"I have met my Muse"

The most poignant 52 words you'll read this week.

Fish Quill Finale

Thus endeth another Fish Quill Poetry Boat tour. After "washing the squashed mosquitoes" out of her hair, Linda Besner joined Leigh Kotsilidis to talk about her experience on CBC. Listen here. (Photos by Nick Thran.)

Sunday Poem

DIP

I dip down to your neck like one of those birds
poised over a drinking glass in a diner—
a small bobbing crane who demonstrates
temperature differences in a room

where waitresses rush around delivering
seafood platters to families
with noisy small children who suffer
the heat badly, and truckers,

who glance sideways and shrug
at this end-of-summer pageant. See
how easily I move away from your neck
which is the subject, not diners,

no seafood platters though these too
have their place. Any consideration
of your neck must have movement,
people bending down, babies

being tended. After hours, after
this diner has closed for the winter,
and its occupants have gone back to jobs,
troubled marriages, rent-controlled apartments,

I am the small bobbing crane who stays there,
fridge thermometer snug in its belly,
dipping downwards towards the coolness
of a half-filled glass of water.

From A Tinkers' Picnic (1999) by Peter Richardson.

Paul Theroux's challenge

"After prudently having himself circumcised, learning to speak fluent Arabic, dressing as an Afghan dervish and calling himself Mirza Abdullah, the British explorer Sir Richard Burton travelled to the holy city of Mecca, a deeply curious unbeliever among devout pilgrims. This was in 1853. He published his account of this trip in three volumes several years later, his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. The last non-Muslim to do this and to write about it was Arthur John Wavell, of the distinguished British military family. An army veteran, and farmer in Mombasa, Kenya, Wavell developed an interest in Islam. In order to know more, he disguised himself as a Swahili-speaking Zanzibari, made the pilgrimage and wrote about it in A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca (1912). Wavell took the trip in the winter of 1908-1909, more than a century ago. No unbeliever has done it since. Now there’s a challenge for a technology-smug couch potato who prates that the travel book is over."

More goading here.

Sunday Poem

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

When I first saw my mother's brother's new wife,
What I saw were two shopping bags,
Laden with food, which her arms cradled around.
She was coming up the path to the big house.

All summer long, I spent the afternoons
Reading G.A. Henty adventures for boys in the bungalow.
When we had lunch on the veranda, her bikini top
Dipped down like the sunglasses along her nose.

I was just learning to put two and two together.
She wouldn't talk to me or my brothers.
I would lie on my belly, dig my hips into the mattress
And, more likely than not, be crossing the Khyber Pass

Or holding a fort set on some promontory.
She was doing her best to remain collected, and calm,
Under the surveillance of the assembled relatives.
Her lips winced at the taste of our coffee.

The plot leaped forward: I was drifting headlong
Down a river, towards the Whirlpool of No Return.
After her swims, she lay sunbathing on the dock
And a drop of water glistened in her belly-button.

We came to clearing. The Hun had retreated
To a temple full of incense and treasures.
An attack would be lunacy but we had no choice—
There was an English life at stake. I discarded the map

And, by examining the underside of a leaf,
Plotted the best approach. Through the window, I saw her
Meting out a laundry line of underclothes and linen.
The bungalow smelled of yellow pages and cedar.

A woodpecker tack-tack-tacked against a hollow tree.
A spider crawled up the screen. I got the message:
They had taken the General's daughter captive
And I, I was the man to free her.

From Shadow Cabinet (1996) by Richard Sanger.

Brian Busby

Interviewed about his blog The Dusty Bookcase and its "attempt to save Canadian books that are in danger of disappearing," Brian Busby reveals why -- especially when it comes to John Glassco -- he's one of the sharpest literary minds in the country:

JW: What do you think Glassco would make of the James Frey controversy and the rise in popularity of creative non-fiction? Did Glassco consider himself a made-up self? I'm also trying to imagine what Glassco would do with social media, if he would subvert or embrace it.

BB: It's interesting to consider what relationship, if any, Glassco might have had with social media. He was, at heart, very much an Edwardian... We see this in his final fantasy, Guilt and Mourning, an unpublished novel set in a Montreal that has somehow avoided the technological advances of the 20th century. Had Glassco lived to be a centenarian—or even a mere nonagenarian—I very much doubt that he would have taken to social media except in one key area: his sex life. Here, the world would have become a less lonely place. I dare say it would be much easier to meet people who shared his interests over the Web than through personal ads.

As to Frey, I wonder how much attention Glassco would have paid the controversy; he had so very little interest in the prose of his own time. That said, he did enjoy a good hoax—and perpetrated some of the very best. We might get a sense of his reaction to the Frey controversy through his own memoirs. In a letter to Kay Boyle, he writes, "I look on the real value of 'memoirs' as being not so much a record of 'what happened' as a re-creation of the spirit of a period in time." So he telescopes and rearranges time, invents dialogue and encounters, dresses "naked facts" and in the end produces a work that Malcolm Cowley considered "the most accurate picture of Montparnasse".

One might say that he did something similar in life; choosing what and with whom to share specific details. We all do the same thing—though perhaps not to the same extent. Glassco wrote a beautiful and insightful passage about this very aspect of human life in writing about Casanova:

"We end, in other words, by loving him as much for what he really was as for what he tells us he was, and discover that the two characters complement each other and make an intelligible whole. In this way we grasp the truth that man is not only a living creature but the person of his own creation"

Read the rest here.

ReLit Awards

Happy to see Susan Briscoe, Michael Harris and D.G. Jones on the just announced ReLit Awards poetry longlist.