Nice Fat F

Peter Norman comes clean about his dirty mouth:

When I do curse, why do I? Because I’ve stubbed my toe. Because I’ve missed an important transit connection. Because I’m copy-editing a bibliography and have just realized that I need to go back to the beginning and check for consistent application of Chicago Manual style in inclusive page-number ranges. Because I slept through the alarm. Because I’m in the company of friends, feeling happy, have a few pops under my belt, and feel like sloughing off my usual circumspect persona.

Am I a fan of the F-bomb? That depends on context, kind of like whether I’m a fan of fire. When it’s used with maximum artfulness, fuck can be an excellent word. Typically it’s a rose-on-casket deal: a single fuck is a more potent, elegant gesture than a machine-gun barrage. But not always. Some of my favourite movies crack the all-time Top 30 roster for quantity of F-words: Do the Right Thing (240),The Big Lebowski (260), Pulp Fiction (265), Goodfellas (300). I’m not aware of a similar list for literature, but James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late apparently contains four thousand of the motherfuckers, and I enjoyed all of them. And then there’s music. One of my upsetting mistakes in the early days of online commerce was purchasing and downloading a Tupac album, only to discover I’d shelled out for the clean version.

In the poem in question, “I Pipes Up,” the “I” is patently not me; he might be the farthest from me of all the speakers in the book. I don’t know exactly who this weirdo is, or more accurately what part of me he represents, but he’s got a lot of bitterness, bile, and spittle in his soul, and when it explodes into verbal form it’s inevitably gonna have a nice fat F at the start of it.

Sunday Poem

SUPER'S REPORT 

Weeds discovered huddled at the tower’s base, in cracks,
were gassed. At last inspection, none had sprung back. 

Feisty but mortal, a gangsta tag was wiped
from the north wall, leaving the merest smear, like soup on an elder’s bib. 

Some vague flaw vexing an exec’s window was effaced,
amendable warp in her expanse of plexiglass. 

All seems well and the marble’s polish gleams unscuffed and chipper.
The dining room revolves, revealing dreamy views of gloaming vista. 

So I sign off, yours truly, humble super, bowing out,
handing my torch to the night shift guy with his paunch and laden belt. 

The chimes of his keys will chatter in halls until the dawn’s cheeks blush.
His nametag will be accurate, his hounds on their leash robust. 

Let’s turn in, those hordes of us who need not know the night;
snore ensconced among the folds of Incident Logs unfilled. 

Dozing, let’s patrol the fabled room immune to grime, or sweep
with brittle straw the pristine floor that greets the newborn feet. 

Pupils shifting under lids, wait, wait for the report:
the gun that starts the race, or kills the lights.

From The Gun That Starts the Race (Goose Lane, 2015) by Peter Norman

The Scarborough, Toronto Launch

Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista

Michael Lista

Carmine Starnino

Michael Lista

Matthew Tierney and (with his back to us) Peter Norman

Carmine Starnino and Nyla Matuk

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Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista, Jeff Latosik, Jason Guriel and Stevie Howell

Sunday Poem

The Turnips
after bpNichol 

The turnips ooze a juice just visible on his chin.
Etiquette-bereft, the cad inturps the conversation I was in.
In the urn’s pit, ash accumulates: mortality’s pith.
A tin spur goads moans from the lover I lie with.
Poking the proxy doll with a rustpin makes for anguish.
Don’t stunrip the ne’er-do-wells. Just let ’em languish.
Pit urns fill with spit-out pits of fruit.
Baffling ritpuns offend the ruling brute.
Punstir the ticklish for a ribald effect.
A nut rips when the razor swipes. Your denim won’t protect.
On the suntrip, bronzed-up tourists tipple plonk.
Untrips are offered. The unship’s waiting at the dock.
Writhe and spin, rut and grunt among the scented sheets.
Runspit in thickets like a rabid boar in heat.
Pitnurs leave me stumped. From a small stump I orate.
Runt, sip that rancid wine. You’ll find it tastes of acetate.
Bail out the punt, sir, or the ferried souls will drown.
Your turn: sip the sugared venom, force it down.
The tip runs off on tipsy legs, leaving the servers broke.
Turps in turpish venues tell the filthiest of jokes.
            Spurtin’ depravity, he mounted the stump—and spoke—

From Water Damage (Mansfield, 2013) by Peter Norman 

Peter Norman

Stewart Cole is back with a piece that makes you want to rush out and read Peter Norman's new collection, Water Damage. In his praise of Norman's poetry, he reminds us that the pleasure we take in a poem sometimes owes less to how well it is made, but rather how it is made and then unmade:

He seems capable of writing anything he wants—ranging in his two collections from brilliant sonnets and rhymed quatrains to fragmentary free-verse narratives and prose poems—and yet every display of metrical virtuosity or musical uplift seems counterpointed by a moment of bizarre incompletion or even just silliness. Put simply, Norman is a master whose suspicion of mastery leads him to self-sabotage, and—and this is the kicker—rightly so, for in continually emphasizing our fallibility, the worldview embodied in his work depends for its persuasiveness on the poet’s showing himself to be fallible. Thus, in addition to exemplifying all the fine qualities I’ve named above, At the Gates of the Theme Park also presents itself as a catalogue of lapses, and it is all the better for it.