Sunday Poem

AN IDEA OF ORDER IN BEACON HILL PARK 

The seagull doesn’t like to be ignored, fans
out a white demi-bloom of tail, flies
breast to breast with the water gull below,
a show of sudden flight and reflected shadow

close or at a distance any eye that pans
this wake of flight is led to spaces
in trees where living branch meets dead;
below, spent cigarettes and blossoms, floating birdshit
and feathers where the willow trails its swimmer’s hair

these things are not what we’ve come for—what’s advertised
are peacocks, the more iridescently bright the better,
rhododendrons fuschia and puff-sleeved as bridesmaids
in procession and attended by fern fronds

more startling still, a short walk down the street—
ladies and gentlemen—scarlet ibis and flamingoes
under glass. In the land of the newlywed and nearly dead
everything’s arranged to please us

but not this misfit, this beautiful fan-tailed scavenger
who, more like us, eats garbage, makes from it ivory plumage,
tries to take over the world, calls out a raucous screed
on the subject of attention here where we’ve come to scavenge
an idea of the garden, cultivated in empire’s detritus

ah look, a lone duckling, an ageing romantic
clucks at the loss of mother but her man looks at his watch,
holds her elbow in a slingshot grip, says
don’t worry, honey, it’s nature 

and along the groomed trails we shuffle out, leave spaces so our tribes
don’t meet in unmediated ways until we reach the street
the lights, the flashing crosswalk man we’ve made
and technobirdsong that must be obeyed

frozen in the sudden open glare, the man
picks a fallen petal from his love’s hair,
the signals change, and we walk on in unison
sprouting shreds of blown down and errant pollen.

by Carmelita McGrath from The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry (Breakwater, 2013), edited by Mark Callanan and James Langer.

(Painting by Tamara Bond.)

Energy Of Slaves

In an excerpt from his upcoming book on Leonard Cohen, Matthew Remski explores the uncomfortable ties between Cohen and his controversial zen mentor Roshi:

It was strange that Cohen and I both disappeared into ashrams at the same time. At least he was at the right age for it. He seemed to be quitting a global identity, withdrawing into silence and his campy apocalyptic songs to come. I was milking my reluctance to really participate in things, and consoling myself of the consequences. But I think we were both enthralled by charismatic teachers who offered a radiant and ambivalent image of patriarchal yet revolutionary confidence that seemed to allow us to relax into obedience and hiding, even as it validated our resentments. For so many men, the spiritual path is a road for those who don’t know how to be their own fathers, who crave to relive the crisis of clashing with authority, to retest themselves, perversely enthralled by the strange virtues of the bully. There’s an erotic self-hatred in it: it feels good to rub yourself raw and then to rub yourself away against an absolute. It feels like justice, like what you deserve. 

Remski goes on to clarify the nature of the acolyte-mentor relationship:

Tension is key. The tension of not knowing whether he will embrace you or castigate you. As a devotee, you need him to reject you as much as he accepts you, or the acceptance will not feel as sweet. We’re not talking about intersubjective relationship here, in which a dyad mutually feels and receives and responds to each other’s needs. We’re talking about an emotional and power imbalance that thrives on the teacher seducing through concealment, and the student desperately craving what is hidden, and only occasionally seeing it, and taking any attention at all as a sign of love. Part of me wonders if Cohen fell in love with the type of man he himself was to many of the women in his past.

The High Point Of The History Of English?

How about the Norman Invasion of 1066?

When the Normans, who spoke a dialect of Old French, ruled over England, they changed the face of English. Over the ensuing two centuries, thousands of Old French words entered English. Because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets—Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)—depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we’d proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive,speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It’s amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English.

Robert Archambeau adds his thoughts:

In any given period, most people are unaware of the presence of the past in their everyday life: it is part of the darkness of their era, the darkness that only the true contemporary sees. This isn’t an obscure point, though it may sound like one. Almost no speakers of English, for example, give any thought to the fact that the words they speak are a living example of particular historical events. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 led to the domination of the Anglo-Saxons by a French speaking elite, and the language we speak was forged in that crucible of conquest, where French and Anglo-Saxon melted together, giving us the rich and redundant (Anglo-Saxon “underwater” and French-derived “submarine”) vocabulary we use. 1066 happens in every sentence spoken in English, it lives in every sentence, though the speakers of the language tend to have no notion of it whatsoever. And this lack of awareness, this darkness, means that most people don’t fully live vast portions of the things that live in them: that is, they don’t grasp, and never come into conscious contact with, the things that make them who they are.

