowing
winter must surely come.

Our mallards long vanished,
geese are found everywhere
refusing to migrate
as though certain their lake
will maintain the open
waters they need to live.

I walk the tip of land
across from the lighthouse
and look at a country
I will visit no more,
where I can never pray
again at my parents’ graves.

Like Syrian families
recently resettled
I, too, am exiled.
Whence this obscure pleasure
to realize this land
finally has become home?

            -- James Deahl

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Tableau

Not a leaf is left
on the poplars
where they stand locked
in their frozen pools.

Behind their boughs
winter turns the sky to silver
as daylight darkens
over an icy river.

Deep in the floodplain
nothing moves
save a man and his dog
silently walking the iron ground.

       -- James Deahl



Three poems by Norma West Linder:

Fragments of Atlantis

See from the long span
of Highway 401
each farm become
an island
fogbound
in morning mist

See horses
stand motionless
in sea-green waves of grass
while ghost-like cows
bob rust-red heads
to drink

And the circular
green lace sails
of lonely maples
     billow
in the unreal
ocean breeze

       -- Norma West Linder



Valediction

Nursing the ancient ache
of human sorrow
I enter the garden
at twilight

But tulips are closed
against me
Red roses have disappeared
into the shadows
of doubt

Only the arms of the birch tree
reach out in luminous welcome
Ghostly white arms
of the birch tree
reach to encircle me

Leaves whisper silver-toned secrets
Sorrow drifts off on the wind
Starlight brings sweet benediction
World without, whirled without end

      -- Norma West Linder


Christmas Trees in July

My sombre mood
is lifting as I float
wide-eyed in this tree-ringed
outdoor pool
where cottonwoods
abound
showering seeds.

Lofty firs and spruces
catch in outstretched limbs
a liberal sprinkling
of their neighbours’
tiny white parachutes
falling all around

I should move on
I know.
My list of things to do
awaits
yet here I lie content
under blue scarf of sky
adrift in warm blue water
spread with summer snow.

      -- Norma West Linder



Interview with James Deahl & Norma West Linder

Interview by Kevin Heslop & Stan Burfield

James, how young were you when you started writing poetry? What influenced you in that direction?
James: I started writing when I was 8 or 9 years old. I had been greatly impressed by the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and thought I could do likewise. Easier said than done! About that time I also discovered the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.
 

Norma, much of your writing career has consisted of prose--short stories and novels? When and why did you try your hand at poetry?
Norma: I started writing poetry in the 70s when I was conducting weekly creative writing classes at Lambton College where I taught English. I wanted to cover all aspects of writing, so I gave my students an assignment to write a sonnet. Unwilling to ask them to do something I wouldn't do, I wrote a sonnet myself. Then I tried a few structured poems. But when I discovered Ray Souster's free verse making great poetry out of ordinary happenings, I was hooked on that form. Then I discovered that my mate James Deahl was a friend of his. I was delighted. He took me with him to visit Ray several times, and I took what was probably the last picture of Ray, one I treasure today. 
 

Which genre do you prefer writing in, poetry or fiction?
Norma: Poems come to me; I can't go to them. So I guess that sort of writing is inspirational, whereas writing fiction takes planning and plotting. I believe both kinds to be equally rewarding.
 

 James, how did you come by your interest in People's Poetry?
James: In 1964 I read Honey and Salt by Carl Sandburg, which had been published the year before. That won me over.
 

Kent Bowman describes you as a “defender of the people’s poetry tradition” of Sandburg, Acorn, Levertov, and Livesay. 
         I wonder if you’d offer a definition of “people’s poetry” and a sketch of that against which it is to be defended. Also, is there an equivalent danger in prose?

James: Good old Kent! When I taught at Ryerson University I developed this definition:
       People’s Poetry / People’s Culture
In general, people’s culture has been based on two key concepts:
       1. That progress can be clearly seen in the human universe. In terms of social physics, this means that society moves from disorder to order.
       Thus, society improves, becomes more fair and less governed by social Darwinism.
       2. That humanity is perfectible within history. That is, humans play a (if not the) major role in personal and collective salvation.
It therefore follows that:
       3. People’s culture promotes peace, equality, and human goodness.
       4. People’s culture opposes racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.
       5. People’s culture opposes classism. It is art made for the people, not the elite.
       6. People’s culture works to preserve the natural and human environment.
              6 a. People’s poetry includes almost all nature poetry.
              6 b. People’s poetry can also be a very urban poetry.
In practice, people’s culture tends to:
       7. Be committed to Modernist concepts while retaining key Romantic ideals;
       8. Support Socialist / Social Democratic political movements;
       9. Oppose large-scale Capitalism and the “business culture”;
       10. Encourage all people to participate in building their culture.
— James Deahl, 1997
 
       The enemy, if you will, of People’s Culture (poetry, prose, theatre, art, and music) is Post-modernism. Strange as it may seem, while most Canadian poets claim to be working within the People’s Poetry tradition, they are not. Most poetry today is either Confessional or Post-modern. Few will admit to it, though.
 

Can you summarize how Post-modernist (and Confessional) poetry run counter to People's Culture and People's Poetry?
James: People’s Poetry is almost always about a person, place, thing, or event other than the poet. Confessional Poetry is really autobiography.  People’s Poetry believes in objective reality. And it believes in the power of language as well as other forms of communication. By contrast, Post-modernism believes in nothing. Reality is not something real that is “out there” but rather something cooked up in your own mind. And Post-modernism teaches that writing is unimportant because it is impossible to communicate with another person. Everyone is a prisoner in his or her own mind. (Odd is it may seem to rational people, Post-modernists are all the time writing books to tell people that there is no point in writing books!)
 

In light of the Trump shock in the U.S., would you say People's Culture and Poetry is still boiling away, or is it just simmering on the back burner  these days, or maybe even lost down the drain?
James: I can see little evidence that People’s Culture is alive in the U.S. In a way, Denise Levertov was the last of the great American People’s Poets.  The Best American Poetry, 2016 (edited by Edward Hirsch) contains 75 poems. Very, very few are from the People’s Poetry tradition, and one of the few poems that is, “More Than You Gave” by Philip Levine, is by a poet who died in 2015. Here in Canada, we have poets like John B. Lee, Ellen S. Jaffe, Ronnie R. Brown, Tom Wayman, Gary Geddes, and several others. But there are hardly any Canadian People’s Poets under the age of 50. That is cause for real concern.
 

 James, in “An Obscure Pleasure”, you write, “I walk the tip of land / across from the lighthouse / and look at a country /  I will visit no more....”
         What has your ostensibly self-imposed exile from the States meant to you?

James: Well, during the 47 years I have lived in Canada I have visited the U.S. about 150 times, if not more. Over the years I have presented poetry readings in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Now thanks to President Trump I will never present a poetry reading in New York City, a long-cherished dream, I will not see the Grand Canyon again nor drive Route 66 to California, and I can no longer visit my parents’ grave. Also no more readings in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which were annual gigs. But I am OK with this. After all, I am a Canadian writer.
 

James, the fourth sestet of “An Obscure Pleasure” concludes the poem with a question the narrator asks himself, namely: “Whence this obscure pleasure / to realize this land / finally has become home?” 
         I wonder if you’d answer this question.

James: I thought I would be sad at being banned from the U.S. (which I had, of course, expected). I really thought I would be sad. But I am not sad at all (except for my parents’ grave). In fact, I feel relived, in a curious way. That seemed strange.
 

Do you see any of the younger generations of poets taking up the mantle of the People's Poetry. Are there any general directions you see them tending to go? Both in Canada and the U.S. And how about Europe, where one might hope poetry is till having an impact?
James: I have little idea of what younger writers are doing. I am quite active in the Sarnia writing community. I also keep closely in touch with the poetry scenes in Toronto and Hamilton. I also attend meetings of The Writers' Union of Canada in London. Really, there are very few writers under the age of 40. From what I can see, younger people are mostly into the music scene and/or drugs. And here I do not refer to pot or hash. I am talking about heavy drugs. As to the future, I feel that poetry will play a much smaller role. Same goes for fiction. The great age of Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Carol Shields, and Margaret Atwood is nearly over. And for a man who used to teach CanLit at Seneca College, this is a sad situation.
 
 
Norma, I wonder whether you’d offer a few words about the community of poets in Sarnia and how you’ve been influenced by them. 
Norma: I belong to a group called After Hours Poets and we try to meet monthly. At the meetings, we pass around our latest creations and have them critiqued. Sometimes, just by changing or omitting a word or two, the poems can be improved. Also, it's good to mingle with others engaged in the same pursuit. I belong to other groups, however, since I also write novels.
 
 
How would you rank attending workshops vs attending and/or giving readings, and having your poetry published, in terms of importance and enjoyment?
Norma: It's of utmost importance to me to have my work published. If it isn't shared, it's not completed as far as I'm concerned. I also enjoy spending time with other writers and doing readings. Living with a poet suits me beautifully. We're here to share good news with each other--that's so much better than quiet satisfaction. Also, we're able to ask each other's opinion about possible titles etc.  
 

 James, could you mention one or two of your favourite memories from your literary life?
James: These would be meeting Milton Acorn, who became a great friend and mentor, and meeting (and falling in love with) Norma West Linder.
 

For those of us who are single, or whose partners don’t share our interests, what has it been like living with another poet? 
James: Because artists have a vocation rather than a regular job, it is good to live with another artist because they will understand the level of commitment art requires. My second wife was the painter Gilda Mekler. We were together for 29 very happy years. I have been with Norma for 6 years and we get along perfectly. Between us we have over 50 books. Seven of my books and four of Norma’s were published during that time.
 
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What would you say is the chief problem in Canadian literature today?
James: While there are problems with the creative act itself, I believe a more serious issue in Canada is the lack of a younger audience. My wife and I are just back home from hearing the bestselling novelist Eva Stachniak. This was a free event with plenty of first-rate food and drink provided. We noted that there were only a couple of people in her audience who appeared to be under the age of forty. Ms Stachniak turns sixty-five soon and most audience members were from her age group.
Having been both the assistant manager of a bookshop as well as the manager of a literary publisher, I well know that books do not get published without readers. There are few readers in Generation X, as it is called. And almost no readers among the Millennials. It seems clear that when the Baby Boomers die off there will not be enough readers to support either publishers or book stores.
I used to run a reading series in Sarnia, and a series in Hamilton before that. The last reading I attended in Hamilton had one (yes one) audience member who was not middle-aged. I have long noticed that most readers are people my age. Or older. And that is a problem.


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THE EVENT

WHERE: 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. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.
WHEN: April 5th, 2017. Poetry begins at 7 pm. Come anytime before that and place your order.

THE FEATURED POETS: James Deahl and Norma West Linder open the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, with an intermission at about 8:00. 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: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario Poetry Society.

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Andy Verboom - Poems & Interview

2/20/2017

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​Andy Verboom is from subrural Nova Scotia and currently lives in London, ON, where he organizes Couplets, a collaborative poetry reading series, and edits Word Hoard, a journal of creative and academic dialogues. His poetry has won the Descant/Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem, has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year, and has recently appeared in Vallum, The Puritan, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, and BafterC. He is the author of Tower (Anstruther Press, 2016) and co-author (with David Huebert) of Full Mondegreens, a winner of the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook Contest (2016).






Olbers’s Paradox
       after PK Page, Leonard Cohen, John Keats, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin

“Here’s the problem with eternity:
guerrilla ranks of starlight taunt us
a lonely ragged column on a forced march
our umbilical slashed
clinking, tumbling onward, bones
shaken from a burlap sack, weeping
this will never end, weeping it will.”
The doctor takes my pulse in shirtsleeves
his eyes bruised. There was a vigil to keep.
During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep
—I have no quarrel with eternity--
but he receives me in his attic
fingers the melon readiness of my gut
and says, friend, there is something wrong.
A batty priest through a parthenon
he patrols his stacks of paper, tweaks wheels
on a telescope. On a bank of the Weser
on a bench, lunch in lap, I vomit blood.
The reddest waterclock peals.
My favourite cooks prepare my meals
but my stomach has declared its sovereignty.
The Weser courses on unconcerned
for the whole day, for its last ten long miles.
Peeking at my blood-flecked shoes
I think did it not run into the sea
it wouldn’t run, just sit, an arctic shelf.
In the mornings, I leap from my bed
a Lazarite. Life pinches like new boots
as if I come at night, become an elf,
my body cleans and repairs itself.
The doctor takes my pulse in shirtsleeves.
He is an old doe, shuffling through white trees.
He salaams at an eyeglass and is a moth
drinking nighttime through his proboscis.
My body, he says, is a broken planet.
I grin oceanic. I heave and swell
ambergris, fields of the North Sea.
“Once things stop happening, once all verbs
become be. Then are we indissoluble
and all my work goes well.”

from Tower
“5. Wellington/Auckland”
     after one simply walks into mordor

Filming wrapped four years ago, but Ngauruhoe
still emanates that new volcano smell. (Bok choy
in roiling vinegar?) So pamphlets promise, its tephra and scree
still infomercially keen.

Ngauruhoe in the off-hours: stiff as a grandmaster automaton
between checkmates. At almost dawn
fog machines hiss and the sky-grey cabinet
catholic as the flank of an Earthbearing elephant
eases open to display light’s lattice of clockworks.
What if sublimity is the echo of the awkward
mind halfway up the foothill, through bitching pianissimo
on damp maps, narrow switchbacks, dry fat mosquitoes?
Dozens of trampers collectively blush: the cone has cuckooed into view.
Held aloft whatsits begin chirping haiku.

The doctor and I congratulate each other’s resistance
to something, shim past these choruses
to mount the rocky saddle (picture a spine like a horse’s)
where she explains the aft end, Tongariro,
is the original musical, whose hero
tenored volcanoes into parks, parks over to the nation.
This head we climb is loose adaptation.
Later, the summit. The caldera is boiled-dry thought.
The ocean meant to be visible from it
in at least two cardinal directions. The Overlander
fumes northward like a feudal salamander
recalling some other existence.
The doctor sits gnostically nibbling an apple,
excising continents as if by scalpel.

