A vow of silence for a lifetime or a day is observance, renunciation. Add ill intent and it becomes subservience, humiliation. In July 2021 Timothy Snyder wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/magazine/memory-laws.html in the New York Times magazine. Last night, CBC played https://www.thisamericanlife.org/758/talking-while-black . In between I’ve been working on a talmudic study of silence, of how we silence, […]
Tristan makes the most of the impossible Toronto real estate market by imaginatively using the 560 square feet he lives in with my daughter, Maja, and their 2 children under 2, Mila and Elsie. I think there might be a useful blog in there. It got me thinking about my own oft-neglected blog and how
I can find innumerable reasons to not write, even an innocent babe. She made us wait six days beyond the nine months, then came as a Thanksgiving. I have made time for Elsie, the soft sun, and the golden leaves to inspire and have distilled an elegiac couplet from the morning’s scribblings. Born without storm
The earth is our home, recent rocket-men notwithstanding, and we don’t treat it with the love and respect she deserves. We are known by our actions and our actions are informed by our words and our words manifest our thinking. I am working on a land acknowledgement that will become part of the forest, whether
site specific poetry Read More »
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft-my-people-are-dying Noor Hindi, a Palestinian American poet, drops the gauntlet with “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”. Ah no, gauntlet is too genteel a word, a word with a history, a word that implies the rules of fair play. Hindi drops a big fat rock, cracking the bones of my feet, my
Poetry and privilege Read More »
Scarborough Golf Club Road had a one lane bridge over Highland Creek then. The road hairpinned into a retaining wall, down an icy hill, then up the other side. In between, one lane, bridge abutments, ice, darkness, the numberless possibilities of judgement impaired, reaction delayed, vision doubled, knuckles bloodless, breath held, prayers half formed. Up
in progress-the Scarborough Bluffs Read More »
In order to create a collage or assemblage or bricolage you first need to take things apart, take them out of context, let them speak to you, reimagine them. My old laptop, physically broken and unsuitable for re-use, became a mine for materials. Removing a few screws and yanking a few tiny wire harnesses renders
un-de-re-constructed Read More »
A year ago I reread Phoebe Wang’s poem Invasive Carp and was inexplicably taken with a word she used – stanchion. From the word and it’s etymology and associations grew eight pages of musings and stabs at scraps of verse. I’d also had in mind for many years a favourite old photograph of snow fencing
How can I write of anything but the visual on these perfect and perfectly benign autumn days? The soft sky and summer air, from who knows where, sooth the mind, distract me from the bone-dry ground, release my eyes from the page to drift among the sudden reds and unexpected umbers. The ivies, yes, even
The Trees Aflame (blog? prose poem? both?) Read More »
…you know the rest. The dry spell has been replaced by abundance, or at least the seeds. I am surrounded, big-windowed, by weather and its effects so why not tread the worn boards of this metaphor? The wet leaves applaud a day of rain, shake off summer’s dust, singing ‘school!’ Thinking ‘river’ I think too