Sunday Poem

THE GREAT BLUE HERON 

Prehistory stands in the saltmarsh
on stem-thin legs sinewy
as a sailor's twisted hemp
and cries once, brief and hoarse,
the bugle blast of a tubercular angel
heralding another apocalypse 

then lifts into the ashen sky
ponderously
and skims the tufted cattails
along the muddied riverbank,
large eyes still reflecting
an earth before time,
blinking away with jaded calm
armies heaped below China's Great Wall
the first stigmata cooled on the cross,
the basketed pallor of French aristocracy,
all the race's casual carnage
running dark and constant beneath
the beating of awkward wings

now flies through the light drizzle,
an umbrella with a broken spine
swept against the darkening sky,
a failed sketch for Kitty Hawk
slowly erased from the page 

and reappears at dawn
alone as always, perched on a rotted piling,
hunched in its shabby raincoat
like a terrorist, smoking long
cigarettes of mist,
coolly staring at life,
waiting for the final bomb to go off,
waiting for the end of history.

From Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2013) by Tim Bowling.

Those Who Came Before

Steven Heighton, proud owner of "a loud blue polyester shirt" once worn by Al Purdy, remembers the last time he saw the famous Ameliasburgh poet.

In the spring of 2000 I saw him for the last time, dying at home in Sidney, BC. Jay Ruzesky and I drove up from Victoria and sat at his bedside for a couple of hours, talking with him and at times just sitting there as we waited for him to wake from another short nap. At one point he tried to eat a piece of bread we brought him, but he couldn’t manage. Some people may die in their boots, but no one really dies on his feet. And no eighty-two-year old, horizontal for the last time, exhausted and unable to eat, rages at the dying of the light. That, after all, was a young poet’s prescription. A heroization of the mechanics of dying....And what do you, the apprentice, feel now in watching the mentor leave? Along with the inevitable sense of loss, you suddenly feel (like a child watching a parent die) much older. You sense how promise is no longer enough and it’s necessary for the real work to begin. You feel the truth of George Eliot’s insight—that it’s never too late to become the man you might have been. Death as the gift of a call to life. Seems the front-line trench, long occupied by elders, who stood between you and mortality and other apparent failures, has suddenly been vacated. You and your generation are going to have to fill it, as you’ll have to fill, or try to fill, the shirts of those who came before.

Emily M. Keeler recounts a story by Margaret Atwood from her on-stage interview at the Al Purdy A-frame fundraiser:

Atwood keeps calling Purdy a terrible tease, and recalls the time he, drunk and thinking it funny, peed on her car. Enright asks if she cleaned it up, and she sensibly says, “What clean? It was just pee!” Everyone laughs, and she says something about rain eventually falling. Atwood tells us one of her favourite stories about the six-foot poet. “I was in Montreal working on a screenplay with an English producer,” she remembers, “Al happened to shamble along the street. He was wearing galoshes—it was winter—and they were unbuckled.” Atwood imitates, for a second, the rhythm of clomping around in unbuckled boots. “He had a mermaid printed tie that he got at the Sally Anne, and a great baggy overcoat.” She introduced him to the stuffy Englishman, who, after Purdy had ambled away, said to Atwood, “Now that is a real Canadian.”

Bovinities and Grey Tote Launches

Deena Kara Shaffer with husband Andrew Lorrison and daughter Evelyn (Montreal launch)

Robert Moore, Judith Mackin and Chris Lloyd (Montreal launch)

Jim Johnston (Toronto launch)

Deena Kara Shaffer reading from The Grey Tote (Toronto launch)

Robert Moore reading from The Book of Golden Bovinities (Toronto Launch)

What Gets Left Out

Sussing out trends during a round-up of new Canadian poetry, Evan Jones reminds us that there is always unseen "variety" beyond the large reputations:.

In the 90s in Toronto, there were only two poets any young buck with his tail in the air talked about: Al Purdy and bpNichol. I remember because I was reading George Seferis at the time. Purdy and Nichol were opposites, sort of, in a way, signs of kids hanging out in different kinds of crowds. The one a poet of the nation and the land, of horse-piss beer and backbreaking days, the other zany, inventive, in cahoots with St. Ein and St. Anza. Purdy had shit on his boots, Nichol was barefoot. Both had lived in Toronto, at least for a spell. Neither was very good. But at least we knew where people stood, on one side of the fence or the other. Or, as in my case, wondering why all these people were standing round a stupid fence. These were the starting points, the gateway drugs, for many of the Canadian poets of my generation, following either Purdy into the country or Nichol into conceptualism. That such a small country—there are more Texans than Canadians—locks onto certain figures, invests in them, holds them up and hopes for more than the best, shouldn't surprise. The problem has always been what gets left out when there is only room for the select few.