Picnic over, the doctor simply walks back to Calgary
where because of family troubles she presumably
quits then walks back to Edmonton.

Hold a steady bearing north from Wellington
where, hushed down the razor-wire esophagus
of an old New Zealand Royal Air Force base
(a few wood barracks shoved steep against a hill
near the airport’s isthmus), an entire Brazil
of prop trees players promenaded among
is being junked into car-sized styrofoam.

from Full Mondegreens
“String ’em up, avant-gardist Cow!”

String ’em up, avant-gardist Cow! Dust off the dark
switch. Hover—groaning blimp leashed to failure,
sad gumshoe’s winged piggery. Damage sells.

Cow dust’s pursed weight is peregrinating, slate-grey, down tooth-sickled pampas.
Cow dust’s in!, vague gull indicts, proselytized squawks beating air.
Jejune brigandry. Favela song.
Gull-warmed, Cow dust’s anchoring there in urban sprawl, lowing prose.

Stringed lanterns off! Seas on! So you huff fog’s gulag, sand and mud-deep etiquette.
Prows sequestered here are oysters ticking with dream.

Men—two heavies—schlep your body from being, burn it to put off the Cow crisis.
They’re noosing anarchist keywords.
Their grace rides a thunderhead at fear’s sand wall.
Their tired heart’s patronage.

String up these exigence hustlers, up sighed hopes’
hankies, up pure aortic clutter, up their proscenium sophistry. Flaunt
thought missiles and set off the holo——.

Forth, Cow! Come and stand for answerless smoke.
Anything’s desert, the rain counterfeit or forfeit
or freak surfeit, fleeting, dirigibles rigging hellward.


I wonder if you’d offer a few words about the importance of surprise (and, relatedly, of humour), and of the subversion of readers’ expectations, of syntax, of logic––Martin Amis has characterized writing as a “war against cliché”; Keats had it that “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”.––which consistently and delightfully appears throughout your work. 
       I guess I’m a good Keatsian and a bad Amisian.
     If I’m not surprised by a poem as I write it and then again after I’ve written it—if my palpable design upon it is actually achieved—I’m bound to hate it. I see this as a useful kind of self-loathing. Poetry, especially your own poetry, should surprise you so deeply and consistently that you keep suspecting you’re on the wrong side of history.
       That said, I often feel like I’m moderating peace talks between surprise and convention. It’s an open secret that my personal sympathies lie with surprise, but I’m always asking it to demobilize, to stand down, to rein it in a bit for the sake of readability. Insofar as clichés are calcified idioms, and idioms are extensions of linguistic convention, and such conventions are the basis of mutual intelligibility, cliché can’t possibly be the enemy of surprise. Surprise needs to be reconcilable with understanding. You can’t be surprised by someone’s turn of phrase if that person is speaking an entirely private language.
       Humour, I think, is a prime example of balance between surprise and cliché. The content of every joke is based on a kind of surprise (tension, incongruity, incompatibility), but every joke structure has been told countless times. You can see how humour works toward understanding when you attend a good poetry reading: each punch line (and the audience laughter that marks it as a punch line) confirms your understanding of (at least that part of) the poem.


How do you mean “on the wrong side of history”?
       I mean a poem should reorient your senses—maybe just a nudge, maybe radically— such that you encounter your own assumptions as obstacles to… something… and are impelled to unassume them. This is poetry as catalyst for retroactive self-assessment, self-doubt, self-critique, etc., as occasion for staging your own miniature, internal judgment day. Maybe I should have said “…you keep suspecting you’ve been on the wrong side of history,” but that implies mere encounter with an artwork is enough to substantively change a person, that mere encounter marks a temporal break between the not-as-good pre-encounter self and the cultured-and-so-bettered post-encounter self. Change is a laborious process not an event, and that labour is the responsibility of the person not the artwork.


I wonder whether the value of humour in a poetry reading as you describe it has something to do with how a punch line makes a group cohere or signals a group’s unification––everyone in that group gets the joke and therefore shares a language––and whether you think ideal poetry therefore might be thought of as a community-forming mechanism, a coagulant?
       I wouldn’t collapse language into community, comprehension into belonging. You can (and should be able to) understand someone’s position and completely disagree with or be actively oppositional toward it. Two people can laugh at the same joke for slightly or dramatically different reasons. Anyway, with regard to community, I’ll say again that poetry is a catalyst or occasion: the labour of community building—or of community splintering—is the responsibility of people not of artworks.


The admirable, heartening variety of your diction and your deep study of and fluency in various forms seem integral to your ability to surprise yourself and your reader. But both elements by definition restrict access to your work––i.e., those who haven’t put a significant amount of work into understanding the canon or aren’t inclined to consult a dictionary when necessary won’t get as much out of your work as someone who has/will––and I wonder whether you worry about or agree with that assessment. I guess the question is: only the sommelier knows what wine really tastes like?
       I agree with the assessment, but I can’t see how using a broad range of techniques and resources could be, in any medium, considered a weakness. People do really hard work to psyche themselves out about poetry, sometimes putting more effort into that than into simply reading it with openness and attention. The same people, despite being gustatorily illiterate, are open to wine-tasting. Genuine readability? Absolutely. But “accessibility” is taste and effort in a false flag operation, pretending to be readability.
       In reception, I think form is an independent layer of poetic quality. Any moderately good formal poem should, to my mind, have enough integrity and interior movement (enough other things going for it) that a reader needn’t be initiated into its form to appreciate how (or at least that) the poem is working. You can read and appreciate an excellent sonnet without immediately realizing it’s a sonnet, but knowing it is may, on a re-reading, deepen your appreciation for it. I’d like to say vocabulary works the same way, but it doesn’t. All I can do is shrug and say I don’t tend to consult a dictionary on a first reading either, even when I should.

I remember you took to a distinction between pre-Enlightenment poetry as having been thought of as coming from “on high” and been funnelled through or translated by a poet and post-Enlightenment poetry as generated by individual poets upwards, towards ecstasy, towards some kind of transcendence. I wonder if you’d riff on why that distinction sits well with you, or whether it still does.
       It’s a gross but serviceable reduction, I guess. It could be used to critique contemporary poetry written under implicit Romantic principles (e.g., notions of genius or of ‘expression’) for maintaining an investment in theology, for taking for granted a vertical relationship between a quotidian and a sublime, an earthly and a divine. But I shy away from historical literary critique because I’m suspicious of historical narratives and because I enjoy anachronism to an indefensible degree.


Are there any sort of sidereal mantras or tenets by which you steer when you’re writing? If so, what might they be?
        Bring enough to a poem that it can begin writing itself, and then be a good editor. When the poem starts being too surprising, course correct by setting it up for a joke.


Is there for you a kind of desire for mimesis in the poem such that the joke you course correct for is a metaphor for the funny absurd death towards which, as Nabokov had it, we’re heading “at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour”, or is movement towards a joke more to avoid reader fatigue? And, is your “too much surprise” threshold identical to your ideal reader’s?
​       Do I like making jokes because we’re all going to die horribly? Yes. Am I concerned with keeping my readers comfortable? Quite the opposite, but I’d like to keep them around long enough to make them uncomfortable.


“Olbers’s Paradox” occasionally slips into approximate heroic couplets, causing metaphors between ultimate words––eternity/us, parthenon/wheels, sovereignty/unconcerned––to emerge retrospectively. Am I projecting, or was this function intentional? What has your experimentation with formal structures taught you about your temperament as a poet?
       Those particular associations are formally accidental. Though “Olbers’s Paradox” is written in form—it’s a glosa, every tenth line in it being drawn from four lines of Leonard Cohen’s “I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”—it flops only loosely around iambic pentameter. The narrator is self-possessed enough to coax out a low, slow rhythm without the aid of metrical regularity. That’s actually what formal experimentation has taught me: I’m a crusty old formalist soul who thinks he needs to justify derivations from form rather than to justify adhering to form in the first place. I don’t hold others to this standard, for the record.

Where did Tower come from? How closely does the result match your original intention? 
        I have a block when it comes to writing about place, probably because I have a difficult time feeling ownership over places or places’ ownership over me. So Tower was a chapbook-length attempt to, on one hand, compensate by writing instead about places in juxtaposition and, on the other, work through that blockage by way of a matrix of constraints: write each poem as a connective tissue between two cities, write in doggerel couplets, write both ekphrastically and concretely, etc. I had no idea what the end product would look like, so I would say the result matches my initial intentions both perfectly and not at all.

Do you think the difficulty for you of feeling ownership over or under a place comes from––There’s this line in Ashbery’s “The Skaters”: The balloons drift thoughtfully over the land, / not exactly commenting on it; / these are the range of the poet’s experience.––something like Northrop Frye’s “Where is here?” (i.e. Canadian identity has a distance or remoteness in its belly) or a kind of personal existential transience, or the result of your relocation from Nova Scotia, or the interrogation of the hollowness of place-identification in a colony, or any combination or none of these? Is distanciation a necessary ability for a poet?
       I genuinely don’t know. It’s easy both to acknowledge the accuracy of and to feel the uncomfortably narrow privilege behind Ashbery’s balloon. It’s easy both to roll your eyes at Frye and to set him in productive proximity to a settler superego. I didn’t feel at home in NS, either. Maybe I have an obscure dissociative disorder. Maybe I should watch more sports.

You’re often astonishingly daring with your use of metaphor and simile. The effect can be stunning, as in, “What if sublimity is the echo of the awkward / mind halfway up the foothill, through bitching pianissimo / on damp maps, narrow switchbacks, dry fat mosquitoes?” It’s tough to talk about, but it feels as if you’re consistently capable of evoking ostensibly disparate auras and hues whose almost synesthetic coherence comes slantwise, through the window, say. It's an intensely captivating, enjoyably baffling tendency. Could you talk a bit about how you think of metaphor when you’re writing? I wonder, perhaps referring back to the question of subversion, whether Keats’s “negative capability” bears upon what you aim to achieve with the poem.
       I’m more interested in the way you just thought about metaphor. Are you saying a fitting metaphor is the juxtaposition of two mutually unflattering colours that, nonetheless, smell great together? Or, for example, the assertion that 1 + 2 = 12 based on 1 tasting kind of like bread, 2 tasting like smoke, and 12—I don’t know—reminding you of a slice of toast? I could buy that as a certain gloss of Keatsian negative capability. I heard an interview with a synesthetic who was a prodigy at mental math because, he said, he could walk through sensory landscapes populated by number-colours. That’s a little grandiose for how I write, but I do feel out metaphors as parts of a poem’s unique micro-world, an internally consistent space even if it bears an arbitrary relationship to reality. This is why editing my own work is a matter of negotiating with surprise, a matter of partially decrypting what I’ve written in order to improve its readability. This becomes tricky, though, because I try to let these micro-worlds spin on their own. They’re only interesting, for me, if they have their own consistency. Case in point, perhaps: I have a problem with clarity.
          All that said, I’ve been thinking lately about how negative capability can be invoked to justify the consideration of an artwork’s beauty (or surprise or humour or provocativeness) above the artist’s social or ethical responsibilities. Keats’s championing of beauty occurred in particular historical and political contexts; we do not share those contexts even if our contexts are descendants of them. In other words, if your guiding principle is the liberation of beauty from oppressive philosophy, then you’re acting like nothing of substance has happened in the last two hundred years. In other other words, you don’t get a pass on pretty, harmful speech because you fly a banner that says true artists don’t think through the implications of their statements.

If you were reading an ideal review of Tower, which adjectives would you come across? Have any responses to the work encouraged your re-consideration of any of the poems therein?
       There’s a low bar for an ideal review of Tower: considering it’s a very imperfect work, any review would be encouraging. (I’m willing to mail out review copies! Get in touch!) I’m fully prepared to disown any poem that someone convinces me is garbage, if that’s what you’re asking.

I mean, Žižek has this thing about watching a particularly gruesome and apparently exceptional scene––he’s basically sputtering with reverence and enthusiasm while he’s describing it––in, I think, Wild at Heart between Willem Dafoe and Laura Dern, then hearing Lynch talk about it in banal and ambiguous tones––Žižek’s disappointed and says something like, “OK, now, you artist go fuck off and let the intellectuals/critics tell you what you’ve done.” I wonder if, maybe in a workshop or after a reading, someone has placed what you’ve done in a context that you hadn’t considered before but thought was insightful and convincing and surprised you.
         Yes! And isn’t that the dream, that someone gives you credit for intending something wickedly clever when you either hadn’t fully thought it through or hadn’t intended it at all? I love that engagement, even if it marks a failure on my part, and I’m happy to step aside and listen to someone tell me what I’ve “done.” As a genre, the artist’s statement is less morbid only than the job application cover letter.

Have you tried or considered writing fiction? If so, how’d it go?
        I grew up wanting to write expansive sci-fi and fantasy novel series, but I got too wrapped up in worldbuilding to ever get to plot or character. There’s likely an underground tunnel running between that and the kind of poetry I write. I can’t imagine the circumstances that would be required to get me writing fiction. Prison?

How did Full Mondegreens come together, and what, if anything in particular, did you and David aim to achieve with the collection?
          Short version: I couldn’t find any already-inaugurated form that was doing exactly what I wanted to do with a source poem—to thoroughly and deliberately mishear the entire source, as “String ’em up, avant-gardist Cow!” does with e. e. cummings’s “spring omnipotent goddess Thou”—so I wrote a trial “full mondegreen,” shared it with some workshoppers, piqued David Huebert’s interest, read one of his, and invited him to collaborate on a chapbook-length exploration of the new form. We had different priorities when it came to selecting sources and have different aesthetics in general, but I thought that starting from two different places would help us cover more ground. I think we both wanted to challenge ourselves and to show off the form enough that someone else might commit to trying it. All I secretly want now is for someone to create a Wikipedia entry on “full mondegreen.” Is that too much to ask?

What are you reading at the moment? Has anything you've been reading lately informed your current work?
         I hate this type of question because I feel the anxiety of influence more acutely in it than I do in any of my reading or writing practices. Like, “Hey, literate monkey: perform literacy!” So let’s just say that what follows are four more-or-less recent poetry collections that you should read if you haven’t already: Matthew Zapruder’s Sun Bear, Andy McGuire’s Country Club, Katherine Leyton’s All the Gold Hurts My Mouth, and Stevie Howell’s [Sharps]. The last two were put out by Icehouse Poetry, who is set to publish Londoner Kevin Shaw’s first collection, Smaller Hours, which will make this a list of five.

