Poetic Edits

In the chaos of scrambling for a summer job, I’ve sorely neglected this site. This past week, I’ve finally gotten back to writing my poem-a-day at twitter. What I love most about twitter is that fact that you have to compress and condense ideas, which seems to be the essence of poetry. Here’s a little posting for today that gives a behind the scenes look at the evolution of a small poem.

birdsong whittles whistles down to a shining note that you wish you could pick up like an impossible penny off the street to see not only year but also the month and day

birdsong whittles whistles down to a shining glint that you wish you could pick up like an impossible penny to see beyond year to month & day

birdsong whittles whistles down to shining glint you pick up like an impossible penny to see not only year, also month, day& places traveled

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There’s a panoply of writing contests just around the corner, so if you’re in need of motivation, you have two to three weeks to dust off that poem or rework a short-story you’ve been banging away at. If your poetry is in the experimental vein, you might want to consider mailing your work to Vallum, the deadline is June 30, 2010. However if you suffer from timbrophobia (fear of stamps) you can email those experimental poems to Existere, a literary magazine that’s currently accepting submissions for the Fall 2010/Winter 2011 issue with a deadline of July 01, 2010. If you’ve just finished writing your poems and they have a prosy look about them, send them to PRISM’s prose poetry competition. Then there’s always the Lush Triumphant Contest (their deadline is this upcoming Tuesday the 15th) or if you’re not too keen on contest fees send something to the relatively new This Great Society. They’re currently accepting submission for the theme of “Pop.”

Most importantly, submit, submit, submit!

If you are at the stage where you need to supercharge your inspiration, I can think of no better recommendation than Betsy Warland’s Breathing the Page. It’s an exceptionally playful and insightful look at all aspects of the writing life. I bought a copy two days ago and I’m already well over halfway through it. In fact, I would have finished it by now, but there are so many gorgeous passages that I’ve had to read again and again. For example on the topic of Embodiment, Warland writes: All the formal and narrative elements of poetry and prose originate in our bodies. Like the heart, our sense of time expands and contracts. An initial walk to a writing hut in the forest seems three times longer in contrast to our return along the now more familiar path. Warland’s style weds philosophy with philanthropy, a caring attention to matters of the heart. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

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I recently picked up Roo Borson’s Personal History, a beautiful collection of essays about poetry and art. One of the pleasure’s of this book is Borson’s knack for gorgeously phrasing powerful ideas. For instance: And there is nourishment in the notion that all books, in all languages, throughout history, form a linked, extended work – like the parlour game in which everyone in the room adds a different stanza to a freely evolving poem – a linked, extended work which, while perhaps not a masterpiece, is surely an epic of sorts.

My addition to the non-masterpiece side of this epic is a poem that I just wrote this afternoon. What sets this piece apart from what I usually write are the conditions under which it was created. For about two hours this afternoon I listened to nothing but John Ashbery’s Soonest Mended on repeat on my iPhone as I went about my afternoon chores. When I got back home, I pressed stop and wrote down the following:

Wind, cherry blossom petals and sporadic raindrops
are the constant elements to this day,
swirling in a luminescent tunnel upon which scenes are painted:
backed up traffic stretching out towards perspective of a pin point
and then a lotto center with chairs and tables, bending and scratching.
Wilfred Laurier on a five spot with feather-like wisps of hair by his ear,
whorls across his face as if it were his thumb print fat and flat
and the reason he made prime minister was that he was the first
person with such strangeness attached to an extremity,
and we were happy to elect someone with such an honest touch.
But the street scene painted again by Ashbery’s bland voice
taking a stroke out of Anger or some landscape artist from Italy
and we’re in Rio Friendly Meats were they are.
You bite into a pepperoni stick that might be the winner
might open to that two hundred dollar scratch and win payoff
but it’s just a willy wonka kind of thought injected into meat,
and the grocery store gets a tener with Macdonald in exchange
for milk and bread and I see something in the future in the cash
display as an electronic opening to watch dreams of future
purchase highlights and I smile and Ashbery tells me that
“not to grow up is the best kind of maturity at this juncture”.
On walk home I see cherry blossom petals on man’s face;
he pulls up jeans at the waist to show that he’s more,
and in the distance of the sidewalk cherry blossom blottoed
people and behind the dumpster man pisses out cherry blossoms
and the tunnel that’s painted around me shrinks to cigar
sized pepperoni stogie in my mouth and I’ve solved the mystery
to Ashbery’s death down this tunnel and how Happy Hoolgan
was behind it all along in a scene to be painted on a future
five-dollar bill in a state of anarchy around the corner.
Once the council approves our escape plan out of this tunnel
and into the promised land where the senses will run free.