You’ve organized and hosted several instantiations of Couplets, a collaborative poetry reading series. What have you aimed for with this series? How do you want it to differ from more traditional reading series?
          I came up with the Couplets model—a pairing of established poet and emerging poet for collaborative writing and performance rather than sequential readings—on-the-spot in a meeting with Stan Burfield and the original venue host. I was hoping to find a niche among the well-established London Open Mic Poetry Night (with its focus on regional and ‘amateur’ poets) and Poetry London (with its focus on ‘professional’ poets from outside the region), and my experiences with Jess Taylor’s Toronto-based Emerging Writers Reading Series were a strong influence. The aim has remained this: give two poets, usually at different points in their career, an excuse to and a stage on which to collaborate. That aim, that responsibility, and that permission have been enough to differentiate it from any of the local and regional reading series. The performances are entirely unique, the poems are largely occasional, and the mentorships between older and younger poets have the potential for lasting impact. That’s really cool, and I’m happy to deflect all the credit for this to the participants.


THE EVENT

WHERE: 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. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

WHEN: March 1st, 2017. Poetry begins at 7 pm. 

THE FEATURED POET: Andy Verboom opens the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, intermission at about 8:00. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the readers' list, which is on the book table at the back––first come, first served.

COVER: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario Poetry Society.

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Ron Stewart: Interview & 3 poems for our Feb. 1st, 2017 feature

1/26/2017

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London poet and workshop leader Ron Stewart is being honoured Feb. 1st for his longstanding support for poets and poetry in London, and for supplying the impetus for the creation of London Open Mic Poetry five seasons ago. Over the years, he has inspired many poets to write and keep writing by creating an inviting home in which poetry could be shared, learning take place, and creation flourish. The London poetry scene is in his debt.

Ron Stewart’s workshop led directly to the creation of London Open Mic Poetry by providing shy poet Stan Burfield with a first step out into the social world. The next step was to read his poems in public, which necessitated the creation of an open mic. 
(Scroll down for bio, interview and three poems.)


THE EVENT
​

WHERE: 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. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.
WHEN: Feb. 1st, 2017. Poetry begins at 7 pm. Come anytime before that and place your order.
THE FEATURED POET: Ron Stewart opens the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.
OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, with an intermission at about 8:00. 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: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario Poetry Society.
​

BIO: Ron Stewart started writing poetry shortly after a crash in Northern Ontario took the lives of three friends (two pilots and a flight attendant, Ron’s co- workers). When asked why he turned to poetry, he replied that both careers are two syllable words that start with p and end with t, and, as a person with very little imagination, he thought it appropriate. Ron has been published in journals, anthologies and online. One of his poems “Sunset” was carved in stone on the tombstone of a dear departed friend. His “A Boy Growing up in London” poem was studied in an English class in Sweden. He has read in library basements, coffee shops, churches, museums, art galleries and bars. Both as a performer and judge, Ron has participated in slam poetry events, and has judged the Poetry in Voice high school competitions for the past five years. Ron created and ran a poetry workshop in Landon Library for five years before retiring to pursue other challenges. In 2006, he won the Great Blue Heron Poetry Award and in 2010, the poetry division of the Coffee Shop Authors competition.

But most of Ron’s life has existed in a very different sphere than that of poetry.

(Scroll down below the interview for Ron’s long and exciting career as a pilot.)


THREE POEMS

On Rippling Water
I watch the water rippling
over rocks
in the stream
in the woods
my dog and I visit every day.
The water is clean
crystalline pure
hugging tight to rounded rocks,
pulled tight as if by
some giant magnet.
Every now and then
a small leaf boat
bounces and bubbles along,
skirting boulders, dipping over stones
slipping between rocks.
always upright, secure, stable.
As if guided by a small insect crew.
Ants on the tiller,
Spiders on the sail.

© Ron Stewart Dec 2015


Le Pendu encore
I thought of great steaks,
good wine,
fine music and poetry,
the company of beautiful women.
None of these would I ever see again.
Are these the musings
of a condemned man
just before that last drop?
Sitting in a bar
co-incidentally named
The Last Drop, I pondered
the last of a long line of hangings
in the courtyard
of the old courthouse
in London Ontario,
where a man could be hanged
for stealing turnips
or worse.
Where Walter George Rowe
dropped to his death
through the gallows floor
nine minutes
after one o’clock
in the morning
June 5, 1951.
His protestation
“I slipped on the grease
and my gun went off”
fell on deaf ears.
I finished my beer
and thought of
Don McKay
Le Pendu
encore.

© Ron Stewart Jan 2014


Make War
The Hercules aircraft,
Military designation C-130
has a wide, spacious cockpit,
often described as
a comfortable place
to make war.
But there's a lot of glass
like a greenhouse.
Too hot in the summer.
Glass can't block the sun's
terrible heat.
Too cold in the winter.
Glass can't keep out
the skies' minus forty chill.
But,
a Vietnam vet once told me
to bank towards the sniper.
The glass will stop a
fifty caliber bullet,
but the aluminum surrounding
the glass
and holding it in place
will not.



INTERVIEW

Joan Clayton: How did you make the transition from pilot to poet, Ron? Were there any defining moments?

Ron: Early in 1989 I agreed to become the Flight Safety Officer for the airline. Before I could get my feet wet at this new job Flight 363 crashed shortly after takeoff in Dryden - killing 3 crew and 21 passengers. I arrived on the accident site in the middle of the night. The crash had a major affect on me. I had attended over 200 aircraft accidents in my time as an aircraft accident investigator, some of them were terrible bloody messes, but this one was personal. I knew all three deceased crewmembers and was friends with two of them. Seeing the burned out remains of the aircraft, the passengers and my friends changed me. For years I carried this around not knowing what to do, then for some reason unknown to me I started to write, and what came out was poetry. Pretty crude in the beginning, but poetry none the less.

Carl Lapp: What influence does the experience of piloting have on your poetry?

Ron: I guess the phrase that comes to mind that sums it all up is “I’ve seen clouds from both sides now” (with apologies to Joanie Mitchell). This may not seem much, however there is more to it than just that. I have seen many such wondrous sights that even now stretch my imagination. St Elmo’s fire on my windscreen and propellors, ball lightning floating down the middle aisle of the airplane (this one I didn’t see, my navigator told me about it), shafts of Aurora Borealis seemingly darting below the level of my aircraft on a night flight down from Cambridge Bay and many many more.

Carl Lapp: I always felt that your wife Jan added a wonderful bright spark and spirit to the workshop. How did she start writing and contributing?

Jan: I have always been the one saying “Let’s go...let’s do this.” Ron mentioned that he could live nicely in a cabin in the Yukon, and that is very true. In Nov 2005, I saw a notice In the Free Press for Poetry London, and, knowing that Ron had started writing Poetry (and he would not go by himself), decided that we should attend and check it out. This became a regular event for us – workshops and readings whenever the opportunity presented itself. I was solely an observer, but did participate in the discussions. One night, I found myself thinking “I wouldn’t have phrased it that way...I might have tried XXX.” Funny, but I don’t even remember if it was a published poem or a workshop presentation. But that was my first inkling that I too could do this, as I don’t have any paper credentials in English Lit or Poetry or anything. I have often said that I started writing in self-defense – if I was going to attend the meetings, I might as well contribute. So I guess I sort of backed into writing poetry, which may partly explain my (mainly) light-hearted attempts. Ron is the serious poet – both in subject matter and dedication. I just write when something hits me over the head!

Stan Burfield: Your workshop was a testament to your interest in poetry for the common person. Most of us who attended regularly had no education in English, except what we provided for each other during the course of critiquing each other’s work. Although definitely some very highly-educated creative geniuses were known to attend as well. I'm curious how you managed to attract and/or find the wide variety of people who attended.

Ron: Jan and I started attending Poetry London workshops the second year of its existence. It was readily apparent from the disappointment of the number of people (poets) that came wanting their poems to be workshopped that something else was needed. As you know, only two poems from local poets are workshopped each time. I’ve always been the type of person that when a job needs to be done, I do it. So with support from Carolyn Doyle I started the workshop hoping to attract those disappointed poets who wanted to be heard, seen, discussed, and encouraged. The way I enticed them to stay was by managing a very gentle approach to the workshop. Many of those attending for the first time were quite uneasy about opening up and allowing others to view/listen to their work. It’s hard to present your own original work (as opposed to a prepared presentation or a reading of someone else’s work). By having the poem read 3 times, twice by the workshop group and once by the poet, and then by allowing only positive comment on the first go around the table I was able to set a great number of fears to rest.

Joan Clayton: You have clearly been committed to bringing poetry to the community in an accessible and friendly way. Can you comment on that please?

Ron: As I said earlier, when I see a job that needs to be done, and no one else is doing it or volunteering to do it, I jump in and take it on. This probably is what was going on in the airline when I took on the safety job. This is probably my best and my worst characteristic. I saw poets coming in to the Poetry London workshop crying out to be heard and going away disappointed. I saw a need for a safe, comfortable place for them to be heard. Hopefully that is what I created.

Stan Burfield: Ron, at your workshops I always greatly admired the smooth and comfortable way you facilitated. You managed to make everyone feel relaxed and at home, even on their first visit. And yet you moved us through the poems efficiently, but without a feeling of heavy-handedness. In other words, the way you ran it seemed quite natural. How did you come by this ability?

Ron: I think I gained that ability over many years and through many different experiences. As a Captain of a multi person crew in the RCAF it was important to listen to the input of all crew members whether they were of lower rank (NCOs - non commissioned officers) same rank, or superior officers (Air Commodores Group Captains, Generals) acting as my co pilots. In my next job as an aircraft accident investigator I was required to interview witnesses, survivors, family and friends of deceased crash victims. It was necessary to extract information without turning off the person I was interviewing. In my last flying job I was again depending on information from my crew. Anyone with a know it all attitude would have a great deal of difficulty in that situation. For instance if a Flight Attendant heard a strange noise in the cabin, it would be foolish to ignore that. If that same Flight Attendant was fearful of the captain she or he may be unwilling to share, and that could have disastrous consequences. I have also chaired meetings, given flight safety presentations, and given many speeches and intros for various groups and organizations and therefore have no fear in front of an audience.

Ola Nowosad: Could you comment on the importance and appeal of rhyme in poetry. Is there still a place for rhyme in modern poetry?

Ron: I think we all start off with rhyming poetry. Let’s face it, that’s how stories were passed down. Songs or rhyming poems carried our history from one generation to the next. My first book had many rhyming poems. For instance, here’s an excerpt from a poem called Red Serge which was a tribute to the 4 Mounties shot in Mayerthorpe Alberta:

The scarlet lines were long and straight
Black britches striped in gold
Marched in solemn dignity
as the drum beat softly rolled


I think this poem would be very easy for someone (perhaps a student or family member) to memorize and thus the story could be passed down to the next generation.

One of my first poems came from a line of poetry from an English Poet named Sarah Williams who died way back in 1868. My friend Lynne quoted this line to be “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night”. When I asked her where that came from she didn’t know, only that it had always been in her family. After a bit of research on the internet, I found that the line comes from Sarah Williams poem The Old Astronomer to his Pupil.

I took this, the last line of Sarah’s poem, and turned it into this:

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night
I have watched the heavens sparkle and felt good earth pull tight. (another excerpt)


Rhyming poetry will always be popular with the average reader, but, as I said earlier, I think the in-crowd views it with disdain. As long as the rhymes are not forced I believe rhyming poetry can be very good. I still do write rhyming poetry – sometimes, it just “feels right”. A few years ago a poet named Tim Bowling was featured at Poetry London. Among his many accomplishments was the Griffen poetry prize. At the time of our meeting, I was starting to write a poem to commemorate my niece's wedding. I knew what I was going to say but unsure what poetic form I should use. Tim advised to go with what the audience would like. He said he had just written a rhyming poem for an anniversary, so I wrote a rhyming poem, and it was greatly loved and appreciated.

Karen Schindler: Since you (and Jan) have been such faithful attendees at Poetry London, I’d love to know who your top 3 featured poets have been over the years

Ron: It’s difficult for me to narrow the field down to only three. Off the top of my head I will give you the poets who have had a strong effect on me and my writing, Cornelia Hoogland, George Amabile, George McWhirter. That being said, Michael Crummy, Marty Gervais, Patrick Lane, Barry Dempster, and Phil Hall would be right up there close to the top. I really appreciate the poets who take the time to tell the background story behind the poem, or the reason why he/she wrote it.

Joan Clayton: Do you have a favorite poem or poet? And why?

Ron: As you well know I love Robert Service. His tales of the Yukon are wonderful majestic masterpieces. In another life I can see myself, and my dog, in a cabin in Dawson City YT. Ola asked me earlier about the future of rhyming poetry. One only has to look at Sam Magee or Dan McGrew for that answer. I also love Leonard Cohen and was greatly saddened by his recent death.

Carl Lapp: Comment on the different events you have contributed to and judged.

Ron: One of my favourite events is the high school student Poetry in Voice competitions. I’ve been judging that for a number of years now. Watching the bright young faces reciting poetry does the heart good. I also enjoyed very much judging the Western University Alfred Poynt poetry contest. I was paired with Laurie Graham and Ola Nowasad who figured they could gang up on me until they realized I loved the same poems that they did.

Debbie Okun Hill: Your life as a pilot gave you a unique perspective on the complexities of the world. A) In your opinion, how can poets and/or poetry make a positive contribution to society? B) Can an individual’s or a country’s pain be healed? Please elaborate.

Ron: Poetry is already a part of everyone’s life. The problem is that only a few of us recognize that. Some only come to hold poetry to their bosoms when reading the poem on the life card printed by the funeral home at the passing of a loved one. There is poetry in everything we do, every step that we take, every breath we breathe. I was forced to examine heart beats as for many years I was saddled with an irregular beating heart (arrythmia). Think about your heart rhythm, thump Thump,thump Thump, thump Thump, thump Thump, thump Thump, (Iambic Pentameter). This real live cadence is copied in so very many poems, and songs too (which I believe are only poems set to music).

I know for certain that writing poetry healed my pain. I can only extrapolate this to a nation. You see this every time a National Hero, Political or Religious leader passes away. There was a great emphasis on poetry in the recent funeral of Mohammed Ali (Cassius Clay). I watched the memorial service for the four Mounties gunned down in Mayerthorpe. Same thing. Ian Tyson even changed the lyrics to his Four Strong Winds (a poem set to music) which he sang at the service.

When I watched the funeral of Rocket Richard on TV many years ago I was struck by the sheer number of ordinary people who came out to say a last good bye to their fallen hero.

“The service was over. They spilled in the street.
They carried him to his last ride.
The sun was still shinning. I felt great relief.
They carried our hero with pride.
The fans still were there and with one last great Hurrah!
The hearse took his body away. and I said
"Rocket Richard scored his final goal today.
And Canada wept as they carried him away."


So Yes, Poetry can heal a nation.


INTERVIEW PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Joan Clayton: psychotherapist, novelist, poet, screenwriter, co-host of London Open Mic Poetry.
Carl Lapp: retired family doctor, poet.
Stan Burfield: retired florist, journalist, adventurer, poet, founder of London Open Mic Poetry.
Ola Nowosad: co-facilitator of Poetry London workshops, teacher at Thames Valley District School Board.
Karen Schindler: managing director of the Poetry London Reading Series, publisher of Baseline Press.
Debbie Okun Hill: prominent Sarnia-area poet, former executive member of The Ontario Poetry Society.


BIO continued: 
Ron Stewart graduated from Royal Military College with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in 1966 specializing in Aeronautical Engineering (aircraft engines). He underwent pilot training in Manitoba and received his RCAF wings in 1967. His first flying job in the Airforce was as an instructor on the DeHavilland Chipmunk. During that tour he alternated between flight and ground school instructor positions. It was here that he authored his first book (a flight training manual). Next was the C130 Hercules squadron based in Namao (Edmonton, Alberta). Here he flew worldwide transport and tactical missions in probably the best and most versatile aircraft ever built. On Herc missions, Ron got to see the world as very few others ever will. Some of the places his job took him to were Canadian Forces Base Alert, Thule and Sondresom Greenland, Reykjavik and Keflavik Iceland, Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Cypress, Hawaii, Wake Is, Guam, Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Japan, Alaska and the Yukon and Northwest Territories. He also accompanied The Queen, Prince Phillip and Prince Charles on three separate Royal tours.


At the end of his Hercules tour Ron retired from the Airforce and joined Aircraft Accident Division of Transport Canada. As part of his training to become an aircraft accident investigator Ron studied at USC in Los Angeles, the University of Arizona in Tempe, Az and the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

As an aircraft accident investigator, Ron participated in over 200 investigations, ranging from ultralight sport airplanes to large jet transport aircraft as well as many helicopter accidents. He didn’t stop flying here either, but kept up his pilot skills on the fleet of Transport Canada aircraft. He also learned to fly helicopters during this time. In the final two years of his Transport Canada career Ron became the Regional Aviation Safety Officer for Western Canada. In this capacity, Ron became responsible for flight safety promotion for the region – basically all of Alberta, the Yukon and the Western half of the North West Territories. This job entailed promoting flight safety through presentations, flight safety seminars, meetings, inspections and safety analyses. It was here he became comfortable in front of an audience. In 1979 Ron joined Great Lakes Airlines and flew for the many iterations of that airline until retiring in 2007 when the airline was known as Jazz.

Presently, Ron is enjoying life in Kilworth with his best friend, his wife for 50 years Janet, their dog Calliope and cat Penelope. He volunteers at Country Terrace nursing home and Hospice London with his dog as part of the St John Ambulance Therapy Dog program. He spent the last 2 years writing grant proposals and fundraising for an addition at his church. This half million dollar project was completed this past summer.

NEW POETRY WORKSHOP
In honour of Ron Stewart, London Open Mic Poetry is opening a new poetry workshop, reviving the components and style he initiated. Beginning Wed. Feb. 8th at 6:30, it will be held every second Wednesday at Landon Branch Library in London’s Wortley Village, in the downstairs room at the far end of the hall. If you would like to attend, bring ten copies of your poem (max. length, one page.) Depending on how many people attend the first workshop, there may not be time to workshop everyone’s poem. If necessary, a second monthly workshop could be started. Further info: burfield@live.com

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David Stones, three poems and a conversation--December 7th, 2016 feature

11/28/2016

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David Stones, a well-known regional poet who has read to acclaim in many of our open mics, will feature at the Dec. 7th London Open Mic.

A poet and spoken word performance artist, David lives in Toronto and maintains a secondary residence in Stratford, Ontario. Since semi-retiring from senior executive and CEO roles in the marketing/ communications and business sectors, David now devotes his creative energy to the craft of creating and performing “little islands of grace” and what he jokingly calls “small acts of poetry to change lives.”

David Stones published his first book of poetry, Infinite Sequels, in 2013, and his one-man show of the same name followed soon after. Acclaimed by audiences and described as “mesmerizing,” “riveting” and “not to be missed,” David has performed Infinite Sequels on stages throughout southern Ontario, from Toronto’s Arts & Letters Club to a recent stint at Stratford’s 2015 SpringWorks Festival. Published in various poetry journals since his student days at the University of Toronto, David also performs regularly at poetry events throughout the GTA and southwestern Ontario. In 2017 he will be the Anchor Poet as part of London’s Couplets series, as well as Feature Poet at several events including Bay Street’s Words & Music Salon. David has recently completed his second book of poetry, Such A Frail Book Of Endings, as well as a unique poetry cycle, 141 Imitations Of Love….. Follow David and his blog

Three Poems


You As Lacuna


Your awayness
has become a presence now
a space
you’ve somehow filled with space
your shape on the bed
still rosy with your fragrance.

Filling the house
the clock ticks
the only moving thing
resolute
as a pallbearer’s boots.

In the afternoon
clouds roll in
before cold fists of rain
staccato the windows.

On the flowered bedspread
the cat finds
your shallow grave
to inhale your sleep
rhythmic as the rain.

Even the cat’s breathing
is audible
on this day
as time passes
on schedule
and without consequence.

My Guitar Just Is


Every guitar eventually weeps.

Lennon, Lorca, Cohen...

is there a poet living
who hasn’t etched those words
at some point
in their miserable life?

Well mine has never wept.

It sobs.

It sobs
because I
bring neither weeping to its soul
or extract it
from the cedary 
perfumed pit
of its being.

Neither giving or receiving
neither weeping or believing

my 
guitar
just
is.

Silence Isn’t Silence Anymore


Silence isn’t silence anymore.

I hear it now
singing and spitting its hot breath
across the coils
pushing itself into spaces
obdurate and invasive
as the moon.

Silence makes noises now.

At night
it freights the darkness
with its lolling tongue
teasing my eyelids
with incantations
telling me it loves me
when I know it doesn’t.

Silence 
is a poor
and lying lover.

Beside me
it does not move.

Its blackness hisses lies.

Resolute and spurned
it regards the ceiling.

Coiled and waiting
I hear it 
urging me
to speak.


A Conversation with David 

David Stones:  “I’ve never acted before; and I’ve gotta say: a number of people come up to me and say: ‘Where did you learn to act? That was great.’ I’ve no acting experience until I did that show [Infinite Sequels]. And that is acting––you’re acting the role of a poet, you’re playing a role. And certainly every poem is like a separate scene, almost. At least in my head it is.”
Kevin Heslop: “Right.”
DS:  “But, um.... I enjoyed it, and it’s very interesting to sell a personality to an audience, and see them become incrementally engaged in you, the character. They’re losing you: they’re losing Kevin and David Stones. And you’re becoming somebody else. It’s quite a fascinating experience––you’re actually projecting someone else on them, and getting away with it.”
KH:  “You hide behind your self.”
DS:  “Yeah.”
​KH:  “A friend of mine mentioned an improv. master who said that one of the most rewarding things when you’re playing a character is that the audience doesn’t think you’re yourself, and there’s a way in which you can express things that you wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to express.”

​          “I found, honestly, that I really enjoyed the acting side of it––playing the role of the poet who wrote the book called Infinite Sequels, which I happen to have done, was an interesting premise. I learned the power of acting, and the power of the spoken word. I saw in the faces of my audience––in a way that you don’t see in a pub, or a typical open mic type of situation."

DS:  “Yeah.”
​KH:  “You can be more dramatic; you can be more honest, or vulnerable, or....”
DS:  “Yeah.”
​KH:  “Yeah.”
DS:  “Well, that’s great. So, what’s next on your acting agenda?”
​KH:  “I’ll be playing Creon in the New Year.”
DS:  “Oh, well. OK. An interesting switch from Twelve Angry Men.”
​KH:  “Yeah, um. I’ll have to build some momentum over the holidays.”
DS:  “Are you going to play an angry Creon?”
​KH:  “Yeah, um. The advice that I’ve got so far is that he sort of simmers and never allows himself to boil because he’s trying to maintain this... sort of veneer of authority....”
DS:  “That sounds like a tougher part.”
​KH:  “Yeah, absolutely.”
DS:  “I’ve always contended that the roles that require extreme emotion––extreme anger, extreme sadness, whatever. Extreme torment––are easier than the more subtle roles––”
​KH:  “Mmm.”
DS:  ​“––where you’re supposed to be boiling beneath the surface, and simmering away. That to me would be harder to portray, as you’ll find out. You’ll discover things about yourself by playing the roles of others.”
​KH:  “What did you find out about yourself by playing this sort of archetypical poet character in your performance of Infinite Sequels?”
DS:  ​“I found, honestly, that I really enjoyed the acting side of it––playing the role of the poet who wrote the book called Infinite Sequels, which I happen to have done, was an interesting premise. I learned the power of acting, and the power of the spoken word. I saw in the faces of my audience––in a way that you don’t see in a pub, or a typical open mic type of situation. The formality of having a proscenium arch, and a stage facing that audience––yeah, I felt a unique sense of control and power, strangely enough. Add to it that it’s a one-man-show, so it’s only me up there doing 26 to 28 poems, depending on the night. So I learned I enjoyed it. In a strange way, it’s very empowering because it’s terrifying; and I reminded myself that 99.9 percent of the people out there couldn’t do this––”
​KH:  “Mm.”
DS:  “––and that gave me the strength to do it every night.”
​KH:  “Did you find, as you started to establish a rhythm night to night, that you were free to improvise or take liberties here or there, depending on momentary inspiration?”
DS:  “Yeah, absolutely, and I think that particularly non-verbal aspects of the role, in wandering around and crumpling my papers up, and doing things like that––expressions that I was using, I found a lot more freedom as I kind of familiarized myself. I don’t know about you but I worried a lot about the actual words. It’s my own art that I’m performing; and it’s poetry, so I can’t go wrong with a word. At least that’s what I feel.”

       "To a degree the sort-of-cranky poet slugging scotch and ruminating about the world is me. I might lean toward that type of character occasionally in my now quasi retired state.  And, frankly,  I love every second of that.  So that role, that character in many ways is myself––the cranky poet trying to figure out the world of his life...."


​KH:  “Right.”
DS:  “I had to be exact. And I had occasions where I literally forgot a line, and somehow I kept going, and no one noticed. But when it’s your own work and your own art, you do feel this powerful sense of responsibility to your craft. And I suppose it’s the same [with] acting in a play. You can’t very well leave out a line or two, as it would destroy the whole sequence.”
​KH:  “Yeah, I mean, destroy a sequence insofar as you might not say the line that’s to cue somebody else to say a line; but as I started to go on I felt I had to do some justice to that character, to that person, and imagining that person really existed, so that, if I decided to reconfigure a passage or something, I felt as if I wasn’t giving him his due.”
DS:  “Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had the interesting phenomenon of playing a character who was actually me, in a curious way, although the “I” in my poems is often a projected “I”. For a lot of the poems, although it is “I, I, I”, it wasn’t me––it was a muse; it was someone who occupied me for the period of time that I wrote that poem. The emotion in my poetry, or what I’m trying to project, or my frame of thinking, or mind, might be my own, but I project it through a fictitious character.”
​KH:  “Do you feel––because it would be difficult to go about one’s daily life sort of drinking liquor, and soliloquizing as you went through a grocery store, do you feel you oscillate between a sort of publicly presentable or congenial figure and that archetype which when you’re writing you get a chance to open up that section of your personality?”
DS:  “Well, it probably is my personality to an extent. I’ve been known to drop into a pub now and then. To a degree the sort-of-cranky poet slugging scotch and ruminating about the world is me. I might lean toward that type of character occasionally in my now quasi retired state.  And, frankly,  I love every second of that.  So that role, that character in many ways is myself––the cranky poet trying to figure out the world of his life, notwithstanding many of the poems are a projected ‘I’. ”
​KH:  “So I read on the back of Infinite Sequels that that experience, that way of being, was relegated to weekends when you were working as a professional in business. Is that right?”
DS:  “Yeah, my whole life––I mean, I don’t wanna emphasize that too much, but I hit that watershed at about 22 or 23. I graduated with a degree in English from U of T and wanted to get into advertising, and I did, and was on a trajectory, a very steep trajectory. I was succeeding very fast, and I could feel that sense of loss, that that was a bit of a watershed for me. It was taking me away from my art and creativity very fast, despite the fact that I was in the creative side of the advertising business. I was a writer when I started, a copy writer, but moved quickly into management, and moved up into CEO. So, by that point I was deeply imbedded in a 70-hour work week until I was 60. So during that time I wrote as often as I could. Poetry was perfect for the occasion because it is such a deliberate and strategic compression of thought, and I loved that about it, that I could write something in a night or two or a week that expressed an emotion or a feeling or a particular incident without going through the labour of writing fiction and developing a character. So, poetry suited my purpose very well.”