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Truth be told, I’m torn about today’s entry. I want to share with you one of the most amazing thinkers on the topic of poetry in our age, but part of me wants to keep her for myself. I’ve always been a little selfish; a scene that comes to mind regarding my greedy appetite involves a bag of Old Dutch potato chips in my eight-year-old hands. At the sight of another kid (a friend) approaching me, I gobbled down the last ones at the bottom of the bag. I’m still engaged in outgrowing that horrible habit and do whatever I can to counter it. So here’s a link I’ll share to an interview with Susan Stewart. I’ve been devouring her Poetry and the Fate of the Senses this past week and this interview animates the voice from the pages of a remarkably thorough study which combines linguistics, philosophy and a number of amazing poets. In fact, Susan Stewart has a lot to say about voice, the senses, poetry and how she writes with the “goal to get people to read more slowly… to slow the culture down and be a stay against this incredible imperative towards speed we have.” Yes, its advice I need and I hope it inspires you as well.

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Came across a nice little poetry site this afternoon that I thought I’d share with you. It’s called hello poetry, which might not be the most poetic of urls but it’s a nifty way to find poems and uses of concepts through key word searches. Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working through a series of alphabet poems based on two pages of the dictionary per day at twitter and so to shore up my knowledge of the use of the word “alphabet” itself, I did a little search and found some uses in poems by Neruda, Dickinson, Browning and something a little more humorous in the Spike Milligan vein. Behind the scenes of the poems that I’m writing at twitter, I’m working on extrapolating something larger and so of course I’m curious to know how the concept of alphabet has been used before. I’m also a big fan of the moon and was delighted to find this haiku by Basho:

A field of cotton–
as if the moon
had flowered.

On the topic of small poems, four and twenty poetry is a lilliputioushly lovely site set up through the auspices of Declaration Editing. It’s a great place to send small poems of four lines that total no more than twenty words. A simple but smart idea that’s put to great use in a monthly poetry journal.
Oh and yes, here’s my own personal plug, one of my poems is in there this month.

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Isn’t it wonderful how one thing can lead to another? The right foot in front of the left. One synapse firing up the next. I recently received in the mail the winter issue of Geist magazine, which is, cover to cover, one of their finest in years. The art direction is eye-catching and concise and most importantly the content is inimitably Canadian, helping as always to build a sense of our collective quirks while also reaching out to find bohemia and beyond outside our borders. All the articles are thought-provoking, but it was a review on a famous Canadian painter that tipped me in an interesting direction of thought. “The Canadian way of death is death by accident,” quotes Daniel Francis, getting trans-Canada mileage out of this concept from Survival in his review of a book about Tom Thomson, a Canadian painter whose bold work inspired the Group of Seven to formation.

The next day, with Thomson’s name fresh in my memory, a certain podcast on Entitled Opinions grabbed my attention. Last night I finally got around to listening to the first part of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, an interview with the philosophy professor come poet Troy Jollimore. I’m not sure yet if the titular Thomson is the Canadian painter of national renown, but the interview is inspiring with Jollimore reading several of his Occam-razor-sharp poems, which reminded me of the importance of hearing authors read their own work. Then I thought about this upcoming Sunday.

This Sunday afternoon is Dead Poets, an afternoon of poets reading from the works of those who’ve passed before us. As I listened to Troy Jollimore reading his poem Glass, I pondered the differences between him reading his own work and the work of someone else. Then it dawned on me that if you want to find out how writers dig inspiration from the graves of the dead, how one thing has led to another in their poetic imaginations, nothing beats a writer reading from the work of someone who’s influenced them. Listen to the speed, intonation, and rhythms of that author and you’ll have secreted away a writing class for yourself. Writing is part of a large and loud conversation but hearing a writer read from someone is like eavesdropping on a student and teacher taking in private after class. If you’re interested in listening in on such a conversation you can find the following writers at the location below:

Charles Bruce read by Sandy Shreve
Edwin Muir read by Christopher Levenson
R. S. Thomas read by Russell Thornton
Al Purdy read by Rob Taylor
Nazim Hikmet read by Kate Braid

Sunday, January 24, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
The Café for Contemporary Art, 140 East Esplanade, North Vancouver
One block up from the Lonsdale Quay and Seabus

This has been organized by the remarkably talented and friendly wordsmith David Zieroth, who recently won the Governer General’s Literary Award for his poetic connections placed carefully on the page. If you’re free this Sunday afternoon I can’t recommend this highly enough.

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