       "...my litmus test for my work a lot of the times is ‘what does it sound like when I perform it in a mirror or to myself?’ And I record a lot of my own stuff and play it back. And I’ll re-write stuff; I’ll change the number of syllables in lines, I’ll balance my work, so that it rolls more nicely, if you will."


KH:  “I read that [Robert Fulford] said of Souster, Raymond Souster that he was capable of articulating moments in flight–– ‘catching a moment as it flies’––in a way that sounds similar to what you’re describing right now.”
DS:  “Yeah, he was the first poet that I really, really.... You weren’t there that night that I performed, uhm––because I remember that you weren’t there that night––‘On Turning Into Raymond Souster’, which is just a recent poem that I wrote. And I told the story: I actually started that by performing ‘Search’, which is a poem written by Raymond Souster in the early fifties. And I discovered that poem when I was eight and carried it with me for years and years. A very simple poem. Souster was known as the Poet Laureate, actually, of Toronto, in that that was all he wrote about, was the people in and around Toronto. And I loved that poem, and Raymond Souster was the first real poet that I discovered. He of course helped found The Canadian League of Poets, and with Louis Dudak he founded a magazine called Contact in 1951 or ’52. And Contact wasn’t around for a long time, but it published some of the first poetry of people like Atwood and Leonard Cohen, et cetera, so it hit that mark pretty fast. Souster was a big influence on me. His style was very simple, straightforward, yet poignant when he needed to be.”
​KH:  “Is there some way that that straightforward mode of poetry writing typifies for you the Canadian mode, or is that too grand a statement?”
DS:  “I think it’s too grand a statement. I suppose I’ve been attracted to that form of poetry. I mean, you read somewhere in there that Rod McKuen, of all the people, was also a great influencer on me. Rod McKuen’s poetry, that’s absolutely dispised in the United States by many people, is the highest selling American poet of all time––he even beats Walt Whitman. Rod McKuen’s stuff is very simple, very straightforward. And he always took the position that if a listener or a viewer has to ask what a poem’s about, you’ve failed as a poet. So, notwithstanding you’re trying to be very poignant and compelling in your interest in language and your compression of thought, at the same time I want to make sure that the reader, or the viewer or the member of the audience, knows what that poem’s about.”
​KH:  “The distinction between simple and simplistic.”
DS:  ​“Yeah. The second poem that I remember was––Louis MacNeice, do you know him? His poem called ‘Snow’ is an excellent, excellent, superb poem, that again I carried with me for a while, and this was before I was really writing poetry. I started writing when I was about 12 or 13––I actually started taking a hand at writing poetry.”
​KH:  ​“And started reading––I noticed throughout Infinite Sequels, for examples, many names in the American, British, and Canadian canon––Plath and Cohen and Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence.”
DS:  “Yeah, exactly. In the poem ‘Emily Dickinson’ where Sylvia Plath gets tickled etc. Yeah, I read fairly extensively. I’m one of these strange people that’s actually kept a journal since 1976 of every book I’ve read. My objective is to read 52 books per year, and I usually read 80 books a year––a lot of them short, and fiction and non-fiction, a bit of everything. I don’t focus on anything much. But I like to look back at what I’ve read, and I can remember when I read it as far back at 1978––I can remember when I read that book––”
​KH:  “Where you were seated....”
DS:  “––who I was married to (ha,ha), what I was doing at the time. And particularly I remember the emotions of that period. So that’s why it’s been interesting for me. In the late seventies I thought, well, I should really write down what I’m reading and keep a manual of it. And in my study in Toronto I have all the different volumes of journals, and I can go back and always have that list, and it’s very interesting to go through it.”
​KH:  “Is there anything particularly outstanding that you’ve been reading now, anything that’s affected you lately?”
DS:  “Ah, not much. Really, I just started a couple of days ago, Trump’s “How to Get Rich”, which is fascinating. And that was actually co-written with that woman who plagerized that speech for his wife?”
​KH:  “Right.”
DS:  “And I don’t know why I––”
​KH:  “Not great literature.”
DS:  “––picked that up at all. I owned it and I didn’t know I had it and I found it in my library in Toronto and thought, ‘I’m gonna read it again.’ There’s an interesting little chapter on ‘Why I’ll Never Go Into Politics’––because ‘I’m not that interested in it and I don’t think that I’d be very good at it.’ I’m surprised that no one’s quoted that, because he goes on about this, and he’s got a whole chapter on it. But uh, one oscillates with one’s readings. Sometimes I might go a week or two where I don’t really read a lot. I lead a busy lifestyle. I’m on three boards, and The Stones Group, which is a marketing and communications agency, is still active; I worked last night, for example, until twelve midnight on a Strat plan for a non-for-profit in Stratford, so I facilitated a session with their board. So I still do that. It takes me away from the reading and the writing still, but I lead a much more balanced lifestyle, quite balanced. As I said earlier, I was kind of swaying towards poetry, golf, a very active social life, my boards, and reading and writing. It’s a good life.”
​KH:  “Cheers.”
DS:  “Cheers to that.”


​KH:  “There’s a line that I found on your blog: ‘Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood.’ By Elliot. Definitely true of his Quartets. I was wondering if you could offer a word or two about what that means.”
DS:  “Yeah, and I love that quote because some people have asked me about some of my poems which are abstractions––abstract poems in the same way that a visual artist can create abstract, impressionistic, or realistic art. Some of my poems are abstractions, and what I’m trying to generate is engagement with the reader or the member of the audience. And I want them to interact with my work and to have that poem say to them what they believe it says. It’s really trying to generate an emotional response. And I think that instances of ‘It Sounds Like Rain’, which is one of my most popular poems, when I perform that, I’ve actually got standing ovations to that poem ‘It Sounds Like Rain’, where I really act that thing out, and it’s, uh––it’s about leaving; it’s about leaving, and it’s about vacancy, and it’s about yearning. And it uses examples, but it is a poem that communicates very early in the going. And if it’s performed correctly, it really generates a lot of responses in people. They don’t even know why they’re applauding; but I know why: it’s because they’ve all been through the experience of missing people, and the longing, and the standing at train stations or airports saying goodbye, and wondering, ‘will I ever see that person again?’”
​KH:  “You say that it needs to be performed correctly in order to evoke that response. What do you mean by that? How could one succeed or fail at that?”
DS:  ​“Well, that’s an interesting question. I think that sometimes poets perform their work too fast, for example. Cadence, the lilt and cadence of my poetry––my litmus test for my work a lot of the times is ‘what does it sound like when I perform it in a mirror or to myself?’ And I record a lot of my own stuff and play it back. And I’ll re-write stuff; I’ll change the number of syllables in lines, I’ll balance my work, so that it rolls more nicely, if you will. I’ve added sections to poems because I realize that when spoken out loud it’s gonna work a lot better if I go to a ABCD, ABC, whatever, rhyme scheme, completely off the wall: something like ‘The Nameless One’ is written in narrative and suddenly goes into a rhyming scheme ending. I mean that some of that is because––and that by the way was a dream I had about being called on the carpet for writing bad poetry, and The Great Master, whoever that is, said, you know, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘I don’t have a name,’ and I refused to answer him, and he was gonna punish me for writing bad poetry, but he said, ‘I can’t persecute you for writing bad poetry if you don’t have a name.’ But anyway, once again I guess what I’m saying with reference to the quote from Elliot is that good poetry communicates fast––not content, but emotion, and it communicates a feeling. And to me, poetry, my good poetry, is going to communicate that rapidly and accurately to my target audience, whether it’s a reader or a listener.”
​KH:  “Images throughout Infinite Sequels likewise communicate rapidly, and one image in particular that you saw I’d sketched in my notes here was of you sitting on a bench, looking off in one direction.”
DS:  “Yeah. ‘Man on Bench’, I call that. That’s my iconic image. Sort of like a leitmotif for me and for Infinite Sequels.”
​KH:  “‘Man on Bench.’”
DS:  “‘Man on Bench.’”
​KH:  “Would it be missing the point to ask you to elaborate on the compulsion to include that, why that sort of typifies an idea for you?”

           "So, I feel as though––Leonard Cohen was 29 or 28 when I met him, as it were. And I grew up with the guy, and I just think he was an absolutely phenomenal master of words, whether he even recognized it or knew it sometimes. Just phenomenal. His language was always so alive, so vibrant, creative and, well, unexpected. He used the word, the metaphor, that no one else would ever use. 'Like a worm on a hook/ like a knight bent down in some old fashioned book.' And he led me to the guitar and guitar work. And I ain’t no Leonard Cohen, that’s for sure, but he’s been a huge beacon at the end of the dock for me, that’s what he was, and was for millions of other people."

DS:  “Yeah, there are a lot of poems––‘The Poet’, you know, all the titles––a number of poems where the poet––‘Into the Lacquered Air of Evening’, and there are others––where I literally envision the poet sitting on a park bench and reflecting on the evening closing or the sun coming up, and that has been the initial premise of the poem that then moves into his reflection on his life in art, or the people walking through the park. There are probably ten poems that have begun that way.”
​KH:  “Is that a way of getting into character, for you?”
DS:  “Yeah I think it is. And to be very blunt, I live at Summerhill in Toronto, Summerhill Gardens is our street, and at the end of the street is a little park––you’ll actually see reference to ‘the little park’: ‘all around the little park/ I hear the windows/ slowly breathing their final gulp of sun.’ That was actually me watching the sun go down reflected off those windows. And so the park really exists, and Man On Bench is a stock shot––not of me––I bought the shot, and then we Photoshopped it so as to bring the colours up and down a little bit.”
​KH:  “Does that have something to do with the idea behind ‘On Becoming Raymond Souster’?”
DS:  “Souster?”
​KH:  “Yeah, with becoming a kind of cartographer of your native place.”
DS:  “Yeah. Well, again, that poem is a response to the poem ‘Search’, and ‘Search’ is Raymond Souster, probably a projected ‘I’, is sitting at a diner––and ‘The warmth steaming at the windows of the / hamburger-joint / where the Wurlitzer / Booms all night without a stop, where the onions are thick / between the buns.’” That’s early fifties. And so he’s looking at a woman who has a very thin coat on, and he’s just wondering how she’s going to go out into that night, kind of a wintry night. And I was literally going––I jokingly say it, but it’s the truth––I wrote that poem in August in a bar on Dundas and just sitting in that bar on a very hot day, it was like 38 degrees, and I somehow or other conjured a snowstorm, and the cars on Dundas that were stuck in traffic in the heat were suddenly mired in a thick snowstorm. So that’s how that poem came to be, but that was a response to the poem called ‘Search’, which I carried for years when I was a kid.”
​KH:  “You use the phrase ‘projected I’ a number of times. I wonder if you could expand on that a bit.”
DS:  “Well, what I mean is that, imagine––if I imagine a scene, then I put myself into that scene, and I write about that scene, in the first-person. And when I do that I search very deeply for my own emotions, and my own emotional responses to that situation. But the person in the scene is not me, it is a fictional person.”
​KH:  “Right.”
DS:  “I’m just writing a poem now called ‘Gethsemane’, which is about––a very long poem––about a soldier who is dozing for an hour in an olive grove, which is suggested to be Gethsemane, and he’s reflecting on how the revolution is going. And it’s got multiple meanings because I also have implications for the life of Jesus of Nazareth––it’s got a number of allusions to that. But it’s written in the first-person. Needless to say, I’ve never been in the Garden of Gethsemane, but it’s a reflection in that olive grove. So, I’m projecting my feelings––which are very genuine––onto a fictitious character and using the character as a vehicle to elaborate on my emotions.”
​KH:  “––as a kind of catalyst.”
DS:  “Catalytic, yeah. Catalytic.”
​KH:  “I noticed that your poems have been lengthening. Compared to Infinite Sequels, the poems in A Frail Book of Endings are, as Gethsemane, longer. Is there some significance to that?”
DS:  “Yeah, I think so. I just think that I’m just fleshing things out more. I’m thinking more in a deeper, perhaps more sophisticated, linear way. I just finished a three-part poem called, ‘What Fleeting Means’, which is three separate poems, almost a tryptych of poems. So, I don’t know. That’s just something that happens. I still like the short stuff. ‘In Apologia’ I just read the other night.”
​KH:  “Yeah. Bold poem.”
DS:  “‘Excuse me––uhm, how does that go?”
​KH:  “Let me pull it up....”
DS:  “I seem to have left the wick––see, you’ve got to read that right. ‘Sincerest apologies/ but I appear to have ignited/ the wick of your woman/ and left it/ burning.’”
​KH:  “Hahaha. Brazen.”
DS:  “It’s a good way to get punched in the head.”
​KH:  “It’s a bold way to open up a collection.”
DS:  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
​KH:  “Well, let’s see....”
DS:  “One thing I don’t want to have the interview go without mentioning is Leonard Cohen.”
​KH:  “Absolutely.”
DS:  “You know, because it gets to the point that you don’t want to say too much about his passing and his life because so many people have commented and you’ll be just a voice in the crowd, but Leonard Cohen––”
​KH:  ​“He was a big influence on you.”
DS:  “––huge. I mean, I discovered him in grade nine in 1962 or ‘3, somewhere in there, and I discovered Let Us Compare Mythologies, which he published in ’57. That was in our library at school and 1965 is when the movie came out, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, which is on NFB now; it’s available there. So, I feel as though––Leonard Cohen was 29 or 28 when I met him, as it were. And I grew up with the guy, and I just think he was an absolutely phenomenal master of words, whether he even recognized it or knew it sometimes. Just phenomenal. His language was always so alive, so vibrant, creative and, well, unexpected. He used the word, the metaphor, that no one else would ever use. “Like a worm on a hook/ like a knight bent down in some old fashioned book.” And he led me to the guitar and guitar work. And I ain’t no Leonard Cohen, that’s for sure, but he’s been a huge beacon at the end of the dock for me, that’s what he was, and was for millions of other people. What’s interesting about Cohen is that he went through a big period of ’68 through ’85 or so when a lot of people mocked him; he was a subject of derision. People forget this. His concerts were easy to get tickets for in Toronto, and I went to every concert, and have every t-shirt, back to ’68.”
​KH:  “Wow.”
DS:  “And his fourth or fifth album, Various Positions, was not released in the States. Columbia Records refused to release it. And it contained little numbers like, oo, ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Dance Me To The End of Love’. They did not release that. They ultimately did, but it took them three years before they did.”
​KH:  “What do you think compelled that derision?”
DS:  “What compelled it was the popularly held belief that he can’t sing, he only knows six chords, and that his songs and melodies are simplistic. And those things are all true: he was not a great singer, and he didn’t know a lot of chords. But people soon realized he mastered the use of those chords just the way he mastered the English language. He braided those six chords into simple but totally unforgettable songs of rare beauty and emotion. And again, those lyrics of his matched the chords in directness and unadorned expression of the most earnest kind.” 
​KH:  “Do you think there’s a similarity between Cohen in that respect and Bob Dylan, who was derided as someone who can’t sing....”
DS:  “Oh, yeah, there was a big similarity. They were very good friends, or had been. Long before Dylan won the Nobel, a number of prominent Canadians have pushed Cohen for that Prize; and in my view the business case for Cohen winning the Nobel Prize is much stronger than Bob Dylan’s.”
​KH:  “What do you mean by ‘the business case’?”
DS:  “Well, his canon of work and his impact––not only as a singer and songwriter, but as a novelist and poet––is phenomenal compared to Bob Dylan’s. And I play a lot of Bobby Dylan, and I can tell you: his words are very clever, very crafty, very interesting, but I think they’re quite meaningless a lot of the time––I really don’t think there’s a lot behind them. But you get the general sense of where he’s coming from, and I love singing his stuff. But the melodies are very simple, and the words are incomprehensible a lot of the time, and they’re very drug-driven. Cohen’s are not. I find Cohen’s work to be much deeper and more sophisticated, more complex and much more meaningful to the human heart. Although  I applaud Dylan’s winning the Nobel Prize. It’s great for poetry and songwriting, and it does open the door, maybe, for Leonard Cohen posthumously winning that award.”
​KH:  “Did you notice a shift in Cohen’s work––and, again, not to dwell too much on Cohen––after he started making these retreats to California, becoming a Buddhist and so forth? I think there may have been a general suspicion that his creative power came to a large degree from a sense of melancholy and a sense of loss and that if he achieved a kind of inner peace he would cease to be capable of expressing that same quality. Did you notice that? I suppose his final album is a testament to that not being the case, but....”
DS:  “Well, I have to say no, because I think that sense of loss and melancholy, driven by depression and melancholia, had been there from the beginning. It became a bit more sophisticated or complex later in life because he became much more reflective about the women he’d known and the hearts he’d broken. So I’d have to say no, in some respects. I mean, that later burst of energy was driven by the fact that his manager had absconded with five million dollars. What a huge gift that really was to mankind. In the late 1990s he was retired and not comin’ back. He was on Mount Baldy for five years, and it was his daughter, Lorca, who told him, ‘Something’s going on here, man. You better come off that mountain and take a look because I think your money’s gone.’ So, I mean you do get a more sophisticated, reflective perspective as you get older. I mean, ‘So Long, Marianne’, written in 1968 had just as much melancholy as anything that was to follow.”
​KH:  “Do you find that your emotional capacity deepens with years, that things in the rear-view take on greater significance than things in the windshield, so to speak?”
DS:  “Yeah, I think definitely. There was a singer I heard on the CBC recently, I can’t remember who it was, who said, ‘I weep more, now.’ I’m more prone to weeping. Weeping becomes easier as you get older. For me, I’ve become much more reflective about my life, my marriage, my loves, my child, etc. I don’t want to get morose about it, because a lot of it’s very uplifting and extremely rewarding, to reflect on those things. But at the same time, I’m 67 now, and it’s hard to believe, but it’s a very good feeling to look back over those years. I’m able to interpret––deal with those years in a much more intelligent, creative way than when I was younger.”
​KH:  “What do you mean by that?”
DS:  “Well, when I was younger I was more challenging about what was happening in my life, the dissolution of my first marriage for example. I was more combative. And issues to do with my daughter, who’s now 36––you know, relationships, both personal and work relationships. And I think as you get older––maybe it’s maturity––you become more objective and able to objectify it and look upon it a bit more objectively, detachedly.”


​KH:  “Um, I noticed there’s a tweet on your twitter account that read, ‘One in four Americans that were eligible to vote’––not to smear this conversation with the exploits of the golden toad south of the border, but––‘eligible to vote, voted for Trump. That sounds like a revolution in the making.’ I think there’s real substance to that, and that this election could be a real catalyst, if I’m trying to find a silver lining––”
DS:  “Well, my tweet was about the fact that fifty percent of eligible Americans didn’t vote: 25% voted for Hillary and 25% voted for Trump. And my tweet about revolution is that 75% of Americans didn’t vote for Donald Trump, and that could a revolution make, one way or another. Who knows where the 50% would have voted if it were Australia, where it’s illegal not to vote, so you have to vote. And I wish more countries would adopt that model, because when push comes to shove, I think we should push and shove.”
​KH:  “What do you think of the none-of-the-above option on a ballot?”
DS:  “It’s valid. I think Australia does that, and you can get a jail term not for voting; but I do believe that they have the option of none-of-the-above, because that’s casting a ballot. So, it’s valid. I don’t want to get into the Trump thing, though.”
​KH:  “Yeah, to hell with that.”
DS:  “Creative process.”

         "Gethsemane is interesting because it’s more based on an imagined scene of a revolutionary, a soldier, a fighter––maybe driven by Syria to an extent, I think, sometimes––taking a moment off, lying in an orchard, and almost falling asleep, and  'the bees are droning/ their lazy hymns in the citrus,' and he’s reflective on his life."

​KH:  “Creative process.”
DS:  “I don’t have one. Creative process: I often start with a title or a first line. I remember Dylan Thomas always said he often started with a title–– ‘Fern Hill’, or––”
​KH:  “Do not go gentle....”
DS:  “In the white giant’s thigh, or do not go gentle. And I often will build around that or a first line. I remember reading a lengthy treatise on cancer, on the disease cancer, because I did a lot of health-related marketing and promotion, particularly oncology and hematology, and it was a line about, ‘We have a lot of lacunae related to cancer’. I was not familiar with the word lacuna. Looked it up. And I remember when I did it, within ten minutes, I had, ‘You as lacuna’––and then I had, ‘Your awayness has become a presence, now.’”
​KH:  “Interesting.”
DS:  “I love that, ‘Your awayness has become a presence now / a space you’ve somehow filled with space, / your shape on the bed still rosy with your fragrance.’”
​KH:  “Beautiful.”
DS:  “And that was the line, and it all started with that book and the word ‘lacuna’, and the title, where a person can be a lacuna, a missing part, a space, a gap. And so that often drives where I’m going to go with a poem. Gethsemane is interesting because it’s more based on an imagined scene of a revolutionary, a soldier, a fighter––maybe driven by Syria to an extent, I think, sometimes––taking a moment off, lying in an orchard, and almost falling asleep, and  “the bees are droning/ their lazy hymns in the citrus,” and he’s reflective on his life. So that one just came from my imagination. Not often do I write about something I’ve seen, or witnessed. My parents drove some of those poems. You heard the other night, I think, ‘My Father’s Medals’?”
​KH:  “Yeah. ‘They’re too heavy for me now.’ What a beautiful encapsulation that is.”
DS:  ​“My Dad actually said that, he said, ‘You know, David, I can’t wear those medals anymore, they’re too heavy.’ And I didn’t say this the other night, but we had––there’s a company that manufactures miniature medals for these old guys who are so frail and stooped over, they can’t wear those big heavy medals––so we had these smaller, lighter ones that we could plug on his chest. But they still connoted the same thing, and my dad knew that. He wore those medals proudly.”


​KH:  “‘My Guitar Just Is.’”
DS:  “That poem, frankly, is based on the solid fact that I’m not a great guitar player.  I think what I was saying is that while some guitars weep, some guitars moan, my guitar doesn’t do any of those things: it just basically is, it does what it can to create music and song and to create poetry and life, but it’s not capable of doing much more than that, and it doesn’t need to. It’s just fine.”
​KH:  “There’s a similarity there to the six chords that Cohen possessed.”
DS:  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just this morning I was playing stuff off Cohen’s latest album. I don’t know if you heard that song ‘Leaving the Table’? ‘I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people in your picture frame.’ Every song is about death. It’s incredible. There was an article on the weekend in the Star that mentioned Cohen’s having said in September to friends in Montréal that he had six weeks left to live. So the cancer sentence was known for a while. He just didn’t publicize it. In Infinite Sequels I paired that guitar poem with another one about old guitar strings [wherein] I’m changing the strings on my guitar, looking at the floor, littered with strings, and it felt like I had cut the songs and words from my guitar. And then I say there will be new songs; there will be new music; there will be new guitar strings that will reinvent my music for me.”
​KH:  “Is death the artist’s great subject?”
DS:  “Is what?”
​KH:  “Is death the great subject of the artist?”
DS:  “Well, I’ll put it this way: death’s pretty ultimate; it’s pretty final. So it’s definitely one of the great subjects of artists, for sure.”
​KH:  “Is there an idea of reincarnation behind the old guitar strings laid on the ground and that they will be replaced by news ones and that there’s a constant, regenerative, creative process from generation to generation?”
DS:  “Yes, I think that’s what that poem would say. Whilst you feel that sense of loss and so on, life will go on, and there will be new music. It’s one of the lines in that poem: ‘There will be new music. There will be new songs.’”
​KH:  “You say, ‘I think that’s what that poem would say.’ Do you ever feel as if particular poems can encapsulate a philosophy that you don’t necessarily have to adhere to?”
DS:  “Oh, for sure. That’s certainly true for me. If an idea intrigues me, or an emotion intrigues me, or an emotion or response is generated by something I’ve read or something I’ve experienced, that may trigger a poem, and I will write about that, but I don’t necessarily endorse or underscore that particular feeling or emotion or idea in the poem. But I think it’s appealing. I think others will find it interesting and will be engaged by it, and that’s enough. In the same way, a novelist can write a whole novel about this or that, but not necessarily endorse any of the ideas in it....”
​KH:  “Right. Like Lolita, Nabokov’s––” 
DS:  “Like Lolita, for example. Once again, an absolutely phenomenal book, phenomenal writer. When I read Lolita I wonder how he got away with getting that published at all. He did have a lot of trouble. I think he’d have more trouble today than he did then, strangely enough.”
​KH:  ​“Interesting. I mean, in contrast to the sort of pop music scene that is wallpapered with recyclable 13- and 14-year-old kids, why do you think that that would be a more problematic book today?”
DS:  ​“Well, simply because it seemingly is about pedophilia. It’s about a male that is attracted to an underage lady. If you’ve seen the original film with Peter Sellers, a fantastic movie, I think way better than the re-make, it more clearly seems to project that pedophilic sense.  I mean it’s about desire and lust and all these underlying themes in a broader sense, but why did Nabokov choose to select a female heroine that’s like 13-years-old?”
​KH:  “Do you think art’s supposed to challenge its audience, or console, or to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed?”
DS:  “I think art should do all those things. It should console and stroke and challenge and disturb and upset. It should do all of those things. Another popular poem I perform is ‘Black Box’, which is a very angry poem which deals with terrorism and the veiled, rather frightening undercurrents we see in the world today.  But I use that as a metaphor, in the same way that I use human relationships. So in the same way that a human relationship can end, and “they’re gonna find that black box in our wreckage, and let us know what failed,”| I see that as a larger metaphor for the world itself. I just did that poem in Toronto to a soundtrack where I did a dance at the end and I said something about, ‘It’s wonderful to dance in the face of the apocalypse. Bring it on, Donald. We’re ready for you.’”
​KH:  “That’s maybe a twenty-first century theme––how to make music on the Titanic.”
DS:  “Well, we’re arranging the deck chairs.”
​KH:  “Arranging the deck chairs, yeah.”
DS:  “Ever heard that expression?”
​KH:  “Yeah, there’s a nice inversion of that of Stephen Colbert’s when he was roasting George Bush during the White House correspondents’ dinner where he says, ‘Some people say that Bush is just arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but no: this administration isn’t sinking, it’s soaring. If anything, he’s arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!”
*Laughter*
DS:  “Well you do bring up a great scene, of dancing in the face of the apocalypse––it’s a very good metaphor––or a comparison could be the Titanic’s musicians having been ordered to play: as the boat sank in the silence of the mid-Atlantic, the orchestra’s playing. And that was sort of the sense I get with that poem, and why I perform it to a sort of Jazz number. Since you saw my show [in 2014], I dance more and I do the twist and I make comments about dancing in the face of the apocalypse. It’s a very similar comparison. It’s sort of like, as the ship is sinking, we keep performing and doing our thing, somewhat turning a blind-eye to reality.”

         "And if you go to some old Rod McKuen stuff from the sixties, that’s where you see some of my roots, because Rod McKuen was an absolute master at the spoken word art, poetry, performed to music. He did more than twenty albums, and he was extremely good at it. That big raspy, smokey voice of his. He was huge."


​KH:  “So, the show’s evolving then, yeah?”
DS:  “Yeah, it is. It is. I keep getting disappointments, Kevin. I’m largely driven by Fringe festivals, and I just missed London for the second year. It’s a complete lottery. I’d love to do my show in a place like London. I didn’t get Ottawa. I find out about Toronto on Thursday night. But, you put a show in like that, and I’ve got the show; it’s a good show; it’s a proven show; it works. But you go into a lottery. And a lot of the people in the lottery don’t even have a show. They got nothin’. ‘Cause I’ve been to the lottery draws, and all you do is you put the name of your company in. So I have a registered company called, Thespis Spoken Word & Stage. I can’t believe that ‘Thespis’ wasn’t taken––Thespis, the god of spoken word. Thespis Spoken Word & Stage. So you put the name of your company in and you pay thirty bucks and if you get selected––I’ve been at the Toronto Fringe three years in a row, now. I go to their party, and a lot of the people who are there, who are selected, have no idea what they’re going to do.”
​KH:  “That’s frustrating.”
DS:  ​“It’s very frustrating ‘cause I got a show and I can do it. But Friday night, I’ll find out. That’s my last one of this season. I don’t have an agent; I don’t go that route, now.”
​KH:  “What’s the new show about?”
DS:  “Um, Such a Frail Book of Endings, it’s a combination of different poems. I’m writing pieces specifically for the show. So, 70 poems.... I might even have some actors involved.”
​KH:  “You know my number.”
DS:  “You could do both––you could act and do a couple of poems.”
​KH:  ​“Absolutely.”
DS:  “So I like to expand the concept. Poetry on stage, spoken word on stage, with musical backdrop, is so powerful.”
​KH:  “And it’s older than one or the other, right? I mean, that’s much closer to the original poetic tradition.”
DS:  “Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if you go to some old Rod McKuen stuff from the sixties, that’s where you see some of my roots, because Rod McKuen was an absolute master at the spoken word art, poetry, performed to music. He did more than twenty albums, and he was extremely good at it. That big raspy, smokey voice of his. He was huge. What have you got there that you haven’t asked me?”
​KH:  “Um, there a couple, here. ‘The white page laughing’ comes up a couple of times. Is this a sense of mockery coming from the blankness of the page?”
DS:  “Yeah, I’ve written a number of poems for Infinite Sequels, a number of them unpublished, about the whole journey of actually creating and writing words on a page. And Leonard Cohen, again, he talks about, what’s the expression, ‘blackening pages’, the challenge of blackening pages.”
​KH:  “That’s an extraordinary phrase.”
DS:  “Yeah, and you’ll see it in a recent poem, which I’ve retitled, by the way, I just call it ‘Snowman’, now. Snowman, where I talk about how the words become the buttons on the page resisting rain, resisting criticism in a way, but they just stare out at you, and they become permanent in that way. So I write a lot about the actual task of writing poetry, of creation, and sometimes it is as though that page is just white, white, white, white, laughing––it’s just laughing at you. It’s like the page is mocking and declaring “you’re not going to cover me with words.” And we all go through it. I go through periods where I don’t write anything sensible for two weeks, and it irks me. It’s usually when I’m busy with these other things that take me away from it. But I know tonight, I’m good. I’ve got some good ideas, and I’m going to be staying at home in my Stratford place, and I’ve got some wine in the wine cellar. I’m going to open up some deeply reflective, disturbingly red Ripasso, breathe deeply and get at it. I feel like writing tonight…..and that makes it a good night…..a very good night.”

THE EVENT

WHERE: 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. 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.

THE FEATURED POET: David Stones opens the event with a reading that begins at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open-mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, with an intermission at about 8:00. 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: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario P
oetry Society.

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Don Gutteridge, book launch and feature reading for Nov. 2nd, 2016

10/25/2016

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London Open Mic Poetry is proud to host London’s most well-known member of the Canadian literary scene, Don Gutteridge. The Nov. 2nd London Open Mic will launch Gutteridge’s 20th book of poetry, "Inundations", published by Hidden Brook Press: Brighton, 2016.

Gutteridge is the author of more than fifty books, including poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. In 1972 he won the President’s Medal at The University of Western Ontario for his poem "Death At Quebec". Among his best-known poems are the mythic tetralogy: Riel: A Poem For Voices, Coppermine: The Quest For North, Borderlands, and Tecumseh. Gutteridge is best known across Canada for his historical fiction. He has also recently produced a series of mystery novels, The Marc Edwards Mysteries.

Don Gutteridge was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1937, and was raised in the nearby village of Point Edward, Ontario. His high schooling took place in Sarnia and Chatham, Ontario. He attended the University of Western Ontario (UWO), where he graduated with a BA Honours in English in 1960. Gutteridge then taught high school English for seven years before joining the Faculty of Education at UWO in 1969. He is currently Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario with his wife Anne. He has two children, John and Kate, and six grandchildren. ​

THREE POEMS

GONE

For My Brother Bob,
in Loving Memory
​
Now that you are gone
I think of all the questions
I meant to ask and never
did, and I stare at these
old photographs
of our shared boyhood
immortalizing the memories
I must muster alone:
the way you hung upon
the words of my stories and brought
them alive in your eyes
that will not brighten again
at my preposterous plots
and characters carrying on –
now that you are gone.

AMBLING
(Guelph: February 1961)
That night the snow
fell as soft as rose
petals on a bride’s veil,
and we walked through the
brightening air, hand-
in-glove, our dreams aloft,
while flakes feathered your lashes
and left your eyes aglow,
as if the world were there,
without preamble, to welcome
lovers and their slow, passionate
ambling.

THE VILLAGE WITHIN
We all have a village within,
a place where we go
when the world fails us,
the home-ground where every
face is familiar and child-
size, where the streets welcome
our walking and each house
is a variation of our own,
its idiosyncrasies known
and loved just for being
there from the beginning
when our eyes were
as wide as any horizon, when all
was new and unrehearsed:
O the tug of the town
that gave us birth is one
of the sweetest joys we know.

INTERVIEW

Inundations, your most recent collection of poems, seems by its title to address the excess of stimuli in the world right now. Was that your intention––and if so, why?––or are inundations for you of a more internal sort?

Inundations is about the inundation of memories that inspire the poems in Part One. As I grow older I return evermore to my childhood days in the village of Point Edward, which has taken in my mind almost a mythical quality. I do memory exercises in which I sit in my study and try to remember images, sounds and events from my past. They have been flowing for the past several books: The Way It Was, Tidings, Inundations and a forthcoming book, The Blue Flow Below.

The term “cartographer” appears in Tidings, is as a theme much expanded upon throughout A True History of Lambton County, and implies itself through “The Village Within”; and in an essay called “History as Public and Private Metaphor” (19..), we find: “Much as the sense of place does, the figures and events of our historical past become part of our psychological ground.” Too, we come across in “Teaching the Canadian Mythology” the phrase: “In a sense one can only know as much about one’s country as one knows about one’s self.”

Is there a way in which, for you, returning through Tidings to the land of your childhood had been a process of personal cartography? Does this sense of mapping psychic geography combine with, influence, foster, or compel your sense of myth making?

Yes, my journey back has the appeal of a personal cartography It is similar to my earlier mythmaking in which the stories of Riel and Maquinna and so on resonated with something personal as well as historical and the two got fused somehow. I have always cheered for the underdog and the historical figures that attracted me – Riel, Matonabee, Maquina and Tecumseh – were all underdogs, trying to survive and maintain their culture just as the poet strives to maintain a sense of his inner self. I still feel I am mythmaking, even though the recent poems are all personal, because the personal is projected onto the “mythical” village of Point Edward (of which I have written probably a hundred poems, starting with The Village Within back in the 60s.

Have you returned lately to any poems or works of fiction and, in doing so, noticed that their meaning has changed for you?

I rarely re-read any of my earlier works, afraid of what I might find.

A lot of your writing features a stark awareness of time, whether it be “Year by year / I sit / in the sun’s thinning / my age growing around / me…” in “Death at Quebec” or the deep meditation on time in Tidings, with poems like “Time Was” where you are aware of the time “whittling / down the days one / by one”, or “Memory” in which you acknowledge the failure of memories to be a substitute for the past, and “An Odd Thought” in which you strikingly state “I am now an old man”. You also explore, manipulate, and re-create time in your works like Borderlands, Tecumseh, and The Village Within. The back cover of Tidings credits you with a “balance between nostalgia and ironic distance,” and, since you outline the sorts of things which time has taken away from you by recollecting or reiterating memories in your poems, I wonder, what has time given you? With both nostalgia and an ironic distance, how do you view the earlier trajectory of your work?

My early work was all about objectifying my own thoughts and feeling onto historical figures, which back then was really, in part, attempting to fill the fairly unoccupied space of Canadian Literature in general (There wasn’t very much until the 1960s: the landscape, both literally and metaphorically was barren. It took Atwood, Birney, Purdy, Munro and others to start filling in the spaces, and I was very much influenced by these pioneers and hoped to be among them. (My comment about ironic distance on the blurb of Tidings was a bit misleading: I feel passionately about my village characters and events but try to avoid sentimental nostalgia. That’s all I meant. Irony is a bit too strong. Time gives you both perspective and the past – yours to mine as you wish.

Referring to Riel: Poem for Voices, you write that, “the poem took its own final shape––which turned out to be quite different from what I had initially envisaged.”
          And, elsewhere, “The words are the poet’s, but they belong to others as well, as they mean in ways beyond his control.”
            Does the arc or final form of your fictional works often surprise you? And do you, as a poet, ever feel a responsibility to attribute part of your work––its inspiration, direction, or conclusion––to “the Muses?”

Yes, the final draft of a work of fiction or a poem is always a surprise. Writers work incrementally, phase by phrase or chapter by chapter, each new set of words setting off a fresh range of possibility and some inner sense (all poets have this) that somewhere/sometime a final fully shaped entity will emerge. It is still a mysterious process to me after some 1500 poems. I write a single phrase, and soon further possibilities emerge (influenced in my later lyrics by rhyme and consonance and the drive to make something whole and complete.

Is the experience of writing poetry different now from what it was when you were in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties? If so, in what way(s) is that process different today?

Today I write short personal lyrics, driven by sound and sense. In my early work I looked outside myself to historical figures whose stories resonated with something in me. In my middle period I experimented with documentary material and found poems (excerpts from newspapers, journals and so on). Now I write only brief personal lyrics about both the past and my present life as a father and grandfather and a handful of poems about the creative writing process itself.

In many of your poems you speak with an authority through your characters, specifically Riel and Maquina. You particularly make claims about the Metis culture, masculinity, and the passing down of knowledge and tradition from earlier generations. Ex. “Riel: Walking (Pembina 1858)”:

They were walking as a Metis always walked
Because a man could feel the Mother Earth through the palms
Of his feet, and know the firmness of her flesh
And the great unturning heart at the centre of her,
Were walking because walking told in every stride
Of man’s moving over the earth in a passing as brief
As a footprint, and because a Metis found
In walking a togetherness of spirit,
Of flesh knowing the same earth at the same turning
Of the sun or the season, and a man moving
Was like the wind’s loving of the deep grasses,
And did not stand like the rocks and die with stillness
In the bones, and because walking made spring
Out of muscle and limb, and a man could feel
His body lean as a willow in its long greenness,
And because there was joy in a Metis walking
With himself or his brother. These things had been told
To him by his elders, and he had felt them.

And “Riel: Last Stand” (19) ends with “Because they were a people, and because they knew / what it was to be a man, and make one’s choice, / and stand.”
          In Borderlands, you make use of real historical figures and include brief descriptions of their histories in the introduction. What was your process in researching these cultural and historical pieces, and how did you work to reconcile the knowledge that you accumulated with your poetic voice? Were there conflicts and/or discrepancies between fact and fiction? Did you find that you had a lot of room for your own creation of myth within history?

My use of material outside the poetry grew out of my wide reading in historical documents and old newspapers and journals. When I went looking for “found” material to resonate with parts of a longer work I simply read until I could say “Aha!”, this would help to reflect the themes of the longer poem I was working on. I simply developed a sixth sense of what would fit into the poetry and enhance the overall meaning. When a documentary piece is fitted into a longer poem, it becomes not only an integral part of the overall meaning of the work but is transformed by its context into a “poem” itself.

Has your relationship to ambiguity, mystery, or contradiction in poems changed over the course of your years?

My early narratives were straightforward, highly rhetorical with dramatized “voices”. My recent lyrical phase has made my work more subtle land at time ambiguous. In the short lyric there is more word-play, and in my poems about Eden there is an ironic tone.

In response to the unlikelihood of your fearfully returning to read earlier of your works, I’ll just offer that I was recently chastened by the image of a writer chasing her published work like tattoos about the body, the next driven by the desire to distract from the previous.
          Do you identify with this sense of functional distancing with regard to your early work? As a fair portion of those who will encounter this interview are largely, so to speak, un-inked, have you any words of advice regarding the pen and its early consequences?

I feel distant from my early works, written forty years ago and in a different style. They are mostly longer-line verse while my current lyrics are all three-beat lines (with a variety of rhythms) Ironically, my lyrics still maintain the narrative spirit, as most of them are a single, continuous sentence with a strong close-out.

In what proportion do you feel your work is guided transcription as opposed to generation?

If I had to choose I’d say generation. I write quickly and usually revise the same day. My novels were all written quickly as well, with a first draft taking up to four weeks. (Further drafts are of course much slower and rigorous)

Are there in the Canadian literary landscape elements whose development has surprised you?

Yes, I am surprised that much modern poetry has become obscure and difficult. My recent work is out of fashion with its use of internal rhyme, consonance and strong rhythm. I find much contemporary verse rhythmically flat and toneless, although still strong on imagery and voicing.

As a writer it is nearly impossible to extract oneself from one’s work, and in your poetry there are traces of yourself in the histories of place and memories--whether it be in Point Edward or in the thoughts and feelings of your historical characters. You mentioned the poet’s endeavour to maintain one’s inner self—do the poems themselves function as safekeeping for your thoughts, emotions, and memories?

Yes, the poems are a place of safekeeping for memories, thoughts and emotions. They also serve to trace my inner development as a human being: father, grandfather, custodian of the family and historical memory.

You mentioned your sixth sense of using ‘found’ material, particularly in your earlier writing, and how a documentary piece can be transformed by its context into a poem. In your opinion, where are the best places to look for ‘found’ material, or material that melds well into poetry?

To find found material I search the library for old newpapers and secondly for books that can act as companion pieces to the poetry as it develops. For example, I read biographies of Riel, Matonabee (Samuel Hearne’s journal), Maquinna and Tecumseh and historical materials written about them.

Does the mythical quality of Point Edward hinder or enhance the personal memories that you draw from it?

I’ve created a Point Edward in my memory and given it a mythical quality (as every-village). And such a creation enhances my own memories about the town.

THE EVENT

WHERE: 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. 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.

THE FEATURED POET: Don Gutteridge opens the event with a reading that begins at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, 15 open-mic poets will read until 9:30 at the latest, with an intermission at about 8:00. 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: Pay What You Can (in 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 The Ontario Poetry Society.​

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David Huebert, London Open Mic's featured poet for Oct. 5th, 2016

9/29/2016

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A child of Halifax, Nova Scotia, David Huebert came to London three years ago to begin his PhD in English at Western University. A writer of poetry, fiction, and critical prose, David published his first poetry collection--We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class--with Guernica Editions in 2015. In 2016, his story, "Enigma," won the CBC Short Story Prize. David has published creative work in journals such as Event, CV2, Matrix, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, and The Puritan, where you can read his work online for free. He is currently completing a short fiction collection called Peninsula Sinking and a second poetry book called Alkaline Purr.

​
Two Poems and an excerpt of Prose by David Huebert

Wild in Me* 

How to recall this wild in me? 
My toes have forgotten how to grasp: 
Now pallid feet push pedals, deaf   
To strut of songs from time before.

My toes have forgotten how to grasp, 
This mouthy mind won’t let me hear   
The strut of songs from time before,  
When handsteps whispered, soft as rain.

This mouthy mind won’t let me hear   
The time before this motorroar,  
When handsteps whispered soft as rain
(Each murmur hummed and purred in me). 

The time before this motorroar: 
Each blade of grass a lilting tongue, 
Each murmur hummed and purred in me:
Each colour pealed, and death was young.  

Each blade of grass a lilting tongue, 
Teeth wandering from bite to song:
Each colour pealed, and death was young,  
And life was heaving, mending, gone.       

Now pallid feet push petals, deaf
And charging through explosive truth:
There’s no such time as time before,
But I recalled this wild, this me. 


*This poem originally appeared in The Dalhousie Review 95.1 



Closeted* 

Your closet is the same size as mine, 
which neither of us thinks is fair.
The cat reposes in yours, shed fur 
turning that black backpack into 
a hairy critter. Knapsacklesloth.

Mine holds hockey skates, 
drying from last night’s shinny. 
You don’t like the smell. 
​But this isn’t about my feet--
it’s about your closet, our cat.

What I’m trying to say is something 
about the feel of your kimono, how 
it only excites me when your skin’s
underneath. The strings of your 
dresses dangle, little girl legs 

on buses, and the cat swats. 
No doubt I’m projecting (the right 
word must start with anthropo)
but I insist she paws those dangly 
bits because she misses you. 

What I’m trying to say has something
to do with the way your closet looks 
the same when you’re not here— 
how that’s scary and comforting, 
how I went in there for the first time 

and just sniffed, conjuring the chimp 
in me to smell the bonobo in you. 
How maybe that was weird but at 
least I didn’t try on your clothes. 
Or did I? Would you mind?    


*This poem originally appeared in EVENT 44.2. 


Excerpt from “Bellyflop*” 

What if it was you, now, alone in the middle of the stark night sky, clinging to those shuddering rungs, hot terror searing like cobra venom? What if a dry panic clutched your throat and your bones went jittery and you both knew and didn’t know what was going on? What if you heard that same pool echo from that day on the five metre but this time you knew it was just your own warbling ears? What if there was a smell like burning hair and you saw the Aquafit ladies flying through the night sky, riding huge blue lightsabers and jabbing vibrating wands in your direction, and you couldn’t tell if they were trying to save you or hurl you into an angry electric abyss? What if the charge was still building and all your muscles were twitching and the ladder was starting to char and every nerve and muscle was urging you to flee? What if the sky, then, turned unspeakably clear and lovely and the Aquafit angels were beckoning and a soft breeze soothed the burn and you were sure, for a moment, you could ride the wind? Wouldn’t you dive towards the Northwest Arm, shooting for the glittering black pool? Wouldn’t you think that maybe the cool water could save you, that once you landed safely Tessa would run down to the water, tearing off her clothes, and jump in beside you? Wouldn’t you be astonished as you found yourself soaring not towards the Northwest Arm but straight for a leafy elm that made you think of Nancy reading in her shady back yard? Wouldn’t you go full reverential when as some small branches broke your fall you heard a voice lilting from the core of the tree, sounding just like Nancy, pleading for you to come closer? What would you do if when you landed between two large but merciful branches you heard that same silky voice saying you could forget all about Blue Velvet and the apology letter you never wrote? What if, as you lay there, wheezing in the tree’s embrace, you ceased to wonder about life and death, ceased to pine over Tessa Brown? What if, when everything else was gone, you apologized and meant it and knew, more than you would ever know anything again, that Nancy understood? 

*“Bellyflop” originally appears in The Puritan 28. You can read the whole story for free here: http://puritan-magazine.com/bellyflop/ 


And to read David's short story "Enigma", which won the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize, click here.



Interview with David Huebert



In “Enigma”, the sort of somnolent synthesis of the story’s two non-human mammals––a horse dying of lamintitis and a whale gently plummeting towards and rebounding upon contact with the ocean’s floor while asleep––suggest a writer whose craft is perhaps both near in proximity and apt to defer to the luxurious metaphors one finds soughing just behind one’s vision on waking. Another, less recent piece of yours, “Fingernail Clippings”, owes, by your account, a debt to an inchworm which liked “to dangle from [your] reading lamp in Victoria...” and so found itself in “remnants and offshoots of dreams.”
        I wonder if you’d offer a bit about how your experience of dreaming influences your work in both prose and poetry. Have you ever seen or generated texts in a dream and been able to transcribe them? Do you ever sort of cinematically replay your dreams on waking in the interest of future writing?


Thanks for this reading Kevin—it’s one of the most profound stories I’ve ever been told about my work.
      This is far from an original thought but I believe attunement to the world of story and poetic imagination takes place somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, or between the conscious and unconscious mind. We like stories and poems because they offer truths that unsettle the banalities of the quotidian.
     Sleep and near-sleep is a natural place for the writer to forage. I don’t rehearse my dreams but I do always sleep with a notebook beside my bed. It is often in a state of near-sleep that a gestating idea will surface or offer itself. I never wake from sleep with a line or a story idea; the inspiration is more likely to hit when I’m falling, drifting down through the murk. 
It is also here, in the rind of consciousness, that lines of poetry and (more rarely) fiction emerge totally unexpected. Such lines often form the core image-world of a poem. I try to be open to these encounters, to welcome the unexpected.
      When I'm writing fiction well it is also a kind of somnambulism. After two or three hours confined to the imagination I begin to get delirious, to see unexpected visions.  

Do you ever feel compelled to moralize through your stories? Are you ever suspicious or ambivalent about a writer's doing so?

I think fiction is a realm for curiosity and question-asking. A good story might illuminate a moral or ethical dilemma in all its complexity, but it shouldn’t reduce that complexity to an easy or obvious takeaway. 
      I do think there’s an important difference between a story that moralizes and one that has morality. The latter is acceptable, even admirable. 
 
Describe, if you would, the place in which you’re sitting at this moment.

An upstairs apartment facing a window looking out over a residential street. The view mostly filtered by a young poplar where, on fortunate occasions, a pair of cardinals flirts. A stack of books beside my left hand and an empty coffee mug beside my right. Behind me a chair, a carpet, more books. In the next room, the sound of a woman sniffling. A woman fighting off a cold. 
 
The care with which you crafted “Wild in Me” seems to be, in a strong field, amongst its most moving elements.
      I wonder if you’d riff on an important quality of the often exacting metrical execution of the poetry you’ve written.


With “Wild in Me,” I had to write and write and internalize the iambic tetrameter rhythm to the point where I hardly recognized it as such. Then words started to come in clusters, already forming around that pulse. All poems have a pulse but when you’re composing with metre the line becomes more important as a unit. There’s no saying, “maybe I’ll break the line here or there.” The line comes to you as a whole and you can edit within it but the line is the line. I like lines. I think (following James Longenbach) that they’re what makes poetry poetry. 

Did you choose to internalize iambic tetrameter to write “Wild in Me”, to get a post-human narrative (yes?) into poetry––if so, why this metre?––or did the poem happen as a result of that internalization? 

I didn’t really choose the metre. The line came to me—“How to recall the wild in me”—and I liked it and realized that it’s rhythm was what it was. It probably came out in part as a response to reading a lot of Milton and other metrical verse at the time. Certain poems I write simply seem to want to surf the wake of traditional formal structures and I try to go with that, to let that happen.
      I wouldn’t say “Wild in Me” aims for a posthuman narrative; I think if anything its striving for a kind of prehumanism or unhumanism.
I think beyond the initial aural impulse I stayed with the iambic rhythm and the pantoum form because this is a poem about recollection. In the nineteenth century they had a concept of deep memory or “racial memory” where they thought you could recall your distant evolutionary past. So the poem is a kind of thought experiment, trying to explore that mnemonic realm through lyric poetry.  

In my capacity as an interviewer, and with respect to your having been exposed to more seasoned interlocutors after your recent successes, I wonder what you hope for, or most appreciate, from a listening catalyst.
      Is there a particular question or theme you wish to be evoke in a reader of your work?


There is no particular question I’m looking for or theme I’m trying to explore. What I like best is when someone reads something into my work that I didn’t consciously realize was there and I can then say, “Yes, that’s right, that was there all along.” As you can probably tell from the rest of my comments, my work doesn’t really have a thematic agenda. It’s more like a constellation of curiosities, a rhizome of images.  ​

How do you find your academic work––which I understand generally has to do with representations of non-human animals in American fiction––influences or shapes your “extra-curricular” writing. By theme, by tone, by subject matter, by a seeking refuge from "the labyrinth of fruitful pain"?

My creative writing has a lot to do with animals, and many of those ideas are generated by my academic research. It’s a lovely symbiosis! I’ve had to read widely as part of the program and that has certainly generated a lot of good material. I really like cross-pollination, and I think exposure to different types of research and thinking at Western has been perhaps more productive than just hanging out with other writers might have been. I’ve also connected with a great community of writer-scholars at Western--Andy Verboom, Kevin Shaw, Madeline Bassnett, Tom Cull, Joshua Schuster, and many more. At the heart of it, I think creative thinking in all its guises is a great inspiration for a writer.    

I was talking to an actor the other day who said he developed and (with occasional mania) listened to a carefully collated playlist to get into a particular character––that this playlist affected the way he walked, spoke, thought, felt, associated.
        Is music important in any way to your work? Are the characters you develop ever associated in your mind with a particular song (or dish, or colour, or object, or memory)?


Music is important to my process; I often listen to classical music when I write. I tend to listen to a lot of movie soundtracks, most frequently the soundtrack to Jane Eyre. I really just listen to this stuff because the soothing tones relax me, but even that is interesting--the music works as a kind of narcotic that enables me to weave through waking dreams.    
        When I reflect back on the characters I write, I tend to think of the most striking images from the stories themselves. So yes, I suppose, some of my characters end up being conflated in my mind with animals. For example, Vince is a Jellyfish and Sam Hoffman is a lobster. Dante from "Without Seeing" is a half-blind man roaming the streets of Toronto with the corpse of a dog in his arms.  

Sorkin, Aaron Sorkin has said that he looks upon plot as a kind of grudging requirement, that dialogue is what he loves to write. 
      Where do you come down on this point? Is it character, or dialogue, or description, or plot––is it theme or tone or the momentum of sentences chasing each other––that you prefer? Is preference dependent on the piece you’re writing? Is your experience of these elements of prose synthetic, or ever tugged at and wrestled as means to ends? 

Funny you ask; I've been thinking about dialogue a lot lately. I've mostly been purging it from my writing and finding that my stories don't need much of it, that they only get stronger when it's culled. This might be because I’m not good at writing dialogue. But it might also be because as a fiction reader I don't particularly like dialogue—I find it has a tendency to become vacuous or cliché. Nothing makes me want to put down a book more than long stretches of flat dialogue. Good dialogue is, of course, really energizing for the reader. But I find it’s best used sparingly.
      In my fiction I'm trying to portray the vividness of a scene in active, resonant, and, when possible, unexpected language. For me, the confrontation of character and story is the most important thing (and story is not necessarily plot).  

Your short fiction collection, Peninsula Sinking, is now under contract with Biblioasis. 
      Can you tell us a bit about this collection––the compulsion behind it, the experience of writing it, how you think of this collection as indicative of another stage of your growth as a writer? What has it taught you?
​

Admittedly, the very first compulsion behind PS was to throw my best stories together and try to make a book. Then I did a long-form mentorship with David Layton through Diaspora Dialogues and we talked a lot about the collection’s larger themes. David helped me listen to the stories, find what they were about, and exhume some of the buried threads between them. So I can now say with confidence that this is a collection about human love for nonhuman life and the reciprocation of that love; it’s about struggling young people in Nova Scotia; it’s about the lure of Toronto; it’s about dealing with the thought of the cities and worlds we know, sinking; and it’s about finding joy in the horror of a precarious, melting life.     

John Metcalf will work with you to sequence the stories in Peninsula Sinking, yes? 
     Would you offer a few words about what an editor as remarkable as Metcalf can bring to the experience of putting a book together, of finding the way in which the pieces want to align with one another? 

I've been privileged, already, to work with great mentors and editors such as David Layton and Elana Wolff, who runs the hugely vital first poets series at Guernica Editions. I’ll add that the individual stories in PS have already benefited a fair bit from encounters with literary journal editors such as Tyler Willis at The Puritan, and from the readings of many generous friends and companions (thanks Aaron and Natasha). The process of finding your themes and your subjects is a long and arduous one. It’s a thing you can’t go looking for, a thing you have to find by stooping in the mire and wrangling sentence after sentence until those sentences break and confess why you’ve made them. So many people have helped along the way.
      John Metcalf will be the editor of the book. We’ve had some correspondence, but haven’t yet gotten into the tangle of sentence and story. So all I can say at this point is that I’m a great admirer of Metcalf’s work as a writer and an editor. The books he’s edited most recently (Kevin Hardcastle’s Debris and Kathy Page’s The Two of Us) both demonstrate what story collections can achieve in terms of sustenance of vision; I can only hope my collection achieves a fraction of the robustness of these works.
      I recently learned that Metcalf worked 18 years without pay as an editor for The Porcupine’s Quill. Need I say more?


David's blog, which contains publications in response to his work, news, contact information, and means by which to purchase copies of his work, may be found here.


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